The Forbidden Oracle

by Devyn Forrest

  It made total sense in my mind.

  Now, I was beginning to doubt everything.

  I could hear Aunt Maria and Zoey chatting out front. Within seconds, Celeste bounded in through the front of the house. Her face broke into a smile when she spotted me on the back porch. She tore open the porch door and gaped at me.

  “What are you doing? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, standing there.

  I looked at her as I continued to listen to Aunt Maria and Zoey’s voices slowly dissipate.

  “I know she’s hiding something,” I stated in a desperate voice. I wanted more than anything for my best friend, too, believe me, to help figure out what the hell was going on, but I also had my doubts.

  Celeste rolled her eyes clearly irritated. “Are we really going to go into this again?”

  “Thanks, Celeste! I don’t mean to bore you with the important topics of my life,” I retorted, feeling completely defeated.

  Celeste shot me a feigned pout that she was sorry but then turned quickly, catching sight of Aunt Maria and Zoey ambling out through the yard. Since our town was so small, they were able to walk to where ever they were going.

  A moment later, I noticed a flash of her hand and Celeste drew a bottle of wine out of her backpack. She swung it back and forth, her eyes sparkling and wearing a Cheshire grin on her pretty mouth.

  “I’ll let you go on about this if you want. But you have to let me get drunk first,” she said.

  A drink was exactly what I needed. I leaped from the back of the porch toward the kitchen door, where I ambled toward the kitchen cabinets. I drew out two glasses, making a mental note to wash them and dry them before Mom got back. I had never been caught by my aunt drunk, although I felt pretty sure she knew I had messed around a little. Even if I had hardly seen her powers at all, I was sure she had a good sense for that kind of thing.

  Celeste found the wine opener and ripped out the cork. “I saw those boys again this afternoon. Downtown,” she said and flashed me a mischievous grin.

  My ears perked up. Since we had seen Raphael, Quintin, and Ezra that afternoon at the second-hand store, I had thought of them frequently. Celeste had told me that I was right on the money. Ezra was a vampire; Raphael, a werewolf, and Quintin, of all things, was a dragon. Like those actually existed!

  “There she is. I know what you look like when you’re interested in someone,” Celeste said, her voice teasing.

  “I’m not. They just seem more interesting than the average normal boys I’m used to at Hillside Falls High, is all,” I stammered and picked at fray thread hanging from my jeans.

  Celeste nodded in understanding and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “They’re pretty fucking wicked, to tell you the truth. Quintin, the dragon? He recently learned how to transform only his head. He was frothing at the mouth and spewing fire at this old rickety boat along the docks. The other boys were just laughing hysterically. I don’t know who owned the boat or whatever. But it’s not like those boys care. They can get away with anything.”

  “Are they from Hillside Falls?” I asked.

  Celeste shrugged. “I think so, but not quite sure. Ezra comes from an old vampire family out of New Orleans. I guess his dad moved out here to get away from the city since it was a bit quieter. He bought an old mansion just outside of Hillside Falls. I saw him once, at some sort of celebration to raise money for Origins Supernatural Academy. He is just downright frightening. Someone mentioned that he was over seven hundred years old. But can you imagine? All the shit he’s seen? The Civil War and beyond!”

  Celeste finished pouring the wine glasses and passed one to me. We clinked and made intense eye contact. Celeste had told me that one of her friends from school—a French witch—had told her that in Europe if you didn’t make heavy eye contact when clinking glasses, you were doomed to seven years of bad sex. This wasn’t anything I wanted to risk.

  We drank, both thinking about being on the planet for that long.

  “They’re assholes, though,” Celeste continued and waved her hand around the room as she continued. “They bully everyone at the school. They’re hot as fuck, sure, but I don’t know why they get away with it, except their families are ultra-powerful across the supernatural world. I guess money and blood are everything, no matter what you are.”

  I swirled my glass, watching the wine swoosh around before I responded. “And me—being a human? What do you think they think of that?”

  Celeste pondered this for a moment. “Most people at the academy think of humans as second-class citizens. Almost cute, like animals at the zoo.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered and took a drink.

  “I mean, I obviously know differently. Unless...”

  I waited. Something brewed in her eyes. The green got all cloudy like I could almost see her thoughts stirring back there. It reminded me again of what had happened with Aunt Maria, only a few minutes ago—like I could actually picture the images in someone else’s head.

  This was ridiculous.

  “I don’t know. It’s just. I don’t feel like you’re any different than them,” Celeste said, shrugging. “And with your Aunt Maria thinking about enrolling you into the academy and all these questions you’ve had lately...” She shook her head instead of finishing.

  “Oh, so now you want to bring it up?” I demanded.

  Celeste rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible.” She drank again, her cheeks glowing pink. “She hasn’t mentioned it again, has she?”

  “What? Going to the academy? No way,” I scoffed. “She’s hardly said a damn word on that topic. She’s holding back information for sure and I just don’t know why.”

  “Hmmm,” Celeste murmured. She pressed the back of her hand against her lips and swiped, smearing her lipgloss. Then, her eyes flickered back to mine. “You haven’t ever tried to snoop, have you?”

