Dark Oracle

by Alayna Williams

  The SUV from the entrance ramp chewed up the road behind her. Tara’s thoughts raced, her eyes darting around the interior of the truck cab. Somehow, she had to keep them behind her. . . far, far behind her.

  Tara rolled down the driver’s side window. The cold blast of air stung her face hard. She reached down on the floor of the truck. Martin kept a lot of junk down here. Hopefully, some of it was heavy junk. She fished around among empty coffee cups, candy wrappers, and newspapers. Her hand wrapped around a floor jack. She threw it out the window. The jack crashed wide, missing its intended target. The SUV plowed ahead, undeterred. Bullets peppered the tailgate of the dinosaur truck.

  Tara ducked down, her right hand scrabbling among the debris on the floor again. She picked up and discarded a flashlight, then smiled in triumph as she found the cold, smooth metal of a tire iron.

  She lightened her step on the gas, waited for the SUV to gain behind her, then chucked it out the window. She watched it bounce once and chip the pavement before it crashed into the windshield of the SUV, caving it. The SUV swerved, struck the guardrail, and stilled.

  Tara ground her teeth. Lucky shot. It might take them a few minutes to recover, to kick out the glass, wipe their bloody noses, and get moving again. She hoped that was enough time.

  Ahead, the second SUV was playing road games with the Pythia. It accelerated, trying to clip the car’s bumper. At this rate of speed, contact would send the car sailing past the guardrails into the darkness beyond. Snow spat flakes into the sharp ravines below the freeway, falling free and weightless.

  Tara accelerated within range of the SUV. Clutching the steering wheel with her right hand, she lowered her pistol out the window and balanced it on the side mirror. Wind whistled over the barrel with the sound of air blowing across the lip of a bottle. It was nearly impossible to aim correctly; she wanted to hit the point at which the SUV’s tires met the pavement, but she had five shots. Her hand was flash-frozen numb in the cold, and the wind shook her aim. Her eyes teared.

  The first two missed; the third lodged in the bumper. Her next shot exploded the rear driver’s side tire in a blossom of rubber ribbon. The SUV swerved and struck the Pythia’s bumper. The SUV slid away, past the guardrails, and down an embankment, out of sight.

  But Tara’s attention was riveted on the Pythia’s car. The tag from the SUV had caused Sophia to lurch out of control. The car swerved left, then right, as Sophia overcorrected, and skidded on the ice. To Tara’s horror, the car struck the rumble strips on the side of the road and flipped, side over side. She could hear her hoarse voice echoing in the car as she clutched the steering wheel and screamed.

  The dinosaur pickup skidded to a halt. Tara grabbed the heavy flashlight from the floorboards and jumped out of the cab. She sprinted to the car, turned upside down like a beetle on its back. She could smell gas leaking and the acrid stench of smoke.

  She reached the back doors first, but they were jammed shut. Swinging the flashlight, she battered the glass until it cracked in a spiderweb and dented in. She pulled the sheet of ruined safety glass away from the window.

  “Cassie!” she shouted. The girl wiggled out of her seat belt and through the window, followed by Maggie. Her forehead was bloodied, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. Maggie whimpered and licked her face, lashing her legs with her tail.

  “Get to the truck. Now.” Tara could see flames licking under the hood, see the gasoline staining the snow.

  The car had come to rest on the driver’s side. She crossed to the passenger’s side, ready to wield the flashlight.

  A thumping echoed from inside the car. The windshield flexed and caved, kicked away under the force of an Italian leather shoe. The Pythia peeled away the remnants of the windshield and leaped onto the hood of the car with the grace of a dancer. Glass shimmered on her, and Tara was struck by the raw power in her stance. Flames licked at the edge of the coat.

  Tara climbed up on the hood, already scorching from whatever broken piece of hydraulics had caught fire. She reached inside for Sophia.

  The Pythia caught her arm. “No.”

  Tara shrugged it away and crawled up the creased hood to the driver’s seat. “Sophia?”

  A platinum braid dangled over the steering wheel, stained pink over a limp hand. Tara reached in, grasped her shoulder. “Sophia, c’mon. Let’s go.”

