Tattoo Read online

  “Then we stop Alecca before tomorrow night,” Zo said, her voice leaving no room for argument.

  I couldn't tell her what I knew about Alecca; couldn't tell her what I thought she might have seen.

  “We stop her before tomorrow night” I said what Zo needed to hear, but as much as I hated to admit it, it seemed impossible. We didn't know where Alecca was, or even really what she was capable of doing. We didn't know how she went about attacking people, or if Marissa, Alex, and company were her first victims. We knew nothing, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing the most obvious piece of the whole puzzle.

  “Lionel has some news for us” Annabelle's voice broke into my inner depressothon.

  “Did he decode the symbols already?” Delia asked. “Isn't that like incredibly fast?”

  “He wouldn't tell me over the phone,” Annabelle said with a frown, “but he sounded really excited. He said I'd have to see it to believe it, said that he woke up in the middle of the night last night with an idea and had been working on it ever since”

  “Old guy's going to give himself a heart attack,” Zo said halfheartedly. The vision had taken even more out of her than she was letting on, and I wondered if she was holding something back.

  “Don't we already know what the symbols mean?” I asked Annabelle, forcing my mind to the problem at hand. “Mine's fire, somehow yours is mind reading, Zo's is future telling, and Delia's is changing stuff”

  As I named our powers, I couldn't help but wonder what we were supposed to do with them. Stop Alecca, obviously, but…

  “That's just it,” Annabelle said. “Lionel doesn't think they're just self-contained symbols”

  “What does he think they are?” Zo asked.

  Annabelle leaned forward, and for a moment, I wondered if there was even the slightest chance that a linguistic revelation could change the incredible odds stacked against us.

  “Lionel doesn't think they're self-contained symbols,” Annabelle said again. She paused. “He thinks it's a prophecy”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was sure of exactly one thing. You could always count on Delia in a crisis. You could count on her to remain utterly and completely unfazed no matter what happened.

  “I'm just saying,” Delia said. “This whole prophecy thing is going to tell us everything we need to know, so you three should just stop worrying and concentrate on the fact that we're headed to a college campus, and Zo could totally scry for hot, single guys who would love to go to a high school dance” Delia was the eternal optimist. In her mind, we'd already as good as beaten the bad guy, so she'd moved on to other important issues.

  “We don't even have a map,” I said, not wanting to point out the more obvious: that we didn't know what, if anything, this whole prophecy thing was going to tell us.

  “I'm sure we can get a map if we really need one,” Delia said, undeterred. “Or can't you just, you know, concentrate on thinking about hot guys?”

  If anything was going to help Zo recover from the crippling vision of doom, it was Delia being one hundred percent Delia.

  “Annabelle?” Sensing that I wasn't going to be any help, Zo turned to her cousin.

  Annabelle held my gaze for a second and then nodded. I got the message: until we knew what was in this prophecy, obsessing over Zo's vision and Monday's dance wasn't going to help any of us.

  “College boys,” Annabelle mused. Even A-belle, queen of common sense, had her weak points. “Prophecy first,” she said as we entered the linguistics building. “Then boys”

  Hearing the word “prophecy” made me feel really conspicuous. People in real life didn't just run into prophecies on a day-to-day basis. This wasn't Buffy, our library wasn't stocked crazy-full of ancient scrolls, and people definitely didn't encode prophecies in fake tattoos. Honestly, what were the chances?

  “Given the events of the past couple of days,” Anna-belle replied to my unspoken question, “pretty good”

  “How's Lionel even sure it's a prophecy?” I asked. “I mean, couldn't it just be a sentence?”

  “I wonder if prophecies are like fortune cookies,” Delia mused. “You know, how you're supposed to add ‘in bed' to the end of the fortune cookie. Think the same goes for prophecies?”

  “What?” Annabelle asked. I couldn't believe that she'd never heard the fortune cookie thing before. The rest of us had been doing it since the beginning of freshman year.

