The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,74
She couldn’t do a reading for herself.
The Deck of Omens grew warm in her hands immediately, and May sensed something at the other end of the tether, something like fear. And when the roots began to vanish, one by one, it felt like they were running away instead of choosing which ones would show the correct path forward.
She focused her mind the same way she had before, beneath the stone tree. She thought of the corruption, tangling its way around the town. She thought of her fear, of her parents, of the world she thought she’d understood transforming into something utterly unknowable. And she felt it again?—easier this time. One path spiraling more brightly than the others. A future that was different.
She grabbed it. She pulled. And as she pulled, an image swirled around her: endless fog just like what she’d seen when she touched the tree. But this time, something was different. A person was lying on the ground beside her, screaming and clawing at their bloated body. Roots rippled beneath their skin, wriggling up their arms and past their neck as a cloudy whiteness spread across the pupils, bleaching all the life out of them. Their spine gave a jerk, and then their body let out a horrible, sickening crack, the torso and legs winding in opposite directions, as if a hand had lifted them up and twisted them in two.
May gasped for breath and found herself beneath the tree again, shuddering. It was just a vision. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t.
“What happened?” Justin was kneeling beside her, looking concerned.
May shook him off. “Nothing.”
There were bloody tears on her cheeks and three cards left in her hands. May found she had to work harder than usual to hold on to them. Stubbornly, she laid them on the ground, then stretched her hands out toward Justin’s.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s see what happens.”
His hands shook in hers, clammy and anxious. May pulled them away, dread coursing through her.
She flipped the first card over. It was blank.
“What?” The word bubbled out of her throat before she could think to hold it back. To pretend this was supposed to happen.
“What does that mean?” Justin asked from beside her.
May’s stomach churned. “I don’t know.”
Never in her life had she heard of the Deck of Omens showing its chosen wielder nothing.
She flipped over the second card, then the third, but they were blank too.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered as blood dripped onto her collar. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want?”
And then, above her, she heard it. The branches of the hawthorn tree groaned and creaked in a sudden gust of wind, and May raised her head, gasping.
The buds above her had opened all at once, dozens of hands unfurling. Fog poured from them, faster than she could comprehend, darkening the sky around them.
The corruption had gone airborne.
She met Justin’s eyes and breathed, “Run.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Isaac found his brother at the Pathways Inn, a cheap old house that had been partitioned off into motel rooms at some point and stayed open for business mostly out of sheer will.
Lia Raynes, whose family owned the place, was sitting behind the counter when Isaac walked in, texting and looking incredibly bored. She nearly dropped her phone in her lap when he approached the front desk.
“Don’t know why you look so surprised,” Isaac said tiredly. “You know who’s staying here.”
Lia gulped. “Yeah. I know. Did he come back to help with the corruption? Is the rest of your family coming back, too?”
Everybody always knew his business. It was one of his least favorite side effects of being a founder.
“Which room is he staying in?” Isaac asked, ignoring the question.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Lia, looking disappointed that he hadn’t offered up more information. “He’s out back. He likes to read on the porch.”
“A man of culture, I see.”
Lia’s thumbs flew furiously across her phone screen as Isaac pushed open the back door and ascended onto the porch. In thirty seconds, the entirety of Four Paths High School would know all about the meeting between the Sullivan brothers. But Isaac didn’t have it in him to care.
Facing things head-on didn’t just mean apologizing to Justin. It meant confronting Gabriel about the role he’d played in Isaac’s ritual and seeing what he had to say for himself.
As Isaac approached, his brother looked up from the rocking chair on the porch and flipped his tattered paperback shut, sliding it into the backpack he’d propped up against the railing. It