by Helena Maeve
“Are you going to tell us what’s going on or not?” Neil asked and Eve could see him balling his hands into fists. So much for blocking the pain. He was red-faced with the effort to keep still, but unlike Felix who had been trashing and writhing on the floor in an attempt to buck their hold, he submitted more or less willingly. He didn’t fight Eve when she slid her fingers through his and gave him something more substantial to cling to than empty air.
“Ten years ago, you also came to me for answers,” the oracle started pensively.
“Yeah, and you lied. Feel free to skip the history lesson. We already know how it ends.” Neil’s outburst was no more and no less than what Eve herself was contemplating. She just hadn’t expected him to speak with so much vehemence. Their eyes met. “What?” Neil barked. “You want a retrospective of our— Aw, fuck!”
The oracle tutted. “Language, Mr Riccard.”
“You remember his name?” Eve asked, balking. “How can you—? It’s been ten years!”
“For you, perhaps. You and I last talked a mere three weeks ago, by my count.”
That had to be a lie. Eve snarled, feeling more than annoyance building in her gut. “I don’t believe you. You’re screwing with me again, just like you did when you told me about the Briars, just like—”
“What exactly do you think happened there, dear?”
Nothing you warned me about. “A lot of bad shit,” Eve measured her words. “The kind that someone like you should take as evidence of what I’m capable of.”
The oracle paused, glancing up at Eve with bleached, unseeing eyes. “And what is that?”
“You know. You read my future.”
“I read one future, just like I predicted one outcome if you followed your packmaster’s wishes and left the Riccards to raise their son to reach his full potential. Of course, they also paid handsomely, which was no small incentive to—”
Whatever else she might have said, the oracle’s words were drowned out by a rush of breath as her back met the wall. Eve held her up by the faded, unwashed fabric of her gown. “Enough cryptic bullshit. I want answers. Now.” Ten years was a long wait.
Dimly, she heard Neil say her name, his tone increasingly frantic. It shouldn’t have made her want to stop what she was doing. She had given up on following orders a long, long time ago.
She did it anyway, setting the oracle back onto her feet, where she remained standing, blinking wide, pale eyes at Eve as though—as though she could see her face.
“There are many paths, Eve Karvan, and I can only see the one you are most likely to take. That’s the one I predict, the one I tell you about. I don’t know where it leads… Sometimes there are divots in the road and men stumble. As for the Briars, I don’t know what happened there, but I wager neither do you.”
Eve snorted.
“Do you? Did you turn and slaughter your pack out of spite? Or is it more likely that something else killed all your fellow wolves?”
“Why them and not me?” There— That was the root of all guilt about that night. Not just the fear that it had been her teeth and claws that had ripped her pack to shreds, but the horror of having been spared a final test that no one else had survived. I’m a monster had become I am a traitor.
The oracle hitched up her bony shoulders. “Search your memory. I cannot read the past. Only the future. That is how I knew you would be coming here today. The omens were very clear…”
“And what happens next? A piece of moon rock buries us alive?”
“That,” the oracle said apologetically, “I do not know.”
“Then what use are you to me?” Eve growled.
It had been meant as a threat, but the oracle barely even flinched. She seemed to ponder the question for a moment, rocking back and forth on her heels like a child. “I can show you how to return home.”
Eve wanted to scream. Of course you’d offer that. The one thing Eve wanted above all else in exchange for the revenge she’d been nursing for almost half a decade.
One glance at Neil was enough to tell her which way he was leaning.
“Start talking,” she ground out. “And it better not be another one of your lies.”
Chapter Seven
Paris, the day after
They hit the surface sometime around midnight. The streets were quiet again and the skies had cleared. The same could not be said about the desolate ruins of homes and businesses that had stood unmolested for two hundred years. “If that’s not a statement to impermanence,” Eve mused, “I don’t know what is…”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you go all philosopher on me,” Neil drawled as he hobbled awkwardly beside her. He was smiling brightly, oblivious to the destruction around them thanks to the oracle’s happy pills.
Eve tightened her hold around his waist. They had bandaged the ankle, but what he needed most was to keep weight off it until it healed. Perhaps it would’ve been wiser to stay down below where the air was hot and humid, but Eve had heard rats, and the narrow mattress in the alcove wasn’t wide enough for three people. She had made the executive decision to bring Neil back to the surface, the oracle trailing behind them with her awkward, shuffling gait. Whenever Eve thought she might have fallen back, she turned up on Neil’s other side, unseeing eyes trained dead ahead.
Eve had worn the goggles on the way out of the station, which helped carve out a path toward the light without tripping overmuch. But she had tugged them off once she hit the surface, letting her pupils elongate and her feline side take over. It was easy to negotiate the darkness when you felt like you belonged in it, but none of her other forms made their natural habitat underground.
It should have been the case for oracles, too, and Eve planned on asking that as soon as she found a moment to approach the other woman when they could be spared Neil’s watchful tug upon her leash.
Opportunity arose as soon as they found a mostly undamaged gas station above which perched two identical flats. The owners had clearly left in a hurry, packing up their things and leaving cupboard doors to hang wide open. They hadn’t made the beds, either, but Eve couldn’t blame them. They were probably dead in some less fortunate part of the world. That was usually how these things went.
