Foretold Read online

  My arm aches, my mouth is a desert, and I’m standing on wet spaghetti strands instead of legs. I drop to the ground. Even the tether to the Heart I distrusted is gone. There’s nothing I can do for Colin now. I’ll be lucky if I don’t die in here myself.I rub at my chest, at the hope-sized hole throbbing inside me. Maybe I didn’t escape a physical punishment after all.

  I hear footsteps behind me and I freeze, visions of Ford and my false Coil-mother blasting through my mind’s eye.

  A little boy giggles as he passes. He stops in the lane and peers down at me with bright eyes too big for his pale cherubic face. He looks about five or six years old and is wearing what looks like a faded school uniform, complete with little white knee socks and shiny black laced shoes. His hair is a brown shock topped by a cap. “Come on. Or do you want to destroy my house some more?”

  “I—I’m sorry?” I stammer, as I struggle to my feet. “I didn’t mean—wait, you live here?”

  “Let’s go,” the boy says. He turns so that he’s shuffling backwards toward the place, facing me as I follow. “You’re sad.”

  “I am,” I agree.

  He smiles.

  You’re not meant to save Colin. You don’t belong at Theban. I look up at the blue Coil sky. A flock of black birds fly overhead. Six crows.

  “I need to get out of here. I need to go home and accept however much time I have with Colin, and… and…” I say, swiping at my eyes. “Maybe I can buy some time. If I tell him about the vision.”

  We’ve reached the boy’s front door. “If you’re abandoning hope, you can come inside with me. The way to Laurel Plain is through my home.”

  “Do—do you have any mirrors in there?”

  “No mirrors.”

  I look down the road stretching past the house. What if there’s something just around the bend that can help Colin? I can’t lose him, lose me again.

  I look back at the boy. His smile is angelic.

  Go to Colin. Be with him for as long as you have together.

  “Okay,” I say. It comes out rough, anguish wrapping its arms around that one little word and weighing it down.

  The boy gestures for me to open his door, a simple white rectangle of wood and a rusting black knob. I’m going to lose Colin. I failed.

  One, two, three. This compulsion is not me.

  Four, five, six. I control it. It doesn’t control me.

  My heart aches. I twist the knob. Five times.

  The door opens and the boy scampers inside. I follow.

  I hold my hands out in front of me, feeling my way through the darkness. “Are you there?”

  It smells like flowers, but not any one particular flower. It smells like dozens and dozens of them, their fragrances blending. It smells like a funeral.

  “Hello?”

  “Vali, what have you dragged home?” a deep, ringing voice asks.

  I hear the boy giggle. “I want it.”

  I feel the cold wash of dread. One. Two. Three. Four.

  A click, and a small gas lamp is lit. It spotlights a seated man in profile, a beard of soot-black bristles coating his chin and climbing up the side of his face to meet his hairline. It’s a regal face, reflecting the light off his firm brow and cheek, but weary enough to make me think he’s older than he looks. The rest of him is embraced by shadows. The little boy climbs onto the man’s lap.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” I whisper.

  “It’s sad and afraid, Asterion,” the boy says. “Can I eat it now?”

  “Not yet, pet, you just ate. You’ll make yourself sick,” the man says soothingly.

  Just ate? He can’t mean… Dill? This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real—

  “Why does it keep repeating itself?” the boy asks.

  “Y—you can hear my thoughts?”

  “It has an illness, pet,” the man says. He shifts slightly, and I shrink back in on myself, seeing for the first time just how hulking and powerful his frame is. Although he does not turn his face toward me, his one visible dark iris, set in a soupy bloodshot umber, passes over me in a searching scrape; an eye at odds with his kingly, bearded face.

  “Oh good. Like the other? Or does this illness spoil her for eating?” the boy sings out.

  “Oh God.” Take a step back. Take your chances deeper in the Coil—away from…

  “No use. You tried earlier. No place deeper than the Heart. Only way out is the way you came,” the man says.

