Her mother blinked several times, and when she glanced up again at Caitlyn, her pupils were back to their regular size, and her face normal. “There is no avoiding death, Caitlyn. Life cannot continue without it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Caitlyn muttered.
Her mother smiled softly. “You aren’t yet ready to understand. But you will be, soon.”
Caitlyn pressed her lips together. She didn’t
want
to understand. Death was no friend to her. “Where’s the Knight of Cups in all this? Shouldn’t he be rescuing me from abysses and fighting off skeletons on white horses?”
“He’ll be there. But not, I think, in the ways that you expect.”
Caitlyn shook her head in confusion and frustration, and then pointed to the final card, facedown upon the table. “So what does this one represent?”
“This is the final outcome.”
“Okay, let’s see it. God knows it can’t be any worse than what you’ve shown me already.”
Her mother turned over the final card.
The Wheel of Fortune.
Caitlyn sighed a breath of wonder, and then looked at her mother. “The
Rota Fortunae,”
her mother said softly.“Fortune’s wheel.” She looked up at Caitlyn. “Destiny is at work in your life. That which seems random chance is not. You are at the edge of the wheel right now, lost in the chaos of a world that turns at maddening speed, but if you fulfill your destiny, you will journey to the heart of the wheel, where all is motionless and clear. You will journey to the heart. The heart. The heart,” she repeated as if possessed, “the heart in darkness.” Her eyes widened, and she stared at Caitlyn. “That is where you will find your true purpose.”
Caitlyn struggled to make sense of what she was saying. “What
is
the heart in darkness? And why did you put this card under my pillow right before you died in that car crash? What did you mean to tell me?”
Her mother’s brows puckered. “Car crash?”
“April 25, when I was four years old.” Caitlyn frowned at her mother. “You haven’t forgotten that you’re dead, have you?”
Her mother looked flustered, her gaze darting around the room, her hands growing restless, touching and shifting the cards on the TV tray. One hand stopped on the card of Death, and then her face slowly filled with sadness. “Dead. And you so young.” Her face contorted, her mouth turning down in an ugly grimace of grief, and then she violently swept the cards to the floor, the tray teetering and then falling with a clatter. She put her face in her hands and sobbed, becoming a living echo of the woman depicted on the Nine of Swords.
“Mom…,” Caitlyn said, reaching out a hand in tentative comfort. Just as her hand was about to connect with her mother’s shoulder, Caitlyn felt a hand on her own shoulder, shaking her.
“Caitlyn? Wake up,” her father’s voice said.
Her mother started to fade into darkness, becoming transparent. “Mom!” Caitlyn screamed, struggling to reach her even as she seemed to be pulled away into darkness.
Her mother looked up, eyes red with tears, and then her face filled with panic. She lunged toward Caitlyn, trying to reach her. “Caitlyn! Don’t go!”
“Wake up! Caitlyn, it’s time to get up!” her dad insisted, shaking her harder.
“Mommm!” Caitlyn moaned, and was pulled against her will back into the world of the waking. Her mother vanished, and she opened her eyes. Her father, his face haggard from lack of sleep, was looking down at her.
He straightened up. “We have to get moving. You don’t want to miss your plane, do you?” He walked out and closed her door.
She sat up, and picked up the tarot card on her bedside table. “Destiny,” she whispered, and traced her fingertip in a circle around the edge of the wheel. The other images from her dream were quickly fading, along with the things her mother had said. She grabbed her art journal and sketched the tarot cards her mother had shown her. The clearest of them was the Knight of Cups.
“I knew you were out there somewhere,” Caitlyn whispered to the knight, as with a few flicks of her pencil she crowned his helmet with wings.
“Caitlyn!” her father hollered from the hallway. “Come on! It’s time to go.”
She stuffed the art journal into her backpack, a smile tugging at her lips. Thanks to her mom, she finally felt ready to leave.
It was time to meet her fate.
CHAPTER
Three
JANUARY 21, SOUTHWEST FRANCE
Caitlyn stared at the back of the driver’s fat pink neck, white hairs sticking out of it like bristles on a pig. He smelled of wool and tobacco, the scents strong in the overheated Mercedes. He hadn’t said a word to her since meeting her at noon outside baggage claim at the Bordeaux airport, his communications limited to grunts and gestures of his head. He was like a henchman in a James Bond movie, and she had a disquieting sense that he was delivering her to her doom.
She’d slept only in fits and starts on the four flights it had taken her to get from Oregon to the French city of Bordeaux, and her brain was fuzzy with lack of sleep, time confusion, and the high tension of leaving everything and everyone she’d ever known. Whatever comfort she’d gotten from her dream of her mother had long since worn off, erased by the torture of airplane seats, layovers, and long confused treks through airports to change planes. She was nauseated with a sour stomach, and had developed an annoying nervous twitch in one eyelid. She could feel it fluttering like a moth against her eyeball.
She’d never been chauffeured anywhere before, and had never been in a Mercedes. When she first got in, she’d felt like a celebrity, glancing around the airport parking lot, hoping someone would notice: Caitlyn Monahan of Spring Creek, Oregon, was being chauffeured in a Mercedes! But no one had spared her a look, and the small thrill of leather seats and a uniformed driver had been quickly forgotten as she’d taken her first real look at France, leaving the airport.
So far it was as gray, rainy, and dreary as Oregon had been thirtytwo hours earlier. Bordeaux was near the southwest coast, and three hundred miles from Paris. Her driver had taken a highway around the outskirts of Bordeaux and then headed east into the countryside, passing through denuded winter vineyards, gently rolling farmland, and low wooded hills. The Fortune School was well over an hour’s drive away, above the Dordogne River in an ancient region known as the Périgord Noir—called
noir
, black, because of the dark forests of pine and evergreen oak trees. Her travel book had pointed out the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux and Les Eyzies that were over fifteen thousand years old, and painted by some of the world’s first artists. The Gauls had been here, too, and the Romans, as had the English, fighting with the French during the Hundred Years’ War.