  I arched my brow, intrigued at her words. Celeste was always one to offer the most irrational task, usually making me feel like an idiot for not thinking of it.

  “I’ve too busy with other things to even think of it. But she could have something in Mom’s study, I guess...” I said, almost cursing myself for bringing it up.

  “And you never go in there? To look?” Celeste demanded and arched an eyebrow.

  I shrugged. “No. When Mom was alive, that was a no ‘Ivy’ zone at all times and I respected that and I guess I continued when Aunt Maria moved in. She allows me my own privacy, so I should give her the same respect.”

  Celeste grumbled. “You’re feeling like an alien in your own life. I think it’s high time you figured out what the hell is going on.”

  “High time? What are you, British?” I demanded and laughed.

  “Just come on,” Celeste said, sighing.

  She walked toward the staircase. She had basically grown up between these walls. As I walked behind her, I had flashing images of her and I when I was seven, eight, nine years old, running around wild while Mom and Dad hollered at us to keep it down.

  My mom’s study was at the very corner of the second floor of our three-story house. A window curved around the entire room, becoming like a near whole-circle of glowing windows. Bookcases hung between the window frames, meaning that nearly every case of books seemed filled with light. Mom’s study was generally off-limits, and I kept most of my books in my bedroom. She’d brought in bookshelf after bookshelf, noting that I was an avid reader since I was a kid.

  “What the hell are we even looking for?” I asked Celeste.

  Celeste shrugged. Her lips were tinged red with wine. “Come on. Activate that imagination of yours. If you think something’s going on—channel it!”

  “Is that what they teach you at that school?” I demanded and rested my hands on my hips.

  Celeste didn’t answer. She marched directly into the study, folding herself over my mom’s desk and read the calendar there. She tapped her finger across it, muttering, “Look. Aunt Maria has it listed. The day she has to enroll
you at Origins Supernatural if she wants you to get in.”

  “What...?” I shot toward her and blinked down at Aunt Maria’s perfect handwriting. “Why can’t she talk about it, if she’s so open about putting it on a calendar?”

  I felt betrayed and angry at the fact she wouldn’t discuss any of this with me.

  But still, with every step I took in the study, I felt like I was doing a shit-ton of the betraying, not only on my aunt but my mother as well. This was her sacred space. Not going through her study was one of the agreements we had with one another.

  There were some lines that had to be crossed, though. I knew that.

  It still felt so dirty.

  “I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I said, marching to the side of the room. My eyes scanned the number of old books. Many of them had belonged to my father. A lot of those, obviously, was about fishing. Mom had always scoffed about this, saying, “How much do you really need to read about fish?” And Dad had just puckered up in those fish lips and chased her around the house.

  I hated it when memories got to me like that. They felt like weapons from beyond.

  “If she’s hiding anything, it’s got to be in a good hiding place,” Celeste said, scanning the shelves.

  “Great, Sherlock,” I smirked. “Wow. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  “Come on. Come on,” Celeste said. She drew her fingers to her temples, closing her eyes. “They taught us this finding spell at school. Maybe you’re Mom or aunt hasn’t hidden it properly, since she knows you would never go looking for it with magic. Well, whatever it is, they might be hiding or not.”

  I didn’t move. I could see Celeste’s eyeballs twitching behind the soft, thin skin of her eyelids. I felt strange like a spider was creeping around in the inside of my stomach. Celeste looked like her head was about to explode. Her cheeks were bright red and little veins were popping out of the sides of her skull.

  Actually, it fucking freaked me out. But I didn’t want to interrupt her, just in case.

  Suddenly, she flung forward, gasping. She coughed once, then again, and blinked up at me. “Jesus. I don’t know. Maybe I’m out of practice or something.” She coughed again. “I thought you said your mom or aunt wasn’t super good at this shit?”

  “I’ve basically never seen either of them do anything in the past,” I said. “I think my mom just wanted to be mortal, or at least act like it. Maybe there’s nothing to find. She’s always told me that I was nobody. Er—not nobody. Just a human. She said to enjoy it. It meant that the world didn’t expect anything from me.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t expect anything of me,” Celeste said, half-laughing.

  My eyes traced up the back wall, where a portrait hung of Mom and Dad on their wedding day. Mom had been thirty-one or thirty-two years old, her brown hair wild and curly, her face serene, yet on the verge of laughing at one of Dad’s ridiculous jokes. I had only asked her once why she had decided to marry Dad. Her answer was. “I had no choice. I loved him so much. He owned my heart.”

  I took several steps toward the portrait, peering at Mom’s eyes. Something about them seemed strange to me suddenly.

  But the pupils themselves seemed to direct toward a specific area of the room. I questioned this thought process immensely. After all, it seemed ridiculous to follow the eyes of a portrait. But slowly, I traced the path from the eyes, back toward the far wall, where a little cabinet jutted out of the wall. When I reached it, I brought my fingers over the little knob.

  “I think whatever we’re looking for is in here,” I whispered.

  Celeste scoffed a bit. I couldn’t blame her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I just... I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it’s here,” I said.

  I tugged at the knob. As I did, something inside it cracked—like it hadn’t been budged in a long, long time.

