The Book of Destiny
The Last Oracle, Book Nine
Melissa McShane
Copyright © 2020 by Melissa McShane
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Alexandra Brandt www.alexandrajbrandt.com
Cover credits:
Book background © Vladimir Sotnichenko | Dreamstime.com
Sun image © Amlyd | Dreamstime.com
Book icon © Ylivdesign | Dreamstime.com
This book,
and the Last Oracle series,
are dedicated to Hallie O’Donovan, wonderful friend
and Abernathy’s first fan
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Melissa McShane
1
I pushed open the door to Abernathy’s office with more effort than usual. It wasn’t a heavy door, but today it felt like something was pushing back against me. I checked to see if there was anything behind it, but saw nothing but a box half-full of Abernathy’s catalogues, minor divination tools for answering simple questions like “Where should I eat lunch?” or “Where did I leave my keys?” The box was about five feet away from the door, not in a position to block it. I shut the door behind me and deposited my purse on the melamine desk, next to the computer monitor.
Silas Abernathy’s picture caught my eye, and I took a moment to look him over, captured frozen for eternity in his three-piece suit and hat. He had his hands tucked into his pockets and his smile was carefree, not the smile of someone who knew what the future held. Silas had been the first custodian of Abernathy’s ever to abdicate his position in favor of becoming a magus, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. I’d wondered, once I knew Silas’s full story, why later custodians had kept his picture on the wall if so many people believed he was a traitor to his calling. Sure, it hid the wall safe, but any large framed image could do that. But Silas had brought the store from London to Portland, a huge undertaking, and maybe those other custodians honored that.
I sighed. “I wish I had your advice,” I told Silas. “You’d understand, though I don’t know if you ever knew the oracle was a living creature. I don’t know if I’m even doing the right thing.”
I polished a smear off the picture glass and straightened the frame. The mail hadn’t come yet, or there would be a neat stack of envelopes on the desk, mail-in auguries for me to deal with. When had my job become something I had to “deal with” rather than a joy? That was a stupid question. I knew exactly when that change had occurred: five days shy of four months ago, when I’d walked into the oracle with a burning need for an answer and come out with knowledge I’d never wanted.
I wished Judy was downstairs already so I could talk to her about ordinary things. Usually if she wasn’t in the store before me, it was because Mike Conti had spent the night. I didn’t resent her love life…well, I resented a little that she wasn’t around right now to distract me. And that was foolish and selfish thinking.
I walked through the stacks, straightening books without reading the titles. The room was the perfect temperature, the air smelled of roses, but I felt itchy, like I needed to shed my skin. I checked my watch: 9:17. Too early to open the doors, and when I got to the front of the store there wasn’t anyone waiting outside, anyway. I perched on the wobbly metal stool behind the counter and let my eyes go unfocused so I could stare at my reflection in the glass top. I looked normal, just the way I had when I’d left home this morning. I didn’t feel normal. I felt haggard, stretched thin, and weary as if I hadn’t been getting enough sleep. But I knew that wasn’t the problem.
I saw the mail carrier coming down the sun-drenched street and hopped down to open the door. He gave me a cheery smile along with a bundle of mail. “Beautiful day,” he said.
“I guess,” I replied, returning his smile. He gave me a funny look and proceeded down the street. My smile must have looked strange. It had felt strange and out of place. I really needed to work on smiling like a normal person.
I sorted the augury requests from the bills and tore open the first. What school should I attend? That was a nice question. A positive, forward-looking question. Something the oracle shouldn’t have any trouble with. I folded the paper back on itself and regarded the bookcases. They ignored me. Well, that made sense; they were made of wood and not alive. Not like the entity they contained, or hosted, or…I was stalling. I let out a deep breath and walked into the timeless silence of the oracle.
The oracle’s attention was elsewhere today, something that relieved my mind. I walked the narrow aisles between the laden shelves, looking for the blue glow of a live augury. Until recently, I would have talked to the oracle as I searched, but now I felt like a sneak thief, hoping to get in and out with my treasure without drawing the attention of the dragon guarding it.
No augury presented itself. I knew the oracle hadn’t rejected the request, because the light within wasn’t red-tinged, but nowhere did it say the oracle was obligated to make it easy on me. And it had become increasingly slow to respond over the last almost four months. I didn’t know why, and asking hadn’t produced an answer, either in the form of a book or of the oracle communicating through my thoughts. Besides, I didn’t want to talk to the oracle, and possibly open up a line of conversation that would end badly.
