“She’s in the shower. I told her you were coming for dinner.” She shrugged. “My cigarettes say so, anyway.” There was a twinkle of humor in her eye that Tara had long forgotten.
Tara hesitated. “Is there dessert?”
“Of course. The Daughters of Delphi know how to bake. Most of them, anyway.” The Pythia blew a smoke ring to the ceiling of the porch, like a wizened dragon. Tara sat down on the other side of the porch swing.
“I am glad you are safe,” the Pythia said.
Tara rubbed the sweat from her hand on her jeans. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“What Adrienne said. . . that I’m to be your successor? The next Pythia?” Words fell over each other. “I don’t want it. No way in hell. You’ll have to pick someone else.”
The Pythia looked at her and burst out laughing. It was not the reaction Tara had expected.
She took a drag on her cigarette and touched Tara’s arm, bracelets jingling. “You are not my successor. You’re good, but you’re not that good.”
Tara blinked. “But. . .”
“You never were,” the Pythia said mildly. “Cassie is the one I want for Pythia.”
Tara’s jaw dropped, dumbfounded. “But she’s not an oracle. . . She’s a scientist. . .”
The Pythia smiled. “We are all many things. I wanted Sophia to bring you back to the fold, in order to guard her and bring her here. I foresaw that the next Pythia will need to guard the secrets of darkness, to keep that knowledge safe from the hands of men. And Cassie has that knowledge, the power of dark energy.
“You’re a warrior, at heart, Tara. Fighting is what you do best. . . whether it’s with men in the outside world or with me.”
Tara stared at her. “Was that you talking to me. . . in the Gardener’s box?”
The Pythia wouldn’t answer, just smiled like the Sphinx with an unanswerable question.
“This Pythia business. Cassie can’t see the future. . .” Tara sputtered.
“Not yet. Not well, in any case. But she’s got an aptitude for astrology, for reading the stars. I could feel it when you brought her to me in the trance. She’s a few years behind in training, of course, but she’ll catch up.”
“Hang on.” Some part of her wanted to protect her, to keep her safe from the Pythia’s grasp. “How the heck does Cassie feel about this? We’re talking about her like she’s a thing.”
“She hasn’t made her mind up yet. She wants to talk to you about it.”
“You’re not going to force her into it?”
The Pythia shook her head. “I can’t force anyone into anything. Even when I see the future, as you do, it’s a possibility that never trumps free will. She can stay with me, or she can go.”
“That’s generous of you.”
The Pythia ignored the dig. “You have news about Cassie’s father?”
Tara nodded. “It’s not good.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry for Cassie, especially.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
The Pythia swung for a moment, her painted toes moving across the floorboards of the porch. “I think Magnusson’s time had passed, but he gave what he needed to give to his daughter. It was. . . his legacy that was important.”
The screen door banged, and Cassie thumped down the whitewashed steps. Tara was startled at her transformation. The dark makeup had been scrubbed from her face, and a few pounds had been added to her too-gaunt frame. . . the Daughers of Delphi did, apparently, know how to cook. With the light-brown bob, she reminded Tara of her own mother, beautiful and glowing.
Cassie threw her arms around Tara, and Tara smiled into her embrace. Tara saw how her eyes slid to her empty car.
“Where’s Harry?” Cassie asked.
“Harry’s back in New Mexico, being deposed by the state’s attorney.”
“Is he in trouble?”
Tara’s mouth thinned. She hadn’t seen Harry since she’d been discharged from the hospital. He’d come to tell her Corvus was dead, but that no trace of Gabriel or Adrienne had been found. At least he had enough sense not to send her flowers. “I think the Pythia has set him up with a very good attorney. He should be fine.”
“And Martin?” Tara could see Cassie was working herself up to the big question, warming up to ask about her father.
“Martin’s back home. When Gabriel’s men came for him, he faked a heart attack, then wound up in a psychiatric hospital. He faked dementia all too well, and Harry had a hell of a time getting him released.” Tara smiled. “But while in the psych ward, he apparently managed to set himself up as the dictator of an imaginary empire of followers who worshipped him as a god.”
