She'd figured it out, a little slower than she usually would, but Peter hadn't told her a thing.
"I require your assistance," the man said.
He then turned to face her. He was a huge man in height and in belly. He had more than a foot on Ari.
"Well, you're the first," Ari said, "and I’m sure you won’t be the last. Release my friend and the others, and I will help you as much as I can."
The man smiled. He had perfect white teeth that shone eerily in the light of the garden, but they were just the flat teeth of a man, and Ari didn't know why she shivered so. She tried not to show that she was afraid. She tried not to be afraid at all.
Yet, she was.
The full moon had risen high in the sky, seeming even bigger and brighter in contrast to all the globes that dangled about her, and even more out of reach.
"I believe you," the man said.
From his silly vest, he pulled a slim remote from one large pocket. It looked like a toy in his large hand, and he appeared to be merely changing television channels, pressing numbers as if he was typing in his favorite TV show and knew it well.
"It's done," the man said.
Biting down on her tongue, Ari choked down the question of what she'd been about to ask. Because she knew then, that he'd freed them somehow with a code and that remote.
"Now," the man said, and they were finally about to get to the point.
"I know your powers as an Oracle aren't infallible."
Ari did not trust herself to release her own tongue from her molars. She knew she'd say something she'd regret as she had so many times before.
She just let herself taste blood and took comfort in the fact that men like this didn't often wait for a response. Ari was not disappointed.
"I've reached the end of my cycle," the man said, turning to face the garden again.
And Ari could tell. Old souls, the kind that was all used up and could no longer be reincarnated, tended toward eccentricities. This man was practically a textbook definition of one.
Still, it was surprising that he knew it. Most humans went their entirety without ever believing the truth of how things worked at all. But money could buy knowledge, and this man seemed to be well supplied with wealth.
The man hummed softly into the night air, taking a moment to decide what to say, or maybe hoping Ari would just pull it out of the sky, like a tune from a song. Clearly, he didn't think of Ari as much of a threat. Ari really didn't feel like one right then, either.
"I wonder… can you tell me what will happen to my soul when I die?"
Ari laughed before she could think to stop herself, and he turned to face her, but he didn't seem angry, only bemused.
"Do you laugh because you get that question often, or because you think I am a silly old fool?" the man asked. His eyes crinkled, turning them to black slits in the strange light, eyelashes blinking back red and green and blue from all the colors strung over his head.
If he hadn't been a terrorizing kidnapper, Ari probably would have liked him a lot.
"You want to know if you're going to hell..." Ari assumed, "but I can't tell you that. Only one being makes that judgment, and it isn't me. As an Oracle, all the knowledge of the universe lives inside me. It's all there, even if I can't access every bit of it whenever I want. It’s not like being connected to the internet. Besides, that information is for something that rests outside of my realm."
The man paled; it was as if his legs had been cut off at the knees. He sank down, and all the color seemed to go right along with him.
"You mean heaven and God—you mean, those things are real?" he said, and as he did, Ari knew he was picturing eternal damnation: fires licking at every part of him for all of eternity. Ari knew people who burned daily, and yet even she couldn't tell you if that rendition of hell was a real place or an invention of men. She supposed at some point she could seek to end that curiosity in her, to search for the origin of that tale, but before this day, she had never bothered with it. She never fit in around regular mortals, and all her friends were different. They wouldn't end up like this man, a burnt-out cinder falling from a last failed life.
"You've captured angels, and yet you doubt the existence of God," Ari said, no longer bothering to keep her tongue in check. There was little point. She knew what happened to souls too damaged to live new lives, but she didn't know which direction any one particular soul would take.
But it looked like maybe this man had assumptions of his own.
"The Heralds, you mean?" the man choked out.
Tears slid down his large nose like fat raindrops, but they were likely several lifetimes too late.
"They're real angels?" he breathed, as though he'd had something so miraculous all along and hadn't known.
"It's strange how you happened upon them, knew what they were, and still failed to believe. That you needed me to tell you."
But maybe it wasn't strange. Sometimes men needed to believe what they wanted to believe.
"I didn't happen upon anyone, they were brought here by someone else, a dangerous man, one I dared not cross. He told me what they were: psychic, and bad news, but I didn't find them, not on my own. I asked them a question just as I asked you. But they knew nothing of the world, even after prompting failed to access any of their power that the man had promised. However..." He trailed off, looking to the sky, fruitlessly searching for stars, or a way out of this mess.
"However, he must have understood something about my manner of questioning, because he told me about you. He told me where to find you, and that I had to do nothing but take the boy first, and send Peter to leave you a few small clues, and that you'd come here on your own... and you did. It was almost too perfect."
Almost, Ari thought. Until he received an answer he didn't like.
The man looked half dazed, as if he was still impressed with himself, even given everything he had just learned.
"What was the man's name?" Ari reached for it, through anything she could find in her head, but she couldn't grasp it no matter how fast or far she looked.
Then it occurred to Ari, the man didn't know the name, either. He looked ashamed, standing there in the moonlight. It was such a strange anomaly.
