The Hierophant (Book 1 in The Arcana Series) (31 page)

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The Hierophant!

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The Tower
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The Tower

Book II in the Arcana Series

Ana Flynn just made a deal with the Devil, but she hasn’t lost her soul—yet.

In exchange for bringing her best friend back from the dead, Ana has no choice but to return to the hellish world of Sheol—a world that has been the backdrop to all of her nightmares since she narrowly escaped it, well over a year ago. But this time, Ana is trapped in a sentient prison school that defies the laws of space and time, a place her new demonic classmates call the Tower. And once you enter the Tower, there is only one way out: graduation.

While Ana wants nothing more than to return to what’s left of her life back home, her freedom can only come at a price: in order to graduate, she must find a way to face her greatest fears, and embrace the dark magic of Sheol—a magic that will transform her, forever.

Ana was human when she entered the Tower. Will she leave a monster?

In this shocking sequel to The Hierophant, Madeline Claire Franklin pulls no punches as she leads us on a new adventure, into the dangerous underworld of the Arcana.

The Tower

— 1 —

When I was seventeen, the Devil came to me in a dream.

He may not have been the
actual
Devil, but he was something devilish: a giant of a man with broad, black, feathered wings, and an uncanny ability to see into my mind. He called himself Nikolai, and offered me a vision of my future—and I, like a fool, let him show me. Because I, like a fool, believed that if I knew what was coming, I could change it.

But it was just a dream, wasn’t it?

Nikolai also believed he could change my future, and maybe he could have. He said I could skip all the mess in between and go straight to my destination: to the hellish world of Sheol, where he would groom me to be a weapon in a war between angels and demons—Malakiim and Sura—a war as old as time itself. But how could I possibly make that choice?

I was so naive back then. Even knowing as much as I did—about the Arcana, and magic, and everything Trebor was able to teach me those handful of weeks in the spring of my junior year—I could not understand that the story I was living was about
so much more
than one human girl, terrified of all the things that she cannot control.

Because the story is about all of us. It’s about the Malakiim ruling from their heavenly world of Shemayiim, policing humans and Sura alike. It’s about the Malakiim’s soldiers, the Irin, a race born and bred to serve and protect. It’s about the
havati bashrat
—the forbidden, supernatural bond I share with Trebor, my own Irin protector, who I have not seen or heard from in almost sixteen months. It’s about my best friend in the entire world, Kyla Patel, who has literally been to hell and back with me.

Kyla, whose future is tied with mine.

Kyla, whose fate I saw in a vision once, in a dream, when I was seventeen years old.

I swallow and try to push Nikolai’s vision from my mind as I have been trying to do for the past year and a half. But it’s October now, and despite the unseasonably warm weather this week, October always brings to mind the ghosts that have been clamoring for attention, just the other side of life.

“Are you sure you still want to go?” my father asks me one last time before he leaves. He looks at my worn violin case and overstuffed backpack, waiting by the front door. “Amrita is still in the hospital—”

“I know,” I stop him with a forced smile. “But she’s going to be fine. The doctor said she’ll be back home tomorrow if the swelling goes down. She told me herself she’d be home tonight.” The smile is a little less forced now, thinking of Amrita, Kyla’s mother, lying in her hospital bed, harassing her nurse to
stop poking me with your instruments, I’m fine!

Abe purses his lips, lowers his voice. “You’re not going all the way to Europe to avoid seeing Kyla, are you?”

I try not to frown. “No, Dad. I bought this plane ticket weeks ago. Remember? How was I supposed to know her mother was going to get T-boned by some jackass on a cell phone?”

He studies me, gives me a sad, knowing look, but says nothing more on the matter. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you before you leave, right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Gimme a hug anyway.” He gives me a lopsided smile and opens his arms to me.

I go in for a hug and let him squeeze me tightly to his chest, returning the embrace with as much affection as I can muster. I love my father. I need him to know that. I need him to know that I didn’t run away because of him.

