Fiendish (23 page)

THE TOWER

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t was a hot, sticky day, and Fisher and I were in the front hall of the Blackwood house, prying boards off the blackened doorways and throwing them into a pile. It was hard, messy work, but there was no way around it. Without opening up the doors, it was impossible to say for sure that the house was beyond saving.

At first, Myloria had been deeply distrustful of this scheme, but now she drifted around after us, peering into rooms she hadn’t looked inside in a decade. The upstairs was flatly unusable, and most of the rooms would need a lot of work just so no one would fall through the floors, but some were only singed and neglected, and it would be nice to be able to spread out.

Fisher kept offering to get various boys from town to come out and help, but Myloria was set against that. It was safe to say that Mike Faraday would probably never be welcome in the house, but Tony Watts and the Maddox brothers had been civil enough, and even said hello to me sometimes in town without acting like I was going to attack them.

Fisher was working at a particularly stubborn board, trying to pry it away from the wall.

“Can you get me a screwdriver?” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

When I came into our bedroom, Shiny was kneeling on the floor with Rae. The two of them were bent over Shiny’s sketchbook as Shiny drew out a sketch of a high, crooked tower. The lines were shadowy and old-fashioned, but something in the shape and the round scallops at the bottom made it look a little like the outline of a truck, with a towering pillar of flames rising from the bed.

Her watercolor box was sitting by her knee, globs of paint arranged around the edges of an old dinner plate. She was staring down at the drawing with a kind of quiet ferocity.

The design around the bottom of the card was only half-finished, but I could make out a tricky scalloped pattern, and there at the center, a girl with long white-blond hair and a delicate fairy-princess face, looking sadly at the burning tower, which would always be an eternal second away from falling.

Shiny glanced up, wrinkling her forehead. “I know it doesn’t seem right to use her.”

“More right than to forget,” I said. “I can’t think of one other person more fitting.”

Rae sat on her knees on the bed, watching as Shiny filled in the flames.

The witch deck was mostly finished now, laid out in a line on the dresser to dry, and I touched the corners of them, letting the rough edges brush against my fingers.

Shiny had drawn each of us at our most pure and resolute, the portraits of our better selves.

I pulled out the ones I wanted and arranged them side by side. When the Tower was done, the five cards would make the reckoning star, but without Davenport, we were just four people who carried all the mysteries of the hollow—the legacy of our blood.

In most decks I’d seen, the Star was a long-haired woman pouring water, but in Shiny’s deck, the Star was a skinny black girl sitting on a red bicycle. Her face was peaceful and kind—not a destroyer or a miracle-worker, but the voice that said the world was good, that secrets could be known and miracles were possible.

Shiny’s own picture was of Justice, with a fishing pole in one hand and a lighter in the other, ready to provide or to burn, depending on the judgment.

She had painted Fisher as the Magician. He stood in a meadow, holding an ax. All around him, the field was full of sunflowers, which bloomed in huge yellow bursts all the way up the sides of the drawing, but the biggest, brightest one was on his chest—a splattery ring, painted in gold and black and red.

“I was going to make
him
the Tower,” Shiny said, watching me turn the card in my hand. “Because of his tattoo and . . . everything else, really. Anyway, I changed my mind. The Tower might be a strong card, but it’s not steadfast or loyal, so I figured I had better make him the Magician instead, since you were the Priestess. She works on him and through him, like the driving force inside things. So . . . you know.”

It was the closest Shiny had ever come to saying that we were good together, or that we could be, so I just looked away and smiled.

The picture of the Priestess was no priestess at all, but an unnaturally red-haired girl standing in the dark rectangle of a doorway. She was dressed in a blue nightgown, surrounded by roots, but not touched by them, not trapped. Her eyes were open.

I stood looking at the image of her. Of me.

So much was beyond my sight. There was so much about our past that I still didn’t understand, and I wasn’t one to tell the future. I could only tell the way the world worked. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it would heal.

ALL THANKS TO:

My agent, Sarah Davies, who approaches every circumstance with grace and style.

My editor, Jessica Almon, who asked a million questions, supplied a million answers, harnessed the power of Pinterest, saved the day more than once, and took me out for olives when she didn’t even know they were my favorite food.

Ben Schrank—the man who steers the ship.

As ever, the brilliant and multitalented team at Penguin Young Readers. They make my books pretty in absolutely every sense and do their best to guide me toward proper comma use.

Maggie and Tess, who never, ever make me do this alone.

My sister Maddy, an object lesson in impeccable principles and a real class act. She totally would have let the animals out of their cages.

David, who reads and reads and reads, even when he should be thoroughly tired of this book by now. Who loves me even when I stop making sense and was a constant advocate for more action, more danger, and more kissing.

The state of Arkansas, where I planted sunflowers, kept tadpoles in a canning jar, had a pet goat named Rover, and rarely wore shoes. My first childhood memories are mostly of various carpets, but my best ones are of the Ozarks. There’s magic there, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.