Cassie’s eyes were anxious, and her voice was lower than a whisper. “And my father?”
Tara rubbed the girl’s arms. She hated to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it was best it came from her. “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but your father died in the explosion. He destroyed his research to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”
The girl’s face crumpled, and she buried her face in her hands. “I thought so,” she whispered, through tears.
“Why did you think that?” Tara asked, stroking her hair.
Cassie sat down heavily on the step. “He had been so secretive about his work, as if he was trying to protect me from it. When it was clear that he gave the laptop to me, I knew something was terribly wrong.”
“You destroyed the laptop’s hard drive.”
Cassie nodded, wiping her nose. “Yeah. I just felt. . . that was what he wanted me to do. And it’s all in my head, anyway.”
The Pythia came to stand beside the girl and put her arm around her shoulders. “That knowledge is your father’s legacy. It will live and grow through you.”
But her eyes were on Tara when she spoke.
THEY DUG HER UP AND PUT HER SOMEPLACE BRIGHT, A PLACE that smelled like chrome and piss and disinfectant. A place full of the chatter of people and machines, far removed from the soft, organic silence of the ground.
Adrienne was furious.
Through eyes taped shut, she could sense the shadows as they stretched over her bed. Some came to stare at her—she could feel the weight of their gazes on her. Others brought blessed oblivion in the form of drugs. . . but it was an incomplete oblivion. She always woke with pain and fury. The crinkle of plastic, the beeping of machines—nothing could disguise the wariness she heard in their voices. And the pity.
“Poor thing,” she heard a woman say. “They should just let her die.”
Pages on a chart flipped like a deck of cards being shuffled.
“No,” another voice responded. “They’re going to keep her. Study her. No one’s ever seen anything like it.”
“It just seems inhuman.”
“Well, she does look horrific, but. . .”
“Not her. Keeping her alive is what’s inhuman.”
Adrienne felt a needle slide under her flesh. Another drug that brought the false darkness.
When she awoke again, she smelled tobacco. She flexed her fingers, feeling them curl against the sheet. At least she still had fingers.
“Gabriel,” she whispered, with malice. Her throat was raw, perhaps from the scrape of a feeding tube. Her mouth tasted like dirt and blood.
She opened her eyes. Something was wrong with her vision. . . Her field of view was speckled with fragments of tiny prisms and dirt. Her brain struggled to adapt, to frame Gabriel’s image in her wobbling perspective. He stood over her in a white hazmat suit, head cocked to one side like an inquisitive bird.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Where the fuck am I?” Her mouth felt numb and warped, and her tongue swelled. The word came out sounding like “thuck.”
“In the isolation wing at Los Alamos Medical Center. You took on some dark matter.” He said it as casually as if she’d taken shrapnel, his eyes tracking up and down her body. “Now that you’re stable, our scientists can’t wait to
get their hands on you.”
“Take me back,” she pleaded. She wanted nothing more than to be returned to the earth.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
He gestured somewhere beyond a clear plastic curtain, and she could hear the wheels on her bed being unlocked. Someone pressed an oxygen mask over her face, and white-suited men zipped a plastic bubble over her. With the clatter of IV poles, they began to wheel the gurney out into the hallway. Through the warble of plastic, dingy ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights flashed past. Adrienne’s thoughts were sluggish with the aftereffects of drugs. She struggled to focus, to pull the head-clearing oxygen deep into her lungs. She had to think of a way to escape. She would not be their science project.
They wheeled her into a service elevator with padded walls. Gabriel crowded in with two nurses, and the numbers blurred on the way up. The elevator ejected them into fresh air and blue sky. The roof of the structure, Adrienne guessed.
The sounds of helicopter blades sliced the air, thrumming at a low whine. A black Huey perched on a helipad like a giant black mosquito, ready to whisk her away to an unpleasant fate, under Gabriel’s microscope.
