The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “You’re corrupting this town,” Harper said hoarsely. Something was bubbling up in her throat; she thought it might be blood but she didn’t look away. If she was going to die here, it would not be with her back turned. “And we’re going to stop you.”

  The Beast raised its hands in plaintive surrender, such a human gesture that it made Harper ill to watch.

  I’m sick, just like your town.

  The words were sent so vehemently into her mind that Harper coughed violently, blood dotting her sweatshirt. Except it didn’t look like blood. It looked exactly like the same gray, oily liquid at the Beast’s feet.

  “But you’re possessing people,” she said, stepping forward. “What do you mean, you’re sick? How could this be anything but you?”

  I am trying to find a way out, the Beast snarled. Look around. Why would I do this to the only place I have left?

  And then it was gone, and Harper felt the world around her dissolving. She whirled around, brandishing her sword, as Four Paths rushed around her once again.

  When she gasped in another breath, she was still standing beside the lake, but it looked normal this time. Harper scoured the trees beside it for the glimmers of corruption, but found none. She sighed with relief and traipsed back through the forest.

  She found Isaac and Violet back at the founders’ seal, both staring anxiously at the place where she had disappeared. At the sight of her approach, Violet rushed up to her.

  “You’re okay!” Violet’s voice was light with relief. “You’re—you saw something in there, didn’t you?”

  Harper nodded, exhausted. “Yeah.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Isaac asked.

  Harper hesitated. She’d thought about this the whole walk back. Maybe it was a trick, but she didn’t think so.

  “I don’t think this corruption comes from the Beast,” she said softly. “I think it’s hurting it just as much as it’s hurting us.”

  She explained as best she could to Violet and Isaac, watching both their faces pale at the descriptions of what she’d seen. And on the excruciating walk back to the Saunders manor, all she could think of was the Beast’s face laid over Justin’s, until she could not quite remember whose smile was whose.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The burned-out husk of the place Isaac had called home until he was fourteen had begun to return to nature. Gabriel had asked Isaac to meet him there once he got off his shift at the clinic—he’d had an idea, he said, about how they might be able to find some more answers about the corruption. Violet had told him the corruption wasn’t his fault, but he knew they both wanted to fix it anyway, so he’d invited her here to help with whatever this was before heading to Justin’s birthday party that evening. But he’d beat them to the ruins he’d made, which was unfortunate. It meant he had time to stew, time to remember.

  Underbrush crackled beneath Isaac’s boots as he retraced the route he’d done every day after getting home from school: through the front archway, now two crumbled stone pillars, into the kitchen, where the old fridge was turned onto its side, blackened with dirt and moss. He paused at the edge of the downstairs den—while all the bedrooms were long destroyed, turned into ashes and smoke, there were still too many remnants of the room his brothers had claimed as their own.

  Weeds grew thickly here, twining around the legs of a maroon couch that had been split open; rotted stuffing spilled out from the sides like entrails. Isaac walked closer to it, a thousand memories tugging at every piece of him. His brothers laughing, his brothers fighting, his brothers dead, dead, dead—

  “It must have been quite an undertaking.”

  Isaac turned around. Gabriel was standing in the place where the archway over the front doors had once been, waiting for him. “Destroying our house like this,” Gabriel continued. “I’m shocked it didn’t kill you.”

  “Disappointing for you, I’m sure,” Isaac said dryly. “Then you’d be free to murder our mother all by yourself.”

  Gabriel’s face tightened.

  “I don’t need to argue about Mom like this,” he said. “I made my case.”

  “And I made mine. She’s all the family we have left.”

  “It’s not her in there,” Gabriel said softly. “You know that.”

  “You’re talking about her like she’s one of your corrupted patients.”

  “My patients are still themselves when the Beast isn’t tormenting them,” Gabriel said grimly. “Our mother…”

  Isaac wanted to hit him. “I’m not talking about this anymore.”

