The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  None of it had worked, because the problem wasn’t physical intimacy. It was all those different kinds of need twisted together, a dependency that had taken every ounce of Isaac’s willpower to walk away from.

  Now, drunk and exhausted, he wanted to take it all back. Instead, he forced himself to shrug Justin’s grip away.

  “I told you that I’m fine,” he said brusquely. “So leave me alone.”

  His hands buzzed with power again, and he felt something loosen in his mind. He’d lost focus. The memories were pressing in on him, his brothers’ screams growing louder. The scar on his neck throbbed. He could feel his legs trembling beneath him, his heart thumping, and suddenly he was fourteen again. Lanterns flickered in the trees, his family’s solemn faces moving in and out of focus. His bare back chafed against the altar’s rough stone, and he could not move, not even when he saw the glint of the dagger in Gabriel’s hand and understood it was for him.

  S for sacrifice.

  A surge of panic roared through Isaac, and he stumbled away from Justin, crashing through the underbrush as his power shuddered to life. And just as he had the night of his ritual, he surrendered to its crushing embrace.

  It started as it always did, with a rush of pain Isaac could not fight and a rage he had to let free, and it ended as it always did, too. He was lying prone on the ground, coated in soot and ash, surrounded by the evidence of his destruction.

  When Isaac had first come into his powers, the meltdowns had been far more frequent. He’d lost control in public a few times, but he had fought tooth and nail to keep his hands from shimmering, to keep the people around him from looking at him as if he were a time bomb instead of a boy trying desperately to keep it together.

  Then there had been the Diner, where his reputation had gone from bad to worse.

  Now there was this: Another disaster. Another mistake.

  Isaac rolled over on his side and groaned. The last he could remember, he’d rushed into the woods—away from Justin.

  Justin. Shit. There had been people nearby—had he hurt them? He felt for his phone, but it was gone, so he rose into a crouch, squinting into the darkness and hoping his eyes would adjust. Slowly, shapes loomed out of the darkness. Every tree within ten feet of him was dead, burned down to sooty stumps and scattered branches, but there were no bodies. Relief and nausea rushed through him, because he knew what Sullivan powers did to a human. The smell of roasted skin and burned hair, the bits of clothing and bone shards left behind. There was none of that here.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, guilt rushing through him. He might not have killed anyone, but he’d still charred an entire clearing into oblivion. He’d destroyed part of the forest for no other reason than his inability to keep his memories where they belonged, inside his head.

  It was still night, but he wasn’t drunk the way he’d been before. Time had passed; hours, maybe. Isaac’s stomach twisted. He’d never come out of a meltdown alone before. Justin had always been there, waiting for him.

  “Hello?” he called out, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Is anybody there?” His words echoed uselessly through the clearing. Isaac tried to think. Surely he couldn’t be that far away from the Hawthorne house. He gazed up at the moon, mentally orienting himself—if he headed west, he’d either hit Justin and May’s home or the main road.

  He tried to walk, but only managed a single step before a wave of nausea roiled through him, so strong it forced him back to his knees. He was sweating and panting; the world spun, his palms digging into the ash on the ground. Using his powers always drained him, and combined with the alcohol still raging in his system, it was simply too much. Isaac groaned and dry-heaved in the general direction of the forest floor, but he was too dehydrated to even vomit properly.

  He was a pathetic excuse for a founder. He deserved to rot here like one of the corrupted trees.

  He did not know how long he knelt there, shuddering, before a light broke through the trees. He tipped his head up and realized it was bobbing and weaving, a flashlight beam.

  “Hello?” he choked out, then cleared his throat and yelled, “Hey! I need help!”

  The trees rustled, and a moment later Violet was standing in front of him. He squinted into the beam of her phone flashlight. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the dirt splotched across her velvet dress. Her tights were ripped; twigs poked out of her crimson hair.