  Delia explained patiently, her mind, for the moment, off of scrying for boys. “Like if a fortune cookie says ‘you will discover a new talent,' then you read the fortune cookie as ‘you will discover a new talent in bed.' A fortune cookie's kind of like a prophecy” Delia paused. “Don't you think?”

  Zo snorted for the first time since her last vision. “The world is going to end…,” she said in a deep voice.

  “… in bed,” Delia and I added at once. Zo grinned. Delia had managed to snap her (and me for that matter) out of it.

  “Beware the evil fairy “

  “… in bed”

  “And the true king will pull the sword from the stone “ Annabelle was finally getting into the spirit of things. “In bed”

  “Doesn't have quite the same ring” Delia looked so honestly thoughtful that I couldn't help myself. Soon, we were caught up in a fit of giggles. We slumped against the wall outside Lionel's office, trying to collect ourselves, but every time I managed to catch my breath, one of them would mutter “in bed,” and I'd be gone all over again. I blame hysteria. We were standing right smack in between a horrible, albeit cryptic, vision and a mysterious prophecy. It was either goofiness or depression, and Delia's optimism was catching. On some level, I felt like if I just let things get back to normal—joking, laughing, making a fool of myself—then everything would be okay. Alecca wouldn't be planning what I feared she was planning, and the whole dance thing would take care of itself.

  “Annie, you're here” The sound of Lionel's voice had me choking back the last of my laughter, but I could feel it sitting in the back of my throat, ready to bubble over with the least bit of provocation. That or I'd burst into tears. At this point, I wasn't going to rule out any possibility.

  “Come look at what Lionel has to show you” The old man grinned so broadly that I thought he was going to hurt himself.

  My mouth dropped open the second I stepped into his office. Hundreds of pieces of paper flooded his desk and avalanched onto the floor. I could make out drawings on some, scribblings on others. The walls, too, were plastered with sketches of our tattoos and other symbols I didn't recognize.

  If I hadn't been there the day before, I would have thought this was the office of an insane person. An obsessed person.

  “I couldn't sleep,” Lionel said. “I kept thinking about the shapes, the twists and turns, the way that all of the symbols appeared both pictorial and textual in nature” He adjusted his glasses. “I'd put in an e-mail to a friend about the symbol in the book, hoping that he'd have some information on the druidic language the symbol is rooted in, but still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing something” The words tumbled out, and I was half afraid that the old guy was going to give himself a heart attack.

  Picking up a pen, he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and drew our symbols onto it by heart. As he spoke, he traced the curves and lines of their forms over and over again. “Pictorial and textual, druidic, and yet there was something almost like Chinese characters about them. I'd look at them and see bits and pieces, elements of Egyptian, Japanese, Greek, and indigenous languages scattered as far as Peru and Alaska—”

  “Lionel,” Annabelle broke in gently. I guess she was starting to have heart attack phobia as well.

  “Then I fell asleep” Lionel gestured toward his desk.

  “You fell asleep here?” I asked.

  Lionel nodded. “I forgot the time,” he said, “and when I woke up, I had a moment of extreme clarity. Had I been fully conscious, I would have dismissed the thought as ludicrous. A linguisti
c impossibility”

  “But you didn't,” Annabelle said slowly.

  “That I didn't, Annie” Lionel's eyes sparkled. “That I didn't. Instead, still half-asleep, I gave it a try”

  “Gave what a try?” Zo blurted out. She was clearly having as much trouble following the sleep-deprived linguist's rantings as I was.

  Lionel gestured to the drawings that covered the walls and floor. “It took me a bit,” he said, “but I was convinced the right combinations were here somewhere”

  “Combinations?” Annabelle tilted her head to the side.

  “What if,” Lionel said, “what if the symbols weren't just druidic? What if the reason I saw so many languages in them, the reason the set seemed so broad, was that the symbols were actually many languages?”

  Now, I didn't have a background in linguistics, but I was pretty sure that what he was saying didn't make any sense. One look at Annabelle confirmed what I was thinking.