  “Fine.” A beat of uneasy silence passed between them, and then Gabriel spoke again. “I want you to know that I don’t want you dead, even as a joke. Look at this.” He shrugged out of his jacket and gestured to the tattoo that spilled across his shoulder behind his thin black tank top: four blades tangled together, roots winding around their hilts. “It’s a family tattoo.”

  “Let me guess,” he said, unwilling to think about the fact that Gabriel had chosen to include him even after everything that had passed between them. Four of them, together, like they weren’t all just as destroyed as the house they’d once lived in. “You told the artist to make one of the daggers a little longer so you could tell girls it was yours?”

  Gabriel’s smile widened into something more genuine, and Isaac saw a flash of the people they had both been, before everything, standing in this same room when it was a home instead of a ruin. “You’re still a smartass, huh?”

  Isaac raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t a no.”

  Gabriel turned his head to the side, clearly suppressing a laugh. Isaac realized how much he looked like Caleb now, stocky and broad-shouldered, dark curls clipped short along his head, stubble dotting his jawline in a way that Isaac was trying to work on.

  “Sorry I’m late.” The voice was Violet’s. Isaac turned to see her at the edge of the trees, her cat trailing at her heels. She was dressed simply in a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a fleece-lined corduroy jacket, and she looked exhausted, her red hair pulled back in a thin ponytail at the nape of her neck. At the sight of Gabriel the tiredness on her face disappeared, replaced by a far more alert stare.

  “I don’t think we were formally introduced,” she said slowly. “You’re Gabriel Sullivan.”

  “And you’re the daughter of that Saunders lady who ran away.”

  Violet shrugged, the shadow of a smirk dancing around her lips. “Seems like you and my mother had running away and crawling back in common.”

  “Fair enough.” Gabriel jerked a head toward Orpheus. “The hell is that thing?”

  “He is my companion,” said Violet, frowning. “He goes where I go.”

  Orpheus yawned in Gabriel’s general direction, then walked up to Isaac and rubbed his head against his leg. Isaac leaned down to pet him, grinning as Orpheus licked his palm with a sandpapery tongue.

  “I think he’s getting used to me,” he said, scratching behind the cat’s ears. Animals did not particularly care for Isaac, but this one seemed to be different. Maybe the cat liked him because they were both supposed to be dead.

  Violet’s voice sounded a little strained, almost like she was embarrassed. “Um. Yeah. Anyway—the corruption is particularly bad back there. I know we’re immune, but I still suggest we be careful.”

  “How are your relief efforts going?” Gabriel asked. “Isaac, does your power help? Maybe you should do something about the yard.”

  “Not as well as it should,” Isaac said, tensing. He was not in the mood for a demonstration, and he certainly wouldn’t be doing it in his backyard. The altar was back there. It was the only part of his home he hadn’t disintegrated, because he wasn’t ready to face it. Besides, if he disintegrated the trees, the corruption would simply creep back from the ashes like a cockroach that refused to be squashed.

  “What about you?” Gabriel asked, turning to Violet. “Half the clinic is talking about how you can possess the trees.”

/>   “I wish that’s what I could do,” Violet said, shaking her head. “I move branches and roots out of the way—like an override, not a command.”

  “We’re all doing our best.” Isaac was not about to watch his friend be criticized when Gabriel couldn’t heal anybody, either. “That’s why we’re working together, right? To try to find a way to fix it, because our powers aren’t enough.”

  “Right,” Violet agreed, nodding. “But why did you want us to meet you here?”

  “Great question.” Gabriel swung his backpack off his shoulder and pulled out a shovel, tossing it onto the ground like a challenge. “The Sullivan archives are right under our feet. We’re here to dig for answers.”

  “Sullivan archives?” Isaac echoed slowly. He’d never heard of such a thing.

  “Our family history,” Gabriel said. “We kept all of our records in the cellar, in a place Mom and all our uncles called the archive room.”

  “We have a cellar?”

  “They wouldn’t have shown you,” Gabriel said. “I wasn’t even supposed to know about it.”

