Dark Oracle

by Alayna Williams

  Tara kept her face neutral. “And that also seems to be what Gabriel is thinking.”

  “It could have been sabotage, by himself or another person, and he was killed.”

  “Possibly. I don’t believe he was happy working on the project. He could have come into conflict with someone with a different agenda.”

  “Or he could have destroyed his work himself.”

  Tara’s lip twisted. “I don’t think he destroyed all of it.” She told him about the scrapes on the USB ports.

  “Where would he have hidden it?”

  “At home, with former colleagues, with friends or relatives. We should start with them.”

  “Sounds good. But we also have to address the last possibility: Magnusson is alive.”

  Tara wrapped her arms around her knees. “Then two possibilities branch from there: he disappeared of his own accord, or someone has taken him.”

  THE FIRST RULE IN TRACKING IS TO KNOW ONE’S ENEMY.

  A tangled skein of property records led Adrienne to Tara’s cabin. She’d purchased the property through an attorney, and it had taken some digging to correlate this with the attorney who had handled Juliane’s estate. Backtracking through public records with the name had given her a location.

  Adrienne left her motorcycle not far from the road. She was forced to pick her way down the overgrown path on foot. Bleached tassels of grasses poked up through a thick layer of snow. Chunks of gravel and ice crackled underfoot as Adrienne walked down what once might have been a driveway, but had been allowed to return to the earth.

  In spite of herself, Adrienne approved. As a nomadic sort, she was accustomed to sleeping under the stars. . . Adrienne had not willingly lived under a roof since she was a child. It was too confining. She could appreciate the next best thing. . . isolation in the middle of nowhere.

  The cabin was perched in a small clearing. More than twenty years old, the wood siding had faded to brittle silver, and the tin roof glinted in the meager porch light that had been left on. Adrienne waited at the edge of the tree line, watching the cabin. She circled the property and peered into the windows, holding her breath to keep it from fogging the glass.

  No movement in the house. Not that she’d expected any. The bed in the only bedroom hadn’t been slept in. Adrienne knew Juliane’s daughter had gone to chase the scientist. With effort, Adrienne held her desire to rush into the house in check. For all she knew, Tara might have left someone here, behind her.

  Adrienne paused at the edge of the property, pressed her bare fingers to the frosty earth. This place was strongly Tara’s; she could feel her residue in its sluggish, wintry pulse. For a geomancer, such earth was nearly as good as access to her prey’s flesh for magickal purposes. She scraped aside a patch of snow and reached into her jacket pocket for an empty bottle. She unscrewed the cap and filled the bottle with slivers of frozen earth. The bottle felt icy against her ribs when she tucked it back into her jacket, as if a shard of ice had been embedded between her ribs.

  She gathered a handful of small sticks from the perimeter of the property. This was Tara’s land, and the roots of the trees extended below the small cabin. The trees absorbed sun and shade, and a good deal of the daily hum of Tara’s psyche and habits. They would make excellent divinatory fodder.

  Traditionally, runes were cast with stones. In the Viking system, stones were marked with one of twenty-one runes and selected at random to interpret the underlying meaning of a question. Adrienne had found using materials from a subject’s location was often more effective than using a static set of tools.

  She paused in a small clearing, holding the bundle of sticks in her hand. She centered herself, breathed her intent to them with frigid breath steaming through the sticks. “Tell me what I need to know about Tara.”

  She opened her hands and scattered them throughout the clearing. To the untrained eye, they landed in a disorganized mess of pick-up sticks lying among stones and desiccated grass clumps poking up through snow. Adrienne’s eye roved over them, searching for a configuration of sticks corresponding to the runes carved into her memory.

  Her eye skimmed to the northernmost part of the clearing. North was the cardinal direction of earth, of stability, of material things. Her attention caught on a pair of sticks crossed in an X shape, crowned with a stick broken to form a V. The formation reminded her of the rune Othila. Othila was a rune of separation, of inheritance. Judging by the remoteness of the property, Tara had thoroughly separated herself from the rest of the physical world. This could be good for Adrienne. It was unlikely a woman in exile would have made much of an effort to maintain her professional contacts or physical resources.