  “I’m… I’m in the—” I’m in the Heart. I’m in the Heart. The Heart. The Heart. The Heart. I draw in choppy breaths. Every muscle aches, tight with the need to run. I’m not scared. I’m pass-out-from-fear-terrified.

  “Heart of the Heart. You’re consumed with what-weres, what-ifs, and what-wills. Real and imagined. It’s a delicious anima,” the man says. “My pet and I have eaten, and still, I’m tempted.”

  “I—I want to go,” I whisper, taking a step back toward the door.

  “If I can’t eat, I want to play!” the boy pleads. “This one likes games, too.”

  “What do I always tell you? You mustn’t play with your food.”

  “If I can’t eat it, then it’s not my food. Yet,” the boy pouts.

  I back up another step, carefully, slowly. Samara Trefoil and the hunted look in her eyes, Dill and the emptiness I sensed in him, these things are responsible.

  “It knows the others!” the boy says with joy, leaping off the man’s lap.

  “I don’t want to play. I want to go home.”

  “It doesn’t want to go home. It wants to save a boy. It wants a mirror,” the boy says to the man.

  “A great sacrifice is needed,” the man says. “What have you to give for this boy’s life?”

  “Presents!” The boy claps.

  “I—I thought…” Dill said the Heart was a lie. But if… if it isn’t? “I don’t know. Minutes off my life? A year?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “I… Tell me what you want.” I tug at my necklace, afraid to hope, afraid to succeed.

  “Bring that to me, pet,” the man says to the boy.

  The boy scampers over. I rear back. He smiles at me with teeth that are now sharp as needles and points to the necklace my Dad bought me for my birthday. I unlatch my necklace with shaking hands, pooling it in the boy’s awaiting palm. He holds it up for the man’s inspection.

  “Open it,” the man says. The boy obeys and flicks the fan-like locket open. I flinch, hating the idea of these creatures staring at my memories.

  “You do not want us to view these images? But we’ve seen one of these before, you know. The thing you call mother. You have, too, in this place. Not very long ago,” the man says to me. He reaches out a yellow, curling fingernail and traces one of the wedges of the locket. “You painted with your pain. Thank you.”

  I hug my arms to my middle, hold my breath.

  “This is precious to you,” the man says, tapping at the five fanned panels of the locket. It is not a question. He brings each panel to his eye, lingering on the final photo of the three of us together. “You would give it to us?”

  “Yes,” I respond.

  “This loss is an acceptable trade,” the man says. The boy closes the locket and runs off into the dark.

  “My locket is…” How is a necklace enough to save a life? That can’t be enough. “I can save Colin by sacrificing that?”

  The man stands and dips his head in acknowledgment. “You will have a tool to save the thing you love. We have accepted your sacrifice.”

  The man lifts the lantern.

  I smother a shriek. The part of him he’d hidden away, the left side of his body… the bulging black eye of a bull, coarse hair covering the side of his face leading to a curved horn, hooves instead of a hand and foot.

  He smiles, I think: a grotesque twist of lips and snout. “My appearance offends you. But I am not the one who wanders about inside your home. Your kind crawl and burrow and build nests in my walls, and the
n you’re offended to find me here, still lingering on after all these years. But you have only yourselves to blame for that. Nightmares linger long after the night has gone when you feed them.”

  The man—bull—thing sets his lantern on top of a hearth and opens a small case with his human hand, passing something small to the boy. The boy sets a small, flat stone down in front of me.

  I stare at them, trembling at their proximity until I hear a hissing. Something slithers along my foot. I leap back, chest heaving. Serpents slide in from around the room, congregating around the stone. Seven snakes in all. In unison, they all bare their fangs and bite down on the stone. I’m in a room full of snakes. A dark room full of snakes.

  “Their venom is potent. Mustn’t stand too close,” the man says.

  I edge back, and one of the snakes snaps at me before sinking its teeth into that stone disc again. A depression appears in the center of the stone, the snake venom eating away at it like acid. A hole appears, grows, and when the stone has a perfect circle housed in its center, the snakes disperse, slithering off to whence they came.