I circled the entire oracle, checking all the aisles, and saw no spark of blue light anywhere. Time for a more direct approach. I opened the paper and read the question aloud. “Do you have an answer?” I added.
I felt the oracle turn its attention on me and braced myself for it to use my mind as its voice. But it didn’t do anything but regard me. Its attention felt like a feather-filled duvet, light and fluffy at first, but slowly and inexorably growing weightier as the minutes passed. I held my tongue. I was not going to be drawn into conversation.
Finally, off to the left, a familiar blue glow grew until it made the bookcase it was behind look like it had a sun’s corona. “Thank you,” I said, and headed in that direction. The oracle went back to whatever it had been doing. I suppressed a sigh of relief and picked up the book, which had a picture of a white pig next to the title Moo. Weird, but that described half the books the oracle produced.
I was almost back to the store’s front when I thought, Helena.
I cringed. I wasn’t in the habit of thinking my own name, but I’d have recognized the oracle’s “voice” anyway. “Yes?” I said,
hoping I sounded polite and not irritated and guilty.
Something comes. Be ready.
Great. Another cryptic warning. Because I needed more of those. “What’s coming?”
Something comes. An end. I will end.
I ground my teeth and hurried out of the oracle, clutching the book to my chest like armor. So far, the oracle had never spoken to me, or through me, when I wasn’t in its unique space, but I had a feeling that wasn’t because it couldn’t. I hoped it wouldn’t feel compelled to tell me any more, to remind me that it had seen its own death.
That it had seen mine as well.
I set the augury on the counter and stuck the request between its pages. Then I picked up the next envelope. But I didn’t open it. I stood at the counter clutching the white envelope and stared sightlessly through the plate glass window with ABERNATHY’S painted on it in reverse. The oracle had told me that it, and I, would die, and it had repeated that warning several times a week for the past almost four months. No elaboration on the theme, no details about how or when it would happen. Just those thoughts reverberating through my head: I will end. Helena will end. And I didn’t know what to do.
I couldn’t even tell anyone. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. I always told my husband, Malcolm, everything, and he had suggested I tell Lucia Pontarelli, custodian of the Gunther Node and head of magical law enforcement for the Pacific Northwest. It had been Lucia who’d forbidden me to tell anyone else until I understood the oracle’s warning. “If it gets out that the oracle thinks it’s going to die, it would be demoralizing as hell,” she’d said. “Keep me informed, but don’t spread the word.” So I’d kept quiet, much as I’d wanted to tell my best friends Judy and Viv. But Lucia was right; people would freak out if they thought the oracle was going away. It was one of the Wardens’ best weapons against the creatures trying to destroy our world.
I tore open the next envelope with enough force that the paper inside tore too. Cursing myself, I unfolded it carefully so as not to damage it further. Where should my team hunt for the next month? There’d been a lot more augury requests along this line lately, ever since the Wardens had destroyed the traitorous Mercy and struck a powerful blow against the invaders. Malcolm said the victory in Montana had given everyone fresh hope. I tried not to think about Montana and what had come of it. It had been a victory, sure, but it had come at a high personal cost.
Footsteps sounded, echoing through the room, and soon Judy emerged from the stacks. She was dressed in a vividly colored smock and her favorite Mary Janes and looked fresh and alert in a way that made me feel like the Wolfman from a ’50s B movie. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Want me to open the rest of those?” She brandished the letter opener in the direction of the envelopes.
“Sure,” I said, handing them over. “And you’re not late. I’m early.”
“Still, I live just upstairs. It’s not like it’s a long commute.” Judy slit open the next envelope and set it aside. “Are you all right? You look a little down.”
“Just tired.” I had to be careful not to use the “tired” response too often with Judy or Viv. They’d eventually figure out that something was wrong, and then I’d have to actively lie. I hurried off into the oracle, clutching my torn paper.
To my surprise, the light had gone from a peaceful, calming bluish tint to blood red. “No augury?” I said, feeling relief followed by anxiety. “Are you sure? This could be an important one, directing a team’s efforts, I mean.”
Two aisles over, a blue star flashed into being. The ambient light didn’t change. “I don’t understand,” I said, making my way over to the augury. “There’s an augury, but you’re giving me the ‘no augury’ warning?”
The augury glowed brightly on a lower shelf. I bent to remove it and examined it closely, turning it front to back and over again. It looked like a fantasy novel, an ordinary mass market paperback titled Old Tin Sorrows. “Huh,” I said, and opened the front cover.
On the title page, in silver ink, was written Helena Campbell, No Charge.
