The second card in the spread represented the recent events having bearing on the situation. The Five of Swords depicted a cloaked man holding three swords, standing in victory over two kneeling dejected men. The swords of these two men lay on the ground, while a castle burned in the background. This card suggested defeat, cruelty, and vindictiveness. She thought of Harry being at the mercy of the men who had planned to kill Cassie.
The third card described immediate influences, the current events affecting the situation. The Five of Cups illustrated a man in a black cloak of mourning, head bowed over three spilled chalices. Red liquid stained the beach on which he stood. It suggested the sense of loss in a relationship, or an argument. Perhaps if she and Harry had parted on better terms, they might have made a better strategy that would have prevented him walking into the trap. Her fingernails dug into her palm. If she had only been there, perhaps she could have prevented this. . .
Two chalices shown in the card remained upright. This heartened her, gave her hope all was not lost.
The fourth card suggested immediate obstacles. She drew the Knight of Wands, reversed. It depicted a resolute-looking armored man astride a white horse, holding a wand like one would a rifle, over his shoulder.
Tara thought back to the card she’d associated with Gabriel, the King of Wands. This card might represent his soldiers. Reversed, this card suggested conflict and movement. His men were on the move.
The fifth card showed the immediate outlook, the short-term possibilities. The Devil card showed a fearsome horned beast, with a man and woman chained to his feet. An inverted pentacle was sketched over his head, symbolizing perversion of the elements. Tara frowned. This card suggested entrapment, fear, and the dark side of human nature. Most often, this card pointed to self-imposed limitations and fears, the bondage created through one’s own actions and the need to see beyond it.
The sixth card showed future influences on the situation. The Strength card illustrated a woman crowned in a laurel wreath, closing the jaws of a lion. She wore a serene expression of tenderness on her face as she looked upon the destructive natural power of the lion. It was a look of love. Closing the jaws of the lion was an extraordinary feat, but not without cost: the woman’s dress was torn open at the collar, showing claw marks in her chest. The card spoke of taming wild forces, of indomitable courage and strength of will. It was a card of mental perseverance over physical force. Tara fingered the scar at her own collar. She hoped she was powerful enough to do what the woman in the card was able to accomplish.
The final card, representing the serpent’s tail, showed the ultimate outcome. She’d drawn the Eight of Cups, showing a man fleeing across a desolate landscape, leaving eight stacked cups behind.
She frowned. She’d seen this card recently. She pulled her well-worn notebook from her purse and flipped through it. Ah, yes. . . This was the card she’d associated with the photo she’d taken of the caldera at Magnusson’s lab. This was the photo in which Harry had seen headlights where there was no road.
Her intuition buzzed throughout her. That place. Her pulse quickened, and she circled the card in her notebook. This was where she would look for Harry.
Her eyes flicked to the lit hotel room window, drapes drawn shut. That was where she would look as soon as Cassie was safe: back at the place where it had all began.
LIKE BAD NEWS AND THE DEAD, DELPHI’S DAUGHTERS TRAVELED fast.
Dawn had scarcely begun to redden the horizon when Tara awoke to the sounds of engines in the parking lot. Not the large growl of semi-trucks and hissing air brakes, these were smaller engines barely perceptible over the hum of the floorboard heater.
But Tara heard them. She drew aside the drapes, watched as a collection of a dozen vehicles and their owners gathered in the unplowed parking lot. A perky blonde soccer mom piloted a station wagon with a bumper covered in stickers from her kids’ schools. The kids were evidently on the honor roll and the track team. A sleek SUV with skis laced to the roof spat out a woman in a snowsuit, sunglasses perched on her head. A middle-aged woman in a plaid flannel shirt parked a pickup truck beside them, joined by a car full of women in jeans and pink hooded sweatshirts. Tara dimly recognized some of these women from her youth, but she had long since forgotten their names.
“Pythia,” said Tara. “Your friends are here.”
