Foretold (29 page)

“They want a future!”

Anger churns in my stomach, the sick taste of hate in my throat. “You mean an improbable future?”

Big John grabs my arm, his fat fingers pressing into my skin. He shoves me against the door, crushing my body beneath his. “You’ve got a smart mouth. Do I need to remind you what happens to little girls with smart mouths?”

The nausea hits me in waves, and I have to swallow the bile to keep from throwing up.

You’re not here. You’re somewhere else.…

I can feel his sweat on my skin, thick and sticky.

Let go
.

He pushes away from me, turning at the bottom of the stairs. “I’ll see you tonight. And every townie that gives you five bucks better walk out thinking he’s gonna be a millionaire. You got that?”

I nod. But I think about all the things he’s taken from me. All the things he’ll continue to take. I think about the smell of cigarettes and Jim Beam, the feeling of sweat on my skin. I feel it again.

The bells on my skirt drag in the dirt. If they’re ringing, I can’t hear them. The only thing I can hear is a Def Leppard song blaring from the cheap speakers above the Scrambler and Big John’s voice in my ear. I walk over the trash and cigarette butts littering the midway. This whole place is nothing but trash.

Something moves in my peripheral vision near the broken cotton candy cart.

Big John.

He’s leading a girl who looks a few years younger than me behind the abandoned cart that marks the edge of the carnival grounds, where the trampled grass and dirt turns into trees and darkness. I’ve never seen her before. Big John’s hand is clamped around her wrist and he’s smiling. She’s not. The girl glances around nervously like she’s trying to decide how embarrassing it will be if she calls out for no reason. Because he’s not going to hurt her … right?

I can’t move.

I’m not the only one
.

I want to run or scream or do something, but every muscle in my body is frozen as I watch them disappear into the darkness.

Do something!

I will my legs to run. My voice to scream. But I’m frozen, trapped by the solid wall of fear I can’t climb.

How long has he been doing this? How many girls?

“Ilana, there’s a line!” Leeds shouts.

I focus on the trailer. The red paint. The folding steps. The line of people milling around outside, waiting for pink and yellow bulbs to light up. They don’t care if half of them are burnt out and a seventeen-year-old who hasn’t been to school since kindergarten is the one making the promises. No one cares.

I force my legs to move and I block everything out, the way I’ve done more times than I can count now.

I scan their faces—hopeful, doubtful, nervous, excited—and think about what I’m going to tell them tonight. Will they win love or lose it? Get rich or go broke? Live forever or die tomorrow?

I think about the girl who disappeared behind the cart with Big John. I wish I could predict her future. It would be happy and safe and far from here.

The night blurs around me. I don’t know what I see in my glass ball or what I tell the steady stream of hopeful faces that sit across the table. Lies, I know that much. But these lies are different. They leave the marks smiling and happy, filled with dreams of improbable futures.

It doesn’t make me feel better like my mother says it will.

But it makes me feel something, even if it’s an emotion I can’t name.

I stay in the trailer long after the door closes behind the last happy customer. I stare at the crumpled bills in the bowl on the table. I grab them in handfuls, ripping them up and tossing them in the trash. The lights on the Ferris wheel go black and I sit in the semidarkness.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting here when the door creaks open and I smell the whiskey. Big John is standing in the doorway looking satisfied in a shiny sharkskin shirt that makes him look even sweatier. A bottle of Jim Beam swings from his hand.

My stomach contracts and twists into a knot. I think about the girl, the way I was too scared to help her, and shame burns though me. “What do you want?”

Big John hooks a finger under his suspenders and smiles. “Came to predict your future.” He takes a swig from the bottle and points at the glass ball. “Says you’re gonna bring your ass to my trailer in ten minutes.”

The other girl wasn’t enough. With him, it’s never enough.

Something inside me snaps.

I think about the old man who won at the races and the woman in the red sweater. Last night, I predicted their futures and they came true. Maybe it was a coincidence. But if there is one thing I’ve learned in the halls of this dirty school without walls, it’s how to play the odds.

“My turn.” I stare at the cheap glass ball on the table and back at his vicious face—evil and sadistic and everything wrong with the world. “Fate will deal you a fair hand.”

Big John laughs, phlegm rattling in his chest. “You’re damn right it will. Cash out and I’ll see you in ten—” He looks at his watch. “No—nine minutes.”

The door slams behind him and I collect the shredded money in my hands. Time to cash out. I’m putting it in my pocket when I hear someone shout.

I know that voice. I rush to the door, bells jingling at my ankles.

“You’ve got it all wrong!” Big John shouts. He’s holding his hands up to shield himself, the way I have so many times.

A man stands a few yards away, holding a hunting rifle. “You filthy son of a bitch. My daughter told me what you did!”

Carnies come out of their trailers, but no one moves. Even Leeds just stands there with his sleeves rolled up.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” Big John says.

The girl’s father doesn’t respond. He keeps the rifle pointed at Big John as if he can see the truth. “Tell ’em that in hell.”

I don’t see the bullet, but I hear the round explode from the gun. My body tenses for a split second and Big John falls in the dirt.

The man with the rifle spits on the ground and walks away.

Everyone rushes toward the place Big John’s body lies motionless. I don’t even recognize the faces as I push my way through the crowd.

“Ilana, you don’t want to see this.”

But I do.

I step through and I see him. The monster from my nightmares, staring up at a sky he will never see again.

It’s something I’ve wished for a thousand times. But I never thought I would see it happen, or that I would be the one to do it. The realization spreads through me slowly like it’s stretching after a long nap.

