Poison Princess

condoms.

I stripped off my filthy clothes, entering the cramped fiberglass stall. The drain was covered with little bottles of shampoo and slivers of Irish Spring soap.

Under the paltry stream of tepid water, I scrubbed as fast as I could. But I was coated with ash, reeking of soot.

Because Haven burned to the ground today.

Had that been just hours before? It felt like a week ago.

My mother died today.

I pressed the side of my face against the stall, struggling not to cry. I feared if I started, I wouldn’t stop. . . .

The shower began to disappear, black dots tracing before my eyes. “No, no, no! Not another one,” I whispered desperately, shoving the heels of my palms against my temples as my headache grew.

Blood trickled from my nose, dripping onto the shampoo bottles. I gazed down, riveted by the stark scarlet drops.

Drip, drip, drip—

“They know, Empress,” Matthew said.

I flattened myself against the fiberglass stall. He was here! In the bathroom with me.

I jerked around, giving him my back, glaring over my shoulder. But he appeared to have no interest in my nudity.

“The Empress is in play,” he said. “The Arcana sense it, like a disturbance in the Force.”

“Star Wars, Matthew? Really?”

“You’re a target. Take her before she grows too powerful, the bad cards whisper. But you talked so loud they thought you wanted to lure them to your farm.” He tapped his temple. “Beware the lures.”

His words spurred a memory from my last day with Gran: “I hate taking you from home, sweetheart,” she told me as she pulled her Blazer out onto the interstate. “Only the bravest—or most foolish— Arcana would ever go to Haven, home of the great Empress. . . .”

“I talked loud? What does that mean?” I was not only receiving voices but broadcasting my own?

Matthew frowned. “No one is as loud as you. They talk back louder, goading.”

“The voices are from the characters I’ve seen, aren’t they? The archer, the flying boy. Death.”

He nodded. “Major Arcana.”

The trump cards of Tarot. “How can their voices be in my head? Am I some kind of clairvoyant?”

“Clairaudient. All Arcana have a call. Like birds. I’m crazy like a fox.”

Whatever, kid. “What do they hear me say? How do I talk softer?”

In a patronizing tone he replied, “Inside voice, Evie.”

I pinched my forehead, irritated at the double meaning—which told me nothing. “Why would they want to goad me? What have I done to them?”

“You’re Arcana.”

“I-I don’t understand. And I . . . I can’t do much more of this ‘Arcana’ stuff!”

“I’ll keep sending you visions.” He touched his nose, murmuring, “Drip, drip, drip. You have to learn.”

“Sending me? Are you saying I’m not . . . foreseeing you on my own?”

“I send you visions.”

“Or maybe I’m deluded, and I’m imagining you saying this even now. Maybe you’re not even real!”

He rolled his eyes. “Nooo. I send you visions. Not your Arcana power. Mine, mine, mine.”

So now I wasn’t even psychic? “Do all Arcana have powers?”

“Vast. Superhuman.”

My eyes narrowed as a suspicion arose. “Are you sending me those nightmares, too? Because I am over them!”

“Never nightmares! Empress, we’re behind. Find me.”

I’d been planning to seek him out eventually. “But I have to get to my gran. Where are you anyway?”

“Find me before Death finds you.”

“Or what?”

He drew his head back, as if this was obvious. “Or he’ll . . . touch you. His power. You are the card that Death covets.”

I shuddered, remembering the Reaper looming over me, reaching for me with his bare hands. “Why covet me? I don’t understand.” But Matthew had disappeared.

And all the water had run out.

“Damn it!” Jackson had asked me for so little—make soup and save water. I’d failed at both simple tasks.

Queasy with guilt, I returned to the cabin. His backpack now lay on the bed beside my suitcase. Surely he wouldn’t expect us to stay in the same room?

I’d just finished changing when he opened the cabin door without a knock, stepping over the raised threshold with mugs of soup in hand.

His gaze roamed over me, over the cami top and gym skirt I’d been forced to wear. His packing had left much to be desired.

My wardrobe now consisted of a total of one pair of jeans and a hoodie—both of which I’d had on—about ten hair ribbons, more underwear than I could possibly wear in a lifetime, bras that barely fit, workout clothes, and one mismatched pair of socks.

He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Too soon, Jackson, much too soon.

After handing me a surprisingly warm mug, he sat at the cabin’s built-in desk to sip from his own. I felt a pang to see that he’d had to wrap his injured hands in strips of cloth. He was covered in grit and ash from digging.

He’d tried so hard to help with my mom. . . .

“This is as good a time as any to talk about the coming days,” he said.

I eased down onto the edge of the bed across from him. “Okay.”

“I did end up making some . . . assurances to your mother. Kept ’em pretty vague, so I feel sure I can wiggle out of them without goan straight to hell. My worry is that you made promises to her.”

“I did.”

He muttered a curse. “Maybe to get to your grandmother?”

“That’s the one.”

“Let me explain the landscape for you, peekôn. Between us and North Carolina, you’ve got Bagmen, offshoot militias, and doomsday cults—who are feeling mighty righteous these days. The slavers control the cities—”

“Slavers are real?” We’d heard rumors. . . .

“Ouais. They round up people to dig wells, like slaves in a gold mine.” At my bemused look, he said, “If they caught someone like me, they’d chain me in an ash-filled quarry with a pickax, or shove me into a mineshaft, and wouldn’t let me out till I struck the water table. Course, if they captured you . . . it’d be different. Same with the cannibals.”

“C-cannibals?” Again, there’d been whisperings.

When he nodded, I tried to imagine what modern-day American cannibals would look like, kept picturing them wearing body parts threaded on a necklace. Maybe they carried bloody clubs. . . .

Though these threats chilled me to the bone, I still said, “I start for the Outer Banks tomorrow.”

“You might not have a whole lot of skills, but it seems like you got stubborn mastered. There ain’t any way for me to talk you out of this, is there?”