She helped Neil down to the mattress, exhausted by the journey and aching in ways that had everything and nothing to do with carrying half of his weight. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was cumbersome, especially when he was drugged out of his mind.
“Is this heaven?” he asked, falling backwards in the general direction of the headboard. Miraculously, he didn’t hit his head. Eve breathed a sigh of relief.
She smoothed the hair from his brow, feeling a flood of tenderness suffuse her. It was easy to shout at Neil—she knew he’d never turn away from her because of her temper—and he usually gave back as good as he got. Sometimes she forgot that he hadn’t asked for the burden of his ancestry any more than she had asked to be part of a pack. “Oh, honey… You don’t believe in heaven, remember?”
“I don’t?” Neil blinked up at her. “Oh.”
“Yeah… Try to sleep, okay?” She wanted nothing more than to lie down beside him and close her eyes. Maybe, if they were lucky, he’d get his strength back and in a couple of weeks they could attempt to open a rift of their own. Eve wasn’t willing to put any money on the date, never mind their chances of success.
She waited until Neil had closed his eyes to tiptoe out of the room and nudge the oracle’s door open. It gave way with a squeak of unoiled hinges.
“Come in,” she heard from within, the words soft and tremulous, just like they had been ten years before. There was profit in pretending to be low in the food chain.
Eve pushed open the door. “We need to talk.”
“So I gathered,” the oracle said. She was sitting on a sunken couch, her knees bent like twigs about to break and her bare feet propped on a cherry wood coffee table. Everything else in the apartment looked flat pack or flea market, but that coffee table had the l
ook of an antique. In the world that was, it might have carried sentimental value, for all that Eve knew about such things.
A window was open and the quiet of the city drifted in, unnatural and eerie, enough to make the hairs on her arms stand to attention.
“It’s a hare-brained scheme you’re proposing, you know that? I’d be skeptical even if I trusted you. As it stands—”
“I’m not surprised,” the oracle sighed. “You always were reluctant to believe. You know, I think if you weren’t born a shifter, you never would’ve come round to believe Neil’s abilities were more than parlor tricks.”
That was a wild exaggeration and a baseless assumption. Eve shrugged. So what if she was dubious about answers given far too easily? People lied. She had been the recipient of enough tall tales to appreciate the value of being a little more circumspect. “You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe that you wound up here by accident, conveniently able to tell us what we need to do to leave Oz. I can’t believe you’re as ignorant about what’s going on as you’d like to have us believe.”
The oracle smiled. “And you don’t believe that the man you saw before you woke up on a Parisian boulevard is the same man sleeping off a double dose of Vicodin, yes?”
It didn’t come as a surprise that she knew. Eve had expected that. “The rifts can be controlled.”
“They can,” the oracle agreed with that same infuriating little smile. “They are portals. Sometimes one opens by accident because the locks don’t hold, but mostly they are someone’s creation—willing or not.”
Neil had said that her grief could attract all kinds of trouble. He had offered her the amulet as protection. Eve wondered if he hadn’t spared her the more damning version of that appraisal. He could occasionally be tactful, and if memory served, she had just accused him of messing with her mind when he suggested the talisman.
It was a very Riccard way of dealing with adversity—why bother facing it head-on, when there were ways to get results without troubling fragile minds with the reality of what was happening to them?
“When we got here,” Eve recalled, “we skipped almost two weeks into the future… That wasn’t an accident, was it? Did that man—the one I saw in St. Louis, before we went through—did he send us here?” Why? Eve wanted to ask. What was there for them to do here? The whole city had packed up its bags and left. It was pure chance that the asteroid shower hadn’t killed them yesterday in the open road—unless, of course, that had been the plan all along. “Was he trying to get rid of us?”
“Of one of you, perhaps, but not both.” The oracle’s smile dipped at the corners. She seemed, for a moment, almost human. “He’s been looking for you for a long time. Every time he finds you, you die.”
Eve went still, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention. She had summoned her feline side before and the instinct to find a high perch so she would be safe from other predators was almost painfully hard to beat back. “He kills me?”
“No,” the oracle said. “No more than you killed your pack.”
That was a sufficiently ambiguous answer to draw a hiss out of Eve. “What did I tell you about giving me cryptic bullshit?”
“I don’t recall, but it sounded very unpleasant. My dear… You’re not hearing me. I’ve told you before, I only see possible futures and I only know what I’ve been told. If you want to know what’s in the cards for you, you’ll have to take your destiny into your own hands.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Eve scoffed. She still had her backpack with the five grand, like the money still mattered now, when the danger had passed. There was no plane or boat that could take her home. It would be months before the world found some semblance of order again—if it ever did.
“There are forests in Europe,” the oracle said, shrugging. “Have you not wondered why you’re so attached to the Rockies?”
“I went there with my pack.”
“Of course you did, but when?”