  “Isaac.” Something happened to her face that he’d only seen once before—that day in her bedroom, when she had told him about Rosie. Like it pained her just to look at him, but she didn’t want to stop. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not more than I deserve.”

  “Good.” She knelt down beside him, carelessly smearing dirt on her tights, and tipped her head up so that her eyes locked on his. Something stirred in his throat, in the core of his stomach, a different kind of heat, a different kind of fear. Then she held out a water bottle. “Here. Drink this.”

  He’d never tasted anything sweeter. When he looked up, the bottle drained, she was holding her phone up to her ear.

  “Yeah,” she said, sounding exhausted. “He’s fine. You can go home—I’ll handle this.”

  “Justin?” Isaac croaked.

  Violet nodded. “He’s had a bad night.”

  “Shit. Sorry.”

  “You think that’s all you need to say sorry for?” Violet said, her tone leaving minimal room for interpretation.

  Isaac felt something new—anger. Justin never would’ve talked to him like this. “I get it. You’re pissed at me, I ruined everything, I’ve heard it all before.”

  “Is that the story you always tell yourself?” Violet asked him softly. “That you’re just going to fuck everything up?”

  “It’s not a story,” Isaac said. “It’s the truth.”

  “You’re more than this.” Violet’s jaw tightened. “Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to say something like that.”

  The words hit Violet harder than Isaac had intended. She jerked backward, hurt spreading across her face.

  “It took me two hours to find you, asshole,” she said. “And I didn’t know if you’d be alive when I did. Maybe I don’t know everything about you, but I know how it feels to have powers that seem like they’re taking you over, and, Isaac, I’m scared for you.”

  The last few words were said in a rushed, embarrassed whisper, and Violet dropped eye contact, sighing.

  Two hours. Two hours of Violet walking through the forest that had taunted her for months, that had ripped her up and spat her out. Just for him. The thought made Isaac almost as nauseous as the alcohol. He didn’t deserve that kind of loyalty.

  “I’m sorry. I’m scared for me, too.” It was the most honest thing Isaac had said since his confession to Justin, and the truth of it scorched his throat. “I just… My brother, my family… it’s all too much. And what I said, about you not knowing me… the only reason you don’t know is because I haven’t told you. But you deserve the truth. You’ve deserved the truth for months.”

  He knew exactly how long he’d wanted to tell her. It had started that night in Violet’s bedroom, on the equinox, when he’d watched her rush into trouble to save Harper in the exact way he would have done for Justin. But Isaac had known even then that the truth would change things. What Justin had seen the night of Isaac’s ritual had changed their relationship forever.

  Isaac wanted her to know what had happened to him without it becoming a burden on them both. She deserved better than that. He had no idea how to do that, but he could not fathom keeping it a secret from her any longer, either.

  And so there in the burned-out crater of destruction he had created, in the witching hour, Isaac Sullivan told Violet Saunders the truth about his ritual.

  “The thing about the Sullivans,” he began slowly, “is that we are taught, from when we are very young, that either our destiny will be to cause pain, or to stop it. And I never wanted to cau
se it.”

  “Who would?”

  Isaac smiled grimly. “You’d be surprised. It’s useful when you want people to take you seriously. And we did.”

  In elementary school, there had been a group of bullies, a few years older than him, who’d made a game out of stealing the book he’d always carried and forcing him to chase them around the playground.

  “They thought it was funny,” he explained, “because I was a Sullivan, and we were known for getting into fights, but I never did.” Instead, he’d been the baby brother—scrawny and quiet, barely participating in class, always reading, always listening. “Anyway, when they stole the book, they’d always rough me up before they gave it back. Eventually, Isaiah figured out what was going on. Gabriel is five years older than me—Isaiah was seven years older, so he’d done his ritual, and he was pissed. He asked me to point out the bullies, and one day, after school, he pinned down their ringleader and threatened him. He made me watch.”

