The Hierophant (Book 1 in The Arcana Series) Read online

  I watch the expression on Kyla’s face as she reads the cards, see the moment when the mysterious and unnamed finds itself in the language of her mind. Her eyes widen and deepen, cavernous dark brown and copper-red swallowing the information of the tarot cards. I don’t understand why those eyes can’t see the same shadows and fangs that I see, when they already seem to see so much else that others don’t.

  Kyla flips the last card—future outcome—The Hierophant. A holy man in red robes sits upon a throne, giving blessing to two genuflecting monks. A pair of keys—one silver, one gold—are crossed at his feet, representing knowledge and wisdom. “Answers are on their way. A teacher is coming to you, someone who will help you make sense of the things you’ve seen. But he’ll also make you question everything you believe in.” Kyla looks up at me, brow furrowed. “This shit’s getting intense. Okay, one more card. Draw for the querent.”

  I swallow, and pull another card: The Hanged Man. A man hangs upside down from a tree, his arms tied behind his back and a halo of light around his head.

  Kyla nods. “You have to let go. You can accept what you thought was unacceptable. You’ll have to fight for your wisdom, but you’re only going to get it if you let yourself be vulnerable, and open to the will of something bigger than you. Than all of us.” Kyla blinks, and exhales. Her brow furrows, and she mutters something under her breath.

  “Ky?” I ask.

  She looks at me, smiles slightly. “Was that helpful at all?”

  I nod. “Yeah. It made a lot of sense.” I play with the carpet under my fingers, biting my lip, trying not to look too sullen.

  “Come on,” Kyla whines, gathering up the deck into a single pile. “That was a good one. Just go with it.”

  “Yeah. Thing about tarot is, most days it’s a lot easier to be the reader than the querent.” I sigh. “Anyway. Are we going to recast those protection circles tonight, or what?”

  Kyla smiles and stands, clapping her hands together. “But of course!” She pulls a box out from under her bed, filled with candles and incense and smudge sticks—dried and string-wrapped bundles of sage and lavender. Shrugging on a sweatshirt, she pulls her dreads back and tucks them under a black knit hat that bulges with the mass of her hair.

  “You think your mom knows what we do out there while she’s gone?” I wonder, selecting the right tools for the job tonight.

  “Hell no. She’d freak out. You know how she gets about the occult.” She finger-quotes the topic. “She doesn’t believe in magic, but boy does she believe in demons. I don’t know why. Your mom was always so chill about New Age stuff. She never even seemed afraid of Sura. I mean, she didn’t actually see them—that we know of—but still.”

  I nod, climb to my feet, think of my mother’s face when she spoke of the Sura—mysterious, coy, and yes, even brave. “I’m not afraid either,” I decide. “Not really.”

  Kyla hands me a lighter and cocks an eyebrow at me.

  “What? I mean, they just kind of hang out in shadows, don’t they? Maybe that’s all they can do, unless you invite them in or something.” Even I’m not convinced by my reasoning.

  “If you’re not afraid, then why are we doing this protection circle?”

  “Well, I said I’m not afraid—I didn’t say I’m brave.” I stick my tongue out at her. “Besides, if you’re forcing me to come to your party Saturday night, I want to make sure I don’t have to keep my guard up all night long.”

  Kyla grins. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll make sure you let your guard down.” She laughs.

  “Whoa, are you hitting on me?” I jest. “I thought you and Vanessa were getting serious…”

  She throws my jacket at me, sighing dramatically. “I mean I’m getting you drunk. You have been so uptight the past few months—” She gives me a hesitant look. “Not that I can blame you. But. As your best friend, it’s my duty to get you to relax now and then.”

  I roll my eyes. “Thanks, buddy.”

  — 8 —

  Outside, we light the smudge sticks until they’re burning at a steady smolder, hot embers releasing an earthy, spicy smoke meant to cleanse the space and project a boundary. We walk clockwise around Kyla’s property, tromping through mud and slush in our snow boots, visualizing the wall of energy we’re leaving in our wake: a bright blue shield climbing as tall as the heavens, plunging into the earth. We chant simple, sacred words: Shama Irin. Shama Iritz. Shama Naghim.