"I didn't ask," the man admitted, "it didn't seem important at the time, and to be honest, I was a little afraid of him."
"And desperate," Ari added bitterly.
"And desperate," the man repeated like a shallow echo.
"There's still time for you to atone," Ari tried. As far as she knew, there was always time, right until your very last breath.
"Atone for what, Oracle? Manipulating strangers? Putting kids in cages? Believe me, I've done much worse than that."
And Ari had no doubt that was true.
"You could live another twenty years," Ari added.
She took a step back, unsure why her gut was so determined that she run, and why her mind was decided she wouldn't heed that warning.
"My dear," the man said calmly, “I won't live another twenty minutes."
Slack-jawed, Ari stared back at him.
"The only way I am ever going to atone for everything, is to stop hurting people, and I've tried. The only way I will ever succeed in that endeavor is to cease being all together."
The man backed up, even as Ari instinctively reached out for him, knowing she was still too far away to do any good.
He tumbled off the first ledge of the garden before Ari knew why. The distance, at a glance, didn't seem to be enough to kill him. Only Ari couldn't bring herself to look when she reached for a timeworn book in her head. However, she saw yet another row of wicked black fencing on the level below, she saw it skewer him before she could shut the book and look away.
And then Ari was screaming. Screaming like she would never stop, and that was how Marx found her.
11
Ari wasn't sure why she was at school on Monday.
It had started as an exercise to distract herself and had quickly morph
ed into something else. She hadn't been able to sleep, and so Ari had gotten dressed just to have something to do with her hands. She'd gone out on the porch only to get out of her house.
She'd held the stair rail, her hand like a metal vice. Unmoving, unyielding, while Marx got his keys.
And then he'd just driven them to school as if it was the most normal thing, and Ari supposed it was, but it still felt...wrong.
They'd parked in their usual spot, and Ari had made Marx sit there as she forced herself into her mind and sifted through visions she didn't want to. She hadn't eaten. She couldn't even remember the last time she had, and Marx seemed to keep pulling an endless supply of snacks from his checkered backpack to tempt her, but he knew better than to suppose he could.
Bayside Art Academy had been built in the middle of a war, and it looked like it. Sturdy, squat, a brown blight rising from the brown earth, hugged by the greenery that was lovingly cared for by the students of the school.
Not Ari, she had a black thumb. She couldn't keep plants alive or people, as it turned out. She wasn't sure why she tried, and she really wasn't sure why she cared.
Yet, she couldn't stop.
As Ari had expected, Leo was in a mood. She'd left him at her house, and sent him on a wild goose chase, for his own good, of course, and it would have been too much to hope that he'd be appreciative. Leo had been at their home when Marx had carried Ari over the threshold like a new bride.
It hadn't been some grand romantic gesture. Ari had every right to question whether or not her legs, that felt like jelly, could hold her weight, and Marx had erred on the side of caution, carrying her like a delicate China doll.
Leo had been furious, but it had bled out of his wide eyes when he'd looked at the lump of Ari on the couch, and left without saying a word. It had been the best he could do, Ari supposed, and Marx had filled him in later.
There had been a lot more yelling involved. Ari heard it from Marx's phone, even though he'd been halfway across the house. She'd been in their room, shoving a hundred pairs of shoes back into their boxes.
It had been impressive, mind-numbing work while it lasted.
But nothing ever did.
She expected to be bombarded the second she'd walked into the Academy. She'd tensed, and that had made Marx close in, but Leo just stared at them with hollow-looking eyes and a sticky wet face.
Ripley was trying to communicate something of the utmost importance to them behind Leo, but Ari didn’t comprehend whatever manner of hand-sign he'd been using and walked right over instead.
She thought about going back into her mind, to find the answer to her own question, but she needed a break. She thought of sending Ripley a fire message, or even a text, but Ari figured that would be too obvious.
No one else in the school walked within ten feet of them, but that wasn't out of the ordinary. Even in this world, they were almost treated as famous freaks, just as the French Impressionists were. Some looked at them quickly, but none of them dared speak to them, not in their current state.
"She's coming," Leo whispered. It sounded like air being leaked out of a balloon.
Ari felt her lips part; she'd been about to ask who. Her lip gloss had made them sticky, and then she knew who was coming.
A thousand books sprang to the front of her mind. Decades. Lifetimes of books. All of them baring the same name, as if they were all signed paintings.
Lucia, her mind told her. Lucia, her heart thudded. Like a phantom, one thought tried to elude her, but she'd grasped the idea by the tail and dragged it back to her. This was it. The answer—the book she'd been looking for. The phantom turned solid to her eyes; this book wasn't filled with mere words. It held truths that would roar with live waves, louder than words, louder than worlds full of them. Ari opened the book in her mind, and she knew everything.
The End
*
Author Angela Kulig writes books for people who love books, she and tweets a lot. Curious about Bayside Art Academy, click here: http://bit.ly/angelakulig-academy
Paranormal Academy Page 106