Poison Princess

31

“Slap that boy awake,” Jackson told me.

We’d just broken into a four-bedroom brick McMansion for the night. After searching the place, Jackson had returned to the van to ferry a still-unconscious Matthew to one of the twin beds in a guest room.

“I want to know how he got himself into that fool bind.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall, hitting the fifth that he and Selena had broken out to celebrate our successful rescue mission.

I sat beside Matthew, shaking his shoulder. Then harder.

Nothing.

“He’ll wake up soon enough.” Selena snapped her fingers for the bottle. “Come on, J.D., there’s a dartboard downstairs.”

Jackson nodded. “Evie, let’s leave him for now.”

“I don’t want him to wake up and not know where he is.” Not after the day he’d had. Mother knows best. I shivered. “You guys can go and play—”

“My friend came for me.”

My gaze darted down. Matthew’s whisper had been . . . out loud? After so long hearing his voice in my head, it sounded so rich, so authentic.

He was awake, his eyes open. Utterly familiar to me.

Shooting upright, he yanked me into his arms to hold me close, his breath shuddering, as if he’d been aching to see me.

Over Matthew’s shoulder, I saw Jackson’s frown turn into a scowl.

In a pissy tone, Selena said, “I thought you told us that you’d never met this boy.”

“I-I haven’t.”

“Empress,” Matthew sighed against my hair.

I stiffened, wishing he hadn’t said that out loud.

“Why did you call her that?” Jackson demanded, while Selena canted her head with curiosity.

Matthew drew away from me to face him. “Why don’t you?”

I couldn’t tell if his tone was challenging or merely puzzled. Apparently neither could Jackson. “Tell us your name.”

“Matthew Mat Zero Matto.” With a sly look, he said, “Empress knows my name.”

Jackson asked, “Where’d the water come from in your house?”

“A pipe.” Then he explained to Jackson, “Water travels in pipes.”

Jackson pushed up from his spot against the wall, clearly reaching his limit of patience. “You hit your head or something, boy?”

“Jackson, please.”

Another scowl from the Cajun. Then he muttered to Selena, “He’s slower than Christmas.”

“Christmas,” Matthew began grandly, “is . . . slow.”

In a loud voice, Selena enunciated to him, “I am Sah-lee-nah Loo-ah. This is Jackson Dah-voh.”

In a bored tone, Matthew said, “Dee-vee-oh and Luna.” He turned from them without interest to gaze at me. “You came for me.”

“We did, Matthew,” I said. “Jackson’s the one who freed you from the basement. Selena played a huge role as well.”

Shrug.

“The only coo-yôn in the world who could drown himself after the Flash,” Jackson grated. “And you owe me a buck knife, boy.”

“Come on, J.D.,” Selena said, “we’ll let these two crazy kids catch up. I’ll bet you the other fifth I packed that I can beat you at darts.”

Smart girl, packing whiskey—for the boy nicknamed after it. Well played, sage foe.

Jackson gazed from Matthew to me, looking unconvinced.

Impulses warred inside me: my curiosity’s need to ask Matthew questions in private, and my jealousy’s need to separate Jackson from Selena, to find out what had happened between them last night.

Curiosity won. “You guys go have fun,” I said. “We’ll be fine. I think I’ll be able to talk to him better alone.”

Selena started dragging Jackson away.

“You yell if you need anything. I’ll be listening,” he added darkly for Matthew’s benefit. Then in French he murmured to me, “We need to talk. Tonight.”

“Gawd, you are sexy,” Selena cried, “when you speak French!” And then they were gone.

Slore! Jackson was right—jalousie did rip at you inside.

I made my face expressionless before I faced Matthew again. “Hey, kid, you need to be a little nicer to those two. Unfortunately, we’re kind of dependent on them.”

He chuckled at that.

“Can you hunt? Or shoot?”

“Had a slingshot once!”

“Okay, then, neither can I. But they both hunt. They’ll source food and protect us. So, seriously, we are going to have to rely on them.”

He grinned. “Empress has a sense of humor this time.” It was one thing to be called Empress in my head, quite another in real life.

Matthew truly was here. With me. “Thank you for the visions, kid.” That was a sentence I’d never thought I would say. “You saved my life from the Flash.”

He nodded gravely. “I am a lifesaver.”

“But I couldn’t have been one. I mean, I couldn’t have prevented the Flash, right?”

He gave a bark of laughter. “That’s just crazy talk.”

Guilt easing . . . “Matthew, exactly how psychic are you?”

“So psychic that other psychics should be called Mattics.”

I smiled, excitement coursing through me. “What all can you see?”

He gazed up at the ceiling, his eyes going vacant. “The last two monarch butterflies are thousands of miles apart and flying away from each other. A boy is skateboarding across old Lake Michigan. The next card is close. Don’t look at this hand . . .”

“Look at that one,” I finished. “I know it. When you hear the voices, do they go quiet whenever you make contact?”

