The Deck of Omens

by Christine Lynn Herman

  May rushed over to Harper as her mother stepped toward her father. The girl was surrounded by the remnants of stone animals, looking exhausted.

  “You’re controlling those?” May asked her.

  Harper nodded proudly. “I thought your dad captured you,” she told May. “We came here to rescue you.”

  “He did,” May said, shoving down the burst of emotion she felt at that. This was not the time to get sappy. “It didn’t stick. You’re here to do the ritual, right? To give our powers back to the forest?”

  Harper’s eyes widened. “How do you know about that?”

  “Long story,” May said. “Let’s just get to the seal and finish this.”

  They sprinted across the cobblestones to the place where Violet lay sprawled out on the ground. Juniper Saunders was sitting beside her daughter, her face drained of all color as she gripped her hand. Orpheus was curled up in Juniper’s lap, while Gabriel was bent over Violet, his hands pressed to her torso, face screwed up in concentration. Green-and-gold light flowed around him.

  “Is it working?” Harper asked.

  Gabriel looked up, face flushed with sweat. “She’ll live.” May sagged with relief. “But she definitely can’t fight. She needs to get out of here.”

  Violet’s mouth moved. An indistinct mumble floated from her lips.

  “Shh,” Juniper hissed at them, and they all quieted, staring anxiously at her face. Behind May, the battle raged, Harper’s siblings, her mother, and Isaac distracting Richard. She tried not to think about how strong he was, that four of them could only barely keep him occupied.

  “I want to finish it,” Violet croaked out, her eyes fluttering open. “Let me… do the ritual.”

  “No,” Juniper said. “You can’t.”

  “We do need someone from every family,” May said. “And if she can’t fight, she’ll be safer in there than she is out here.”

  “See?” Violet pushed Gabriel’s hands away, ignoring his noises of protest, and laboriously sat up. “I’ll be fine.”

  May wasn’t sure that was true, but they had no time to argue about it.

  “Can you use your powers?” she asked.

  Violet paused, then shook her head, panic dawning on her face.

  “Not without hurting myself more,” she said, looking even paler than usual.

  “That’s okay,” May said, mentally readjusting her plan. They could still do this without Violet’s Saunders abilities, but it would be a little tougher. “You won’t need them, but you should probably leave your companion behind.”

  Violet nodded with understanding and gave Orpheus a quiet, knowing look.

  “Keep Mom safe, all right?” she said to the cat, scratching him between the ears. “And, Mom—I promise, I’m coming back out.”

  May wasn’t sure that was true either, for any of them, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she reached out a hand and helped Violet to her feet.

  Harper approached the trees growing thickly around the seal, her heart pounding in her chest. Behind them, the battle raged; she could hear Richard yelling and cursing at her siblings. Their goal, May explained, was to drive the girl’s father away from the seal so that they could find a way through the trees to do the ritual inside. They had enough obstacles already without factoring in Richard’s powers. It was working for now, but Harper had no idea how long they had until their reinforcements failed.

  She turned around one final time and caught Mitzi’s gaze. Her sister looked at her, fierce and determined, and Harper felt a tangled mixture of regret and pride for all they had endured. Her siblings were survivors, she realized, just like her. And if she could finish this, they would find a way to heal together.

  Beside her, May and Isaac supported Violet as Harper walked up to the nearest tree trunk. All the trees were rippled and bloated, the clear outlines of iridescent hearts beating within their chests. Hair hung in great clumps from their branches, which crooked and wriggled like beckoning fingers. Human hands pounded against the trees from the inside out. It was an orchard of flesh, an image that Harper knew would be stamped indelibly on her brain for the rest of her life.

  “This place radiates a deeply cursed energy,” Violet murmured, her voice a little loopy.

  “That’s because it’s literally cursed,” May said, sighing. “Get it together, Saunders.”

  “That’s no way to talk to a girl who almost died—”

  “Stop it,” Harper said quietly, drawing her sword. “Let’s go.”

