Cassie shivered in the pond so hard water droplets were shaken off her laurel wreath. Tara was thankful that her own initiation had taken place in July, when the spring had been warm as bathwater.
“We mourn the passing of our loyal sisters from our sight, and we ask Apollo to bless their memories.”
A voice from above rattled down, thin and reedy. “So easily out of your sight and out of your mind. Is that right, Pythia?”
Tara reached for her gun. Footsteps creaked in the leaves above the crevasse. This place was too much of a natural trap, with blind sides and echoes, and she couldn’t tell where they originated from. She scanned the ridge of the landscape over the sight of her gun, skimming that high horizon for any sign of movement.
“Everybody get down,” she shouted.
Delphi’s Daughters scattered, pressing themselves to the walls of the cave. Cassie sucked in a deep breath and ducked under the surface of the water. That was a temporary hiding place; she was far too open. Maggie stood at the mouth of the spring and barked. The Pythia climbed out of her contraption of a chair and drew herself up her full five feet in height.
“Adrienne,” the Pythia bellowed. Tara was amazed that such a mighty voice could come from such a tiny woman. “You’ve dishonored yourself. Come here and face judgment.”
Bitter, rusty laughter squeaked overhead. “I’ve dishonored myself? You’ve dishonored the lineage by your own weakness. You’ve squandered your power on the ungrateful. And the successor you’ve chosen? A girl with no power of her own? Unimaginable.”
“I do not answer to you,” the Pythia shouted.
“The Daughters of Delphi are dying, old woman. And I am happy to help consign you to history.”
A hail of bullets cracked into the gorge. They split the surface of the water and spattered shards of sand from the stone. Tara returned fire blindly, unable to see, much less hit anything over the outcropping of rock. She glanced back at the spring in her peripheral vision. She didn’t see Cassie. Maggie plunged into the water after the girl. The Pythia had pressed herself against a wall, hands balled into fists. Her tripod chair was shattered by the bullets, lying like a broken insect on the stone. One of Delphi’s Daughters lay, bleeding and twitching, on the ground.
“Haul your ass down here and face me, Adrienne,” Tara shouted.
The footsteps echoed overhead, receded. A figure appeared at the mouth of the gorge, and Tara froze, momentarily stunned at the sight of her.
Stringy blonde hair brushed the shoulders of a too-baggy military flight suit. She held an MP-5 in her hands, even as some part of Tara’s brain tried to figure out how many shots she had left in the clip. Cold gray eyes glared with searing malevolence.
But that was all that remained of Adrienne. Her pale skin had warped like glass under too much heat. It sparkled like quartz at her temple and on her warped lips, but blackened to the color of rich prairie soil on her chin and throat. A vein the color of silver pulsed behind the zipper at her neck. She looked like a rough-hewn diamond, just pulled from the ground, uncut and without polish. She limped toward Tara, and Tara could see that her foot was pigeon-toed in her boot. She couldn’t imagine what else was ruined beneath that flight suit.
“What the hell happened to you?” Tara breathed.
Adrienne tipped her head to one side. “Gabriel said I got too much dark matter. Particles of the earth fused with me.”
“You survived what happened to Magnusson.”
“Adrienne.” The Pythia moved forward. Her almond eyes were widened in horror. “Come back to us. We will take care of you, get you the help you need.”
“Help?” Adrienne spat. “You’ll take care of me like you took care of me as a child? You’ll shuttle me from place to place, never having a true home?”
“We were training you,” the Pythia said. “I had high hopes that—”
“Not high enough to give me the title of Pythia, no matter how hard I worked.” Tara could see tears glittering in those inhuman eyes as she paced forward, onto the Pythia’s dais.
The Pythia met her eyes. “I had hoped that for you, yes. You were a brilliant student. But there was too much coldness in you.”
Behind them, the surface of the water broke open. Cassie’s head burst through the surface to gulp a lungful of air. Adrienne spun to shoot, presenting her back to Tara.
Tara lunged forward and opened fire. The bullets struck Adrienne in the throat and below the ribs. Adrienne pulled off two shots that shattered the surface of the water before she fell, growling, at the edge of the rock.
Maggie paddled, whining, in the crystal-clear water. Tara dove in behind her. The shock of the cold water against her chest was like a slap in the face, driving the breath from her lungs. She grabbed for the arms of the pale figure suspended beneath the water and hauled Cassie to the surface. The Pythia, looking like a drowned rose in her soaked robes, helped her drag the girl out of the water.
A gunshot echoed through the tiny gorge.
Tara turned to see Adrienne aiming at her with the MP-5. Tara instinctively shielded Cassie and the Pythia with her body. She tensed, anticipating a bullet tearing into her.
Another gunshot echoed, and she flinched. But the gunshot wasn’t from Adrienne’s hands, and it didn’t strike Tara.
It came from above, and struck Adrienne in the eye, the last human part of her. Red blossomed on Adrienne’s cheek, and she fell on her back to the rock. The MP-5 clattered away into the water.
Tara looked up at the ridgeline. Harry stood on a rock outcropping, gun in hand.
He’d come back.
“She’s not breathing,” the Pythia shouted. Cassie’s head lolled limply on the Pythia’s shoulder, and she’d turned blue.