Eve searched her memory. She was bad with dates, always had been, but when she thought back to that hiking trip, she remembered herself as a young woman. Early twenties? No, earlier. She remembered being in a bad mood until they had got to Denver and she saw the majesty of the crags, scented the unpolluted air. Everything else had vanished after that—she’d shifted not into wolf or jungle cat, but into a hawk. It had been her first time as a bird and with every beat of her wings, the rest of her pack had seemed to grow smaller and smaller, until they disappeared completely beneath the twisted branches of junipers, pines and oak trees.
She could feel them like a second heart in her ribcage, always pulsing a little louder than her own. And, just as quickly, she could hear nothing at all. The rush of blood in her ears became the howling currents, warm and cold, allowing her to soar over the water and the jagged peaks packed tight with fir and spruce.
Something shiny caught her eye, a tin roof in a sea of emerald. She tipped her wings just so, on instinct, and swooped down. The glint of metal grew and grew, widening as she approached it from above. She spied people moving between gray edifices, then a chain-link fence separating them from the rest of the wood. She sighted security cameras.
A sign that read ‘Briars Examination and Research Facility. Restricted Access’.
A sparrow flew in through the open window, chirping madly before dashing right back out into the silent night. Its presence jolted Eve free of the memory as the room resolved around her again, sad and abandoned, not unlike the rest of the city. “How— How did you do that?”
“I didn’t do anything,” said the oracle, smiling one of her small, enigmatic smiles. “What did you see?”
“The Briars.” How had she forgotten that the facility was in the Rockies? Why had she forgotten? Eve paced the length of the room. It wasn’t much. A handful of strides and she was faced with a wall, penned in. Trapped. “I saw the Briars…”
“Did you see your pack?” the oracle pressed. She seemed animated all of a sudden, interest writ in vivid streaks across her pale, sickly face.
Eve shook her head. It was only half of a lie. She’d been able to feel them—that all-encompassing warmth of home and hearth, the drift of minds tethered together in far more intimate connection than human minds ever could be.
A summoning was nothing compared to the tug of belonging she’d felt moments ago. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed them since she’d escaped. Hadn’t allowed herself to feel the emptiness that lingered. “Keep Neil safe,” she gritted out, “or I swear—”
“Yes, yes. You’ll pull my insides out with your claws,” the oracle said, waving a careless hand. “Why not keep him safe yourself?”
Rather than answer, Eve let the atoms in her body rearrange, shift past the limits of what the air around them seemed fit to accommodate. Wings sprouted where human arms had been a minute before, her feet shortening, losing their fleshy, useless toes to sharp claws. She leaped into the air before her clothes could hit the ground.
The night sky welcomed her.
* * * *
Dawn was creeping over the edge of horizon as Eve shifted out of her animal form, shedding her feathered cloak for human skin pebbled with goose bumps. She felt pleasantly exhausted, like she always did when she became the Other, and she tumbled into bed without a second thought. Sleep found her quickly—for once, it was utterly dreamless and undisturbed by alarm clock or neighbors battling it out on the other side of a paper-thin wall.
She woke to Neil’s silhouette standing sentinel by her window.
“Hey…”
He turned at the sound of her croaky greeting, a smile tilting up the corners of his full lips. “Hi.” He was still hobbled by the swelling around his ankle, but he made his way to the bed well enough, sitting down when Eve shifted to make room. “I didn’t hear you come in last night.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” Eve said, grinning with half a mouth. She still felt pleasantly sluggish, sleep taking too
long to fade from her usually hyper-alert senses. It was amazing what letting the trappings of her human form fall away could do for her peace of mind.
“I was worried,” Neil murmured.
Eve scoffed and said, “You were asleep.” She rolled over onto her back without bothering to take the bed sheet with her. Bad enough that she’d had to sleep in some stranger’s bed, surrounded by foreign scent. She saw no reason for false modesty. Neil had seen her naked more than any other man in her life.
She watched him scowl, his lips pressing into a taut line. “I woke up and the bed was empty. I thought you’d left.” Again.
As tempting as it was to needle him for his lack of faith—justified though it was—Eve hooked a hand around his shoulder instead and pulled him down to her. “Let me make it up to you,” she entreated.
Neil did not protest. He shed his clothes quickly, looking almost surprised to discover that he was wearing any. Eve laughed when he got tangled in his undershirt, sitting up to help free him. It was all skin on skin after that. It was everything and nothing like what they’d done the day before in a desperate attempt to block the sound of falling debris with their moans.
Eve kissed her way down his body, raking human-short nails over beloved skin as if to mark Neil for all to see. She had bitten him once, hard enough to leave a bruise on his neck. His family had been horrified and had forbidden Neil from ever seeing her again. If only they knew… Eve flicked her tongue over his nipples, reveling in the noises she could draw from him with so very little effort.
She didn’t hesitate to mouth at the sharp ridges of his ribcage, much less dip her tongue into his belly button. She knew how to make him squirm and shiver, how to draw out his pleasure all without touching his cock. It wasn’t a matter of denying Neil—he had willpower enough for two and wouldn’t beg if he could help it—but of tempering her need for him. Left to her own devices, Eve would have straddled his thighs already and ground down until she found her pleasure. She didn’t want to rush.