  The moment she swung the blade forward, branches shot out toward them, twisting, grasping. May jumped back, yanking Violet with her. Harper reacted on instinct, spinning and slicing through the branches. They fell to the ground, wriggling, as Isaac knelt down and pressed his hands into the dirt.

  “Stand back,” he growled, a moment before another shock wave emanated from him, just like the one he’d used to attack Richard earlier. The effect was immediate: a line of trees collapsed into a path, sinking, writhing, their trunks bubbling grotesquely as they disintegrated. Harper rushed forward, her sword at the ready. She sliced and hacked at branches as they reached for her, refusing to let her guard down. Every moment of her training had been for this: an army that she’d never expected yet knew exactly how to fight.

  Together, they rushed through the tiny path they had made, one that was already closing behind them. Harper saw a great, writhing mass of roots over the town seal that extended up into a tree stump, a cauldron boiling with liquid. Already, the iridescent puddles they had left behind were writhing and foaming, new saplings rising from the ashes.

  May walked toward the cauldron, her blond hair streaked with grime, and spread her arms wide.

  “This is it,” she whispered. “This is where we end it.”

  The founders’ seal had grown markedly more corrupted since Richard had forced May to drink, the branches twining thickly above her head, nearly blocking out the light, the roots growing just as tightly along the ground.

  All around them, the hearts illuminated in the trees beat in tandem, their thump, thump, thump loud enough to drown out the rhythm in May’s own chest. May knew she should feel scared, but she felt strong instead. She could feel the Beast’s presence swirling around her—what was left of it, anyway. Feel its panic pulsating at the edge of her consciousness, whining in the back of her mind. It was dying, but what power it had remaining was centered here.

  The others looked just as disturbed as she did. May had no idea how Violet was even standing, her shirt caked in blood, her face flushed with the clear effort of every step she took. She swayed, then sank to her knees, panting. Isaac knelt gently beside her, gesturing for May to continue.

  Beneath the membranous skin of the trees, forms stirred, vaguely humanoid. They pressed themselves against the edges of the trunks, reaching toward them but unable to break through. May gasped and stepped backward as a handprint appeared on the nearest chestnut oak, bulging outward. A familiar face appeared a moment later, then another, both of them baring iridescent teeth.

  May’s stomach dropped as she gazed at Caleb and Isaiah Sullivan.

  Isaac’s voice rang out a moment later. “No,” he murmured. “No…”

  Violet, who was leaning on his arm, let out a noise of recognition. May turned her head to see that Daria Saunders’s wizened face had appeared across the clearing.

  She whirled around, staring at faces she remembered from obituaries and so many others she did not. Each of these figures stirring in the forest was a life the Gray had taken to hold back the corruption, to satisfy its appetites. It didn’t matter that she knew they were merely echoes, that the souls in each of them had long since departed the earth. They still shook her to her core.

  May fell to her knees, her breaths coming too quickly, the world around her spinning. A moment later, a figure appeared in front of her—not an apparition or a grotesque reimagination of the dead, but Harper Carlisle, grime and iridescence smudged on her cheeks, her mouth a thin, de
termined slash.

  May swallowed, tears brimming at the corners of her eyes. “It’s all our fault,” she whispered. “All of this… all of them…”

  “Don’t break on me, Hawthorne.” Harper’s voice was soft and steady. “Not now. Not when you know that this is his fault, not yours.”

  She held out her hand. May grasped it, and together, they rose to their feet. Across the clearing, Isaac and Violet still knelt together, transfixed and trembling. Wordlessly, they walked up to them; wordlessly, Isaac and Violet turned.

  “We can’t let him win,” Harper said.

  Violet snapped out of it first. She placed a hand on Isaac’s shoulder, and he nodded, leaning into her touch, his eyes fluttering shut for one short, pained moment before they opened again, blazing with determination.

  “Let’s do this ritual, then,” he said. “Now.”

