Poison Princess

another woman.”

As I wondered what that meant, Jackson said, “Now can we get back to your summer away?”

He’d shared so much with me that I supposed I could at least tell him this. And hadn’t I yearned to talk to someone about these things? But I didn’t want him to look at me like those docs had. Because at some point in the last nine days, Jackson’s opinion of me had become important—

“You went to a nuthouse, didn’t you?”

“Wh-why would you guess that?”

“If anybody else saw that journal of yours, you’d have been sent up for true.”

I glared. “Or maybe you guessed that because you saw my texts to Brandon, and put things together.”

“You told me there was a reason you’d asked about me going to prison. I think it was ’cause you got locked up too, only you were with all the fous.” Lunatics.

“Ugh! You are such a dick!”

“Shh.” His gaze darted, body tensing before he gradually settled down once more.

I never should have sidled around this subject with him! Now he thought I was mental.

“You go in for the visions—or the voices?”

I just stifled a gasp. “What . . . how did you know about the voices?” Why was I bothering to hide anything from this boy?

“I’m not stupid, Evie. I’ve caught you talking to yourself. A lot. Muttering for someone to leave you alone or begging them to shut up.”

“I don’t . . . it’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“Why should I tell you anything? You’ll just make fun of me again,” I pointed out, even as I was nearly shaking with the need to unload. “You’ll call me a lunatic.”

“I never called you a lunatic. I’m not making fun.”

Did I dare confide this to him? I bit my bottom lip. “I’m not talking to myself—I’m talking to others. I do hear voices, tons of them. They all sound like they’re kids our age.”

“Do you think they’re real?” he asked in a neutral tone.

I sighed, nodding. “And I feel like I’m connected to them somehow. Like we share a hive mind or something.”

“Pardon?”

“Hive mind. Like how bees communicate.”

“You’re starting to confuse and unsettle me, Evangeline,” he said, but strangely, he didn’t look either at all. Did nothing faze him? “What they say to you?”

“Sometimes nothing but gibberish. Sometimes I hear these phrases repeated over and over. A girl says, ‘Behold the Bringer of Doubt.’ This Irish kid always says, ‘Eyes to the skies, lads, I strike from above.’ It gives me chills.”

Jackson studied my expression, probably reading me like a book, while I gleaned nothing from him. Would he be even more likely to cut his losses now, to ditch the mental girl? “Why do you think it’s happening?”

“I don’t know. That’s the reason I have to get to Gran. She will have all the answers.”

“Is she psychic?”

Good question. “I honestly don’t know. She could be.” Or maybe she’d learned all this Arcana stuff from her own mother, information handed down through the generations.

Hadn’t Gran told me she herself was a chronicler? Matthew had mentioned something about it as well.

“If your grandmother knows so much, then why the hell didn’t she teach you before she packed up for the beach?” Jackson said. “Let me guess: There was some secret passing-down-the-baton ceremony on your sixteenth birthday that never came about—”

“She was sent away when I was eight. Everybody said she was insane. I was forbidden to talk about what she’d taught me.”

“You have to remember something.”

“Not enough. I was forbidden even to think about her.”

“Nobody can control what you think about,” Jackson said.

I gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, but they can.” I recalled sitting at a cold metal table with my primary shrink. I’d glanced down, confused to see a puddle of saliva pooling. Even when dosed so heavily —with a billion milligrams of don’t-give-a-shit drugs pumping through me—I’d been humiliated to realize the drool was coming from me. He’d asked, “Evie, do you understand why you must reject your grandmother’s teachings . . . ?”

Jackson slid his gaze to me. “They get into that head of yours?”

How to tell him I’d been drugged to within an inch of my life in an echoing ward, then hypnotized until I could barely remember my name?

No, not hypnotized—that might’ve been beneficial. Hypnosis that made things worse? That was called brainwashing.

“Yes,” I said simply. Let’s see how he likes that for an answer.

He let it drop. “So, do you hear voices right now?” When I eventually nodded, he did a double take. “Like right now?”

“Don’t look at me like I’m a freak, Jackson. I hate that look!” I squeezed my eyes shut, mortified. His nuthouse and fous cracks hadn’t helped things.

Why had I revealed so much to him?

Oh yeah, because he’d shared with me. One difference: I didn’t judge him.

“Did you just get your feelings hurt again? Damn, cher, I doan know my way around this with you.”

I opened my eyes but wouldn’t look at him. “Around what?”

“Being with a girl like you.” Now I had to raise my brows at him. “Yeah, with your bebins and your girly ways. You got soft hands, and you’re . . . soft. But I doan think you’re a freak.”

“How could you not?” I imagined what Brandon’s reaction might have been if he were the one here with me tonight. Would he be able to handle my confession? Then I remembered that I probably wouldn’t have survived this long without Jackson.

“Look, Evie, I saw some things before the Flash, things that couldn’t be explained. Hell, my grandmère was rumored to be a traiteuse.”

A kind of Cajun medicine woman. “Really?”

He nodded. “After the Flash, I’m ready to believe just about anything. Do these voices make me uneasy? Mais yeah. Am I itching to know what causes them? Ouais. But that doan mean I think less of you for hearing them.” He curled his forefinger under my chin, until our eyes met— and I could see he was telling the truth. “Just glad you told me a secret.” He canted his head. “Though you got a thousand more, non?”

So many more.

One of those voices belongs to Death on a pale horse, and he wants to kill me. I communicate “clairaudiently” with a crazy boy who gives me nosebleeds when he thinks I’m not listening hard enough. Just about every morning, I wake up to the scent of blood and the sound of agonized screams.

My gaze dropped, and he lowered his hand.

“What’re the voices saying now?”

“They’re quiet enough to ignore,” I said. “When I’m around others, they pipe down.” I peered up at him from under a lock of hair and admitted, “But never as much as they’ve done around you.”

“Evangeline,” he sighed. “It ain’t ever goan to be easy with you, is it?”

Though I feared more and more that he would get sick of me and leave one day, I answered honestly, “Nope.”