  It’s a protection ritual, the kind that has been done for thousands of years. There’s something about the right herbs and incense—the clarifying shock of sage, or the astringent tang of burnt lavender—that can drive a wall between us and the dark entities that prowl the liminal spaces between worlds. I’m not sure how it works, but it does. A clockwise circle, three times round, with purifying herbs burning at hand—this is the recipe for a circle of protection. The basic ritual can be found in almost any New Age or Wicca book, but the sacred words belong to my mother’s clan.

  I’m not sure what all of the words mean, but I know Irin were a kind of mythical guardian—Watchers, my mother sometimes called them. In some tribes, the legends say the Irin were of faerie blood, and that they were even older than the angels. But in most stories, my mother had said, the Irin were made by angels, crafted to look just like us so that they could walk among humans and protect us from the whims of the Sura. The Irin had what humans had lost a long time ago: real magic.

  But that was before the Irin Fell. Poisoned by their nearness to humanity, they fell victim to their own lust, anger, and hate, making their magic too dangerous of a weapon to be wielded. According to some legends, the angels banished them to another world. In other legends, the angels trapped them in a cavern at the center of the earth, where they starved to death.

  She was full of stories like that: the old stories, legends that her clan had passed down for centuries, of angels and demons and far away worlds. But so far, only the demons appear to be real.

  I don’t know where in the world the legends of her clan come from. To look at my mother, it wouldn’t be obvious. She might have been Irish, Russian, or Slavic—who knows? And her people have gone by many names, worn many stories to cloak the truth of their history as they traveled from place to place, selling their crafts and wares, telling fortunes, performing music. Most people just called them “gypsies,” but they are not Romani, or any other known race that claims that word. Even my mother did not know where they came from.

  And for some reason, my mother chose to leave her clan and settle down in suburbia, instead of continuing on with the nomadic lifestyle bred into her bones. I know it’s there, because I feel it in my own. Even though I’m only half of what my mother was, I feel the need to sleep beneath the stars, to move with the season, to live without the confinement of possessions, my whole life able to fit into a backpack. I feel the pull of elsewhere as strongly as I feel my own blood, coursing through me.

  Visualizing, chanting, calling on the old words and the old ways, summons a ghost inside of me. Shama Irin. Shama Iritz. Shama Naghim. I may not know that language, but I feel its power in my lungs as I inhale the pungent smoke, and I feel it in my skin when the cool, early spring breeze caresses my face. It calls up a thrumming from deep inside, like a churning of the sea. Unlike earlier today, the thrumming feels good—almost intoxicating.

  When we finish, I snuff the smudge stick in the wet grass and lay down on a rock by the creek that cuts through Kyla’s back yard. Kyla stands beside me, alert to the strange energy electrifying the night. “That’s outside the protection circle, you know,” she half-jokingly scolds.

  “Meh,” I reply, watching the stars through the still-bare branches overhead. I breathe deeply, feeling more calm and empowered than I have in a long time. “Maybe they’ll come. Don’t you want to see one?”

  “I can’t.” Kyla’s voice is like a shrug. “And besides, what if they are watching you? What will happen if they know you can see them?” She leans over me, obscuring the sk
y, tugging a lock of long red hair out from under my head.

  “Maybe they’ll drag me down to Sheol,” I tease, raising my eyebrows. “And make me their dark queen of the Fallen.”

  Kyla scoffs and sits next to me on the rock. “Dark queen? Last I checked I’m the brown one. You’re about as dark as skim milk.”

  “Racist.” I sit up and lean into her shoulder.

  She’s curiously quiet.

  “You okay?” I ask after a minute.

  “Just thinking.” Kyla stares into the creek rushing past us, swollen with runoff and melted snow. “About that reading I gave you…and the Hermit card. I know sometimes we all need to be a little introspective, A, but you know you can talk to me about things, right? About anything.”