Despite those promises of a rich and dramatic history, the area was as rural as Spring Creek. She was five thousand miles away from home, and cave paintings or no, she was still surrounded by farms and dreary winter weather.
Brilliant.
Maybe coming here was the wrong thing for an unhappy girl with a possible mental disorder. That was what her parents had secretly feared, Caitlyn knew: that her bad dreams and depressed moods meant that she was on the verge of a breakdown. They could never understand that it was staying locked in the stale embrace of home that truly threatened to push her into the pit of despair.
Caitlyn remembered Joy’s sad face and her long hug good-bye, and she felt her throat tighten. For a brief instant she wanted to ask the driver to turn the car around and take her back to the airport: she’d made a horrible mistake and she had to go home. But the words stuck in her throat, kept there both by her fear of the gruff stranger and her reluctance to admit defeat.
It wasn’t just the exhaustion of travel that was eating at her. Even her complete ignorance of what it would be like to live and go to school in France was not what was making her feel almost sick. It was the anticipation of what her fellow students might be like.
A little Internet research had shown her that the Fortune School was meant for the daughters of blue-blooded, filthy-rich families, not for daughters of log truck drivers from Oregon. The girls at the Fortune School probably spoke several languages, skied in the Alps, vacationed on private yachts in the Mediterranean, and bought their clothes from shops like Chanel and Dior.
She had spent the last several months too engrossed in getting to France to worry about what would happen once she did. Now that the flights were over and she was on the ground, only an hour from the Fortune School, she finally began to wonder not just what
she
would think of the people she met, but what
they
would think of
her
.
And she knew they were going to think she was a hick.
She
was
a hick.
Her eyelid fluttered at the thought, and she pressed her hand against it. After all she’d gone through to get here, she would never forgive herself if she gave up on day one.
She closed her eyes and lay her head back against the headrest and tried to relax.
Suddenly, the brilliant glare of headlights pierced the rain and filled the car, a semi’s horn blaring a warning. Caitlyn screamed as a massive truck bore down on them out of the gray drizzle, aiming straight for her in the backseat of the Mercedes. The truck’s front grill filled her window, the headlights turning the driver’s head into an abstract shape of white illumination and black shadow. There was a violent jerk, and then all went black.
The car was gone. As if in a dream, she was flying with the graceful ease of a bird, skimming low over summer-bleached farms and forests of oak. She saw the Dordogne River, wide, smooth, and green, with poplars and willows edging its banks and golden limestone cliffs rising roughly above on one side. Narrow honey-colored stone villages clung to the bottom of the cliffs, bounded by the river. The stone-shingled buildings looked centuries old.
She flew over a long-ago peasant family harvesting wheat by hand, flying so close that she could hear the mother’s scythe as it cut through the stalks and feel the dust of the harvest in her nose. She left them and came up behind a group of riders on horseback, on a dirt road. They wore clothes out of a Shakespearean play: doublets and trunk hose, tall boots and plumed hats. As she approached, one of the figures turned in his saddle as if to stare at her: a beautiful young man with bronze curls, a straight narrow nose, and gently curved lips framed by a square jaw shadowed with stubble.
The Knight of Cups
, something inside Caitlyn said.
You have found him.
The young man’s dark hazel eyes narrowed as she flew up close and hovered for a long moment mere feet from him, like a hummingbird examining a flower. Was this him, the one she had been waiting for?
She wanted to touch him; she wanted to feel that rough stubble on his cheek. She stretched her hand toward him, fingertips reaching for the plane of his cheek. He couldn’t see her, his gaze going right through her, but his eyes were hard and suspicious, as if he knew someone or something was watching him. As if he knew that
she
was reaching out of the ether to touch him.
“Raphael, what is it?” one of the other men asked when her fingertips were an inch shy of his cheek.
The bronze-curled young man shrugged and faced forward. “Nothing.”
Nothing? Caitlyn lay both hands on the back of his neck and ran her fingers up into his hair, knocking off his hat, and then flew beyond the chaos she had caused: Raphael jerked, his horse shied and crashed into the one to the right, voices shouted as the mounts danced and were drawn back under control.
A moment later she was past the riders, and when she looked back for another sight of the beautiful young man, the riders had disappeared, replaced by a vast army encampment of men, tents, and horses, with bedraggled women tending the cooking fires and squires cleaning armor. She could smell the smoke, the meat cooking, their unwashed bodies, the manure of animals. As they, too, melted away, vanishing like a vision, she looked forward and saw a field bisected by a column of Roman soldiers marching down a stone road, their leather-clad feet slapping the ground in drumlike rhythm. Their stone road sank away beneath green vegetation, taking the soldiers with it. A herd of strangely horned, enormous cattle grazed in their place beneath a sun that baked Caitlyn’s skin, and when they as well faded away to nothing, Caitlyn felt a chill run over her body, and the landscape turned to blowing snow as far as she could see, as if an ice age had swallowed the land.
She jerked awake to the skittering sound of sleet on the roof of the car, the ice pellets scrabbling like the claws of frightened mice. She looked around in confusion, the scenes of her dream tearing apart like clouds in the wind, leaving her with only a memory of intense hazel eyes and a name: Raphael.
The Mercedes was moving smoothly along the road. Where was the semitruck?
“Excuse me?” she squeaked at the driver. “Er,
excusez-moi?”
The driver’s dark pebble eyes flicked up to look at her in the rearview mirror.