  “You don't believe me, I see, my girl,” Lionel said, tweaking Annabelle's hair. “Nor should you, until you see what I have to show” Delicately, he picked up a stack of transparencies off his desk. “Several hours in, I realized that this way might be easier, not to mention environmentally friendlier than using paper” Carefully, he spread the transparencies apart. On each of them, he'd drawn one of our symbols.

  “By this time, I'd gotten the rough translations of the symbols themselves,” he said, as if that was of no importance at all.

  “What are they?” I tried to keep my voice soothing and calm.

  Lionel pointed to each of them as he spoke. “Fire. Knowledge. Future. Metamorphosis”

  Come to think of it, Delia's tattoo had always kind of looked like a half butterfly.

  “But that is unimportant,” Lionel said. “What is interesting is what happens when you superimpose the symbols” Gingerly, he lifted my symbol and put it on top of Annabelle's. “Apart, you get druidic symbols of obscure meanings, but together “ Sitting on top of Annabelle's, parts of my symbol disappeared, aligning exactly with hers, forming a new shape altogether. “It's a Sumerian character meaning life,” Lionel said.

  Annabelle gawked at him.

  “Don't give me that look, my dear. It's all perfectly verifiable” He tweaked the end of her nose. “Just watch” He switched the transparencies around, turning Annabelle's upside down and placing it over Zo's. “Japanese,” he said as the lines of Zo's symbol crossed Annabelle's. “Or rather an Indo-Japanese precursor, but that's not the point. The point is, combined this way, the symbols take on a new meaning” He paused, looking at each of us in turn. “A new meaning in an entirely new language” I thought the old man was going to break into a dance of glee. “Any way you combine the symbols, you get a valid, though often obscure, character from a different extinct, ancient language”

  Zo let out a low whistle. “That's some pretty crazy stuff,” she said.

  Lionel boomed with laughter. “That it is,” he said. “That it is”

  I cleared my throat. So far, all we had was one character that meant life, and that didn't seem entire-school-dying-level bad. Maybe Alex and company were just a little light-headed. I clung to the idea as I pushed on. “Annabelle said you thought it was a prophecy,” I said. “What does it say?”

  “Perhaps I spoke too soon,” Lionel said. “I was overexcited by the discovery and conjectured that anything put so thoroughly in code that spoke of life and death could well be of a prophetic nature”

  “Life and death?” I asked.

  He nodded, and took out six new drawings: each one a combination of two of our tattoo symbols. “Life and death. Battle. Spider or web, the translation is ambiguous on that one. End. Soul”

  Hadn't Zo said something about a sentence? That didn't sound sentencelike to me.

  “These concepts can obviously be combined in a variety of novel ways,” Lionel said. “For example, one such reading might be, ‘in the end battle, the soul will be in the web of life and death,' or ‘the battle of the soul of death will end the spider's life.' You see?”

  Life. Death. Battle. Spider. End. Soul.

  “What if you combine the combinations?” Delia was the first to recover her voice.

  Lionel looked at her, surprised. “I hadn't tried that,” he said, “but with six combinations there and with the number of archaic languages possible, it could take quite a bit of time”

  I scratched my fingernail lightly over the tattoo on my back.

  Life and death, death and life.

  “What if you just combine life and death?” I asked. Lionel did as I asked, and there, all four of our symbols sat on top of each other. Lionel opened a book and started flipping through it. “Tathuvian? Nalagasi? Honduit?” He rattled off the nonsense-sounding words. I was guessing they were more obscure archaic languages, though it honestly sounded like gibberish to me.

  “Balance” Lionel closed the book and slumped over on his desk. “It means balance”

  “Balance,” Delia repeated.

  Time runs thin.

  “No time,” I said out loud.

  The other three looked at me.

  “It is getting kind of late,” Zo said. “And we do have that thing with needing to be in before dark”

  “We have time,” Annabelle said. “Not a lot, but plenty to get home and then some to spare”

  Time runs thin.

  Sheesh. Persistent little voices, weren't they? Did they think I didn't realize that we had less than twenty-four hours until the dance of doom? No matter how hard I laughed or tried to forget about it, I couldn't.