I did this, even if I wasn’t the one holding the gun.

I turn and start walking. I pass the trailer I share with my mom. The bells on my skirt are ringing again. I bend down and rip them off one at a time. I keep walking until the carnival is somewhere behind me and I can see the highway in front of me. I won’t stop until I can see my future.

It’s not possible. It can’t be. The end of the world should come at the end.

Not now.

The words of the
Prophéties
rise and fall, senseless, unreliable, as if I am trying to read a flame.

In some ways, I am. At least, Luc is. That’s his job. To read.

It’s only my job to believe him.

I look up. “So you’re absolutely sure? That’s it then?” I’ve said it a thousand times before, now a thousand and one. I smooth my fingers across the yellowed page, resisting the
urge to seize it and rip it into tiny pieces. On the other side of the table, a pale-faced mage watches me, dark eyes in more darkness.

Those eyes, most often glued to his dull gunmetal machine, are the only fixed thing in my universe.

“Don’t, Adi,” he says. Luc knows how I feel, even though I can barely see his face well enough in this light to read his expression.

Les Immortels
. We can be so stupid about so many things Mortals take for granted. Like, for example, when it’s time to turn on a light.

When it’s time to go
.

Still, I don’t move to light the old lantern in front of me. Instead, I hear the sound of a match striking. Luc shrugs, cupping it in his hands. “I don’t make up the words. I just decrypt them. And they’re all saying the same thing.” The cigarette bobs in his mouth while he talks around it.

“Terror from the sky?”

He nods.

“How long? Weeks? Days?”

“Hours.”

I force myself to look back to the words. “But 1999? He’s a little late to the party, this king-of-the-sky person. It’s 2012. Maybe Nostradamus got it wrong.” I push the paper away, stubborn.

Luc smiles.
“Ah, oui, Michel de Nostradame
. Let’s ask him again.” An old joke, an inside joke. One that only a few would understand.

I wish I didn’t. I don’t want the words to be true, and I don’t want to know what the truth means. More than that, I don’t want to be the bearer of the news.

Which I am. Determining the prophecies, that’s Luc’s problem. Believing them, explaining them, that’s mine.

Luc takes a drag off a cigarette from where he sits behind the machine—not the least of his dirty habits. That’s Luc, the perpetual rebellion of a boy who is forever seventeen. He’ll never do what you want him to, and he’s no one’s man but his own. James Dean ad infinitum, a thousand years in the making.

He grins at me, his crooked smile the only thing not model-perfect about his rugged face. “
Tant pis
. Too bad. So we’re off by a decade or two? It’s not a perfect science, what we do.” His chin glows like a lump of coal in the shadows, and light flickers off the metal keyboard in front of him.

La Machine Enigmatique
. The Enigma Machine. It looks like an old typewriter. Luc types the messages in French, and they appear on the other side—wherever that may be—encrypted. Likewise, encrypted messages appear in this realm on his machine in French. I don’t know why Luc clings to the old protocols of World War II cryptology tech. I suppose old habits die hard.

The message today has said that we will die harder, and die now.

Terror from the skies
.

That’s all the Enigma tells us, all we are given to know.

Another problem of Immortality. We’re old, older than Paris, most of us. Older than the Gauls, some of us. Lone creatures of lonely habits. We don’t like change. I still pin my hair into curls. Take rosewater baths. Write with fountain pens, on linen paper.

“Put that out.”

“Why? Because it will kill me?” A harsh laugh.

Luc sighs, grinding his cigarette into ash. He’s only doing it to humor me, though he knows not to smoke in here. The priests might smell him—his tobacco and his coffee and his sleeplessness—and they barely tolerate our presence as it is.
We don’t have time for words with them now. We are the children of the devil, by most accounts. Still, things have improved in my long lifetime. No more stakes. No inquisitions. Not for a very long time, at least.

It’s what makes today possible, this small room filled with papers and smoke and bad news and a typewriter that is not a typewriter and my old friend with his dark eyes.

So Luc and I sit here, in this smallest room of this large cathedral, perhaps the most famous in all of France, certainly Paris. An anteroom to an anteroom to an anteroom, hidden away on the Ile de la Cité. Ours isn’t a room you’ll ever see, or one you’ll ever know existed. I’m not sure it does, to be honest. Not in the Mortal world, if that’s how you define existence.

How do you define existence? Does it even matter anymore?

I consult my watch. “Five minutes. We’d better go.”

“And then?” Luc holds my eyes with his, but I can’t bear it.

I look away, rising to my feet, smoothing the deep creases in my rumpled summer dress. The washed-out floral print seems incongruous, given the situation. I wish I’d gone home and changed. A pencil skirt, maybe. My good silk blouse, the one with the navy and white polka dots.
La Société de Notre Dame Immortelle
, the deepest secret organization from the darkest corner of the supernatural world, they’re not used to seeing me like this. It’s one of the countless vanities of Immortals in a Mortal world; we look good even if we don’t have to. Especially because we don’t have to.

Not that it matters now.

How do you dress for the end of the world?

The others are waiting. The meeting will start soon, if it hasn’t already. I grab the page, holding out my hand to Luc. He slips on his battered leather jacket and takes it, cold as death, soft as butter.

It’s time.

That’s all I know for certain.

I watch her move and it’s all I can do not to touch her. No man is immune to the pull of
la Sirène
, but of all men I am the least. Hair. Curves. Bare neck. Bits of wrist and ankle, above and below her wrinkled dress.