Verum (The Nocte Trilogy 2)

asn’t yet. There’s something left to know… an answer left to be had.

I need to find it.

I don’t make it far before Sabine finds me.

It’s like she was waiting just for me.

“It’s time to read your cards again,” she tells me, as though it’s not one in the morning, as though it’s such a normal thing.

I start to shake my head, but she won’t hear it.

“It’s important,” she insists.

Her gnarled fingers sink into my flesh, her fingernails biting into my muscle. I let her take me to her room, to where it’s dark and the moonlight is shining onto the table.

The cards are already spread out, in the same weird cross, the gold gleaming garishly in the night.

“You started without me,” I point out softly. She glances at me, and sits down.

“I read them every day,” she admits. “But recently, the night of the party, they changed.”

The night I was with Dare.

The night I found out what he did.

Of course.

Everything changed that night.

I felt it.

“Pick up a card,” she tells me. “The one on top.”

I do. It’s cool beneath my fingers.

A priest rises against a stained glass window.

“The hierophant,” Sabine whispers. “The teacher. It means you must listen to me now, the time to teach is here.”

“Teach me what?” I ask, my voice the merest of whispers. I’m scared now, at her tone, of these cards, of this place. I was wrong to stay here. I know that now.

There was a fork in the road, and I chose the wrong path.

“I have to teach you what you need to know. Your mother wouldn’t let me, she left. But you’re here and you must learn from me, child.”

Oh my god. This just gets weirder and weirder. I start to get up.

“I’m going back to bed now,” I tell her. “This just got too strange for me.”

“Sit,” Sabine directs, her voice stern and loud and unarguable.

I sit.

I can do nothing else.

Sabine sifts through the cards, her eyes moving so fast that I see them working back and forth, faster and faster, like she’s experiencing a dream.

Finally, she looks up at me.