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“Sam?” Marlowe’s voice again. “Are you inside? What do you see?”
Soldiers in a clearing. Familiar. Something familiar here. A young soldier with twinkling blue eyes and a small pout of a mouth smiled up at Sam, and Sam felt that he knew this man. “It’s just about to start,” the soldier said.
“Okay,” Sam said, though the soldier seemed to take no notice. They were readying for something big, Sam could tell. One soldier danced a little soft-shoe. Another shaved at a mirror affixed to a tree trunk. The soldier with twinkling eyes—why is he so familiar?—wrote in his journal.
“Sam?” Marlowe.
“Soldiers. I see soldiers.”
Sam focused on the field telephone. Soon that phone would ring. How did he know this? He had the oddest sensation, like knowing that a murder was about to happen and not knowing what to do to stop it.
“Hey, what card am I holding?” one of the soldiers asked the blond twinkly-eyed fella.
“Eight of hearts,” the blond soldier answered without missing a beat.
“Son-of-a-bitch, O’Neill. Right again!”
O’Neill. Sam saw the patch on the soldiers’ uniforms: 144. He looked again at the blond soldier. Evie’s brother. Same bowlike mouth.
“Sam.” Marlowe. Insistent. “Leave the soldiers. Tell me what you see around you. Anything about the King of Crows. Concentrate.”
Sam walked away from the camp and into the lush winter forest. As he went farther in, the trees became diseased. From the tops of their leafless crowns, foul smoke belched up, blotting out the sky. Ash covered every surface. Sooty flakes fell on Sam’s clothes, and where they landed, they bit holes through the fabric. There was some sort of energy field here—Sam could feel it pulling on him, starting to make him uncomfortable, as if all his atoms were being thrown into chaos.
Sergei. Fight it, Little Fox. Do not let it claim you.
“Mama?”
Use your power, my son.
“What else do you see, Sam? We need to know.” Marlowe.
“I don’t feel so good. I wanna stop.”
The pressure of all that energy was squeezing in on Sam. He didn’t know how much more he could take.
“Sam. I need you to be brave,” Marlowe said.
Sam pushed aside the forest like a curtain. On the other side, as far as Sam’s eyes could see, was an army of the dead, hungry and waiting. And sitting on a throne of skulls, the King of Crows. Sam took a step backward. His foot squished into the carcass of some decaying animal.
“Who goes there?” The King of Crows was up and pushing through the dead with his feathered coat flapping and squawking as he moved. “One of Jake Marlowe’s little Diviner spies, no doubt.”
Use your power.
Don’t see me. Don’t see me, Sam thought.
The King of Crows sniffed. “Where are you? No matter. Jake Marlowe’s hubris will be to my advantage. I will tell him what he wants to hear.”
“Pack up your troubles. Pack up your troubles. Pack up your troubles.”
Sam was back on the field.
“The time is now!” the sergeant yelled to his men.
“Time to tell the story again,” the King of Crows said. “But only for a little while longer.” The King of Crows ran a hand across an hourglass. Inside, Sam saw every possible future collapsing into one filled with darkness and horror and death.
“And smile.”
The soldiers raced to their positions. Miss Addie stood in the middle of the field. She was an old woman. Her fingernails were bloodied and broken, as if she’d been scratching at something that would not yield. “Sam. I need to tell you about the ghosts. They’re not like before. They—”
