Then I would ask her to locate my daughter instead. We could go to Jane, ask her for Tammi’s belongings. Surely Isabel would be able to find her. And then I would free her. Somehow.
I had a feeling that something was wrong as the car got close to Isabel’s shop. The door was hanging slightly open, a crack of darkness. Even as Kane pulled up to the curb, I was already pushing the passenger door open and leaping out, barging into Isabel’s shop.
“Isabel? Isabel!” My shouts hung in the air, unanswered. My eyes slowly got used to the shop’s dark gloom, and my feeling of dread grew. The floor was littered with shards of glass, papers, books, and bits of cloth. Isabel’s wooden furniture had been toppled and smashed. Almost nothing in the shop remained whole.
In the corner, a small limp form was curled, inert. I rushed to it, a sob in my throat as I saw it was Isabel. Her face was bloody and bruised, her hair tangled, her clothing torn. She lay in a fetal position, as if she had been trying to protect herself from the beating. Her right hand was outstretched, two of the fingers twisted at unnatural angles. I was relieved to see her chest rising and falling—she was breathing. But when I whispered in her ear, tried to shake her gently, I got no response.
This was ABC’s doing, I knew, and a molten kernel of pure rage blossomed inside me. He should pay for what he’d done to my friend.
“Is she alive?” Kane was by my side, horror and worry in his voice.
“Barely,” I answered. “ABC got to her. He probably tried to get her to tell him where I was. Maybe he asked her to find me for him.”
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Kane said.
I nodded distractedly, caressing Isabel’s hair, not daring to move her. “Call Sinead too. Tell her to get here.”
Kane spoke urgently on the phone behind me. I tuned him out, focusing on Isabel, whispering in her ear, apologizing, begging her to wake up, promising vengeance. She was lying amid her tarot cards, which had been scattered on the floor.
One drew my eye, the image on it disturbing. It was the card of the Lovers, but it looked wrong. Different.
I picked it up and stared at it. The nude man and woman stood across from each other, as before. But above them stood a strange creature, its body a mass of darkness. The couple’s expressions were masks of pain and fear. Their bodies were etched with scars and wounds.
I picked up another card, the High Priestess. The woman in it was fighting off a dark creature as it slashed her with its claws, her cheek torn and bleeding.
The Empress was dead, several shadowy creatures looming around her body. The Fool cried as a creature tormented him with a barbed blade. The Emperor sat in mute horror as creatures committed atrocities around him.
“Sinead is on her way,” Kane said behind me. “So is the ambulance. What is that?”
“It’s the future,” I answered. “It’s the future Isabel saw.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
We sat in Isabel’s torn up shop. The ambulance had gotten there first, Sinead a few minutes after, just in time to see Isabel carried out on a stretcher.
I gazed at the floor. There were specks of blood everywhere, a reminder of what Isabel had gone through in here mere hours before. Sinead was picking things up, trying to busy herself by restoring a shred of order to the chaos around us. Kane smoked a cigarette.
“Are you sure it was ABC who did this?” he asked.
I bit my lip. “Who else could it have been?”
“Harutaka. Trying to make sure we didn’t find him like we planned to.”
“Then why beat her up and ruin the shop? Why not kill her instead? Whoever did this wanted something from her. It was Breadknife. And he wanted me.”
“He called me several times after you left,” Sinead said. “I didn’t answer. I haven’t been home yet.”
“He realized I was gone,” I said. “That I was hiding from him. He went for Isabel and Sinead, because he knows they’re close to me. He couldn’t find Sinead, but he found Isabel, beat her up, bashed up her store. And then he… went for my daughter.”
“He what?” Sinead snapped.
I showed her the message he had sent me on the phone. Her eyes widened with horror.
“There’s something about this crystal,” I said. “I’ve never seen him that obsessed about anything.”
“What does he want to do with it?” Sinead asked.
“I don’t know. But I have to get it to him. He has Tammi. He’ll hurt her if I don’t hand it over.”
“Is there a way we can find Harutaka without Isabel?” Kane asked.
“I can’t think of a way…” I tried to think of a solution. “Can you create some sort of… forgery? I don’t know, something that looks like the crystal? An illusion?”
Kane nodded slowly. “Yes, but I’d need the original to do it.”
I groaned. “That doesn’t help us, then. We still need to find the crystal.”
“I can ask around,” Sinead suggested. “Maybe someone knows where Harutaka is. And hopefully Isabel will wake up and help us find him.”
“If they hadn’t hurt her…” My words faded as I gazed at the cards scattered on the floor.
“Lou? What is it?” Kane asked.
“What did Isabel ask the cards?” I pointed at the twisted images strewn on the floor. “She wanted to know something. Something specific. What was it?”
“Couldn’t she have just… asked about the future?”
I shook my head. “Isabel always looks for specific answers. She doesn’t believe in a generic pointless reading.”
I suddenly recalled what she’d said last night when we were breaking into the vault. Darkness, and misery. She couldn’t see the numbers because of the suffering.
She had seen something in the tea leaves. Something terrible. Thinking back, she had been distracted for the rest of the night. Hardly speaking, her mind somewhere else. When we had celebrated our success, she had remained silent. Whatever she had seen had worried her.
But she did ask about the box. Asked where it was. The truth suddenly hit me. Harutaka hadn’t taken the crystal after all.
“Isabel saw the future when she read the tea leaves last night,” I said. “She saw something that scared her. She saw…” I gestured at the cards. “This. Or something like it. Maybe it wasn’t entirely clear. But she saw something very bad approaching. And it had to do with the crystal.”
“She took the crystal,” Kane said.
“She was worried that whatever Breadknife was about to do with it would result in this. So she took it, probably just to buy time, and then came home, and began reading the cards to see what he wanted to do with the crystal. And this is what she saw. Somehow, if Breadknife gets hold of the crystal, it will unleash… whatever this is.”
“But if she took the crystal, and Breadknife was here, he might have found it,” Sinead pointed out. “So he would have it already.”
I shook my head. “He came here before he kidnapped my daughter, I’m sure of it. That means he still thinks I have the crystal. Isabel must have hidden it somewhere.”
Kane looked around the broken store. “Well, they would have found it, if it was here.”
“It’s not here,” I said. “It’s in her family’s mausoleum.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven