The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “Knowledge like our entire family mythology being built on a lie?”

  “It’s not all a lie,” Juniper said delicately. “But it is quite sensitive. Not even Augusta knows about this. When I regained my memories, I thought I was the only one left alive who knew the truth.”

  “Yeah, well, the Hawthornes have half the story now,” Violet said quietly. “Secret’s out, Mom. Might as well give me the rest of it.”

  Juniper’s mouth twisted. “It is not a pleasant piece of information. You may not want to hear it—”

  “Of course I want to hear it.” Violet gaped at her. “I just learned how to trust you. Now I know I can’t.”

  “You’ve made your point,” Juniper said. In Violet’s opinion, her mother had not earned the right to the wounded expression on her face. Dusk had fallen, swathing the town hall in a bluish shroud that winked iridescent in the slowly gathering mist. “And you have to understand that much of what you know is true. We are bound to the Beast. We draw our powers from it. It’s trapped in the Gray, just as you’ve discovered, and we protect the town from it. Mayor Hiram—my uncle—had a saying about the story of the Beast we tell ourselves. That it’s as true as most stories are, which is to say it is and it isn’t.”

  “That just sounds like a convenient excuse for a lie.”

  “Perhaps.” Juniper shrugged. “Regardless, the truth is messier, and it’s passed down from mayor to mayor. It recounts how the founders discovered a power source when they arrived here, not a monster. When they figured out how to use it, however, it came with an unfortunate side effect.”

  “The Beast?”

  “No.” Juniper’s lips thinned. “The same disease we’re calling the corruption.”

  “So the corruption comes from us.” The words felt like poison in Violet’s throat. This disease, this nightmare—it was their fault after all.

  “Well, yes.” Juniper’s footsteps sounded on the cobblestones as she came to stand beside Violet. “The founders made an attempt to stop the corruption, and it worked—but not fully.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “The founders died, which was obviously quite unintentional,” Juniper said. “And the Gray was born, alongside the Beast. Again, their deaths creating the Gray is true, it’s just that the purpose is not what you’ve been led to believe. It is a shield that keeps the corruption from spreading any further, and the Beast is an unfortunate side effect.”

  “An unfortunate side effect,” Violet echoed hollowly. “How does an attempt to make a shield make a monster instead?”

  “Well.” Juniper sighed. “Something went wrong during the ritual, and the founders… melded with the power source. We draw our powers from the Beast because the Beast is an amalgamation of the founders, and their powers—the ones that corrupted Four Paths in the first place—are safe inside the Gray.”

  Juniper had known this back when she was a teenager, Violet realized, and on some level none of it surprised her. It made sense. More reason for her mother to run. More reason for Juniper’s dread, for her insistence that she was uniquely suited to keeping Four Paths intact. She was the only one who had known what was truly going on.

  “So this monster is an accident.” Violet wanted to throw up. “So everything the people in this town look up to the founders for is just them trying to cover up a mistake.”

  “Perhaps that was true generations ago, but the secret died out with the founders’ children. The founders now truly believe themselves to be heroes.”

  “I just can’t believe you lied about all of this,” Violet whispered. “I can’t believe all of the mayors did.”

  Violet remembered the Beast’s voice hissing in her ear: Do you really think I was bound here out of altruism?

  She saw the founders for who they were now: people who had told themselves a story again and again until they believed it. They were cowards and liars with blood on their hands. This was the truth of her legacy, ugly and raw, ripping through her chest like a gaping wound.

  “It’s a lie that keeps us respected,” Juniper said. “A lie that allows us to keep everyone else safe—”

  “At what cost?” Violet shook her head. “I understand now. The founders have never really tried to destroy the Beast because the person in charge has always known it’s our power source. Because they don’t want their abilities taken away, and they’re willing to pay for that selfishness with other peoples’ lives.”

  “Or, Violet, because we don’t know how to get rid of it, and this is the best we can do? Just because I know how something was broken doesn’t mean I know how to fix it.”

  “Why should I believe you? Why should I ever believe anything you say again?”

  Violet didn’t know when she’d sunk to her knees. The world was still blurry, and she was still furious. The stone seal was rough beneath her jeans, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  “Listen, Violet,” her mother said. “I know this is a lot to take in—”

  Violet shuddered. “All this time, you could have helped us, and you stayed silent.”

  “That’s not true,” Juniper said. “I don’t know why the Gray is failing now, or why the corruption is eating through it and hurting us. Something’s changed, but I have no idea what.”

  “It still would have been helpful information to know.” Violet had only been this angry at Rosie’s funeral. It was an incandescent sort of rage that buoyed her even as it rooted her further in the ground. “I’m going to tell everyone in town exactly what you lied about. And I’m going to finish this fucking nightmare for good.”

  Juniper’s face turned ashen, and Violet felt a sick rush of satisfaction that she’d finally gotten to her mother the way Juniper had gotten to her.

  But then she realized that Juniper was staring not at her, but behind her.

  She turned, her heart hammering in her chest.

  All around her, roots were burrowing up from the seal. With them came the unmistakable stench of death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  May stared unhappily at the front of the Hawthorne house. Smoke wafted in curls above the gabled roof, but it wasn’t coming from the chimney. It was coming from the tree.

  The buds, once unfurled, could not be closed. Harper, Violet, and Isaac had done their best, but that was not enough to stop the air from changing. May blinked, her eyes watering in the thin film of mist that now hung around her home. It was a problem in all four of the founder territories, collected in the areas that had fallen to the corruption.

  May hated it. It was a reminder of her failure. She’d tried to change the future and the cards had seized up on her. She’d been wrong about her capabilities, and the corruption had spread even farther as a result, leading to the evacuation of the town.

  Which had left her with only one option: pooling her resources.

  Ezra had seemed to view her inability to change the future as a mishap, not a catastrophic error, and he’d said he had another plan but it would take extra help. The time for respecting petty family rivalries was past. If Juniper Saunders could come to stay at their house, May figured she had nothing left to lose by inviting over her father. She was worried about his susceptibility to the airborne corruption, but he’d promised her that he was taking every precaution he could. May had to believe that would be enough.

  His car pulled into the driveway, and she walked him to the front door, watching as he scanned the smoke rising behind the house.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. “The evacuation must have been hard on you.”

  “The evacuation was tough, but this is going to be worse,” May said. “Mom’s going to freak out when she sees you.”

  “You didn’t warn her I was coming?”

  “She would have told me no and grounded me until the corruption ate Four Paths alive.”

  “So she hasn’t changed at all, then.”

  “Nope.” May swung open the front door, took a deep breath, and gest
ured for her father to follow her inside.

  She had known springing Ezra Bishop on the rest of her family would be an unpleasant experience. But she had not anticipated just how severely they would react when he appeared behind her in the doorway to the living room.

  Augusta rose to her feet immediately, disbelief and anger mixing together on her face. Brutus and Cassius rose with her, their hackles raised defensively, while Justin remained seated, frozen.

  He stared at Ezra as if he were seeing the Beast itself. It was like watching them both gaze into a mirror. Ezra had aged so well he barely looked in his thirties, let alone his fifties, and Justin had grown up in his absence. They had the same hair, the same eyes, the same wide, easy smile. But May knew already that neither of them would be smiling now, that this reunion wouldn’t be anything like hers.

  “What the fuck is he doing here?” Augusta asked, the words ricocheting off the wall like bullets. May rarely heard her mother swear. The word dropping out of her mouth so casually made May realize just how much she’d thrown into her family’s path.

  But things were desperate. She wasn’t sure she’d had a choice.

  “Helping,” she said, meeting Augusta’s eyes. “I know you’re not going to be a huge fan of this idea, but he’s been studying the corruption and he has a plan—”

  “Studying the corruption?” Augusta snarled. “How long has he been here?”

  “Augusta,” Ezra said.

  “I’m not talking to you.” Augusta’s gloved hands twitched with fury. “Ezra, sit. The dogs will keep you company. I need a word with my children.”

  Ezra sat nervously on the couch. Brutus and Cassius flanked him, still at full attention. A long string of drool dripped onto the floor from Brutus’s gaping maw as he gazed at May’s father like he was an afternoon snack. She hoped he’d still be in one piece whenever they came back.

  Augusta herded Justin and May into the foyer. The moment the living room door was closed behind them, she rounded on May, her voice low but furious.

  “May Elaine Hawthorne, how long has he been here?”

  When Augusta was angry, she had a kind of terrifying focus. May had seen it in action many times, the way her mother could zero in on a target and immediately decide how best to eliminate it as a threat. Right now May was in the center of her mother’s furious spotlight, and she knew there was only one way out: telling the truth.

  “He’s been in and out of town over the last few weeks,” she said.

  “And you didn’t see fit to inform me that your father had decided to waltz back into Four Paths and make contact with you?”

  “He didn’t make contact with me. I invited him.”

  At this, Justin let out a sharp noise of disbelief.

  Augusta’s face twisted. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “Because we needed help.” May was so tired of her family acting like any slight deviation from the Hawthornes’ precious rules was a betrayal of the highest order. Following the rules had led them here, to a town on the verge of falling into a corrupted hell. As far as she was concerned, that meant the rules needed to be broken, or at least changed. “Help he’s offering, if you would just be willing to listen—”

  “You listen to me.” Augusta leaned forward, tilting her head down until she was less than a foot away from her daughter. “You cannot trust that man. Any plan he wishes to put into motion will only benefit himself. It is not worth your time or consideration. So let me tell you what’s going to happen: We are going to go back into the living room, and I will personally escort him out of town. He can evacuate, just like everyone else, and we will discuss your punishment for this transgression later.”

  “No.”

  May didn’t even realize she’d spoken aloud until Augusta stepped back, as if she had been struck.

  “No?” she repeated slowly.

  “You heard me.” May’s heart was beating far too fast, adrenaline coursing through her veins. She felt as if she might pass out, as if she was standing outside of her body. Never in her life had she spoken to Augusta this way. But she wasn’t ready to stop. “Dad has a theory about my powers, about the corruption. About a way we might be able to stop it. I’m not giving up on that just because you told me to drop it.”

  “Wait.” It was Justin’s voice. He was staring at her with that same fearful expression May had seen as they knelt beneath the hawthorn tree. Again that memory stirred in her: his face, much younger. Don’t go downstairs, May—but it slipped away before she could grasp it. “Is that why you said you could fix the corruption by changing the future? Because of him?”

  “You what?” Augusta shook her head. “Of course. You came to me about your powers. I should have known that’s where you got such a ridiculous idea.”

  “It isn’t ridiculous!” Tears burned in the back of May’s throat. Her voice had grown shrill, and she hated it—she hated it. “I did it before. I could do it again, if I had the right support. The right training.”

  “I told you, May. Some powers aren’t meant for us.”

  “You mean me. Some powers aren’t meant for me. Because it’s not like you put those limits on yourself.” May’s voice rose. She was shaking; she was very close to screaming. “You’ve erased half this town’s memories, but how dare I try to give any of them back. How dare I try to change the cards.”

  “When I was younger, May, I didn’t know my limits. I’m trying to help you learn yours before you hurt someone you love. I don’t know why you’re so determined to let your father poison your mind, but I assure you that I know more about our family than he does.”

  “Oh, I see.” May’s voice was just as cruel as Augusta’s. She knew how to use her anger, too. She knew how to make words hurt. “This isn’t about Dad at all, is it? This is about my ritual. You still can’t handle that the hawthorn tree chose me, not Justin. That’s right, Mom, I’m powerful—more powerful than you. And it terrifies you, because you can’t just take it away the same way you took it from Violet and Harper or control me the way you control Isaac.”

  “Be very careful, May,” Augusta said softly. “You cannot take this back.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to take it back.” May stared at her. “Maybe you deserve to know that I see exactly what you’ve done to protect this town. And I think you’ve done a shitty job.”

  “I see you’ve made up your mind,” Augusta said coldly. “If you’re so determined to believe that you know everything, go on. Take him with you. Enact that brilliant plan of his and see just how well it goes for you. But if you think our family has done nothing but hurt this town, then surely you can protect us all without the gifts we’ve so generously given you.”

  She held out her hand expectantly. It took May a long, disbelieving moment to understand what she was asking for.

  “The Deck of Omens doesn’t belong to you,” she whispered, her heart thumping painfully in her chest. “It chose me. It’s mine.”

  “It belongs to the Hawthornes,” Augusta said, a brutal smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. And May understood. This was her mother’s trump card. If May refused to hand the deck over, she’d be a hypocrite. But if she did, she’d be powerless.

  Slowly, she drew the cards from her pocket. Peeling her fingers away and leaving them in her mother’s hand felt like ripping out a vital organ with her fingernails.

  “Take them, then,” she said, proud of how her voice did not waver. She turned away, unable to bear even another second of watching Augusta clutch the cards triumphantly, and started toward the living room. But a hand closed around her wrist before she’d taken a single step.

  “If you leave, you’re betraying us.” Justin’s eyes were wide with panic, his hand clammy around her arm. He paused, gasping for breath, and May felt a stab of unease. He hadn’t been running. Why was he so tired? “Just stay for a few minutes, all right? I want to talk to you about Dad. About your powers—”

  May shook him off. She was don
e listening to her family’s excuses.

  “You’ve betrayed us for the so-called greater good a hundred times,” she told him. “Seems right that I finally get a turn to save the day, don’t you think?”

  The forest was eerily silent. All sounds of life were absent except the rustling of May’s footsteps in the dead leaves as the sun set around them. Before long, the ground grew soft and squishy beneath May’s feet and the smell of corruption began to rise around her, stronger than she remembered. It was the smell of lost and ancient things, the smell of despair, the smell of death. But May headed deeper into the trees anyway. All she wanted to do was get as far away from her family as possible.

  Well, most of her family.

  “I must say,” mused Ezra from beside her. “That was deeply unpleasant.”

  “I can’t believe she threatened you with the dogs,” May muttered angrily. “She had no right—”

  “It is her choice to decide not to take my help,” Ezra said. “I wish she were capable of changing her patterns, but both Augusta and your brother are unfortunately set in their ways.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” May shoved down the awful things she’d said to them, the guilt she felt. She was tired of feeling like she would never be enough. There was someone who valued her abilities, who actually believed in nurturing her powers instead of suppressing them. That felt like a far healthier thing to focus on. “So. About this plan…”

  “Ah. Yes.” Ezra brightened up visibly behind his glasses. “As I said before, May, it would have been lovely to have their help, but they aren’t necessary. The only part of this that’s required is you.”

  “But I failed,” May said softly. “When I tried to change the future, the cards went blank. And the corruption got worse.”

  Augusta taking the cards away stung more than anything else. She was disarmed. Declawed. But refusing would have been worse—would have felt like a different kind of loss.

  “That’s because we both miscalculated how strong the corruption would be,” Ezra said. “You’re strong too, but it will require more ability than you currently possess to destroy it. This ritual will grant you the power you need.”