Raintree: Oracle (Raintree 4)

Myra swallowed down a sob before reaching for Ariel. But the girl’s hand was outstretched already. She was open and trusting, and because of that might be hurt the worst.

“Don’t lose these,” she beseeched them. Without the protection of the little pewter charms, none of them would be strong enough to survive.

“We won’t, Mama,” Elena answered for herself and her younger sisters as she attached her charm to her bracelet and helped Irina with hers.

Despite her trembling fingers, Myra secured the sun charm on Ariel’s bracelet, but when she pulled back, the girl caught her hand. “Mama?”

“Yes, child?”

“You called it a curse...this special ability,” Ariel reminded her, her voice tremulous. She had been listening.

Myra nodded. “Yes, it is a curse, my sweetheart. People don’t understand. They thought our ancestors were witches who cast evil spells.”

And they had been witches, but ones who’d tried to help and heal. Her family had never been about evil; that was what had pursued them and persecuted them through the ages.

“But that was long ago,” Elena said, ever practical. “People don’t believe in witches anymore.”

Myra knew better than to warn them, to make them aware of the dangers. She’d shown them the locket earlier, the one nestled between her breasts, the metal cold against her skin. It was the one Thomas had pressed upon Elena all those years ago. Inside were faded pictures, drawn by Thomas’s young hand, of his sisters, who had died in the fire. Their deaths could have been prevented if only they’d listened and fought their fate. “Some still believe.”

“Mama, I’m cursed?” Ariel asked, her turquoise eyes wide with fear. Her hand shook as she clutched the sun.

No more than I. Myra had lost so much in her life. Her one great love—Elena’s father. And now...

“Mama, there are lights coming across the field!” Ariel whispered, as if thinking that if she spoke softly they wouldn’t find her. Maybe she didn’t hear as much as her sisters, but she understood.

Myra didn’t glance out the window. She’d already seen the lights coming, in a vision, and so she’d hidden the camper in the middle of a cornfield. But still they’d found her; they’d found them. She stared at her children, memorizing their faces, praying for their futures. Each would know a great love as she had, and all she could hope was that theirs lasted. That they fought against their fate, against the evil stalking them, as she would have fought had she been stronger.

She just stood there next to the camper, in the middle of the cornfield, as the child protective services, who’d already declared her unfit, took her children away. The girls screamed and reached for her, tears cascading down their beautiful faces like rain against windows.

This wasn’t Myra’s final fate; her death would come much later. But as her heart bled and her soul withered, this was the night she really died.

But the authorities didn’t take them all. Her hands clasped her swollen belly. Soon she would have another little girl. This child would need her even more than the others, for she would have more abilities than they had. She would be more powerful a witch even than Myra. But yet she would be even more cursed. The witch hunt would end for the others. But for her fourth child, whom she would call Maria, the witch hunt would never end...

Chapter 1

Energy flowed from the cards up the tips of Maria Cooper’s tingling fingers. Warmth spread through her as the energy enveloped her. This will be a clear reading...

She had been blocking her special abilities for so long that she’d worried she might have lost them. But maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. In the past they had proved more destructive than special—more curse than gift.

“What do you see?” the young woman asked, her voice quavering with excitement.

“I haven’t turned the first card,” Maria pointed out. Only the Significator, the fair-haired Queen of Cups, lay faceup on the table between them. The card didn’t represent the young woman’s physical appearance—not since the girl had dyed her hair black, tattooed a crow on her face and renamed herself Raven. But the card represented the wistfulness of the young woman’s nature,

so Maria had chosen it for her.

“But you see stuff—that’s what people say about you,” the girl continued. “That’s why I wanted to learn from you—how to read the cards and how to make the potions and amulets. I know that you have a real gift.”

A gift. Or a curse? She used to think it was the first and had grown up embracing her heritage. But then everything had gone so wrong, and she had begun to believe what others had—that she was cursed. That was why she had refused the girl’s previous requests to learn to read. Maria had taught her about the crystals and herbs she sold in her shop but she’d resisted the cards—afraid of what she herself might see.

“I have it, too,” Raven confided. “I get that sense of déjà vu all the time. I know I’ve already dreamed what’s happening. I saw it...like you see stuff.”

I hope you don’t see the stuff I’ve seen...

“That’s why I want to learn tarot,” the girl said. “Because I know I’ll be good at it.”

Raven had been saying the same thing ever since she had first started hanging around the Magik Shoppe. The twenty-two-year-old had spent so much time there that Maria had finally given her a job, and now she had given in on teaching her tarot. She hoped like hell that she didn’t come to regret caving in to the girl’s pleas.

Maybe Raven had a gift. Or maybe, like so many others, she only wished she did because she had glamorized the supernatural ability into something that it wasn’t. Into something powerful, when having these abilities actually made Maria feel powerless, helpless to stop what she might see.