Arcana Rising (The Arcana Chronicles #4)(39)

“Attempt escape, Hunter. Or be cut up for meat.”

Trusting him would be like playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the chamber.

He slanted his head. “It’s time for you to go. I thought you’d want to see her.”

“Of course I want to! Desperate to. But unless you got a hacksaw . . .” My blurry eyes tried to follow his movements.

From a backpack, coo-y?n produced a goddamned hacksaw! The Fool was saving my ass? The rescuer being rescued?

Dizziness had the mine spinning. I gave my head a hard shake. “Might pass out, coo-y?n. You got a plan to get us out of here?”

He knelt to saw. “No plan.”

Merde! “You ready to fight your way out of here, boy?” I asked, though he’d never lifted a finger to fight in the past. “If we doan win, they’re goan to catch us and lock you down here.”

When he peered up at me again, my blurred vision failed to place him for a second, almost as if I were seeing another face. Or a . . . mask. He didn’t look like the boy I’d spent months working beside.

Then he gave me his usual blank grin, back to the Fool again. He truly didn’t have a plan.

All the sudden I could read the future. By tonight, he would be in chains, and I’d be butchered. . . .





24


The Empress





Creepy book in hand, I sat beside the fire in Gran’s room.

Sure enough, the Empress’s line had chronicles.

Either I was going crazy, had gone crazy, or my grandmother was lying. Had she truly shown the book to me half my life ago? How could my memories have gotten so scrambled?

Both Matthew and Selena had said my line chronicled, but I’d thought the knowledge had been passed down verbally or something.

After Gran’s revelation, she’d dug an ancient-looking book out of her bag, having trouble lifting the weighty thing. The battered leather of the cover looked like the skin of a Bagman.

She’d been stunned by my lack of recognition, sinking down on her bed, looking ten years older. “No wonder you hesitate to kill them,” she’d said, as if explaining the worst tragedy. . . .

Now she watched me like a hawk. “Nothing?” I shook my head. “How could you not remember?”

“I was only eight when you went away, and I was forbidden to talk about anything you taught me.” Young as I was, I’d been old enough to know that Mom had banished my grandmother for her beliefs. Why wouldn’t I have pushed Arcana stuff from my mind to avoid a similar fate? “When I got older and I had visions of the apocalypse, Mom blamed you, so she sent me to a head-shrink place, like the one you went to. I got . . . deprogrammed.”

They’d pumped me full of drugs, then asked, Do you understand why you must reject your grandmother’s teachings? Those mental ward docs had done a number on my head, but I’d thought I’d shaken off most of their “therapy.”

Yet I’d failed to recall vital events from the past. No, the situation was worse than that: I hadn’t even realized the memories were missing in the first place. “I have . . . gaps in my memory.” My brain felt like Swiss cheese at this point. Apparently, the gaps even predated the deprogramming.

If Gran was telling the truth about all this . . .

So why did I sense she was lying to me—about something? “I remember the day you were arrested. You talked to me about the cards.”

“I’d been talking to you about them all your life, always telling you stories.” Almost to herself, she said, “I knew Karen hated my beliefs. Didn’t know how much though.”

“Maybe reading will trigger some recollection.” Would I recognize these pages from my childhood? Why would she ever lie about this?

But I hesitated to open the book. It gave me chills. Even Gran gave me chills. “This was passed down?”

“From my mother, and then her mother before her.”

Mom had told me the whole line was disturbed. I supposed I was merely the latest in a long line. “How far back do these chronicles go?”

“There are detailed entries from the last two games, but the games before that are summarized.” She waved me on. “Open it, then.”

If this book was the gateway to transforming permanently into the red witch, would I be tempting fate just to read it?

With a shaking hand, I cracked open the weathered leather. The scent of old parchment swirled up. An orderly script filled the page. It began: What followeth is the trew and sworne chronikles of Our Lady of Thorns, the Emperice of all Arcana, chosen to represent Demeter and Aphrodite, embody’g life, all its cycles, and the myst’ries of love. . . .

“Who was the chronicler here?” I asked. “Who wrote these words?”

“They’ve been translated by chroniclers over the generations, transcribed and retranscribed. But they were first recorded by the Empress’s mother.”

“My mother, in that other life. Was Mom reincarnated too? Were you?”

Gran shrugged. “Maybe. We can’t know for certain.”

“Was this chronicler a Tarasova?”

“Probably. We’ve been fortunate in our line. Our chroniclers are usually gifted with second sight.”

I took a deep breath, bracing myself to read. . . .