once, twice, three times, her brain unwilling to process the image it received. A set of shoe prints were burned into the ground next to Hunter—next to the seared memory of Mr. Thompson’s corpse.
Panic tightened Hunter’s chest and she coughed into the magical smoke that dissipated with each gust of spring air. “Mag—” Hunter stared at the cards. The second face had changed. The image of a gnarled branch bisected the card. Above the limb, a skull nested under the smooth arch of a sickle. Below it, a puddle of skin, its face and arms slack and empty like it’d been stripped from its frame and dropped amidst the grass.
The mortal’s skin becomes a living disguise.
“It wasn’t just Mr. Thompson. Someone else was here.” Hunter motioned to the footprints scorched into the earth. “Someone else was taken.”
Ecru grass dusted Mercy’s cheeks as she crawled around to Hunter’s other side where the grass was unmarred by the tarot and whatever creature had slipped through the crumbling gate. “Will your cards tell you what did this?”
That’s what the last card was for. It had to be. It would tell them exactly who to look for and then they could begin to put this whole mess behind them.
Inhale. Hunter’s fingers found the third card. Exhale. “The creature, who is it?”
Mercy gripped Hunter’s arm as the sisters waited for the truth.
A gurgling sound like a growl through wet paint while images slowly flicked along the card’s surface as if it were scrolling through a digital contacts list: a woman with snakes piled atop her head like hair; a three-headed beast; a female rising from ocean waves, her hands cupped around her mouth; and a drooling beast with a single bulging eye and sparse hairs that stuck up from its lumpy head like question marks. The final image froze upon the face of the card.
“Oh, Freya!” Mercy pulled Hunter against her. “His eyes are gone. That’s what Em said about her dad.”
“And the sheriff said about Mr. Thompson.” Hunter glossed her fingers over the image. “It’s collecting eyes.”
Mercy’s breath left her lips in short quakes. “H-how do we stop him?”
Hunter lifted the card and squinted at the single eye glaring at her from the middle of the creature’s broad forehead. That was the new question.
How on earth would Hunter and Mercy catch a Cyclops?
Twenty-two
Hunter passed the card to Mercy who flipped it over and examined its silver back. “So, that’s it? I mean, your cards told us that it’s the Cyclops, which is great, but he’s not exactly walking around like this.” She pointed to the strings of saliva dripping from the creature’s chin and the lone eye it was best known for. “Can you do your, you know”—she waved her hand in front of Hunter as if polishing glass—“tarot thing again and ask the cards to be more specific this time?”
Hunter picked at a tender piece of skin hanging from her index finger. “That’s not really how it works.” She held her palm over the charred grass. “And I used up all the magic from this site.” She plucked the card from Mercy’s grasp. “Sometimes the tarot gives veiled answers. It would sort of be cheating if the cards just came out with a big arrow that pointed directly to what we need to know. Half of the magic is how the images are interpreted.”
Mercy groaned and collapsed onto the tall grass. “It wouldn’t be cheating. It would be answering the question you asked in a clear and direct manner.” As she spoke, she held up her fawn hands. Her slender forearms had begun to freckle under the persistence of the spring sun. “When I do spellwork, I know whether it’s been successful or not. If it has, I get results. If it hasn’t … well, nothing usually happens. But that nothing always tells me something. This isn’t a nothing or a something. It’s just—”
“A star!”
“I guess it’s a start, but my point is that it could be a better one.”
“Not a start. A star.”
Mercy sat up as Hunter flipped the card around to face her. “I didn’t notice it at first, but there’s a star around his eye and another in his, um…”
Mercy squinted and tapped the Cyclops’s left pec. “Scraggly chest hair?”
“Gross, but yes.” Hunter looked at the card. “This is the answer. This is who the Cyclops is wearing.”
“A star?” Mercy’s brow remained pinched as she untangled a seedpod from her hair. “You think the Cyclops is parading around town in