My whole body went numb for a few seconds, during which I gripped the augury tightly to keep it from falling, and my heart lurched painfully once before falling back into its normal rhythm, though faster than before. “I see. No augury for this team, just one for me.”
I looked the book over again. A fantasy, yes, but a murder-mystery fantasy in which the killer was taking out the members of a household one by one and turning them into zombies or something. I couldn’t see any way in which it was relevant to me. I hoped it had some sideways meaning, and that the oracle wasn’t predicting painful deaths for my friends and family. “Thanks, I guess,” I said, and headed for the exit.
Helena. Something comes.
I stopped. “I know that! You told me already! Stop reminding me unless you’re going to be more specific. It’s driving me crazy!”
The oracle’s attention hovered on me, a feeling like having a giant thumb press me like a thumbtack into a wall. Finally, I thought, They strike. Two are gone. Four remain.
“That’s an improvement. Two of what? Four of what?” I was being testy, but I didn’t care.
We remain. Four remain. The guardians fall.
The oracle’s attention drifted away, just as if it didn’t care about what it had told me. Or maybe it had more faith in my ability to figure things out than I did. I closed my eyes and practiced breathing calmly, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I’d done a lot of calming breathing over the last four months.
When I emerged from the stacks, Judy was gone. I set the torn augury request on the counter and went to the office, where I found her intently staring at the computer screen and typing furiously. “Anything wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The oracle gave me an augury.” I wasn’t sure if I should mention the warning. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with its premonition that it would end, but if I was wrong about that, telling Judy would open up all kinds of questions I didn’t want to answer.
Judy looked up, her hands pausing. “Did you have a question?”
“Not really. That’s what’s strange.” I showed her the paperback.
She turned it over, read the cover copy, and handed it back. “Weird,” she said. “Murders, the undead…you’ll have to study it, because nothing’s coming to mind. Unless there’s another serial killer running around.”
“That one belonged to the Mercy. Those guys don’t exist anymore.” I shoved the book into my capacious purse. “And I don’t think the undead are a thing.”
Judy went back to typing. “Not that I’m aware. Girls’ night tomorrow? Tonight Mike and I are having dinner with my father.”
I whistled. “That’s brave.”
“They have to learn to get along eventually. Mike might be a permanent part of my life now. And if he can be friendly to my father, and vice versa, maybe that means good things for all of magery.”
“That’s uncharacteristically optimistic of you.” Mike was an Ambrosite, and Judy’s father William Rasmussen was a Nicollien—two factions the Wardens had been divided into for the last seventy-odd years. In the time I’d been custodian of Abernathy’s, I’d seen the factions’ animosity grow from mutual dislike to full-on hatred, and I doubted Judy’s hope was reasonable. Even if the Nicolliens stopped using familiars—the sticking point on which the factions’ disagreement was based—both sides were so used to seeing each other as the enemy I wasn’t sure anything would change.
“They can talk to each other for five minutes at a time without shouting,” Judy said, “and if they know what’s good for them, they’ll manage to be civil for the length of dinner.”
Judy’s fierce scowl amused me enough that I was able to smile naturally. It had been a long time since I’d done that. “I hope it works out.”
Back in the front of the store, I did two more mail-in auguries before I had to open the doors to the waiting Nicolliens. The oracle ignored me both times. I wished I didn’t have
the tangle of emotions that assailed me every time I entered the oracle: fear of what it might say, guilt and sorrow over losing the closeness with the oracle I’d come to take for granted, anger that it wouldn’t just tell me what it meant.
I remembered how it had felt when the oracle had been under the influence of an illusion intended to destroy it, how devastating it had been to watch it effectively descend into madness. This was worse, because the oracle was in its right mind as far as I could tell, and that meant the problem might be me. If I was the weakness, and something happened to the oracle because I failed it…I didn’t complete that thought.
I opened the door and held it for the first Nicolliens. A breath of warm summer air entered with them, smelling of sunshine and exhaust and hot popcorn from the theater next door. “Welcome to Abernathy’s,” I said. I managed another very realistic smile. “Please form—”
“Helena,” someone called out, and Harry Keller pushed past the Nicolliens filing in, causing a young man to protest. Harry ignored him. He no longer stood as tall as he once had, thanks to an attack that had drained his magic and left him no longer a magus, but his voice was as firm as ever and his hand on his cane was steady. His wife, Harriet, followed in his wake, plump where he was thin. She looked like a stereotypical small-town librarian, down to the glasses perched on her nose, but she’d fought in the Long War years before I was born, and I knew better than to underestimate her.
Now she took my hands in hers and said, “We came as soon as we heard the news. Are you all right, dear?”
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