  The roots grew wild and free, coiling across the founders’ seal. May knelt in the center of the stone and yanked them away just as she had in her vision.

  “It’s like what we did on Founders’ Day.” Violet’s voice was soft. “When they crowned us.”

  “You’re right,” May said, her eyes snapping up to the girl’s disturbed expression. They had playacted this every year, she realized, glorifying something they did not understand. But they knew now.

  Each of them sat in their place—May to the south, for the Hawthornes; Isaac to the west; Violet beside him at the north, still visibly shaky; and Harper in the final spot, in the east. The place where their ancestors had died. Where they would complete the ritual they had failed to finish all those years ago.

  An iridescent liquid soaked through May’s jeans. The cauldron bubbled and smoked between them as she pressed her hands to the cool stone, exhaling. A presence whistled through the air, a voice in the clearing, tinny and hollow.

  Well done, Seven of Branches.

  May could hear the voices twined together in it, now that she knew who they belonged to. They were the voices of three people who had found magic in the world and used it to make themselves stronger. They had twisted it and broken it until it could not survive on its own anymore, and all that remained was their blood, their legacy, their ugly, mutated sacrifice.

  It was time at last for the monster they had become to find peace.

  “If this works, our powers are gone,” May said, staring around at all of them. “Are you sure that’s really what you want?”

  “Of course it is,” Isaac said immediately.

  “I didn’t even know I could have these abilities until a few months ago,” Violet said, shrugging. “I think I’ll be okay.”

  Harper hesitated, though.

  “It’s the only way I can ever be free of this place,” she said finally, locking eyes with May. “What about you? Are you ready?”

  May nodded.

  “All right,” Harper said. “We know the song. You’ll figure it out, I think—join in.”

  And she began, the tune as familiar to May as her own heartbeat. It was the “Founders’ Lullaby” as she had never heard it sung before, and yet after only a few lines, she felt the forest’s presence rushing through her. All their voices joined together, chanting the lines over and over again. It was a song and a promise and a story all in one.

  Seekers in the woods, they say,

  Found a forest, strange and gray,

  Saw its power, found a way

  To take it for their own.

  Now we wish to give it back—

  It was never ours to have.

  Heed our plea, we beg, we pray:

  Branches and stones, daggers and bones,

  We wish it all away.

  As they sang, May reached inside herself and pushed, surrendering her magic to the tree, energy moving through her and into the seal. And as she glanced around at the others, she saw that they were doing the same.

  It was working, she realized. The ground beneath them was beginning to shake, the iridescent trees shivering, their fingerlike branches moving in an unseen wind.

  And then a noise sounded through the clearing, a scream that seemed to tear through the fabric of reality itself. A figure appeared at the edge of the clearing, his hands braced against two dissolving tree trunks.

  “Nice try,” Richard Sullivan spat, stepping into the clearing. His coat was tattered, his hair windswept and wild, and blood and grime were smeared across his face. But he was here, and he was standing, and that alone was enough to make May’s arms prickle with gooseflesh. “But this ends now.”

  Before any of them could move, he spread out his hands. The roots untwined from the ground again, easily incapacitating Isaac, Harper, and Violet. They were all yanked back, their arms and legs pinioned together by branches. They struggled and screamed, but he was too strong. The fight was over in mere moments, leaving only May to face Richard.

  She rose slowly to her feet, her father’s gaze tracking her every movement.

  But he could not track her thoughts.

  Are you there? she asked.

  Yes. The voice was faint, but clear. You’ve almost done it. Just one more push… just one more time…

  I’ll do it. May set her jaw.

  “Dad,” she said. She couldn’t think about whether or not he’d left bodies in his wake, and yet she couldn’t imagine a world where the other founders let him pass while they could still move. But she could worry about that later; right now, this was all that mattered. The man before her and the ritual she’d promised to finish.

  Richard looked at her, and she did not for a moment believe the regret she saw on his face. “It didn’t need to come to this, May. If you’d only just cooperated…”

  “Is that what you told the other founders?” May snapped. “Your friends?”