  Isaac paused, remembering the fear on the boy’s face as Isaiah pinned him to the ground, his knee in the boy’s back, and placed his hand on the nape of his neck. He’d never seen such raw, powerless terror before, and it made him sick inside to think of it even now.

  “He didn’t hurt him,” he said. “But he terrified him, until he, um… he pissed himself. I begged Isaiah to stop—but he didn’t listen.”

  And later, when they’d been home, Isaiah had gripped him by the shoulders and stared at him with wide, wild eyes. “He said, ‘Pain is power,’” Isaac went on. “‘You have to show the world that you can hurt it more than it can hurt you. That’s the only way we survive.’”

  “That’s a terrible philosophy,” said Violet.

  “Yeah,” said Isaac softly. “But it’s kind of tough to unpack that when you’re eight and your family is your whole world.”

  “Fair,” said Violet. “So what happened next?”

  Isaac didn’t want to look at her for this part. He stared hopelessly at the destruction he’d wrought instead, dimly lit by Violet’s phone flashlight. Charred stumps and piles of ash; the smell of burning, the smell of destruction. “I grew up. And everything changed.”

  Isaac hadn’t known much about his family’s ritual. They kept that a secret for as long as they could. But he had seen the scars: The lines that rose above his mother’s shirts and lanced across her shoulders. The cuts across Gabriel’s arms that he had taken great pains to tattoo over. They snaked down calves and across collarbones, in a slightly different place on all his aunts and uncles, but still scars, still there.

  “We all give the Beast part of ourselves when we do our rituals,” he continued. “You do it with your mind. The Hawthornes and the Carlisles have their conduits—the lake, the tree. But us Sullivans, we give it our blood.”

  Violet shuddered.

  “I know,” said Isaac. “Anyway… I knew my ritual would hurt. But I thought it would be worth it. I wanted to heal people like Gabriel did—he’d go on patrols and come back with all these grand stories about how he saved people who came out of the Gray. I realize now, of course, that they were bullshit. People don’t come out of the Gray alive.”

  On his fourteenth birthday, the day of his ritual, Isaac had woken up early. Eaten his favorite breakfast, although he’d only picked at it, too excited, too nervous, to do much more than that. Found it only a little odd the way his family treated him, with far more affection than usual.

  “I realize now,” he continued, “that my mother tried to stop them. We went on a drive a few weeks before it happened—and we got off at this rest stop, right, and then my uncles were there, and we all acted like it was fine, oh, what a coincidence, but no. They knew she would try to run with me. And they were ready for it. So on my birthday, my mom was shut up in her room. They were guarding her.”

  “What about your dad?” asked Violet.

  Isaac shrugged. “Never knew him. None of us did. Lots of single parents in the Sullivan family—we’re sort of all raised together. I realize now that having an outsider parent involved makes it a whole lot harder when ritual day comes around. Anyway, dinner tasted a little funny that night. It wasn’t until I was moments away from passing out that I realized I’d been drugged.”

  He had come to later in the night, chained to the altar in the woods behind the Sullivan house. His family gagged him. They chanted. There was a dagger, and Gabriel’s face, and his neck hurt more than he had ever thought possible.

  That was how it was supposed to go: the other Sullivans’ rituals were mere precursors. They gave their blood to the earth, to the Beast. But to renew it, they needed to give it one of their own.

  A sacrifice.

  Isaac did not know why they had decided he would be the person from his generation to die. In the ensuing years, he had tormented himself trying to figure it out. Perhaps they had thought he was weak. Perhaps they had thought, out of all of them, he would simply be the easiest to kill.

  They’d been wrong.

  After they slit his throat, his mind slid into the Gray, and he heard the Beast’s voice all around him, urging him to find the thing inside him that snarled and clawed and chafed against his rib cage.

  And he had unleashed it.

  His power had roared to life, wild and free, sparking its way through the woods around him. His family had panicked, because he was not dead—and then something else happened. Something that sent everything utterly off the rails. His mother and Caleb, rushing into the clearing to save him.

