Page 45 of The Reveal
If I wasn’t sitting down in her chair, I think I would fall over. “Are you actually senile at all? Has this all been an act?”
Looking at her now, it’s hard to believe that I could ever have imagined her anything less than sharp as a tack.
“I’m no spring chicken.” She considers for a moment. “Some days are cloudier than others. Some days I might forget where in time I am.”
“Gran.”
“I’m old and I’m tired,” she tells me. “I’m not sure what world I’m in, some of the time. But one thing I do know, Winter, is that I need to live until I can pass the torch. I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
“You’ve been waiting forme?” I realize my voice is a little too loud. I lower it. “I’ve been right here. Doting on you night and day.”
She waves her hand. “That’s not what I mean. The gift is a tricky thing, like anything else. It can’t be forced. It has to be accepted.”
“If I had that kind of gift,” I tell her in a low voice, “the last few years would have been very, very different.”
But my head throbs, as if to contradict me.
Gran’s eyes gleam. “You would have shown us how it’s done, would you?”
“I don’t want your torch,” I tell her. “I don’t even know what a torch is in this context, and anyway, I’m sick to death of fire.”
“Everyone is sick to death of fire, child,” my grandmother replies. “But that’s no reason to go on burning.”
She picks up the cards in her lap and hands them over to me, placing them down before me on the table next to her chair with a decisive little thump.
I stare at the cards, the same pile of them that she always has in her hands or near enough to swipe up at a moment’s notice. They are worn, with frayed edges and creases, plus the clear sense of her fingerprints all over them.
If I squint, I think maybe I canseethose prints on the dark edges. Or pressed into the gold symbols.
“This deck has been handed down in the family for generations,” she tells me, and there’s a certain ringing in her voice that echoes in me.Uncomfortably. As if she’s calling my bones to attention, these words like some kind of tuning fork. “They like to be handled, as they do enjoy a good preen, but only by the blood. Our blood. The cards don’t like being touched by anyone outside the family. They are not simply oracle cards that anyone could pick up in a shop. They are the cards of the oracles that have long been in this family.”
I’m finding it hard to breathe. “Discussing a deck of cards like it’s sentient is not really going a long way towards convincing me that you’re not senile,” I tell her. “In case that’s a concern.”
Gran only sniffs at that.
I shake my head. “I’ve always had an aversion to them. You know this.”
“You loved them when you were little,” she says. Almost sadly. “They liked you from the start, the day you came home from the hospital. That’s how I knew it was you, Winter. They took such a shine to you.” She sighs. “But your mother hated that the gift skipped a generation. So far as she could tell, it washergift and you had no right to it. She punished you anytime you considered picking them up and getting to know them. If they weren’t hers, she thought the tradition might as well stop dead.”
I want to feel that same sense of bafflement and disbelief again. But I don’t. Instead, the things she’s telling me are starting to feel like memories. And my temples are kicking at me, not as painfully as they do after a nightmare, but enough to get my attention.
I have a snatch of memory in my head then, as if it burst on the scene with these words. With the spike of a headache. My mother catching me on the stairs with Gran’s cards and wrenching my arm so hard as she pulled me away that it still twinges now. I reach over to wrap a hand around that ribbon of pain, like a ghost in my bicep.
Gran nods, like she can see my memories all over my face. “It’s my fault. I should have managed Lilianne better. In a thousand ways. But these things are always more clear in hindsight, which has never been my strong suit. Give me a future any day.”
I stare down at the cards, scowling at them as if the symbols stamped all over them are jeering at me. Wishing I had the nerve to pick them up and throw them out the window for the zombies to ooze all over. There is no part of me that wants to touch them. I can almost feel my skin crawling. As if something is prickling all over me, poking at me, changing me. I hate it.
“Your mother never liked the futures I told,” Gran continues, and she sounds like her old self still, but I can also hear a weariness in her voice. Age showing itself, maybe. Or possibly just the heaviness that is my mother. “She thought I could change them at will and was furious when I couldn’t. That’s my fault too. I want you to know that my intentions were good, Winter. They were always good, even though things never ended up the way I wanted them to. That was a test and I failed it, again and again.”
There’s a growing din in my head. My skin feels uncomfortable stretched over my bones.
That prickling and prodding seems to grow more intense with every jarring beat of my heart. The headache is starting to build.
“What test?” I ask. My voice sounds thick and strange, far away and ... not mine.
Her gaze looks like precious jewels in so little light. Those deep indigo eyes Augie and I got from her, another gift that skipped a generation. The moon slips and slides all over her, capturing her like a kind of cameo, right there in her bed. I have a feeling I’m looking at a memory of her. It feels slippery inside of me, as if I’m looking around time and not through it.
As if I’ve already lost her, and that notion is far worse than any sense of betrayal I might feel.