  But Sophia’s head lolled to the side. Her face was a ruined mass of pulp where it rested against the broken dashboard. Tara’s blood-slick fingers reached for purchase, trying to find a pulse. Her own roared in her ears. The rearview mirror dripped red onto the burled wood dash.

  She felt the Pythia’s hands on her like a vise, dragging her away. The Pythia’s shouts were indecipherable, but the diminutive woman hauled Tara off the hood of the car, back into the snow. Tara fought her, but some part of her knew it was useless.

  Flames licked up over the frame of the windshield, and black smoke overtook the wreck. She could smell burning rubber and oil with the sweet aftertang of antifreeze. Tara’s bloody hands flung off the Pythia’s grip, but the heat kept her from approaching the fire.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” the Pythia told her. “We have to go.”

  Tara choked. Her logical mind tried to force her back to the shadow of the truck, but she remained rooted in place. Beside her, the Pythia stared into the fire. Even when Tara started the truck and limped them out onto the highway, the cab of the dinosaur pickup full of two oracles, a girl, and a shivering dog, the Pythia kept staring at the receding fire.

  It wasn’t until afterward that Tara wondered what she saw in the flames.

  A RAVEN SCAVENGED ALONE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, BESIDE a car wreck. His head bobbed as he walked. Snow stuck to his iridescent plumage and filled in his tracks. He paused over a broken taillight, admiring his image in the shiny surface. He had the attitude of an oracle scrying, turning his head this way and that, watching until the snow blanketed the fragment of plastic and blotted out his reflection

  Yards distant, the door of a battered SUV opened. A woman climbed out, one eye matted with stringy blonde hair and blood.

  The raven paused, watching her. She wasn’t playing with anything shiny, so it ignored her, returning to forage for things in the wreckage that glittered.

  She snapped the antenna off the roof of the SUV. Adrienne squatted at the edge of the road, pulled a bottle and an envelope from her coat. From the bottle, she tapped out the remainder of the earth she’d collected from Tara’s cabin. Warmed by her body, the granules sunk into the snow. From the envelope, she pulled a few strands of dark hair. The strands caught on the snow and road grime at the shoulder of the road.

  With the broken antenna from the SUV, she made sixteen lines of random dots, counting under her breath. The dots speckled the snow and drove the strands of hair deep into the snow. This was traditional geomancy, one of the oldest and most powerful forms. It operated similarly to the I Ching, relying on sixteen possible geomantic figures to divine the future. Figures were derived in stages from the sixteen random lines called the Mothers, Daughters, Nephews, Witnesses. . . and finally, the Judge. Each of the sixteen geomantic figures could occupy one of those positions. The figures, given traditional Latin names, represented timeless human conditions: people, paths, union, imprisonment, fortune, gain, loss, sadness, joy, passion, illumination, men, women, entry, and exit.

  “Tell me where to find my prey.”

  She reduced the sixteen lines of dots to four geomantic figures, the four Mothers. Odd sums gave one point, and even sums gave two. She counted under her steaming breath, sketching four figures below the sixteen original lines. She summed and reduced the Mothers to four Daughter figures, and the four Daughters to four Nephews.

  The raven, bored with his treasure, wandered by to see what she was doing with the shiny stick. He had little interest in her, but the shiny stick fascinated him. He wandered under her shadow, and Adrienne made note of where his tracks fell. Divination by animal tracks
was an art unto itself; any input the raven would provide would be heeded.

  His tracks crossed over the symbol Amissio in the row of Mother symbols, over a cluster of six dots in the shape of two nesting cups turned upside down, spilling their contents onto the ground. Amissio represented loss, things taken away from the querent, whether willingly or by force. Adrienne frowned at seeing this symbol in the Mother row.

  The raven hopped over to the Daughter row, and his talons scraped a figure with dots arranged in a large V. Tristitia, the Latin word for “sorrow,” was a marker of sadness.

  That was the past. No information she didn’t already know. Impatient, she returned to her calculations with the broken antenna.

  From the Nephews, she derived two Witnesses. She paused when she derived the two figures: Conjunctio and Cauda Draconis. Conjunctio, a simple X formed by the dots, suggested the recovery of missing things. The figure was a sign of conjunction, the joining of two lost things. A good omen for a tracker.

