9
Reacting purely by reflex, I leapt away and raced across the snow.
The fortress was on lockdown, only the front door open. I careened through the entrance, then slammed the blast-proof door closed. I turned the lock, but even this weighty barrier wouldn't keep Aric out for long.
"There's nowhere for you to go, Empress," he said outside the door. "For the first time since I met you, my thoughts are clear. I know I can never have peace while you live."
"WHAT???"
"You mesmerized me. Made me believe you loved me. Just as you've done before."
"Have you lost your mind--I do love you!"
"Lies!" He pounded on the door with his unnatural strength.
What was I going to do? "Something is happening to you! Your tableau is turned upside-down."
"Everything you say is a lie. Nothing changes. You killed the Magician--another of your allies--just as you do in each game! We trust; you betray." He kept pounding on the door: boom . . . boom . . . boom.
I was trapped on this mountain with two Arcana who wanted to murder me. I had dead vines climbing the ceilings, but even if I managed to revive them, Aric would easily slice them away. My only real hope was to get to the nursery, to the sunlamps--
A spine-tingling growl sounded from behind me. I slowly turned; Cyclops crouched in the foyer, saliva dripping from his knifelike fangs. More animals filed into the chamber beyond. The creatures I passed by every day now looked rabid. Under Lark's control, they were all predators.
"No, Cyclops. Don't do this." I raised my palms in front of me, struggling to revive nearby vines. Would Lark truly make him attack? "I didn't hurt Finn!"
From outside, she screamed, "You poisoned him! Cyclops, disembowel her!"
The giant war wolf sprang for me. I squeezed my eyes shut. Vines shot from the ceiling, jabbing like wooden spears, out of my control.
YELP. When I looked again, the beast was skewered throughout his body, pinned to the floor. Unable to move, he cast me a heartbreaking look of confusion--my onetime bedmate and favorite pet.
"Cyclops, I'm so sorry." Reminding myself that he'd heal, I edged around the whimpering wolf.
A trio of badgers, a Komodo dragon, and two snarling hyenas blocked my way to the nursery. As they advanced on me, I screamed, "Stop this, Lark!" I revived more vines to knock the beasts out of my way, but twice as many took their place. My powers were already sputtering.
BOOM . . . BOOM . . . BOOM.
I'd never reach the nursery before Aric leveled that door. Lark's arsenal was preventing me from reaching mine.
No choice but to flee up the stairs. I'd barely made two steps when a wave of small forest creatures descended. I booted a couple, dodging the worst of the onslaught.
Racing upward, I tripped on two foxes. Falling forward . . . My forehead banged the edge of a step. "Ah!" Blood streamed into my eyes. Sprouts shot from the crimson drops, coiling around the creatures.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed on, managing to reach the second-floor landing. I drew up short, swiping my eyes. Paul stood off to the side, guarded by Scarface and Maneater.
"How in the hell did you get inside?"
"I know every secret chamber and passageway in this castle. I grew up here, was the caretaker's son." My lips parted. "I can get in anywhere, have had access to every inch of the place." He smirked as he said, "Even after I was 'locked up.'"
A hazy light glowed behind his head, the same color as that dome outside. It seemed to be strengthening, spreading.
Then an image flickered over him. A tableau. I'd seen it before: a man dangling upside-down from a rope looped around his ankle and tied to a tree limb. A jagged burst of yellow light haloed the man's head.
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 Dominija, 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."
"Not seeing much of a difference from where I'm standing, Paul."
"Oh, Evie, a card reversal means that I can only work with what's available."
So he couldn't manipulate Aric and Lark to hurt me--unless they were already inclined to do so?
As if to illustrate, Lark shrieked from outside, "I'll kill you, Empress! Why him?"
Paul tsked. "She can't decide whether to end you or herself." Then her most marked Arcana trait--her single-minded determination--was gone. "Of one thing I've recently convinced her: the need to protect me at all costs." He petted Scarface.
BOOM . . . BOOM . . . BOOM. The hinges screamed as the door bowed.
Poison finally welled in my claws, my vines slithering higher. Would I get to Paul before Aric got to me? "And Death?" His card was all about embracing change, letting go of the past and bitter resentment. The reverse of that meant he'd be mired in the past, and our history was filled with mistrust, hatred, and murder.
The present that we'd built for ourselves would be destroyed.
Paul grinned again. "Hating you is the knight's factory setting, if you will. Which works for me."
"Lark will hear everything you've said through her wolves."
He glanced at the slavering beasts. "And she'll thank me for plotting against you. She despised your grandmother, was happy to see her go. I've been of service to Lark, to everyone here but you."