The pink hooded sweatshirts stayed on guard in the parking lot, while the others invaded the motel room. Tara was surprised to see that many of the women were armed: the soccer mom had the bulge of a .357 under her shoulder, and the skier slung a rifle across her back. In a methodical flurry of activity that reminded Tara of ants, they scoured the hotel room and began taking the Pythia’s and Cassie’s meager belongings to the cars.
Cassie stood in the corner, her arms wrapped around her elbows. Tara placed her hands on her shoulders. “You’re going to be fine.”
Cassie’s lip trembled. “Can you come with us?”
Tara hesitated. “I can’t right now. Harry’s in trouble. I need to help him.” She embraced the girl. “But I promise, once I find Harry, I’ll come back to you.”
Over Cassie’s shoulder, Tara saw the Pythia smile, and Tara fought the urge to scowl at her.
• • • •
“I’M GLAD YOU’RE WELL.” CORVUS KEPT HIS DESK BETWEEN himself and Harry. Harry slouched in his chair, tasting blood on the inside of his cheek. Corvus seemed to eye the gravel scrapes on his face and the red rimming the torn knee of his pants with a barely disguised sense of unease. How a man so squeamish and hands-off managed to be in charge of anything was a mystery to Harry. He’d bet that Corvus was a real treat to work with at a crime scene or a morgue. Back in the day, when Tara had the ill fortune to work with him, he imagined that she’d done all the heavy lifting.
“As well as can be expected.” He glanced at Gabriel, visible through the dark glass on the other side of the hallway. He’d pulled some cigarettes from his fatigue shirt, had lit up. The smell of smoke began to filter underneath the door. Harry watched Corvus’s nose wrinkle imperceptibly. Such delicate sensibilities. He was sure smoking wasn’t allowed in any federal facility, but it didn’t seem like Gabriel cared so much about the rules. . . or Corvus’s preferences.
“I’m grateful that Major Gabriel found you. You’ve been out of touch.”
Harry remained stubbornly silent. Gabriel had thrown him in the back of the SUV, blindfolded. Harry had no idea where he was, only that their location was somewhere off a gravel road. The place smelled strongly of earth, of metal, with a close, strange echo that seemed to travel through the glass and roll up to the walls. Harry thought they might be underground, given the deadening of sound, but he couldn’t be certain.
“Where the hell are we?” he countered with a question of his own. This pretending, this false civility, the talking around the fact that Harry had been essentially abducted, pissed him off.
“You know that I can’t say.” Corvus thinned his lips. “Where’s Magnusson’s daughter?”
Harry looked Corvus directly in the eye. “I don’t know.” He could answer that truthfully, at least.
Corvus crossed his arms, brushed some imaginary dirt from his fingers onto his suit jacket. “Is she with Dr. Sheridan?” When he spoke Tara’s name, something dark, like guilt, glinted across his vision.
“I don’t know where either of them are.”
Corvus leaned across his desk. “Listen to me, Agent Li. You’re an inch away from obstruction of justice and kidnapping charges. I can salvage what little remains of your career if you work with me.” Corvus’s left eye twitched, and Harry noticed his shirt was wrinkled. Signs of high stress for a fastidious man like Corvus.
“Look,” Harry said. “I don’t appreciate being trussed up like a pig, sandbagged, and then accused of kidnapping. You and Gabriel have been waiting in the shrubbery to pounce on whatever we can beat out of it.” Rebellion scalded his throat, tasting both foreign and pure. “I’m not playing the game.�
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Corvus’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think you fully appreciate your predicament. You can either work with me, now, or. . .” His eyes flickered to the figure blowing smoke outside the door. “Gabriel will get the information from you in a much less pleasant way. It’ll be out of my hands. You saw what happened to DiRosa.”
The threat slithered across the desk.
Harry weighed his options. Corvus had him backed into a corner, and there was only one course of action.
Harry stood up and approached Corvus’s desk with his hands folded respectfully at his sides. He spat blood on the immaculate glass surface.
Corvus kicked back from the desk in horror, flecks of blood peppering his snow-white shirt. His chair fell backward, and his shoe tipped over the desk. It shattered in a jingling rain of safety-glass fragments on the gray carpet.