The summer after I was blinded to magic—after Trebor left, after Kyla went off to college—I packed up this very same backpack, grabbed my violin and whatever money I had stashed in my savings account, and hopped on the first bus headed over the state line. I’ve been traveling ever since: busking for money, staying in hostels and sleeping in train stations. On warm nights, I sometimes sleep in parks, on boardwalks, under bridges. I wonder if my mother’s people—the now-extinct clan of travelers called the Ouros—had ever lived like that.

But I didn’t run away because of my father. Every time I see him, when I come home for a day or two, here and there—I
need
him to know that. Because I can’t tell him the real reason why I had to drop out of high school, why I had to leave town. I can’t tell anyone that if I had stayed—if Kyla and I had remained best friends—if my life had gone on exactly as it was…then Kyla might have been dead by now. Murdered. While trying to save me.

But I fixed it. People don’t die trying to save their
former
best friend’s life. People
can’t
die trying to save your life if you never, ever see them. And if that is what the future really held for Kyla and me when Nikolai gave me that vision, then this is the only course of action I could have taken to keep her safe. I had to stay away from her. I had to make her hate me, no matter how hard it was.

Sometimes, I think it is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

“Don’t get into trouble while I’m gone,” Abe says, tousling my dark red hair before he pulls away. He kisses me on the forehead with a
mwah
and grabs his keys from the hook by the front door.

“Bye, Dad,” I say with a chuckle.

“Bye, sweetheart.” He smiles before he walks out the door, and it makes me happy to see it.

I look at the clock hanging over the mantle on the other side of the living room. If I know Kyla, and I think I still do, she left Manhattan the second she got her hands on a form of transportation, after she got the phone call from the hospital. It wouldn’t matter that her mother is not in any danger—she had a concussion and needed a few stitches after the accident, but that was all—Kyla would find a way to come home.

She would have gotten the phone call last night. And right now, it’s almost noon, which means she might already be at the hospital. Which means she could, realistically, show up at any minute if her mother decides to take a nap or send Kyla out for lunch.

It’s not that I expect Kyla to hunt me down the moment she knows I’m in town, but that it’s a
possibility
. I’ve dedicated the last year and change to keeping away from Kyla—to keeping her safe from the future Nikolai showed me. I cannot afford to take a single risk.

When my father’s truck pulls out of the driveway, I sling my purse over my shoulder and head out the door, walking to the nearest bus stop. The unseasonable heat combined with all of my clothes being stuffed into my backpack has driven me to wear flip-flops and a shortish, gray cotton skirt, with a simple black tee shirt. I won’t stick out, even if I am still unreasonably tall for a woman.

Hopefully, no one will notice that in a crowd.

— 2 —

The North campus at the University at Buffalo is laid out over hundreds of acres of green space, which, right now, are crawling with students. There are stages set up by the Center for the Arts, near but not quite part of the main stretch of academic buildings. It’s for some kind of music festival the campus has every year, a few weeks before midterms.

Vendors are set up along the perimeter of the official festival area: food and drink stands, tee shirt booths, fundraising tables for fraternities and sororities, all of them advertising “WE TAKE CAMPUS CASH.” There are people everywhere, standing and sitting, some people stretched out on their backs on the grass. No one notices when I slip between them and take a seat on the grass between two picnic blankets held down by some very stoned college students.

I lean back on my elbows and cross my legs at my ankles, trying to listen to the band that’s on stage right now. It’ was only one o’clock when I got off the bus a minute ago. I have a lot of time to kill.

Most of the time I’ve spent on college campuses has involved crashing frat parties. I know, it doesn’t sound very much like me. But it’s a trick I learned from another busker out in California—Allison. She wasn’t as young as me, but she was petite and bright-eyed, and could pass for late teens, early twenties.

First, you doll yourself up to make it look like you are a legitimate college girl trying to impress other legitimate college students. Then you stash your stuff in a locker at the bus station and put the key in your bra so you don’t lose it. Then, (and this works best if you have a partner like Allison) you show up looking like you’re ready to party—maybe even
actually
party a little, but remember the most important rule:
do not drink or consume any mind-altering substance
. In fact, never drink anything that you didn’t draw from a tap by yourself, unless it’s from a sealed water bottle.

