I’d given up on trying to help people. It only made things worse.
I felt my heart stutter when I saw Oberi standing outside of my cell in her unicorn form. Her head hung low, and the flames on her mane and tail barely simmered. They were only an inch high, making her look bald. Her eyes were dull, and cracks ran through her hooves.
“What’s going on, girl?” I ran a hand through her mane, and the flames barely licked at my fingers. “Why is your fire going out?”
She gave a low nicker, and I desperately worried. I pushed open my cell door, and she changed into a husky.
Oberi’s usually bright coat was nearly void of color. I gave him a pat, and to my horror, a chunk of fur drifted to the floor.
“You’re sick.” I knelt by Oberi’s side and examined him for any wounds, but he didn’t have any. He gagged when I checked his mouth, and gave me a resentful look.
Maybe it was something he ate. He slumped to the floor and tossed a loose sock I had lying around between his paws, appearing listless.
“I know it’s hard that you have to go back and forth all the time,” I told him, and I stroked his ears. “You like it when Charlie and I are together.”
He gave a harsh snuff, but I said, “Wecan’tbe together, though. It’s hard for Charlie and I to be in the same room. This is just how it has to be.”
Oberi hacked on the floor. I was sure him puking was a way of getting back at me for making that statement. I sighed and cleaned it up.
A knock came at my door. To my surprise, I found Kallie waiting outside.
“I thought I’d leave Opal be,” Kallie said. “She’s having somewhat of a tantrum right now.”
“I can imagine.” I let Kallie inside, and we sat on my bed.
“She’s as upset over Ez as you are about— well.” Kallie gave me an awkward look.
I barely allowed myself to blink. “Charlie who? I’m out here living my best life without him.”
“Sure.” Kallie shook out her hair. “Anyway, I came by because I thought we could take a look at that journal.”
“The one my Aunt Maddie left me?”
“Yes. I know you’ve read it a million times, but we’ve never gone over it as a group,” Kallie said. “I figured you could show me, and I could tell the guys, so it’d be less weird between you and You-Know-Who.”
I scoffed. Charlie might as well be Voldemort, in my opinion.
“Let’s check it out.” I opened my desk drawer and dusted off a bit of dirt that had gathered over the journal. I set it on the bed, and we began turning pages.
“Most of the journal is just a lot of phrases and words, jumbled around drawings,” I explained. I pointed to a drawing on the page of a girl walking towards a tunnel of light. The words scrawled around it saidAncestral Landsanddestined meeting.
“That looks like you,” Kallie said, peering closer.
“It has to be me, because I’m who the prophecy is about. Then if you look here, you’ll see the two drawings are connected.” I pointed to the next page, where my aunt had sketched a drawing of a phoenix. “It’s a message of death and rebirth.”
“Are you supposed to meet someone from the Ancestral Lands?” Kallie asked. “Or perhaps another Hawkei god? You’ve already seen Coyote and Whale Spirit.”
“I think so. The Hawkei can summon their ancestors, and we can speak with them, but I’m not sure what the phoenix has to do with it. It’s some sort of clue,” I said. “Then once you turn the page…”
I did so, and Kallie gasped. On both of the next pages was a depiction of a building aflame, bodies gathered around it. Smoke was rising over the horizon and blocking out the sky.
“That looks like the Institute,” Kallie whispered.
“Yeah, and it’s on fire,” I said. “I feel like that’s pretty obvious.”
“Okay, so we know something is going to happen to the school at some point, but what?” Kallie asked.
“I think it’s a timeline.” I shuffled back through the pages, until I came to a page with a jagged line. “I couldn’t make this drawing out before. I thought it was some sort of code, until we came back from Forevermore, and I looked closer. I realized that it’s the skyline of the city. So that already happened. On the page beside that, it’s completely covered in black ink. You can’t see anything. It’s like some sort of dark pit I’m descending into… maybe a basement of some kind?”