  The very conspicuous sound of snoring broke me from my thoughts. There, in the middle of a stack of papers, Lionel had fallen asleep, and somehow, he was managing to make more noise asleep than he had awake.

  Very sweetly, Annabelle leaned forward and pressed a small kiss to his cheek. “Thank you, Lionel,” she said.

  The rest of us took that as our cue to exit.

  “The battle of life and death ends the spider soul” Zo tried out variations on the words. “The spider battles the end of life and death”

  “You forgot soul,” I said.

  Zo snorted. “Fine. The soul spider battles the end of life and death,” she said, sticking “soul” in at random.

  “No,” Delia corrected with a weak smile. “The soul spider battles the end of life and death in bed”

  For a split second, there was silence, and then I felt the giggles pouring out of my mouth. It made no sense. The prophecy that was supposed to solve all of our problems made no sense. It shouldn't have been funny.

  And yet, it was.

  “In bed,” Zo agreed with a grin, and just when she was starting to return to her normal self, her head was flung back against the wall. Her eyes glazed over, and another vision took hold of her body. Moving quickly, Annabelle grabbed her cousin's shoulders, steadying her while the premonition ran its course.

  I gritted my teeth, watching Zo's body shudder with the power of what she was seeing. Was it me, or were these things getting more and more violent? When Zo's body finally stopped trembling, she met me with eyes on the verge of tearing over. “A little boy,” she managed. “Eight or nine. He was taking a bath, and then he lifted his eyes to the ceiling and just stared” She paused. “He was thinking about Little League and sloshing water over the side because he was mad at his mom, and the next second, he was humming and staring, staring and humming, and “

  Delia took a step toward Zo and grabbed her hand. Zo held on tightly. “He just hummed and stared and went under” Her words hung in the air. “And he stayed under, staring up through the water with these horrible blue eyes until he drowned”

  First our entire school falling to the floor (dead?) with no warning, and now this—a little kid, humming and staring like Amber. I couldn't shake the image of the smoky gray tentacles from my mind. Were they there in the bathroom Zo had seen, pulling the boy out of his body?

  Were they in the auditorium, pulling
our classmates out of their bodies?

  For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe Zo had been getting premonitions about Alecca from the start. Amber. The dance. Now.

  “Where?” Annabelle asked the question quietly.

  “I need a map,” Zo said, “and I need one now” She turned away, but I saw her drag the back of her hand across her face, roughly brushing off the single tear running down her cheek.

  Time runs thin.

  Right now, that was the last thing I needed to hear. I looked out the window. The sun was still largely visible on the horizon, but I knew that we only had about forty-five minutes of sunlight left.

  Without a word, I followed Zo in her hot pursuit of a map. Right now, there was only one thing that mattered, and it wasn't time.

  The glare on Zo's face was starting to take on a life of its own. Any second now, I expected it to rush to the front of the bus and throttle the bus driver for daring to slow down and pick up more passengers when we were obviously in a hurry.

  “That's it” Zo charged up to the front of the bus.

  “What's she doing?” Delia asked warily.

  Without a word, Zo stomped down the steps and off the bus.

  “But we're still two stops away,” Annabelle said. “She can't possibly think we'll get there faster on foot”

  Zo put her hands on her hips and stared up, daring us to argue.

  “Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that she can,” I said, and with a sigh, I got up from my seat, squeezed my way down the aisle, and went to stand next to Zo. Delia and Annabelle were right behind me.

  On the horizon, the sun was just starting to set.

  “Four blocks,” Zo said, and that was the only explanation any of us got before she took off running.

  “The running thing?” Delia said. “It gets really old”

  I had to agree, but I couldn't shake the image of the gray tentacles pulling the life out of a little boy. Somehow, my antirunning feelings didn't really weigh in.

  We'd made it about half a block before Delia's eyes lit up. Without so much as a word to me, she wiggled her fingers at my shoes. “Rollerblades”