  Oriented to true north, the rune was reversed. This suggested Tara had become bound by her exile, trapped or unwilling to move to new patterns. The rune also suggested inheritance. In this case, Adrienne suspected the inheritance aspect of the rune dealt more with the line of succession established by the Pythia, and Tara’s rejection of it.

  Adrienne stuffed down a flash of rage and turned her attention back to the makeshift runes.

  The cardinal direction east represented the mind and intellectual faculties. It was the direction of messages. Adrienne probed the sticks for a weakness she could exploit. She found a trio of sticks forming an angular, reversed F. The rune Ansuz spoke of signals and messages. Tara had accepted Sophia’s summons. But Ansuz was also sacred to the Norse god, Loki. Loki was a notorious trickster. Adrienne suspected Tara had not been told the whole truth, that there was some element of deception to the message. Tara did not, by her reading, have a true grasp of the situation.

  South was the direction of passion, fire, strength. In this quarter, Adrienne found a single stick perfectly aligned with true north. Isa, the rune of ice and winter. This part of Tara’s life was at a standstill, frozen. Adrienne smiled. Tara was as weak as she’d expected.

  West was the realm of emotions. Two sticks crossed lopsidedly, leaning to the left, in a fair imitation of the rune Nauthiz. Nauthiz represented constraint and sorrow. In this orientation, it was reversed from its traditional vantage point, suggesting a deep shadow had fallen over her quarry, as Adrienne’s shadow fell over the rune now.

  Adrienne stretched her cramped muscles and strode to the front door. She bent to examine the lock: a strong one, new. The bright brass of it gleamed in stark contrast to the weathered door.

  Small obstacle, that.

  Adrienne fished a set of lockpicks from her boot and made short work of it. The door swung open, and Adrienne slid her hand along the interior of the wall for a light switch. Her brow wrinkled, though. The place was still warm. . . Why was the heat on, if no one was home?

  A growl emanated from the darkness, and Adrienne’s hand stilled on the wall.

  She smiled, flipped the switch.

  In the center of the floor stood a gray tomcat. He’d been awakened from a sound slumber, by the looks of his rumpled fur and the fact that only the fur on his back and his tail were fluffed up properly.

  Adrienne shut the door behind her. “Are you the watchdog?”

  The cat hissed and bolted for the back bedroom. Adrienne didn’t bother to chase him. Instead she wandered to the kitchen counter. At the edge of the beat-up refrigerator, the cat’s water and food dishes were full. Someone had been here. Feeding instructions had been left for someone—perhaps Sophia?—in a sharp-edged scrawl.

  Adrienne ran her fingers over the ink. This was her enemy’s writing. It was terse, composed of no unnecessary ornamentation or flourishes. Juliane’s daughter was not a frivolous woman.

  Juliane, herself, had had a touch of whimsy about her. As a child, Adrienne remembered seeing Juliane in the circle of priestesses, or watching how she would sometimes build houses from her Tarot cards to delight the children. Her dark hair hung over her shoulders, wound with tangles of jasmine. Adrienne had watched how the Pythia had favored her, how she had braided the other woman’s hair and spoke with Juliane in hushed tones be
yond the limits of Adrienne’s hearing.

  And the Pythia had favored Juliane’s daughter. Tara had shown little interest in her mother’s work. The few times Adrienne had seen her, the older girl had her nose stuck in a book, or else was distracted by counting stars or pebbles. She’d been shy and awkward. Bookish. Not a leader.

  Adrienne’s mouth thinned to a hard line. The girl had no appreciation for what her mother could have taught her. At least Tara had a mother to teach her.

  Adrienne’s parents had abandoned her quite young, beyond the reach of her memory. She had been shuffled from the house of one of Delphi’s Daughters to the next. The Pythia had said this was to develop her talents, but Adrienne knew the truth: no one wanted to be bothered with her for any length of time. Adrienne had a knack for getting into trouble: she was always the one to disappear during hide-and-seek for hours at a time, to set her bedroom curtains on fire with a magnifying glass. She’d been the girl who refused to wear shoes, whose clothes were always filthy with mud.