  The man bends, setting a second hoof on the ground as he picks up the stone. He straightens and extends it out, pinched between two thick, yellow fingernails.

  “This is an adderstone glass. To use one is a blessing. You may use it now to finish your ritual and save the thing you care for,” the man says. “Use it as you would the mirror. Look through and create the reality you require.”

  I take it from him. The hole has a rose-colored transparent film, thin as a bubble’s skin stretched over it. This is the last piece of my ritual: visualizing the soul whose harvest I want stopped in a Mag Five Mirror.

  Save Colin. Save Colin. Save Colin. Save Colin. Save Colin.

  I hold it up to my eye and peer through. I picture Colin, and he appears in the center of the adderstone. He’s alive. He’s older. It’s years from now. He’s living a life full of laughter and… he has children of his own. He doesn’t die in the street in front of Mrs. O’s shop and the school. He lives. He lives. He lives. He lives. He lives. I say it, and I see it, and I believe it.

  I look up from the stone. The boy holds his hand out. I place the stone in his palm.

  “The boy will live,” the man says. “And you will stay.”

  “Stay… here? No! But—” My pulse is a battering ram. My throat works as I swallow. Samara’s sobs sound in my mind’s ear in a sharp voice like broken glass. I’ll play. I’ll play.

  “What if—I… I’ll play to…”

  “Yes!” the boy says eagerly. “A game!”

  “No games, pet.”

  “But I want to!” the boy whines, stamping his foot. “If it loses, we can still feed on it.”

  My heart jerks. “I’ll play. I’ll play.” I’ll play. Play. Play.

  The boy cries out, a thirsty, grating sound. He rushes to the man’s side and pulls on his sleeve. “A question game, I think,” the boy coos.

  The man—at least the human half of his face—appears resigned and amused. “Very well.” He turns to face me more fully, and I can’t stop my shudder. “You’ll play with my pet. If you are victorious, you may go. But if you lose…” He smiles.

  Is this where Samara failed? Where Dill failed? Or was it the fear that drove out all the light in their eyes?

  The boy smiles, his fangs reflecting the light, and approaches slowly. I shake, a marrow-deep cold settling in me as I watch him.

  “What is dead before the dawn, lives for the day, and dies after dusk?” he asks in a sing-song voice.

  I lick at my dry lips, tasting the color storm. There is a warning tingle at the base of my neck. Trivinometry. Treat it like any game of Trivinometry, Cassie. One where my life is on the line. For once, that’s not my catastrophic thinking exaggerating, either: riddles have always been my least liked part of Trivinometry.

  I repeat the riddle in a whisper. “Is the answer… light?”

  “That’s right, but it asked me,” the boy tells the man. “That’s not fair. This is my question game. It didn’t answer, it asked.”

  “Ask it another.”

  The boy takes another step forward. “I am a glimmer, a ray, an undying spring. I am lost, abandoned, a shattered thing. I am raised, and dashed, a lifeline to some. When all others fled, there was only one. What am I?”

  I repeat the riddle to myself. I dissect it. Trying different answers on in my mind and discarding them.

  “It’s having trouble with this one,” the boy says. “I hope it’s wrong! I’m getting hungry again.” He sings out the riddle as if it were a lullaby, to the same melody as my mother’s.

  “H—hope.” I nearly say it in a questioning voice, but I manage to spit it out firmly. That might be Pict’s best lesson to me. If I make it out of here alive, or with my mind intact, I’ll have to let him know he would approve of this ghoul.

  The boy pouts.

  “Last question, pet,” the man says.

  “Fine,” the boy barks. “What is always coming, but never here?”

  “Never here. Always coming… always coming… never… never here. It’s tomorrow!”

  The boy scowls. “She’s been here too long and doesn’t smell fresh anymore, anyway,” he says. I can see the hunger for me fade from those too-big eyes, along with his interest.

  “Go now,” the man says. The front door swings open. I back up toward the door, keeping my eyes on them both. The boy follows, his teeth are no longer razor sharp. He once again looks like a mop-haired child with big doe eyes. I’m almost at the door. I don’t dare ask the question, even to myself, but he answers it anyway.