  “I know,” I assure her, brow furrowed. “Kyla, I tell you everything. I told you about seeing demons and kissing Matt Sharpe. Two very frightening things to tell a person.” But I didn’t tell her about the man at the cemetery. And why not?

  I don’t know. Maybe because it was too vulnerable of an experience. Maybe because I’m still not sure it happened at all.

  Kyla gives me a crooked smile. “Good. It’s just…I worry about you sometimes. I know you have a lot on your mind most days…and I know it’s rough around your house still…and I know life isn’t always fabulous…”

  “Ky—” I try to stop her.

  “But I want you to be happy, Ana. That’s all. And maybe that means letting your guard down now and then—even when you’re not sloppy drunk.”

  “Hey, I don’t get sloppy.” I frown. “And I do let my guard down, all the time.”

  “Not with anyone else but me.”

  “So? I’m a private person. And enough of my private life has been on display for this town over the past four years. I’m owed the luxury of a few secrets.”

  Kyla tilts her head. “What are you going to do when I’m gone next year at college?”

  I look at the creek and shrug. “I’m not worried about it. Don’t you worry about it. I do have a life besides hanging out with you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve got my violin, and I’ve got my tarot cards, and I’ve got school, and the ever deepening mystery of the Sura…I’ll be too busy to even notice you’re gone.”

  She frowns. “I’ll miss you, you know.”

  “You know I’ll miss you. I was just saying—”

  Snap.

  A stick breaks somewhere to our left, in the woods, and we both whip around to see. Shadows obscure the shape of the beast, but I can see that it’s large, with forked horns rising from its head, eyes shimmering in the dark, catching the moon as it moves forward—

  “Oh,” Kyla breathes. “It’s just a deer.”

  It cocks its head at us, snorts, and gallops off into the night, antlers bouncing.

  Kyla laughs at herself.

  I grimace and try not to alarm her, because there is something out there. I can feel it watching us, eyes like tiny hands running along my skin. I can’t tell if whatever is watching is good or bad, but what’s more strange is that I swear it feels…scared.

  — 9 —

  The Village of Williamsville—the tiny suburb of the City of Buffalo in which we live—is nestled inside one of the safest towns on the East Coast, so I’m not particularly worried about being in any danger when I walk home around midnight, well past my weeknight curfew. Main Street runs flat through the heart of the village, lined with quaint shops and restaurants, all gone quiet at this time of night. A church steeple rises black against the light-polluted sky; rows of street lamps mark a straight path down the road, bathing the sidewalks in lurid yellow light. The village smells like mud and wet cement, and fresh woodsmoke drifting into the night as embers die in someone’s fireplace.

  I’ve walked the streets of this village alone at all hours, day and night. I like to think that maybe I’m the only one who has, since I never see anyone else out here past a certain hour—no one human, anyway. From time to time, I’ve spotted Sura wandering in the shadows, slinking around windows and crawling along rooftops. They don’t seem to do anything but look—inside houses, through windows, around corners, and at me, though I don’t let on that I’m looking, too.

  I don’t understand what they want, what their purpose is. I seem to remember my mother telling me that they were always on the lookout for humans with a weakness, a darkness they could manipulate to make the Sura more powerful, to somehow feed them and make them more real, but I don’t know how any of that would actually work. It’s an unnerving mystery to be living with.

  Tonight, alone, in the fresh chill of early spring, I feel my bones thrumming with that strange, sticky vibration—the electric pins and needles that have been haunting me for months. When I do spells with Kyla, it intensifies. Usually it’s awesome, like a sober high, but lately it keeps building until it feels like I’m about to burst. Right now, the voltage is running much higher than I’d like.

  This is the second time in one day.

  When I was younger, I thought this was what fear felt like—but then at other times, I thought it was excitement. The two seem inextricably confused inside my body, like a powerhouse of extremity—something all too eager to find out what’s going to happen, unable to sit still. Most days, I can ignore it. Other days, I channel it into tarot reading, or playing my violin. Lately, I’ve actually taken up running just to burn off some of the energy, to dull my senses through exhaustion.