When the party starts to thin, find a corner, a couch, a pool chair—whatever you can find that looks like it’s out of the way and unlikely to be disturbed before morning—and pretend to drunkenly slump yourself down on it, feigning the kind of slow pass-out that comes with binge drinking.

Then sleep until you’re kicked out the next morning.

I’ve only had to use this trick a handful of times, thankfully. There are a lot of kind, unusual people, especially on the West Coast, who are willing to help a girl out with a couch to sleep on, or at least the use of a shower and/or their washer and drier.

When I’m feeling particularly wealthy (there is good money to be made in busking, some days), I’ll buy a week or two in a hostel dorm and hang out with all the European kids who have come to travel across the U.S. for their gap-year, before heading home to start their first year at
university
, as they say.

Kyla would be proud: I guess I’m finally
out of my shell
. Somehow it’s easier to be friendly when you’re all alone, when no one knows anything about you, or where you come from, or what your nicknames were in high school.

“Where are you from?” They always ask.

“New York—the state, not the city,” I always say.

“Why’d you come all the way out here?” They always ask.

“Just looking for an adventure, I guess,” I always say.

“You have a boyfriend back home?” Some of them ask.

“Yeah. His name is Trebor,” I always say. And the more I say it, the more it feels like the most untrue thing about me.

I haven’t felt the flicker of his heartbeat since the night he returned to Shemayiim. I haven’t seen him, except in dreams. I haven’t heard from him in any form, not even a message delivered by another Irin, not even a letter slipped under my door. It hurts, but more than that, it makes my mind go wild with tragic possibilities.

Movement to my right draws my attention: two of the stoned college students are making out on their picnic blanket, giggling and kissing, running their fingers over each other’s bodies, through each other’s hair.

I look back to the stage and pull a pair of sunglasses out of my purse, trying not to think about those scarce moments Trebor and I shared. They were never lighthearted, never giggling and soft. Every kiss was a plea. Every touch was a wound, reminding us of what we cannot have.

Not
yet
, anyway,
I think, too forcefully.

Or maybe not
ever.

I swallow both truths, and dig my cell phone out of my purse to check the time.

1:12.

I still have a
lot
of time to kill.

The hours tick by like molasses. I’m bored out of my mind, making myself anxious with too much time to think: wondering if going to Europe by myself is a terrible idea; wondering if Trebor is dead; wondering if I remembered to pack enough resin for my bow; wondering if Kyla has already gone to my house, trying to find me—or if, when her mother told her I’d visited her in the hospital, Kyla had sniffed and shrugged, and changed the subject.

Eventually, as dusk approaches, all I’m really thinking is:
ohmygod I have to pee
.

I’ve been lurking among the students for hours, not wanting to go to the row of port-a-potties on the edge of the festival, where there are no crowds to hide me. I don’t really believe that Kyla would think to come here to look for me—if she would even bother to look for me to begin with. I don’t like crowds, and she knows that. I don’t like parties. I don’t like situations that can easily fly out of my control, and she’s known that about me longer than I’ve known it about myself.

But Kyla is clever, and as well as I know her she knows me. She might very well be thinking:
Where is the very last place in the world that I would expect to find Ana? Then that’s where she’s hiding.

Finally, when my bladder can take no more, I make a B-line for the nearest big, green, plastic outhouse. I hold my breath, but it’s not so bad—cleaner than I expected. When I’m done, I steal a few pumps of hand-sanitizer and hurry out the door, sights narrowed on the edge of the crowd just a few feet away—

“Ana?”

I jump, turning to the sound of my name. “Andy?”

He’s standing there, unshaven, clad in cargo shorts and a tie-dye shirt, with a comically oversized beverage container in his hand, the kind with a lid and a bright green straw.

“Hey, holy crap, how are you?” Andy says, striding over to give me a hug.