  Isaac pushed down a thread of hurt and tried to focus on the positive here. The Sullivan archives. The thought was intoxicating. It was possible it held the kind of answers the town archives never had. It was possible they could find a way to face the impossible task that lay before them.

  Or maybe he’d destroyed it when he’d torn the house down, just like he’d destroyed everything else.

  Isaac pushed the thought away. “Why did you only just remember this now?” he asked Gabriel.

  “Honestly? I just didn’t think it would be helpful. But May Hawthorne was in the clinic yesterday, talking about how she thinks the corruption isn’t new. She thinks it’s something old that the original founders had to deal with.”

  “Where did she get that idea?” Violet asked.

  “Probably her mother,” Isaac said. Augusta knew more about Four Paths than anyone, but it wasn’t information she liked to share. Maybe she’d decided to give some of it to May. “So you think, if the original founders had to deal with it, these archives might have some information on how?”

  “Exactly.” Gabriel gestured at the ruins before them. They were in the rubble where the kitchen had once been, beside the fallen fridge. Bits of metal fixtures gleamed dully in the dirt around them. “We need to proceed carefully—I have no idea what your powers will do to the ground, Isaac—so for now, shovels only.”

  It took twenty minutes before their shovels hit something metal. The three of them reached down to scrape the remaining dirt away, and there in the middle of the ground, tarnished but still intact, was a trapdoor.

  It had been there this entire time, Isaac realized, whenever he skulked to the ruins to stare at them and wish things had gone some other way, whenever he’d asked himself questions about his family that he had no idea how to answer. But that was how it always was in Four Paths. Answers were buried somewhere. You just had to know where to look—and be ready to face the consequences of whatever you found.

  Nerves stirred in his stomach. Maybe the cellar had caved in. Or maybe the truths hidden inside it would make Isaac wish he’d crushed it all to rubble. Either way, though, there was no turning back now.

  “All right,” Gabriel said, reaching down and inspecting the padlock. “Still in pretty good shape. Either of you know how to pick locks?”

  Violet shook her head. So did Isaac.

  “Figures,” Gabriel muttered. His gaze met Isaac’s. “Do you think you can disintegrate this?”

  Isaac shrugged, swallowing hard. “Only one way to find out. Stand back.”

  He knelt, spread out his palms and pressed them to the cold, dirty metal of the door. And let go.

  In the first few months after his ritual, controlling his power had been harder. Isaac had woken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, his sheets turned to ash beneath his palms. By now, Isaac had mostly clawed his way to control, but it still wasn’t perfect. Handling his power was a war he could not win. He could only hope to lose as few battles as possible.

  As his ability roared to life, eating a hole in the center of the door that immediately spread outward, he concentrated on keeping the bubble around his hands as small as possible. The power wanted more, like it always did; it begged to be unleashed on the rubble, on the room below—but he yanked it back.

  “All right,” he said, breathing heavily as he gazed down at the hole he’d left behind. The daylight illuminated dusty stone steps. “Let’s go.”

  Isaac’s first thought as he stepped into the founders’ archive room was that he had been here before. Stone walls and high ceilings, an echoing floor, and a series of drawers pushed into the walls reminded him uncomfortably of the mausoleum. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that both places had the same architect. Gabriel handed them flashlights, and Isaac walked slowly through the room, holding his light above his head, eyes peeled for anything more dangerous than a cobweb.

  “Isaac,” Violet murmured from beside him. “Look at this.”

  Isaac turned. Her light illuminated a mosaic stretching along the far wall: a tree, of course, laden with green, leafy branches. Violet looked ethereal in the glow of the light bouncing off the artwork, as if the forest itself had birthed her and sent her to Four Paths, instead of a shiny car and a series of family tragedies.

  She had shaken all of them up, Isaac realized. Given Harper her memories back, knocked May completely off-kilter, asked Justin to grow into the man he was attempting to be. Isaac was not sure exactly what she had done to him. But just a few months ago, he would never have been able to set boundaries with the Hawthornes. Would never have been able to handle Gabriel without combusting.