Gabriel and his men burst through the door, ground Harry’s face into the carpet, and twisted his arms behind his back.
Harry could hear Corvus sputtering in panic, and smiled against the itchy carpet. Bastard.
His smile faltered as Gabriel kicked him over, driving the breath from his lungs, and stood on his sternum. Harry could feel the pattern of Gabriel’s boot tread pressing into his flesh.
“I gave Corvus the courtesy of letting you hide behind his skirt. You’re all mine now.”
Chapter Sixteen
THE SWELLING moon rode low over the desert, bleaching the earth pale gray and white. Frost shimmered with the illusion of movement as the serene light played over ice crystals. Its light burned away all but the brightest stars, casting their distant gazes on the ground below.
Tara wound the truck around the northern edge of the caldera cradling the remnants of Magnusson’s lab. The moon illuminated enough of the colorless landscape that she could cut the lights for the dark, silent drive. Frost from her breath accumulated on the inside of the windshield in spidery tendrils. She paused to wipe them away with her sleeve, only for her breath to conjure them anew in minutes.
Her fingers twitched at the radio dial, trying to summon something human in the darkness. The dial grazed only static, and she wondered if it was some side effect of military technology in the area, or whether the radio was simply shot.
The cold and silence of the dark had settled into her. Her fingers fused with the radiating chill of the steering wheel, the icy metal of the gas pedal flowing through the sole of her shoe. She felt drawn, as if pulled by fishing line through the surface of cold water. Her reflection, glimpsed in the rearview mirror, seemed inhumanly surreal: winter had drained the color out of her face, the moonlight casting planes and shadows over her unbound hair and eyelashes. She looked like a ghostly figure from a fairy-tale: the Queen of Swords, the Snow Queen. She felt the power of the ancient archetype settle deep within her chest: the sorrow of loss, the resolute sense of duty, staring into a desolate kingdom.
She parked the truck at the rim above the caldera, looked down at the plastic-wrapped remains of the lab. At this distance, it seemed that a ghost paused at the bottom of the crater, shrouded in pulsing white. The figure eight of the accelerator track was merely a silver path on which that ghost might travel, retracing its steps for eternity. The pinging of the truck engine as it cooled was the only sound in this barren place.
She reached into her purse for her cold cards, shuffled them in her chapped hands. She nestled her chin into her coat. It wasn’t hers; the Pythia had left it behind for her. It smelled like cigarette smoke and made her eyes itch. But itching was better than freezing.
“What do I need to know?” she asked the cards.
She pulled one card with numb and clumsy fingers: the Hanged Man. A man was suspended by his foot from a tree. His hands were laced behind his back, and serenity glowed in his expression. The card suggested sacrifice, a transformation. Her intuition shivered over her, despite the cold.
She drew a second card, and her hands stilled in contemplation. Judgment. A man, woman, and child rose up out of coffins to herald an angel trumpeting them awake. This card suggested finality, that a permanent decision for good or ill was to be made. But the symbol of the coffin, especially the woman in it, chilled her. It struck far too close to her own experience at the hands of the Gardener.
Movement in the bowl of the caldera seized her eye. Dark violet sparks seethed into the darkness, vanished. She’d seen that glimmer before, when she’d found Magnusson’s watch.
Her breath obscured too much of her view, and she climbed out of the truck. The squeak of the rusty door hinges seemed to pierce some of the crystalline silence. The image of the Magician stepped into her thoughts, standing alone with the glowing symbol of infinity drawn in the ether above his head, paralleling the track of the particle accelerator below. Was this truly where Magnusson destroyed himself?
Her eyes narrowed, and she descended farther into the field, gun drawn. Dried grass lashed against her legs. Was this some manipulation of radiation, some trace of light left behind? Or was this some aftereffect of the dark matter pulled from the ether?
She walked up to the fence, cast a pebble at it. No arc or sparking lanced across its surface. Scanning east and west for video surveillance, she saw no signs of it. She took her coat off. The cold air cut through her shirt and skin like a slap. Digging her fingers into the fence, she climbed up to the edge of the razor wire. She slung her coat over the tangle of razor wire, clambered over it, and dropped back to the other side.
