The Dark Calling (The Arcana Chronicles #5)(20)

The Hanged Man. Paul was the inactivated card.

His tableau was reversed as well. Which meant the Hanged Man appeared to nimbly stand on his toes. No dangling—because he was in full control.

“You killed Finn.” I looked for an icon, but he wore gloves. “You poisoned him, and now your powers have been activated.” I tried to recall anything I’d read about this card. He was called Our Lord Uncanny—because so little was known about him.

“We both know that you poisoned him. Just as you did in past games. You are the princess of poison, remember?”

Had I murdered Finn in this game? I did clearly recall doing it before.

I sliced him to ribbons and choked him in vine. My God, I’d said that aloud! I shook my head hard. “Finn was my friend. I didn’t hurt him—you did.”

Paul tilted his head. “Interesting. Even as my sphere of clarity spreads, you’re able to resist me.”

He’d generated that yellow dome. Whereas Sol could emit a pure white light of illumination, Paul’s was a bewildering haze. He must have the power to brainwash Arcana, which explained why Lark and Aric currently wanted me dead.

So how had I resisted?

BOOM . . . BOOM . . . BOOM. That door wouldn’t hold much longer.

Once I killed Paul, the haze would surely lift, and then my husband and friend would return to normal. As I struggled to build poison in my claws, I called on the vines I’d revived downstairs to creep up the steps. Buying myself time to strike, I asked Paul, “Have you always known you’re an Arcana?”

Outside, Circe’s river continued to crack ominously. I knew she couldn’t hear past the ice. Was she sensing Paul’s activation?

He leaned a shoulder against the wall, fully relaxed. “When I first spied Domīnija, the mysterious businessman who’d purchased my childhood home, I sensed I had some kind of mystical connection with him. So I figured out how to get into his household and make myself indispensable.” Paul cast me the smile I used to think was charming. “I’ve read everything here I could lay hands on, including your chronicles. After talking to your grandmother for hours on end, I suspected I might actually be an Arcana, the inactivated card. After all, fate likes us to converge, and I’d long dreamed I had supernatural abilities. But how to activate myself?”

“By killing an Arcana.”

“It’s not so easy a feat! I didn’t want to arouse suspicion with an unexplained death, so I decided to kill someone connected to the game—your Tarasova grandmother. The right meds accelerated her decline.”

“I knew it!” Everything Gran had said or written toward the end became clear. A rat on my table gnaws the threads . . . the serpent coils around the tree and chokes its roots.

Paul was the rat, the threads coming from a hangman’s noose. Like a serpent, he’d been coiled around me while choking her—my roots.

But Gran had been too far gone by that time to make me understand. “She discovered what you are.”

“Eventually. I feared someone would catch on when she kept blabbering about midnight and noon.”

Comprehension. “Twelve is your card number.”

“Evie gets a star!” He grinned, crinkles forming around his wide blue eyes. “When I gave her that last injection, she experienced a small window of lucidity. She stared me down and said, ‘Evie will figure out I was murdered, but she’ll blame Death. She’ll avenge me. I want this.’”

Gran had written in my chronicles, I have put the end into motion.

“As soon as your dear ol’ gran kicked it, I felt the stirrings of my abilities, and I reached out telepathically.”

Aric had said “errant thoughts” kept hitting him. Was Paul’s telepathy similar to Matthew’s, working like a two-way radio? Arcana powers often overlapped—because the gods’ powers did.

Could the Hanged Man hear thoughts? I mentally screamed, LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU, PAUL!

Yet he droned on: “The Reaper and Lark were easy to reach. But you and Finn . . . not so much. The Magician was immune to me—I dreamed his card was a foil to mine—but you’re not naturally immune.” He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to see inside me.

“Brainwashing has no effect on me, not since I freed myself from the Hierophant’s mind control.” Cracking ice still sounded outside. Had Paul reached Circe as well? Was she trying to break free to help me? Or to end me?

Irritation stamped his features. “I’m no brainwasher.”

“Then what are your powers?” Would he tell me? After so many months of taking orders and skulking in the shadows, this smug man must be all too ready to crow about himself.

“What do you think they are?”

“Aside from telepathy? I think you possess guile and concealment.” His forgettable appearance was a power in itself. I’d rarely noticed him in the beginning of my stay here. “Definitely trust manipulation.”

“The power to lie and always be believed? That’s the same as brainwashing.” Huffing with indignation, he said, “I’m not like the Hierophant! From what I’ve read, he used eye contact to turn his followers into unthinking drones. My sphere brings clarity. When I reverse an Arcana’s card, they’re in no way mindless. They still have free will. They’re simply enhanced. Whereas the Hierophant lied, I mentally relay truths.”