  I know I can’t go on like this forever, but for right now it has to be enough. I don’t have a solution and don’t know where to begin to look. So I just keep walking, dealing with the brimming in my bones, and almost don’t notice the man up ahead, striding towards me. Well, maybe not towards me, per se, but on the sidewalk, in my direction.

  I straighten my posture to come to my full height, set my jaw, and look forward. Indirectly watching, I can see he’s dressed in dark denim and a hooded, black, wool coat. A familiar coat.

  Is this him? Is this the man from the cemetery?

  Of course not, I scold myself as I press forward. Hooded, black, wool coats are a dime a dozen in Buffalo three quarters of the year. Don’t be silly.

  He’s closer now, but I can’t see his face—just a hint of lips and a chin slightly darkened by stubble. As he nears, he slows his pace all too obviously, making my heart rate jump. He’s just a few feet from me now, and I can see he’s at least as tall as me, maybe taller.

  I turn my eyes away and move faster, longer strides pulling me past him on the narrow sidewalk.

  His shoulder hits mine, and I think it’s intentional.

  Shit.

  He stops.

  I keep walking, look over my shoulder to see him openly staring in my direction. “Sorry,” I mutter, even as his shadow-blanketed stare cuts through me.

  His eyes flash like an animal’s, reflecting the light from the streetlamps like two thin, gold coins. My foot loses direction mid-stride and I stumble—cover it by turning around completely—but I don’t take my eyes off of him.

  I’m not afraid, I tell myself, walking backwards, feeling quite the contrary. “I said sorry.” My heart hammers despite the snarky confidence in my voice.

  The man moves just so, as if to take a step towards me, making my heart leap—but then he decides against it. He nods instead.

  “Sorry,” he says as he turns and walks away.

  He isn’t looking when it happens, but his voice undoes something inside of me. My breath flies out in a silent gasp as if I’ve been punched in the gut, and I scarcely manage to turn and keep walking, all the while wondering how and why it is that my body has taken up this mission to betray me.

  — 10 —

  “Am I interrupting?” Kyla asks, pulling up a chair at my table in the cafeteria.

  “Hmm? No.” I shake my head, pulling my eyes away from the spread of tarot cards before me. “I thought you had class first period?”

  “And I thought you slept in every other day becau
se you don’t?” Kyla smirks. “What’s up? Who you reading for?”

  I frown. “Trying to read for myself, but, you know how that goes.” I sweep the cards up into a pile. They’re my mother’s old cards, a deck that was passed down to me from her, and to her from my grandmother. I can feel the weight of the years in them, as if the women who have touched them still possess the cards in some way, imbuing them with power.

  “Oh!” Kyla grins and slaps a hand on mine. “Here they come.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Andy and the fresh meat!”

  I turn to look behind me and see Andy walking towards us, looking confident and self-assured as usual. Trailing behind him is the new kid, olive-skinned and dark-featured, with roaming eyes that seem to take notice of every detail of the cafeteria as he moves through it, from the crack running through the middle of the flat tile floor they’re walking on, to the loose corner of the heating vent as they walk beneath it, to the names carved into the table they’re passing just now.

  I can’t help but notice that he carries himself with incredible poise, as if he’s weightless in his own body. I also can’t help but notice that his wild, blackish hair shines the same blue-green color as dragon fly wings where it catches the light. And I also can’t help but notice the strong lines of his jaw, the dark lashes around his eyes, the vaguely Semitic, smooth planes and angles of his face. I can’t help but notice a lot of things about him.

  But I do notice—much to my dismay—that my heartbeat has deepened, almost to a pound. Each pulse makes me feel light-headed, like the blood in my body is too distracted to care about reaching my extremities. And when I notice his eyes have settled on me, it’s a wonder my circulatory system doesn’t give up all together.

  I turn my attention back to my cards and pretend not to have noticed, pretend that no wave of prickling warmth is fluttering through my mind and body at the mere sight of him. I pretend I’m not distraught by my own ridiculously girly and predictable reaction. He’s not even that good looking, just new. Different. And tall—tall always gets my attention.