Page 17 of Be the Serpent

“Hey, buddy,” I said, smiling warmly at him. I spread my arms and he flung himself into them, shaking as he huddled against me. I hugged him for almost a minute, breathing in the scent of his skin and the mingled dry straw and milk scent of his magic. Then I pulled away.

He made a frantic sound and scrabbled to hang on to me, grabbing at my shirt and clinging. I pushed him gently back. “Hey, buddy,” I said again. “Hey, you need to go to Tybalt for a second, okay? I need to check on your brother.”

Andrew kept fighting to hold on to me. Anthony shifted positions inside the castle, shoes scraping on the wooden floor. “I’ll be right out,” he said, voice considerably weaker than it usually was. He sounded like he was fading, poor kid. Blood loss will do that. At least he was awake. I’d been getting worried.

I stopped pushing Andrew off of me for a moment, and he clamped down on me like a limpet, clutching tightly. I stroked his hair with one hand, and I waited.

The scraping sound came again, louder this time, and Anthony pulled himself into the light, offering me a weak smile. I didn’t even have to push Andrew away again. Tybalt was already plucking him off of me, bundling the boy into his arms while I dove for his brother.

“I don’t look that bad, do I?” asked Anthony, chuckling a little, like he was making a funny, funny joke. Then he coughed, barely covering his mouth with his hand. It came away even bloodier than before. He looked at it, blinking. “Oh. I guess I do.”

“Yeah, buddy, you do,” I said, on hands and knees beside him. His shirt was drenched in blood, darkest around the wooden hilt of the knife that was still jutting from his side. He followed my gaze down to the wound and managed a wan smile.

“Learned from watching you,” he quipped, smile becoming a grimace. “Don’t pull out the knife, it just means everything it’s keeping inside can come outside, and that’s bad for most people.”

“Hey, you haven’t seen me get stabbed that many times,” I said.

“Mom talks about it every time you do,” he said, and coughed again, eyes going unfocused. “She’d like you to . . . stop . . . ”

“Hey. Hey.” I didn’t want to touch him when he was already injured, but I reached over and shook his shoulder anyway. “I need you to stay awake. Arden’s bringing the car. She can take you back to Muir Woods as soon as she gets here. We have healers there.”

“Arden?” Anthony’s eyes had been drifting shut. On hearing the Queen’s name, he opened them and looked at me quizzically. “You mean like the Queen?”

“Not like the Queen, the actual Queen. Come on, buddy, stay awake. You’re going to get the royal treatment.”

“You’re so . . . weird.” His expression softened. “Should have listened to the wind this morning. It was saying bad stuff was going to happen.”

“The wind?” I looked over my shoulder to Tybalt, who looked as confused as I did, then back to Anthony. “What do you mean, ‘the wind’?”

“You know how Cass tells the future from the air? Doesn’t have to be moving. Can be inside, even, if she needs to be. She got the better end of the deal.” He coughed again, closing his eyes. “I need wind. Me and Bert from Mary Poppins . . . ”

“Oak and ash, kiddo, can you all tell the future?” Two Seers in a family was strange. Three was pushing the bounds of logic. Four was . . . four was impossible.

“I don’t read air,” said Andrew, crouching next to me and locking his arms around my neck.

Tires screeched to a halt on the street in front of the house. The scent of musk and pennyroyal drifted slowly over me. Tybalt had shifted to his cat form and was presumably going to meet the rest of our group before they could go inside and see what was in the living room.

I relaxed a little. Backup was exactly what I needed. “Oh, good, I was going to be—”

“I only see the future when I look at a fire, but I don’t like to look at fire. It still makes my dreams all tangled, like when that bad man took us away.”

I froze. Five kids, five Seers. How was that even possible?

Answer: it wasn’t. This couldn’t possibly be happening.

The back gate slammed open and feet pounded across the grass toward where I was kneeling with the boys. I twisted to look over the shoulder not being blocked by Andrew. Cassandra was almost to us, moving fast.

Arden was behind her, running more slowly, Tybalt inexplicably in her arms—still in feline form. And behind them, Simon and Quentin. As odd groups to come running to my rescue went, it was definitely not one I could have predicted.

Cassandra actually shoved me aside as she tried to get to her injured brother, and so I stood, lifting Andrew as I did. He was almost too big for me to lift, and he wasn’t making it any easier by hanging off me like a deadweight, burying his face against the side of my neck in sudden shyness.

“Hi . . . Cass,” said Anthony, audibly pained.

“What did you do?” she demanded. Looking wildly around, she added the one question I didn’t want to answer yet. “Where’s Jessica?”

“Inside,” I said. She looked from Anthony to me, meeting my eyes. I gave a small shake of my head.

Watching realization wash across her face was worse than being stabbed myself. She crumpled inward on herself, seeming to age and get younger at the same time. Then she turned back to her brother and stroked his forehead with one hand. “Hey, buddy, you remember Queen Windermere?”