Tara shoved the Pythia out of the way. She performed the Heimlich maneuver on Cassie. A trickle of water emanated from her mouth.
“C’mon.” She jammed her doubled fist into Cassie’s diaphragm again. This time, water gushed from her mouth as if poured from a pitcher.
Cassie coughed and sputtered. She leaned over and vomited up water.
“Are you hurt?” Tara demanded, shoving her wet hair back from her face. She could see no sign of blood on the girl’s body, quaking from the cold.
She shook her head but couldn’t form any words under the force of her teeth chattering. The Pythia wrapped her cloak around her, and one of Delphi’s Daughters retrieved the girl’s toga to wrap around her shoulders.
Tara climbed back to the flat rock for Adrienne, but she had disappeared. A smear of blood extended from where she’d been shot to the dark crevasse behind the spring. She’d gone to ground. The darkness below was thick, black as the Gardener’s graves.
But Tara felt no residue of panic when she lowered herself into the space between the rocks. She landed in cold water splashing up to her knees. There wasn’t enough room to stand upright, and Tara hunched over. Water dripped from the ceiling, and the enclosed space smelled like iron. Light poured in a jagged shaft from the fissure above, enough to distinguish a human shape, curled into the fetal position in the farthest, darkest part of the tiny cave.
“Adrienne?”
She sloshed forward and warily touched the woman’s shoulder. There was no movement, no rise and fall of her chest. Tara couldn’t be sure, but in the dim light, it seemed a smile played across Adrienne’s swollen lips. Adrienne had chosen a familiar grave. The geomancer had gone back to earth.
And the close earth held no fear for Tara, now. She took a moment to marvel at that, at the sharp contrast between dark and light in this place, at the sound of water and the breath rattling in her throat. Her fingers brushed the wall of the tiny pocket cave. It felt safe, womblike. She knew then that her ordeal at the hands of the Gardener had been cleared from her psyche; she had no lingering fear.
“You all right down there?” Harry’s head and shoulders were outlined at the opening of the cave.
“Yes.” She grinned up at him. “What brought you back?”
She looked up at him quizzically.
He shook his head. “Long story. I’ll tell you later.”
He extended his arm to pull her out, and she reached up to take it.
SITTING IN SOPHIA’S PORCH SWING, TARA LEANED BACK TO stare into the starry sky. Her cards lay in her hands, and she shuffled them over and over without drawing one. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know the future, what lay ahead. There was too much to contemplate: Cassie’s initiation, the Pythia’s intentions, whether Harry would stay.
And Tara had to decide where she wanted to go next. Being thrust out into the world like this. . . It had felt good to break exile. To be useful again. The last few days, she’d been contemplating what it would mean to go back into practice, if the world of profiling was necessarily closed to her.
Unlike so many of the others, she had options and a mutable future. One of Delphi’s Daughters was killed in the firefight. She had no surviving blood family, and the Pythia was having her buried nearby. Delphi’s Daughters had moved a large stone over Adrienne’s rocky grave, and showed no interest in retrieving the body.
Even Harry showed no inclination to do anything other than leave the body there. DOJ had summoned him back to the New Mexico field office to file a mountain of reports, and she’d reluctantly let him go. She knew she’d see him again, but the bed in the upstairs bedroom felt much too large without him.
But there was still unfinished business to attend to.
A match flared in the darkness, as the Pythia walked through the screen door, patched with duct tape. Tara watched her, waited.
The Pythia didn’t speak. She stood beside Tara, dragging on her cigarette.
Tara was first to break the silence. “You knew this would happen. You knew that Adrienne would come back, and that Harry and I would be forced to kill her.”
The Pythia tapped ash from her cigarette. “You know as well as I do that seeing the future only shows possibilities.”
“You grew that monster in your own backyard. Here.” And Tara feared for what that meant for Cassie. Under the watchful eye of the Pythia, would she grow into a monster, like Adrienne? Or would she become a hollow shell, like Tara?
The Pythia seemed very old to Tara, as the tiny ember outlined the sagging skin under her chin, the kohl smeared under her eye. “No matter into what fire I looked, I saw that Adrienne would grow into a powerful oracle. You have no idea how much I wanted her to follow in my footsteps.” She shook her head. “No idea. I felt her turning away, moving into the darkness, and I was powerless to stop it. We all were.”
Tara glared at her. She wasn’t buying it.
“What about Cassie? What are you going to do to make sure she doesn’t follow in Adrienne’s footsteps?”
The Pythia puffed out a ring of smoke. “Cassie will be a wonderful Pythia. Someday, she will turn that title over to your daughter.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Tara growled. “I can’t have children. The Gardener saw to that.”
The Pythia snorted. “You’re not the type of woman who believes what she’s told.”
Tara reviewed her cryptic conversations with the Pythia. “You said I would be the one to bring you the new Pythia.”
“And you will.”
The Pythia faded back into the house, leaving Tara alone in darkness. She considered what the Pythia had told her. The future was about possibilities. Perhaps the Pythia had been right, and some new ones had been opened to her.
Her emotions reeled. She had taken a long time to forgive her mother for dying, and to stop blaming Sophia. It would take even longer to forgive the Pythia. If that ever happened.
But she now had good reason to forgive, to stop fighting destiny.
Dark Oracle Page 26