She’d half expected flashlights and men with guns to appear from the dark, to corner her immediately. But there was only silence, the cold, and the moon. Tara walked down the caldera to where she’d seen the milling fragments of light, shivering. She’d stopped feeling her face, and when she touched it with her hand, it felt rubbery, like stone. Her wounded arm ached hotly, and it seemed the cold settled more deeply into the scars lacing her body.
“Magnusson,” she whispered. “Where are you?”
She felt this place was too strongly tied to him, that perhaps he had never left it. There was no other sign of him, anywhere. The last traces of him had been found here, this place with the mysterious light.
She paused, looking down. Faint specks of violet light appeared and disappeared along the grasses. They glinted very faintly, and Tara had to look slightly away from them to truly see them, as one does with dim stars. These last bits of fallout from Magnusson’s experiment disappeared within the earth, then reappeared.
Tara remembered the devoured walls of the laboratory, the missing guts of Magnusson’s watch. Still, she felt inexorably drawn to these faint pinpoints of light, and reached toward them with her bare hand, adorned only with Magnusson’s watch. Some distant part of her mind chided her for her fearlessness of bodily harm. There were much worse things than the scars she bore, that small voice warned her.
Several tiny particles hovered over the grasses and swarmed over her hand. She held her breath, half expecting to have her flesh disassembled at a subatomic level. . .
But they dissolved into the watch, vanishing painlessly.
Tara stared at the watch, stripped it off her wrist. She turned it over and ran her finger over the engraved infinity loop on the reverse. She popped open the back with the truck keys, wanting to know where that light had gone.
She gasped. The interior of the watch glowed, the violet particles racing along the remaining bits of circuitry. In a flash, she understood. In her hands lay a battery Magnusson had created to attract and hold dark energy, cleverly disguised as a watch.
She put it back together, dousing the light trickling inside it, and snapped it back on her wrist. She stood, eye roving over the landscape. Magnusson, whatever his condition, would never have left this behind.
Some yards distant, she spied something irregular in the earth, a lump seeming out of place for this perfectly sculpted place. It looked like a buried tree branch, jammed into the ground and twisted, like driftwood. Around it, the rocks and soil had swirled in on themselves, as if a d
ust devil had died there.
She remembered the Hanged Man, suspended from the tree. She trudged to the spot and scraped aside grasses and loose gravel with her numb hands. The hard earth cut into her hands and drew blood. But she kept digging, driven by her own sense of magnetic north. She dug until her blood mixed with the hard soil and she’d excavated a hole reaching into the earth.
She sat back on her heels, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth and suppressing a violent shudder.
Magnusson.
Or what was left of him. She recognized the line of the physicist’s jaw from his photos, judged the dark eye socket to be similar to his. But the skeleton wasn’t pale bone; it was rock melted and twisted like iron in a forge. A shoulder turned in the wrong direction; an arm and part of his face were half buried in the earth, fused to the stones and rocks and part of a cactus. She ran her finger over his brow. His hair had melted into the grass, and his cheekbone melded with a piece of basalt that glittered in the night. His fingers dribbled away into pebbles that dislodged their delicate formation at her touch. He reminded her, at a deep level, of renderings she’d seen of the Celtic Green Man, at one with the earth. No wonder the investigators had missed him; even with ground-penetrating radar, Magnusson’s remains had fused with the earth so thoroughly that it might not have registered to the technician. He was one with the hard-packed earth, and there was no disturbance or foreign substance intrusion for the radar to detect.
This had to be the worst way to die: buried alive.
She understood the Hanged Man and the final Judgment now. Magnusson had made the ultimate sacrifice to destroy his research. She guessed he’d been caught by one of the mini black holes he’d opened up, and when it had finally winked out of existence, the black hole didn’t differentiate among the animals, plants, and minerals left behind. And the bits of dark energy remaining here. . . without the battery or a black hole to attract them. . . they were fading fast.
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