  Violet’s brow furrowed, her gaze turning toward him, and Isaac looked hastily away, eyeing the artwork more intensely than was perhaps necessary. He was immediately drawn to the center of the tree trunk, where a real dagger had been set into the artwork, designed to look as if it were stabbing into the wood.

  “This is pretty fancy for a cellar,” he said grimly.

  Violet nodded, a smile flickering across her face. “I thought the same thing when I found my family’s secret attic.”

  Isaac shook his head. “Why do we even have the town archives if every family decided to hide their good shit away?”

  “Because Four Paths has a secrecy problem?”

  “A secrecy problem and no other issues at all,” Isaac drawled, feeling gratified when Violet laughed.

  From across the room, Gabriel beckoned them forward. He stood beneath the drawers themselves. As Isaac came closer, he saw another dagger set into the wall above them.

  “Hopefully the contents are still okay,” Violet said.

  This close, Isaac could see that the drawers were labeled with tiny plaques, starting from 1990–2010 and going all the way back to 1840. He reached for the oldest drawer and tugged on it, but it wouldn’t give. The tiny keyhole beneath the plaque was locked. Isaac sighed in frustration.

  Beside him, Violet looked thoughtful. “Do you think you can burn through it?”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  Isaac placed his palm against the stone, but as his power surged through him, concentrated on the door, something stopped him—hitting him like a blow to his sternum. He doubled over, gasping with pain.

  “Shit,” he wheezed.

  “You all right?” Violet asked.

  Isaac nodded, wincing. “Just… not doing that again.”

  “Fair enough,” Violet said, starting forward. “I guess we just have to try them all.”

  The three of them set about tugging on the drawers. Isaac felt more foolish with every handle he pulled, and he was just about to give up when one opened—the drawer labeled 1920–1945. Inside were a bunch of neatly slotted file folders crammed with books and papers. Not perfect, Isaac knew, but it was a start. They each grabbed a folder and crouched on the floor.

  Isaac’s was full of ph
otographs. Dozens of them, slotted neatly into an album, scrawled handwriting below telling a story he’d never dreamed of being able to access.

  The photos were faded and blurry, sepia-toned and grim, with unsmiling Sullivans facing out of each and every one. Below was a date and a name, and sometimes, a tantalizing bit of information. Several looked like army photos; from their death dates, Isaac ascertained that the draft had reached Four Paths during World War II the same way it had reached everyone else in the USA.

  Otto Sullivan, he read, healer and combat medic, 1910–1944, marked missing during D-Day.

  “Hey, did you know about this?” he said softly, in Gabriel’s general direction. “That we had a healer who became a doctor?”

  Gabriel nodded without looking at him, buried in his own folder. “That’s part of why I wanted to do it, you know? We don’t just destroy things. We can make them better.”

  “You can,” Isaac corrected him, staring at his own hands.

  He could not deny that it had been so much easier to sort through the archives with Violet, looking for the Saunders history, than it was to look for his own. So much simpler when it wasn’t pictures of your family, when you weren’t the one learning about everything you had destroyed.

  In his peripheral vision, he saw Violet stiffen.

  “What?” he asked, turning. “Did you find something?”

  She stared down at a yellowed letter and shook her head. “No.”

  Violet was lying. Isaac could see the unease in her stiffened shoulder blades, the same sharp-jawed defenses as Juniper Saunders sliding across her face. But as her gaze flicked between him and Gabriel, he understood. She wasn’t lying to him.

  “All right,” he said slowly, returning to the archives. Later, they would talk this out. Later he would figure out what it was, exactly, that Violet did not want his brother to see.

  He flipped to a page in the photo album—and frowned.

  It began with a black-and-white baby photo. An adorable infant in a frilly outfit, then a solemn toddler, sitting on her mother’s lap, a bow in her hair, her thumb shoved in her mouth. He traced the photos of the same person’s life, wondering why there were so many. Every other photo was a group picture or a formal portrait, but this was oddly modern, a clear expense for a family who had lived when cameras were still rare instead of something everyone carried in their pockets at all times.