Adrienne took a deep breath. The plastic bubble over her rattled. She felt something dark and lightless roiling in her chest. Something strong. She reached up for the zipper as men in camo uniforms rushed forward to pull the gurney into the gaping maw of the copter. They were going to devour her.
For the moment, she let them. Her bed was lifted into the back of the copter, IV poles and machines trailing like the tentacles of a squid. Adrienne took a head count: a pilot, two guards, a medic in white, and Gabriel. Her odds were improving.
They milled around, securing the gurney and blinking equipment. One of the cabin doors had become jammed open by a rock. Gabriel gestured for the men to secure themselves, and to leave it. Adrienne waited for the sickening lurch that told her the helicopter had lifted off, waited for it to bank left and peel away into the sky, before she struck.
The zipper ripped open, and the wind from helicopter blades snagged the plastic bubble like a kite. Adrienne twisted and reached for the gun at the hip of the nearest man in camo. She felt IV lines tear out of her arm and the oxygen mask rip from her face. She grasped the cool metal, flopped like a fish on land, and pulled the trigger.
Blood spattered on the outside of the bubble.
Wind ripped through her hair, nearly blinding her. She heard Gabriel shouting for them not to shoot her. Must’ve been part of his latest mission: bring back the dark matter without damaging it. She wondered what he was willing to sacrifice in order to do it. Adrienne launched herself out of the egg of the plastic-covered bed, feeling cold air skimming through her hospital gown against her raw skin.
Her. . . skin. She hesitated for a moment, glimpsing mottled, warped skin that glistened like granite.
But only for a moment. She rolled beneath the cart, ripped away the Velcro straps holding it anchored to the helicopter frame, and kicked it as hard as she could. The cart slammed into the medic and kept rolling. Both tumbled out of the open cabin door of the helicopter in a rattle of plastic and white sheet.
“Adrienne.” Gabriel said something more that she couldn’t hear; she just recognized the shape of her name on his mouth.
No more words. No more stupid, simpering, deceitful words. She was tired of people talking to her.
She shot the remaining guard.
The pilot pitched the helicopter forward, trying to throw her off-balance. Adrienne skidded in bare feet, snatching at a cargo strap. She leveled the 9mm at Gabriel, saw he’d drawn down on her.
He’d not killed her so far, when he’d had the chance. His mission must be too precious for him to lose her.
“What do you want from me?” she screamed at him, and the wind shredded her voice.
“The dark matter,” he shouted. “It’s in you.”
She shook her head, lashing hair around her face. She wasn’t going with him. She pulled the trigger. The wind muffled the pops chewing into his chest. He fell onto the floor of the copter, sliding precariously toward the open door.
The helicopter pitched forward in a dive. Adrienne advanced to the cockpit. She wouldn’t let him ditch the copter. She had places to go.
She skidded forward and pressed the gun barrel to his helmet. “Level off.”
He paused, then pulled up. Good man. Perhaps the pilot had more of a sense of self-preservation than Gabriel.
“Where to?” he shouted.
Where, indeed? Adrienne slid into the copilot’s seat. She had none of her usual tools of geomancy to guide her: no stones, no dowsing rods, no handfuls of earth to scatter.
No. She did have the earth. She could feel it singing in her bones. It was inside her. She listened to it. It grew and filled her with a sense of magnetic north. From this great height, she could see the blue spiderweb of ley lines crossing across the distant ground, could feel the energy of earth as never before. Unraveled threads of wrath and unshed tears rose in her.
She pointed to the horizon. “East. Take me east.”
Her quarry was there, gathered with the rest of Delphi’s Daughters. She could feel it, as surely as she could feel gravity or hate.
KNOWLEDGE WAS A LIVING GIFT, PASSING FROM ONE GENERATION to the next. It could be a boon or a curse. Tara wasn’t quite sure which it was that Cassie had inherited from her father.
