He raised his eyebrows, but flipped the notebook over and read aloud:
Held at gunpoint four times
Threatened with knife once
Beaten nearly to death
Shot at several times, injured once
“That was me,” he said. “Helena—”
“I forgave you. Just keep reading.”
He cleared his throat and went on:
Kidnapped twice
Attacked by invaders multiple times, bitten three times
Witnessed seven murders
Nearly died from becoming the oracle twice
Nearly died from being trapped in a burning building
Serious car accident
Saw two invaders disguised as women shot and killed
Killed Rafael Santiago
When he got to the end of the list and handed the notebook back to me, I said, “I didn’t include the oracle telling me we were going to die, because that’s still a secret. And I didn’t include all the little things, like…oh, knowing that Nyla committed suicide rather than face justice, and Kevin dying so the intelligent invader could get close to me. But that’s still a lot.”
“I have always said you’re the strongest woman I know,” Malcolm said. “I didn’t realize until now how true that was.” He took my hand and helped me sit up so he could hold me. “Love, you have every right to be changed by these experiences. And I’ve seen that change. Do you want to know how I think it’s affected you?”
“Made me a dripping wreck who can’t forget the sound of screaming?”
He held me closer. “It’s made you someone who can’t bear to sit by and watch evil destroy others. Almost every one of those things happened to you because you couldn’t not take action. And yes, that means you have some terrible memories. But there are people who are alive now who wouldn’t be if you’d kept yourself safe. You chose this path, and I believe it was the right one. And in time, you’ll come to terms with your history. Until that happens, and long afterward, I will be by your side, feeling unspeakable awe that someone like you chose to link her life to mine.”
I gaped at him. “That’s…amazing. How do you always know what to say?”
Malcolm smiled. “I learned it from you, love.” He kissed me, a light touch that gradually deepened until I was breathless. I put my arms around him and reveled in his kiss. He was right, I could endure this, because the alternative—hiding from the monsters—would turn me into someone I’d hate.
“Do you want—” Malcolm murmured.
“I’ll always want,” I said, and tossed the notebook across the room.
10
I woke Monday morning to a sense of nameless dread. It took me several seconds to remember I was going back to work today and that was the source of my dread. I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, trying to think positive thoughts. The store was protected against invaders, even the intelligent ones. I had an important role to play in the Long War. And maybe the oracle would give up on reminding me of its, and my, upcoming end. I’d never realized how much I’d come to look forward to communicating with my strange friend until those communications had gone sour.
Malcolm had made breakfast: chocolate chip pancakes and sausages, both of which I drenched in maple syrup. “I will never understand some of your eating choices,” he said, watching me fork up a dripping bite of sausage.
“This is delicious. It’s salty and meaty and sweet all at the same time.”
He shook his head in mock despair and ate his own sausage, totally free of syrup. “I can drive you to work today, if you want,” he said. “I have to give the final approval to the new alarm system.”
“That would be nice.” I took another gooey, delicious bite. “Did I tell you Viv is working for Mr. Wallach now?”
“No, you didn’t. That sounds…actually, it sounds like a recipe for disaster. They have the kind of personalities that would reinforce each other’s most adventurous qualities.”
“I’m sure it will be fine. Viv’s not stupid, and Mr. Wallach only looks like he’s reckless.”
Malcolm nodded. “And for all we know, this partnership will result in amazing discoveries.”
I scraped up the last of my syrup and sucked it off my fork. “That’s a very positive attitude. I’m collecting those today. It’s way too easy to fall into despair, what with everything that’s happened, so I’m choosing to look on the bright side.”
Malcolm stood and held out his hand for my empty plate. “I’m glad to hear it.”
Judy was in the office opening the mail when we came in. “I want to know what the front door really looks like,” she told me.
“Um…didn’t you look at it already?”
“Yes, but the letter with the instructions says they put an illusion on it to make it look normal. You can see through illusions, and I’m curious as to what was so extreme they had to cover it up.”