  His family turned on one another after that. When they were done, Isaiah and Caleb were dead, his mother was unconscious, and everyone else had fled. Everyone but Gabriel, who had chased him deep into the woods until Isaac collapsed from sheer exhaustion, certain he would never wake up again. Until Justin Hawthorne found him, and one nightmare ended and another one began.

  He finished talking—the sun peeking through the trees now, his heart heavy in his throat.

  When he looked at Violet again, there were tears in her eyes.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said hoarsely, and he didn’t know which of them started it, but a moment later his arm was wrapped around her back and he was shuddering, dry sobs wracking his body to its very core.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her velvet sleeve. “I hope this is okay—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, her hand making small circles between his shoulder blades, and there was something in her voice that he hadn’t heard from another person in a long time—tenderness without a single strand of pity. “Do you remember what you told me? How what happened to my aunt Daria wasn’t my fault?”

  Isaac pressed his forehead against her shoulder. “I remember.”

  “Well, this isn’t your fault, either. I promise.”

  And so they stayed like that for a long time, holding each other. Something solid, something real, in the midst of everything he had destroyed, until Isaac was finally ready to stand.

  It happened at dawn again. May thought at first that it was the alcohol tugging her from her bed, disrupting her sleep. But it wasn’t. It was the hawthorn tree calling her, a cry of pain. A cry for help. A voice that twisted and screamed in the back of her head.

  May didn’t remember sliding on a sweater and her platform sneakers, but she must have, because it was only moments later that she was outside.

  Frozen stone branches reached up, as if pushing the rising sun into the sky. They tugged at her chest and pulled her forward, the same physical sensation she’d felt the night Harper had turned the tree to stone. A tear slid down her cheek. She lifted her hand to her face; it came away scarlet.

  “Harper promised,” she whispered, rushing up to the tree and placing her palm against the stone that had once been bark. “Just hang on a little longer.”

  The voice in her mind stirred again, stronger this time, hissing panic at the edges of her thoughts. A deep crack rang through the dawn, and May saw it then, rippling out from the
place where her outstretched hand had touched it: The stone was splintering. A deep, nauseating dread rolled through her as a familiar stench washed out from the tree: decay.

  Something terrible is coming, she thought, but she knew that wasn’t right. Because something terrible was already here, and it was just now getting ready to show itself.

  The cracks in the tree snaked upward, stone flaking away like peeling skin. The patches they left behind were gray and oily, glimmering with a sickly glow that pulsated slowly in the night air. Iridescent liquid shot upward, oozing through the cracks and winding around the back of the tree like silver veins.

  “No,” May gasped as the branches creaked to life, buds lowering like extending hands. “No.”

  She braced her other hand against the trunk, as if she could put the tree back together with the sheer power of her will, and grasped for the roots in her mind, for the future.

  This won’t happen. It won’t.

  She screwed her eyes shut, gasping, and when she opened them, Four Paths was gone.

  Fog floated around her, misting in her hair and condensing on her eyelashes. Her hands were still outstretched, but the hawthorn had disappeared. Instead, she was standing on top of the founders’ seal in the Gray.

  The fog began to dissipate, revealing a canopy of intricately woven trees above her head. Something wrapped around her leg, and May realized that roots were spiraling below her feet, crawling over the seal and twining through her ankles. A voice echoed in her mind, tinny and hollow.

  May knew she should have been terrified, and yet all around her was a powerful sense of calm, of familiarity. Roots wound across her wrists as if she was part of the forest itself, and when she opened her hands, her palms were bleeding, cut along her lifelines, the blood mixing with oily iridescence.

  As soon as she saw the blood, the voice in her mind changed. It was a deep, clear sound that reverberated through the roots and branches embracing her.

  Welcome home, Seven of Branches, it said, and then everything went black.

  PART THREE