  Cauda Draconis was known as the Tail of the Dragon, represented by an upside-down Y. In some situations, it spoke of a way out. This was the solution she sought. But the Tail of the Dragon was considered a sign of evil, and was tied to the astrological symbol for the moon.

  Adding together the symbols for the two Witnesses, she arrived at the final outcome, in the final position called the Judge. This represented the Fates’ judgment of the situation. Carcer, six dots arranged into a closed shape, was her final figure. It represented imprisonment, a link in an unbroken chain.

  Adrienne leaned forward. That was where she would catch Tara: where her partner was imprisoned. She had spent too much time chasing her. She needed to allow her prey to come to her.

  She cast aside the antenna and reached for her cell phone. No signal, this far into nowhere. She began to walk back to the nearest exit on the interstate. If the cell phone was still useless there, at least she could hitch a ride.

  The raven waddled back to the geomantic oracle. He cocked his head right and left, looking at the impressions rapidly filling in the dirty snow. When he took wing, one of his pinfeathers brushed a figure in the Nephew row: Rubeus, Latin for “red,” the color of blood. The dots formed the shape of an overturned cup, its contents spilled. The figure was a warning to cease and desist, presaging destructive passion.

  Unseen by Adrienne, snow continued to fall, obliterating the warning.

  Chapter Fifteen

  YOU’VE LOST much, my dear. But not everything.”

  Tara shook her head. “Pythia. . .” She focused on scrubbing the blood from her coat with a motel washcloth. She didn’t know whose blood it was staining the white washcloth or the coat spread over the motel ironing board. She would have felt guilty removing it if it had been Sophia’s, but she liked the illusion of not knowing.

  Tears glossed her eyes. She had never forgiven Sophia for the loss of her mother. And now it was too late.

  At her feet, Maggie moaned. Tara had spent a half hour brushing glass out of her fur, but the dog was otherwise unhurt. Tara suspected the groan was another complaint about the bath she’d been given. A damp spot from the dog’s fur soaked into the carpet.

  “You still have Delphi’s Daughters, whether you want us or not.” The Pythia sat on the edge of the bed. She seemed somehow elegantly incongruous with the ugly floral bedspread and the quarter slot for the Magic Fingers vibrating bed. Tara could never imagine the Pythia using the Magic Fingers. Freshly scrubbed, her hair was bound up in a towel, and she was wrapped in a robe. A cigarette twitched from her fingers into the ashtray that the Pythia had demanded from the night clerk in no uncertain terms. Worms of red light pulsed through the ashes that never quite grew cold. She stared at them. “And. . . there’s someone new in your life. I can feel it.”

  Tara looked away. She spread her hands out helplessly before her, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I destroy everything I touch. Everything I love is taken from me. . .”

  “No.” The Pythia’s voice was harsh as steel wool. “Look at me.”

  Tara faced her, her vision blurry.

  “Do not do what your mother did,” the Pythia whispered furiously. “Do not give up. Fight. You are a fighter. You have the strength to see this through.”

  Tara gave a wan smile. “I’m not so sure.” She felt weak, ineffective as dandelion fluff in a thunderstorm.

  “I am,” the Pythia said. She tapped more glowing ash into the ashtray. “Don’t let him get away.”

  Tara lifted her eyebrow and opened her mouth, but the bathroom door opened. Cassie came hesitantly into the room, running her fingers through her newly brunette locks. “What do you think?” she asked. The hair swung over a cut on her forehead Tara had closed with butterfly bandages. She smelled of the cloyingly sweet smell of the hair conditioner that came with the dye.

  The Pythia smiled. “You are lovely, my dear.” She fished out a pair of scissors from the discount-store bags cluttering the floor: hair dye, new clothes, candy bars, first aid supplies. The Pythia herded her back into the bathroom, and Tara could hear the snip-snick of scissors as the Pythia cut Cassie’s hair.

  They were waiting. Waiting for Delphi’s Daughters to come and hide Cassie. The nearest ones were still a few hours away. The Pythia had stared into her lighter and stated that this fleabag motel would be safe. Tara had parked Martin’s dinosaur pickup in the shadow of tractor-trailers; there was no way it could be seen from the road.