  “Your fear was a good snack. I would have liked eating you. But you have to go.”

  I shudder and step through the door. I’m slapped in the face with the sunshine and cheering crowds.

  Chapter 33

  I squint and stumble, eyes attempting to adjust to the light, my mouth dry as the sand beneath my feet. My heart is still thumping against my chest like a war hammer. The music is disorienting.

  Mountains. A range of blue-gray mountains loom over me. An impressive ancient amphitheater and its red-brown pillars in front of me. People, laughing, dancing.

  The Laurel Plain?

  I look back the way I came. From here, it looks like a dark tunnel burrowed into a mountainside. A calling wind breezes from it. Like any entrance to the Coil.

  I look up. This amphitheater, this whole space, is carved out of the mountain. A hand lands on my shoulder, and I shriek. Another pulls at my hand. Two girls I recognize as prefects from class. They’re speaking to me. Kindly but urgently, asking me to follow. They lead me up the rough limestone steps to the shadow of the amphitheater pillars. From up here, I can see down into the valley of the mountain range where glittering azure waters are snaking their way along bends and curves.

  “Cassandra Morai!” an announcer shouts. A cheer goes up—and an almost equal number of boos, I notice. The band begins to play louder, though I didn’t think it was possible. One of the prefects sets a laurel wreath on my head. Another sets a blanket about my shoulders and hands me a water bottle. I greedily gulp it down, so quickly it almost comes back up.

  All around us there are bonfires, and Magpies with carts, and music… the whole thing feels like part music festival and part human sacrifice in one.

  “Cassie!” Regan shouts. I shrug off my blanket and rush to the edge of the platform. She pushes through the vendors and crowds and rushes up the stairs to launch herself at me. We cling to each other. She’s showered and changed her clothes since last I saw her. “I was so scared. We weren’t sure what happened to you after you disappeared. And when you took so long to get out…” Her eyes dart around nervously.

  “Regan! I did it! I saved Colin. And… what is this place? This is the Laurel Plain?”

  “Yes. It’s the Coil version of Mount Parnassus. Temple of Apollo… it’s not a ruin here…” She trails off, peering at someone in the crowd. “We need to g
o. Now.”

  The crowd’s chants pound in tempo with the ache in my head. They’re chanting something in Latin. “What’s going on? What are they saying?”

  Regan pulls me along, down the stairs over the objections of the prefects. “Initiating you into the order. We made it to the Laurel Plain. We’re Oracles now. Come on.”

  “Where is Griffin—”

  “Infirmary. Him and… and Noah… they got into it when we got back because of what Noah did. Don’t worry, Griffin’s okay. They were finally treating his hands when I saw him. The place is mobbed. Only six people have made it here on their own so far, and we’re two of them. The search parties have pulled out most of the others, but some are in bad shape. Another search team just went in looking for you and the other three still inside.”

  “How long were we in there?” She’s pulling me toward another mining tunnel cut into the mountain.

  “For me, it felt like a couple of days in there, but out here it was only about twenty-three hours. For you, though… we went in on Thursday. It's Monday.”

  “Monday?” We duck around a stone pillar. “I’m going home today.” I try and swallow. “Water. I need more—”

  “When I say go, we run. Ready—”

  A guard steps in front of us, almost knocking Regan down. “Ms. Morai. You’re going to need to come with us.” He grabs my arm away from Regan and shoves me toward the mineshaft entrance Regan was leading me to.

  Regan follows, pleading. “Let her go. Please! This is a mistake.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask. He tightens his grip. I pull back, dragging my feet until we stop. I can’t move.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  This compulsion isn’t—

  “Move or I’ll make you move.” The guard shakes my shoulder. “I’m not telling you again.”

  Five.

  He grabs me and throws me over his shoulder. I fight and twist as I hang.

  “Put her down!” Regan shouts.

  “If you keep following, you’ll end up in a cell with her.”