Malcolm had already left the office, heading toward the store front. Curious myself, I followed him. The store felt bright and new today, as if the oracle had needed a break, too. Even the deeply shadowed aisles between the bookcases seemed less dark, and the air had the fresh linen scent of line-dried laundry. My resolve to be optimistic increased.
I came through the last bookcases and stopped, stunned. Malcolm stood next to the door, feeling along its surface with his face nearly pressed against it. “What do you see?” he asked.
Where the old wooden door with a glass center had been stood a magnificent piece of what looked like leaded crystal, beveled and faceted to collect sunlight and turn it into fractured rainbows. It was impossible to see clearly through it; the world beyond appeared as colored angular lines, with the moving ones from cars and people passing looking like ripples in a pond. It looked more like a magic mirror than a door. If it had come to life and told me I was the fairest of them all, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“It’s amazing,” I said. I walked forward in a daze, blinking away the brightness. “It looks like solid crystal.”
“That’s how it feels, too,” Malcolm said, stepping away from the door. “And sounds, if you knock on it. I’ll get someone over here to adjust the illusion. It ought to cover all five senses, but although it smells like wood, it feels slick like crystal.”
He put his hands on his hips and surveyed it. “The rest of the magic is active. It will now kill an invader outright if it touches the door, and it still operates as before to prevent an invader in a human body from entering. But it’s also proof against anything short of a nuclear warhead impact, and the magic that reinforces its physical resistance extends to the entire building. It occurred to me that there was nothing stopping someone from blowing a hole in the wall from either side, or the roof, so we took care of that possibility.”
“So how is this different from regular wards?”
Malcolm leaned against the counter, graceful as a cat. “Stone wards are a function of magic reinforcing stone’s natural tendencies to protect and guard. A stone ward…I suppose you could say it anchors itself within the stone, and the more magic a stone magus pours into it, the stronger it gets, until it creates an impenetrable ward.”
“Which would do us no good, because we have to keep Abernathy’s open.”
“Right. This magic is more like a web, but an irregular one. Lines of magic extend from the focus—the door, in this case—and interweave in a random pattern until they’re threaded through every inch of the walls and roof. The randomness increases its effectiveness because it’s a highly redundant system. If one line breaks, there are fifty others doing the same job. But that’s metaphorical, because the lines can’t break.”
I touched the crystal of the door, then jerked my hand away, afraid of smearing the perfect surface. My fingers hadn’t left a mark. “That sounds better than a stone ward. Why don’t we use these instead, all the time?”
Malcolm shook his head. “It requires too much magic to operate. With a stone ward, it requires a lot of m
agic to set, but the magic just sits there within the ward, powering it passively. This system needs magic poured into it constantly, and that’s expensive so far as sanguinis sapiens goes. But don’t worry,” he added, forestalling me as I opened my mouth to protest, “it’s only an impractical solution, not an impossible one. We have plenty of sanguinis sapiens to maintain it indefinitely.”
“That’s good, I guess.” I crossed the room to hug him. “I already miss you. I’ve loved the last few days of having nothing to do but spend time together. I’m sure we’d eventually get tired of each other, but not for a long while.”
“I agree,” Malcolm said.
We walked back through the store and kissed goodbye at the back door. When I returned to the office, Judy had a stack of bills at her elbow and was frowning at the computer screen. “Anything wrong?” I asked.
“Just the usual finances details. And Mike wants me to move in with him.”
I sat on the corner of the desk and picked up the fat stack of augury requests. “Wow. I thought you said he wasn’t interested.”
“He’s not. He’s worried about me living here when there’s a chance invaders might destroy it.” Judy sighed and pushed back from the desk. “I don’t know. He may have a point. I’m just not sure we should move in together for that reason. I could tell he was…oh, he wasn’t begrudging or anything, but he was clearly more interested in my safety than in building a life together.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“I’m probably saying it all wrong. I guess I mean if he could find another way to keep me safe, he’d be as hot on that as he is right now about me moving in. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah. But the store is totally safe now. You should see it—the door is a giant crystal. On a bright day, I’m going to need sunglasses.”
