The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,3
and thought of the roots, felt the path in her mind unfurl a little further. She could feel the hawthorn more clearly. Another vision?—herself, standing in the same place she was kneeling now as the tree changed from stone to bark. And yet it didn’t feel like a victory. The vision May had seen a moment ago tugged at her mind, a deeper dread, a bigger problem. Something she needed to solve.
“I don’t think my card is just here because I’m doing the reading,” she said, frowning.
Augusta raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“No.” May swallowed. “The tree is asking me for help.”
The doubt on her mother’s face hurt. “Are you certain?”
“Would you have said that to Justin?”
May hadn’t meant to put it so bluntly. She knew from the thinness of Augusta’s lips that she would pay for it later somehow, in a privilege taken away or an unpleasant patrol schedule for the next week. But it wasn’t fair?—it wasn’t. That nobody seemed to believe she could be that important. That, deep down, May worried they were right.
“Justin isn’t here,” Augusta said. “And you still have one card left.”
May stared down at the all-seeing eye. It was easier to look at the card than her mother’s face. Her hands trembled as rage, hot and heady, swirled within her. Rage for her tree. Rage for her mother, still desperately chasing down the child who could not help her and ignoring the one who could.
Deep in her mind, the pathways spiraled and wound. May felt something unfurling?—a path that was hers. Thin and spiky, coiling around itself like a tangled knot of possibilities that could not yet be unraveled.
It pulsed in her mind like a beating heart, and for the first time, May reached for it. She grasped at the tendrils and pulled that path into focus, letting the roots worm their way into her mind.
It’s mine, she snarled, at the cards, at Four Paths itself. Whatever happens next belongs to me.
A surge of energy coursed through her, to the card in her hands. It burned white-hot between her interlaced fingers, tracing the maps of old wounds that had long since faded. It was only her sense of self-control that kept her from crying out.
May felt the path lock into place. Felt the card in her hand vibrate?—then shift, until the heat on her palms had faded.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She could feel blood pooling beneath her nostrils and at the rims of her eyes, blurring her vision. When she blinked, crimson splatters appeared on her pajama pants.
“What was that?” Augusta said sharply.
May’s lie was quiet, easy. “The cards had more to tell me.”
But it had been just the opposite. She’d had more to tell the cards?—and they had changed. They’d listened to her.
A Hawthorne shouldn’t have been able to do that. But she had.
May flipped over the final card without another word, ready to see her path, ready to accept her future.
And gasped.
Her eyes took in the Crusader?—a knight on a horse, reared back to charge, no part of him visible but two fiery eyes beneath his helmet.
Her father’s card.
May already knew that when she looked at her mother’s face, all she would see was crushing, inevitable disappointment. Augusta would insist it meant nothing, that it was a sign to be ignored.
But May knew better.
Because the Crusader in this context could only mean one thing: She would not be able to fix the hawthorn tree without her father. And if that meant going against Augusta’s wishes, so be it.
After all, the Deck of Omens wasn’t her mother’s to command. It was hers.
CHAPTER TWO
One week later
Harper Carlisle waited for her reckoning with a blade in her hand and a deep, impenetrable dread in her heart.
“You can put that down,” Violet Saunders said, the calm in her voice belied by how aggressively she was gripping her cup of coffee. They stood side by side in the backyard of her friend’s imposing manor house, staring out at the woods. The treetops on the hill before them shone like a wildfire in the late-afternoon sunlight. “They aren’t going to hurt you.”
Harper eyed the two figures standing at the bottom of the hill, perhaps twenty feet away, and opted not to lower her sword.
“They’re my family,” she said. “Of course they’re going to hurt me.”
This meeting hadn’t been her idea. But she had agreed to it when her siblings texted Violet, desperate to see her. Because after a week sequestered in the Saunders manor