“Don’t want them quiet. Dee-vee-oh makes them quiet for you. Whenever he helps, he hurts.”

“Do you want to elaborate on that?” He gave me a wide grin. Apparently not. “So you can send your visions to anyone? And you can spread them through touch?”

His hair was drying, now flopped charmingly over his forehead. “Messages.”

“Did you send them to other Arcana?”

He looked insulted. As if I’d accused him of cheating on me. “You are my friend and ally.”

“So why’d you send me visions of Selena? What did that one in the woods mean?”

“Mean?” he asked in a baffled tone. “Is it bedtime?”

“Um, not quite. Tell me this, is Selena good like us or bad . . . like Death?”

“She’s the Moon,” he said matter-of-factly.

Obviously this subject was a dead end. I raised a new one. “Can you see my grandmother?”

“Tarasova,” Matthew murmured.

Just as she’d described herself to me. “Is she okay?” Nothing. “We’re on our way to find her. She has all the answers.”

“You have matching questions.”

Surely he’d tell me if she hadn’t survived—since we were going there? “If you’re psychic, and I can control plants, what are some of the other Arcana powers?”

“Vast.”

“Are we genetically altered or something? How did we get our powers?”

“We are born.”

Okay. “Does Selena have other abilities besides her archery?” Other than always looking perfect, bike racing, and cooking like Top Chef? “Does she know what we are? Is she literally the Bringer of Doubt? And how many Arcana are there? Why was that vision of Death more lifelike than all the others?”

Instead of replying to any of my questions, Matthew yawned widely, his eyes less clairvoyant-y—more a sleepy, childlike brown.

Though I burned for answers, I sensed that pushing him on any subject would help as much as pushing my own memories had. In other words, not at all.

Sometimes you have to let things unfold. But I had to know one thing. “When you were knocked out earlier, I saw a vision of you today. You didn’t look surprised when your mom locked you in. You saw your future?”

“Not my own. Never my own. Hers.”

He could only see others’ futures? “You didn’t want to, um, intervene with her?” Maybe to keep her from attempting to murder her son and committing suicide?

Had she snapped under the stress? Or had she wanted to spare him a ghastly Bagman death—with a drowning instead? Why wouldn’t she just take him with her in the car?

Then I remembered; Matthew had already told me. She’d known he wouldn’t stay in the car.

“Wouldn’t have mattered with her. Not for long.” With glinting eyes, he whispered, “I see far, Evie.”

So she would have died soon after? Or maybe her fate would have been worse?

Even as I debated whether there was a fate worse than death, I wondered how Matthew handled making these excruciating decisions for others.

You poor boy. I reached forward to smooth his hair from his forehead, as my own mother used to do to me. How could I feel this much affection for him so quickly?

But then, we had known each other for months.

He blinked up at me with endless trust. “I believed you’d make it in time.” Another yawn.

Watching him yawn was equivalent to watching a puppy dozing off—about the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Will I ever see a puppy again? “Why don’t you try to go to sleep? We’ll have hours tomorrow to talk.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

His lids grew heavier. “It begins with me . . . and ends with him.”

“Ends with who, Matthew?”

He’d already drifted to sleep.

I headed toward the other twin bed, lying down, reflecting on the hectic day. Of course Selena had wanted to come with us: “Hell, J.D., I could use some adventure.” She’d had her survival gear, high-performance clothes, and high-energy food packed in minutes. Bitch.

At least she had let us rummage for sleeping bags and portable food of our own.

And she was certainly equal to the journey, handling her own bike like a professional stuntwoman. In fact, she’d wanted me to ride with her—no doubt to prevent me from clinging to Jackson like a dryer sheet.

But in a tone that had brooked no argument, Jackson had said, “Evie’s with me.”

Had I reclaimed his attention from Selena? I couldn’t decide! At times, as we’d sped north, my thoughts had turned to the night before, but then I’d remember that Matthew’s life was at stake, and I’d feel ashamed.

Now I could mull it all I wanted to. Facts: Last night, Jackson had been drunk and pissed off at me. She’d been all over him. This morning, when Jackson had shepherded me back to the mansion, Selena had acted indignant, like a spurned girlfriend.

Three possibilities. One, they’d been at it like minks and would be again tonight. Two, they’d gotten together, but now Jackson regretted it. Or, three, he’d kept his hands to himself, and Selena was psycho-jealous over nothing.

I had to know. Yet while nothing they’d done or said convinced me they were a couple, they’d also done nothing that would allow me to rule that out.

“Empress?” Matthew said, waking.

“Did you have a bad dream, kid? Are you hungry? We have food.”

Gazing at me intently, he rose—then climbed onto the bed with me.

“Whoa! What are you doing?”

He took my hand, covered it with both of his own. At once, I relaxed.

Being with him like this felt normal, natural. Familiar.

“They play, Evie.”

“Who?” I grew warm, unable to keep my eyes open.

The last thing I heard: “The Arcana.”