  But she’d grown into her talents—as they had feared. Adrienne had heard it whispered that the Daughters of Delphi had only taken her in to keep her from becoming something monstrous.

  Adrienne smiled. They knew she was the most powerful of Delphi’s Daughters. The formal arts of geomancy: pendulums, casting stones, dowsing—those she had been taught by Delphi’s Daughters. But she’d learned other things, largely through her own experimentation. How to scatter handfuls of earth that would indicate the direction of any quarry she chose. How to read ley lines, the spirit roads departed souls wandered. The Earth hummed to her, spoke to her, became the mother she’d never known.

  The title of Pythia was her birthright.

  Why give it to another, to one who had never shown the slightest interest in it? Why surrender it to Juliane’s distracted daughter? Especially now, when the Pythia sensed a great and terrible technology on the horizon, one that could be used for war as easily as it could be used to instill peace.

  Adrienne’s hands balled into fists. She could sense it, hear it whispered when she pressed her ear to the earth: something wasn’t right. Someone was interfering with the balance of earth, cleaving it in ways it shouldn’t. All of Delphi’s Daughters could hear it, in their own ways, whether it was in their scrying bowls or hinted in their astrology charts. Something terrible was coming. The Pythia was too old to see it clearly. And Tara was too weak and broken to stop it.

  But Adrienne would. Whatever it took.

  Adrienne paced through the living room. Her fingers plucked up strands of Tara’s hair from the couch, sifting through the short pieces of striped cat hair. She paused at Tara’s old work boots near the door, held the soles of those shoes up to her own. Tara possessed a slighter build, smaller feet.

  The bedroom smelled like cedar. Adrienne felt something take a swipe at her ankles when she walked by the bed. The cat. Adrienne ignored it and crossed to the closet. Tara’s clothes were not what she would have expected from a former government agent. Only jeans and loose shirts hung in neat rows. No dresses, blouses, or anything to suggest femininity. Adrienne reached for one of the shirts, a light blue chambray. She shrugged out of her jacket and T-shirt, buttoned Tara’s shirt over her chest. The shirt was a bit tight on her, but it was like trying on the quarry’s skin. Adrienne rubbed her fingers over the worn cloth, twiddling with the buttons as she searched the closet.

  Adrienne leaned forward, sniffed. Below the cedar, she smelled gun oil. An empty case for a Ruger SP-101 lay open on the floor of the closet. The foam inside the case was dented, but the revolver was missing. Adrienne guessed the gun had been stored there for a very long time.

  Her eyes slid to the dresser. She rummaged through the drawers. She found little of interest: jeans, old jewelry boxes, sweaters covered in cat hair.

  On the top perched a framed photo of a young Tara with her mother. It was the only photo of Tara Adrienne had seen in the house.

  Royal succession for the Pythia’s favor. With a swipe, Adrienne knocked it over. The glass cracked on the surface of the dresser.

  She felt a small stab of regret. She wanted to leave no trace of having been here, of having worn Tara’s skin or flipped through the pages of her books. She was reminded of the furious creature underneath the bed. Perhaps this transgression would be blamed on the cat.

  Adrienne turned out the light and stretched out on Tara’s bed. The springs squeaked as she shifted. She was too accustomed to sleeping outdoors, and the bed felt like a ridiculous luxury. The pillows smelled of her quarry’s sweat and tears.

  She lay, staring up at the ceiling, with her hands behind her head. She looked forward to experiencing those smells in person, when she’d chased her quarry down and killed it.

  Chapter Five

  HARRY LI left shortly after the moon set, leaving Tara with her notes, photographs, and the only tangible artifact of Magnusson’s disappearance: his watch. The room seemed a little less. . . alive. . . with him gone.

  She held the cool metal of the watch in her hand. Judging by Harry’s reaction, he didn’t feel the same odd, sticky aura about it that she did. It seemed somehow vacant, as if something was missing. It felt too light, and it rattled when she shook it.

  She dug in her cosmetic bag. Its contents were spare: lipstick, mascara, a bit of plum-colored eye shadow. They’d gone a bit stale and gloppy; she wondered why she’d brought these things with her. She knew the answer: because it was expected of her, and it was part of the mask she’d always worn while working a case. Habit.