  “Wow. I think you just broke the lock,” Celeste said. She beamed and jumped up to stand by me. “Jesus. This could really be something...”

  Slowly, I drew open the cabinet and blinked down. There, on the only shelf of the cabinet, was an extraordinarily old book. It was thick—maybe 1000 pages or more—with this weathered leather binding and cover.

  On the front were the words—written in gold—“Scripture from the original tribesman.”

  I stared down at it, completely entranced. It felt like I had uncovered a dead body in my mom’s study. Celeste’s mouth had dropped fully open and she couldn’t rip her eyes away from the old leather-bound cover.

  “What the hell. This is—I mean, it at least seems—way older than anything me and Mom have,” Celeste offered. “Holy shit!”

  “Should we take it out?” I whispered and stole a sideways glance at her, trying not to shake.

  Celeste drew back, gripped her glass of wine and drank down the rest of it. She blinked at me with enormous eyes. “Come on, Ivy. We’ve come this far.”

  She had a point.

  Slowly, gingerly, I brought the book out of the cabinet and placed it in the center of my mom’s ancient desk. Dust swept out from the cover, drenching us. It didn’t matter.

  “Why does she have this? I thought she was only a shapeshifter who didn’t even want to belong to her tribe anymore?” Celeste asked, puzzled.

  I didn’t bother answering because I didn’t have the answer. There were too many questions, but maybe this book would have some of the answers. I prayed that I wouldn’t crack the leather as I slowly, achingly, opened the front of the book. There was a cracking sound as it opened, but luckily this was sound alone and not the actual physical cracking of the book.

  Just like on the front of the book, it read, “Scripture from the Original Tribesman- Written in the year 540 A.D. by the fourth oracle, Dramadis Thereonis.”

  Celeste recited this name again. “Dramadis Tereonis. Sounds dramatic.”

  “Weren’t they all back then?” I whispered. “But what is an oracle?”

  Celeste sucked in a breath before responding. “You really haven’t been told you anything about the supernatural world, huh?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mom always told me to keep things a bit hush-hush around you,” Celeste continued. “When your mom was alive, she kind of told my mom and you’re aunt not to let you know so much about the community. I never understood it, really. I mean, it’s interesting that they’ve kept you so closeted. Maybe they thought this was better. They were doing it for a reason, obviously.”

  I gaped at her, really at a loss for words. “Why would not knowing about this entire facet of my family—of my mom’s life—make my life better?”

  “I don’t know. Not everything is fun and games in the supernatural world,” Celeste said and then swiped a hand through her hair. She was just as confused as I was.

  I slowly swiped through to the next page. A Table of Contents listed everything in the book, including my mother’s tribe’s way of living, their rules and consequences if they were broken. It also included spells that healed the sick, spells that brought back spirits and also returned spirits to the other realm, spells that called on the voices of darkness.

  It was all incredibly bizarre to me. I couldn’t fathom that my mother—boring old mother—had ever had this book in her possession, let alone made up her mind to hide it.

  On the following page, Dramadis himself had written out a text in gorgeous handwriting.

  If you are reading this book, you’ve been given an enormous gift.

  You, my darling, my child, are an Oracle. You were chosen, once out of every thousand years, to bring peace amongst the supernaturals and humans. You are plagued with—and gifted—the ability to see the future and the destiny of all creatures. You can read omens as clearly as you can read this text on the page.

  Time is not a flat line for you, dear Oracle.

  In fact, if you’re reading this now, I already know precisely who you are. I’ve seen thousands and
thousands of years into the future and can name each and every one of you that will come after me.

  You’ve been given a tremendous gift. But alongside this gift, comes incredible responsibility. Perhaps you know that already.

  This book will be your guiding light in the darkness. It will offer you steps to call upon the spirits you require alongside you to ensure that you fight evil and uphold good the very best you can.

  I wish you luck, dear Oracle. But I know you don’t need it. You supersede luck. You are goodwill, incarnate.

  Dramatis Tereonis

  I turned back to Celeste, watching as her eyes skated over the text from Dramatis again and again. Her mouth curved into a round O. When she looked up at me, she looked like she was seeing me for the first time and we both realized that my mother wasn’t just some shapeshifter.

  “Was your mom an oracle?” she whispered, still wide-eyed with shock.

  I sucked in a breath allowing my brain to try and understand what I had just read. “I don’t know. All this time, I was told her and my aunt came from a shapeshifter tribe and that’s it. I don’t have any idea what an oracle even is.”

  Celeste rapped her finger against the ancient text. “It tells you right here. They’re born only one thousand years. And of course, they can see the future and all that. They experience omens in a different manner. I’ve obviously never met one since they’re only born every one thousand years.”

  Then she looked at me as though she just unlocked a treasure. “But of course, if your mom truly was an oracle... Then that means I’ve known one my entire life.”

  “Then why would she be living her life as a normal person?” I demanded. “If she’s this all-important being, why did she marry my dad? How is it possible she had a human child?” My mind had already been racing with questions, but now, it was racing with even more questions and I was mad. If any of this were true, that meant that my own mother was lying to me all this time. Aunt Maria had also been lying to me.