  Tara gathered up the bloodstained clothes and put them in opaque black trash bags. After a moment’s hesitation, she put her coat in there, too. There was no saving it. She let herself out of the room and walked out to the Dumpster to dispose of the evidence. A lump formed in her throat; she felt as if she was losing the last bit of Sophia.

  The cold lanced through her T-shirt and jeans as she walked, barefoot, to the Dumpster. Her feet crunched over the sharp ice slivers as she crossed the parking lot.

  She paused before a pay phone and fished out some change.

  Tara pressed the greasy receiver of the pay phone to her ear. Bitter wind chewed at her hair, and she turned against the wind to keep it from whistling across the receiver. She knew that the GPS chip in her own cell phone would be traced the instant she powered it up; her odds of remaining undetected were better using a pay phone. She transferred through three operators, hoping that would obscure her tracks, before connecting to Harry’s cell phone number. It clicked immediately over to voice mail, and she hung up before hearing more than “Hell-.” Two seconds wasn’t enough time for Gabriel to trace her whereabouts, but that one syllable told her all she needed to know. She wound through directory assistance and an operator again to connect her to the number at Martin’s home. She let it ring twice: no answer.

  She hung up, shivering. Dread twitched through her. Had Harry fallen into a trap, or was he merely angry with her? Had Martin managed to escape, or had their pursuers taken him prisoner?

  She minced her way through the parking lot to the truck, climbed in, and punched the dome light on. It filled the cab with a warm yellow glow. She fished her cell phone out of the glove box.

  Resolutely, she reached into her back pocket for her cards. Tara had no choice; she had to find out. As ambivalent and resentful as she felt about her powers as an oracle, there was only one way left to her to find out the truth.

  She shuffled the cold cards, thinking of Harry. She thought of the last time she’d seen him, of the look of hurt on his face, thought of last night and the sense of wholeness she feared was lost.

  “Is Harry all right?” Tara whispered into the darkness, and drew a card.

  Her breath froze in her throat when she flipped over the Eight of Swords. It depicted a bound and blindfolded woman surrounded by a cage of eight swords thrust, edge-down, into the ground. A castle on a cliff stood in the background with lights shining from its windows, suggesting that her keepers were watching her struggle. The card represented imprisonment and indecision, fear of extricating on
eself from a situation. Seeing this, she knew he’d fallen into a trap, that he was being held prisoner.

  She looked closely at the card. There was a gap between the cage of swords, and the woman’s feet were unbound. She could be freed. There was still hope.

  Tucking the card back in the deck, she thought of Martin. “Is Martin all right?” she asked, still hearing the phone ringing endlessly in her mind.

  She picked a card. The Eight of Wands depicted eight flowering branches flying through the air over a tranquil landscape. Tara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. This was a positive card, one that indicated travel and positive momentum. It suggested that Martin had found a way to escape. She smiled, wondering what the cagey old man had dreamed up to get away.

  She held the cards close to her chest. She had to help Harry, whether he wanted her help or not. He clearly wasn’t in a position to help himself.

  Attempting to still her thoughts, she shuffled the cards.

  “What do I do next?” she whispered, breath fogging in the saffron light of the truck. She drew seven cards and laid them out in a clockwise circle on the seat. This spread was intended to represent Ouroboros, the mythological serpent that ate its own tail. It was a powerful spread she rarely used, but it spoke to universal cycles, to re-creation of a situation.

  She turned over the first card, the one at the top representing the serpent’s head. This represented the distant past. She pulled the Six of Wands, showing six wands interlocked together, framed by the wings of victory. This card was reversed, suggesting treachery, betrayal by colleagues, life drawn to a standstill.

  Tara rested her head in her hands. She needed more clarification, and drew another card from the deck to provide more information.

  The Death card, the one she’d associated with Corvus, peered back at her from his skeletal visage. She shook her head. Corvus was ancient history, but he kept cropping up in the present. She pulled out her notebook and scribbled this down for later analysis, and turned her attention to the next card in the spread.