  She dug a pair of nail clippers from the bottom of the bag, folded out the metal file, and began to crack the case of the watch. It took some doing, but she managed to open it without scratching the case.

  What she saw inside surprised her. . . or rather, it was what she didn’t see. She expected to see the usual mass of gears, maybe a circuit chip. There was only one thing inside: a mass of tiny copper wires, finer than hair, spiraled in on themselves in an infinity loop, bordered by a backing of green circuit board. The rest was smooth and empty. Time had disappeared from the watch, even as it was running out for Magnusson.

  Tara closed the case up, contemplative. There were too many things that seemed missing at the scene. The inordinately small amount of rubble and now the guts of Magnusson’s watch. To say nothing of Magnusson himself.

  She reached for her cards, spreading her mother’s scarf out on the bedspread. She pulled out the Magician card, lay the watch below it to focus the reading, and cleared her mind to focus on the investigation. She meditated on the Magician, on his stance and his inscrutable, secretive smile. What was he hiding? What had he conjured from the elements before him, what forces had he summoned from the darkness?

  She shuffled the cards, feeling the familiar flex and flip of them in her hands. Amazing how easily she was falling back into this life, and that worried her.

  “Where do we stand now?” She drew one card, placed it on the far left of the scarf. A picture of a man hanging upside down by his ankle looked back at her. He was dangling from a wire drawn taut between two trees. His hands were held behind his back as he hung over a misty chasm. It was impossible to tell if his hands were bound behind his back, or if it was simply an attitude of contemplation.

  The Hanged Man. It represented suspension, sacrifice, limbo. Tara wasn’t surprised. The investigation had been blatantly stonewalled, and it felt like more than sheer territoriality.

  She wrote down in her notebook the date and Magician. Below, to the left of the page, she wrote Hanged Man. Beside that, she wrote the first word that came to mind: stagnation.

  “Where do we want to go?” She shuffled the cards again, until her shuffle felt smooth and even, and picked another card, laying it in the center of the scarf.

  The Six of Wands depicted a man on horseback, holding a flowering staff with a laurel crown attached to it. Surrounding him were people holding up other wands bursting with flowers. The sky was blue behind them, and the
overall attitude was one of victory, of a conquering hero returned to his homeland.

  Tara frowned. The card also represented mobilization, promotion, public acclaim, and the acknowledgement of others. Why would she want the acknowledgement of others?

  Her eyes slid back to her makeup case, and she recalled slipping and letting Harry see one of her scars. Perhaps she cared more than she wanted to admit about what other people thought.

  But perhaps this card didn’t relate so much to her. She recalled Harry’s situation of being in political exile. Perhaps he sought a way out, might see this case as an opportunity to move out of the shadows. She looked back at the Hanged Man. That may also speak of Harry, his state of career limbo.

  In her journal, she noted this, but she also wrote Whose victory?

  She framed her third question in her mind, and voiced it aloud. “What’s the path to get there?”

  She pulled a card from the deck that seemed to draw her eye, placing it to the far right. The Star again. The smiling maiden poured water from ewer to ewer under a night sky. She’d pulled this when she’d read the cards back at the cabin. When she drew cards more than once, it usually indicated she was overlooking something important.

  She flipped back through her journal for her initial impressions of the card, recalling what she’d used to focus her first reading: the picture of Magnusson and his daughter. Her mind skipped through its familiar nonlinear thinking, like a butterfly over a field, and she let it light on Magnusson’s daughter, Cassie. She let her thoughts roam over the hills and valleys of her impressions, not guiding them, waiting for a flash of intuition to light her way, a flash that would quicken her pulse with knowledge.

  She grabbed some of the papers Harry had left, scanning them for more information about Magnusson’s daughter. She found a notation about her birthplace: Ithaca, New York. . . and her full name: Cassiopeia Marie Magnusson. Just the kind of name a physicist would saddle a child with.

  Her mind seized that. Cassiopeia. The maiden in the card was looking up at the stars. It could be the constellation Cassiopeia.