Tara sat on the porch swing at Sophia’s house, looking out toward the yard into the darkness, one of Sophia’s sweaters wrapped around her shoulders. It smelled like sage and jasmine. Maggie stretched out at her feet. Oscar had emerged from Sophia’s breadbox to grace Tara with his presence, tucking himself under her arm. Cold chills rippled through her, though her brow was glossed with sweat. She’d eaten little of the sumptuous dinner Delphi’s Daughters had prepared. She was afraid to imagine how deep the radiation sickness went, and had slipped out into the darkness to allow the stillness to permeate her, to allow some equilibrium to sink in. Inside the house, a half dozen of Delphi’s Daughters bustled about. Someone was playing music, and by the laughter and creak of the floorboards, she guessed they were dancing. Polka, followed by the Electric Slide, from the sounds of it.
She remembered the apple trees in the yard from when she was a child, when she and her mother and Sophia would gather them in laundry baskets to make pies. She remembered her mother’s easy grace, her love, and the gift of knowledge she’d passed on to Tara. Tara’s mother had never treated her abilities with cartomancy as a curse. Strange that Tara had come to look upon it as such.
Tara looked at the tattered Tarot card she held in her hand. Strength. Her mother’s cards were gone. Her mother was gone. All she had left was the ability to honor her memory, by being of service.
Tara turned the card over in her hands, thinking of Harry. He’d saved her life, in many ways. She wished she could tell him how grateful she was to him for pulling her out of her shell, for breaking her exile and helping her to feel again. She frowned. Perhaps she and Harry were too different to make a relationship work, but she still owed him a debt.
The screen door slammed, and Cassie slipped out onto the porch.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Mind if I sit with you?”
Tara scooted over to give Cassie room on the swing. The girl vigorously rocked it back and forth with her sneaker, making Tara queasy.
“About this thing with the Pythia. . .” Cassie began.
Tara waited, laced her hands in her lap.
“I’m not sure what to do. Everything’s happened so fast, and I. . .” She leaned back and looked at the stars. “I don’t know.”
Tara followed her gaze to Cassiopeia rising on the horizon. Without her cards, Tara’s intuition was stubbornly silent. For an instant, she felt as if she were missing a limb, unable to accurately advise or see around corners. She was surprised at how easily she’d fallen into her old familiar patterns, and how much she mis
sed them.
“No matter what happens,” Cassie said sadly, “I’m gonna have to leave everything behind. . . school, my name. . . everything but Maggie.”
The military might still be looking for her, and Cassie would have to shed her old identity, whether or not she stayed with Delphi’s Daughters. Tara suspected one of the hardest parts of her grieving process would be losing her father’s name and taking on a new identity. But as long as she kept her father’s knowledge close to her heart, Tara was convinced the girl was stronger than even she knew.
“The most important thing,” Tara said slowly, “is to make sure that you’re safe. The rest are simply choices that can be altered later on.”
Cassie smirked. “You think the Pythia would let me change my mind? Join later? Or drop out of the Daughters of Delphi?”
Tara shrugged. “Why not? I did. And she hasn’t eaten me alive. Well, not yet.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Dragon Lady eats people.”
Tara snorted. “Dragon Lady. I like that.” Her expression sobered. “Look, I’ve got very little love for Delphi’s Daughters. But I do believe they can keep you safe. So. . . it’s your choice. Just tell the Pythia that you reserve the right to change your mind at any time. And keep my number handy. I’ll come get you, no matter where you are.”
Cassie smiled. “I believe you. Thanks.” Her eyes shone with reflected starlight. Tara guessed that if she looked deeply enough into her eyes, she might see galaxies unfold. “When did you join Delphi’s Daughters?”
“I was initiated when I was about seven. Yeah, that sounds about right. That was the year my mom made me the Wonder Woman birthday cake and the year I discovered comic books.”
“Your mom was in it, too?”
“Yes. You might say she was the Pythia’s favorite. Like you.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I’m not much of a joiner.” She thought about it. “That’s not exactly true. . . I wanted to save the world. And I didn’t think that I could do that within Delphi’s Daughters.”
“Wow. Delphi’s Daughters seem. . . to have so much power.”
Dark Oracle Page 23