  “I’m not here to argue about morality.” Richard’s voice was hollow. “I am here to take the powers I was promised when I made my sacrifice. There’s still room for you to take that power, too. Do you understand that if you go through with this, all you’ve worked for will just… disappear? You’re so talented, May. What a shame to throw that away.”

  May took a deep breath and tried to focus. Richard had raised her to believe that she was meant to be useful, not loved. That no one would notice her or care for her if she was ordinary.

  But May knew better now.

  She was more than her power. More than the Deck of Omens, more than the Gray. Strong enough to make a monster listen, and strong enough to know it wasn’t right to command it at all. It was time to end this now, make it so that no child would have to go through this ever again. She would not let Four Paths do this to anyone else.

  She’d come here to give all of this up, and she was not about to let her father stop her.

  “But it isn’t your power,” May said, reaching for the roots in her mind. “It’s never belonged to any of us.”

  As she exhaled, she let the hawthorn’s endless pathways spiral through her. Her mind spun, visions dancing behind her eyes, and in that moment it was as if she held the entire forest inside her, as if she was at the heart of the whole town. Her mind spun as she felt the collective pain of all of those who had died here, their horror, their sadness and fear in their final moments.

  She collapsed to the ground, her hands twining in the roots, and pushed.

  The effect was instantaneous. The roots around her friends uncoiled, releasing them; they tumbled onto their sides, gasping for air, as the founders’ symbol began to shake beneath them.

  “Give it your power!” she called out to them. “Finish this.”

  Wordlessly, they pressed their hands to the roots as she had; May felt the collective hum of their power as it joined hers.

  “What is this?” Richard snarled, stretching out his own hands. But nothing moved.

  “You’re too late to stop the ritual,” May said, tipping her head up to meet his eyes. “I am not your tool. And you will never make another sacrifice.”

  As she spoke, gray mist poured out
of the cracks in the founders’ symbol. It hung in the air, coiling and uncoiling, and from it, three figures emerged.

  At the sight of them, Richard blanched, and May gasped.

  “You betrayed us,” Lydia Saunders whispered. She was ethereal in gray, her braid dissolving into smoke at the ends.

  “You destroyed us,” Thomas Carlisle said, his eyes dark pits of despair.

  “You have been running for a long time,” Hetty Hawthorne snarled. “But not anymore, Richard. This ends here.”

  They advanced, and he ran, scrambling back toward the edge of the clearing. But they were far faster than anything living, and the moment they reached him, their hands grasping at his flesh, Richard began to scream.

  He fell to his knees, writhing and twisting. May gasped as she realized that his hair was turning from blond to gray to snow-white, thinning across his scalp, his flesh puckering and changing as his magic seeped away.

  His body turned ashen; his spine twisted and spasmed just as the founders’ had in the memory Richard had shown May. Just as the body had in that vision the Beast had shown her.

  Around her, the others bowed their heads, unable to watch. But May did not look away as her father’s flesh disintegrated. As roots spiraled down his arms and legs and his eyes faded to white. Soon there was nothing left of him but iridescent dust spread across the edge of the founders’ seal.

  May got to her feet, shuddering not with pity, but relief.

  Richard Sullivan was the only real monster in Four Paths. And this death, at the hands of those he’d wronged, was exactly what he deserved.

  She blinked again, and the founders were gone, their bodies dissolved into a mist that coiled in gray ropes around the seal. The Beast’s voice murmured wordlessly in her ear, fading in and out of focus. Wind whipped through May’s hair; the mist spun, and she tipped her head back, gasping as a great crack appeared in the center of the Gray’s off-white sky.

  A wave of light-headedness washed over her, and she beckoned the others. They crouched together at the edge of the shaking seal, their arms wrapped around one another as the world broke apart.

  The Beast’s voice sang inside her mind, and May knew with everything in her that this was the last time she would hear it.