“I’ll tell him that. Actually, I’ll tell him to ask Malcolm about the details of the protections.” Judy sighed. “Sometimes I think about our future—me and Mike, I mean—and I just don’t know what I want.”
“But you love him, right?”
“Love isn’t always enough. What if we’re too independent to really fit together? Long-term relationships need compromise to work.” Judy twined the keyboard cable around her fingers. “But then I think about how far we’ve come, and I wonder, haven’t we already learned to compromise? To overcome our differences? So…I don’t know.”
“I think you should be more concerned about whether it’s what you want. Because if it’s not something you want to do, it’s a bad idea.”
“I know.” She moved her hand restlessly and appeared surprised to find it tangled with the cord. “Some days, I can picture us together for the rest of our lives. And other days, that feels like a huge burden.”
I tapped the sheaf of envelopes on my palm. “That sounds like you’re not ready to make the decision.”
“True.” She looked up at me. “Right now I’d settle for Mike and my father getting along. They’re superficially polite, but I can practically hear them thinking ‘filthy Ambrosite’ and ‘degenerate Nicollien’ whenever conversation stalls.”
I swore under my breath. “Why can’t they all see how stupid they’re being? We need unity if we’re going to win this war. Especially now that the invaders are stepping up their game.”
“I wish I knew. Sometimes it feels like the Nicolliens and the Ambrosites actually enjoy having someone to hate. It’s like having a favorite sports team, only a million times more intense.” Judy stood. “You probably ought to get to those. They didn’t stack up nearly as much as I expected while we were closed, but there’s still a lot.”
I didn’t tell her I’d sort of been using our conversation as a delaying excuse. “Yeah. Let’s see how many I can get done before the Nicolliens show up.”
Back at the front counter, I set the stack of envelopes down and withdrew the first letter. Without opening it, I walked into the oracle—and into an ambient red glow like the light of a dying star. “Wow,” I said involuntarily. I’d intended not to speak to the oracle unless it spoke to me first. “I—it’s hard not to feel this is a bad omen for the rest of the day.”
I returned to the counter and scrawled NO AUGURY on the outside of the folded paper. Judy would print out a copy of the nice little note I’d taken to mailing people whose requests were refused. It felt like the polite thing to do.
The second augury, though, was normal, and so were the next three, which was all I could manage before ten o’clock. The oracle never spoke, though I could feel its presence nearby, its attention fixed on something else. I sometimes wondered what it did all day long. I didn’t think it needed much attention to give auguries, and I always had the sense that it was doing something, just nothing I could comprehend.
At ten o’clock, I let in the three people who waited outside. “Quiet morning,” I commented as I accepted the first augury slip. “I thought we’d be swamped.”
“I think most people expected Abernathy’s to be closed longer,” the woman said. “How are you holding up? That attack must have been terrifying.”
“I’m all right, thanks. And everything worked out okay, so…” Feeling myself on the verge of once again suppressing my feelings, I made my escape into the oracle.
The rest of the morning was so peaceful it was hard to remember how awful things had been last week. I filled augury requests, then had lunch with Judy, then filled more augury requests. As two o’clock drew near, and no Ambrosites lined up outside the door, I felt superstitiously as if the end of the world had come and no one needed auguries because they were all off fighting the last battle of the war.
I was about to remove the second to last augury request from its envelope when the bells over the door jangled. It had relieved my mind that the magi replacing the door had either left the bells in place or installed new ones. It made me feel less like my whole world was in upheaval. “Welcome to—oh, Ariadne!” I exclaimed. “How can I help you?”
Ariadne Duwelt pushed her short red hair back from her face as if the wind had disordered it. “Hi, Helena,” she said. “I’m here on behalf of the Board of Neutralities. It looks as if Abernathy’s wasn’t even touched in the attack.”
“I know. The repairs are better than perfect. I wish you could see what the new door actually looks like.” I liked Ariadne, who was far nicer than my previous Board liaison, Timothy Ragsdale, but her permanent semi-smile always made me feel as if she were secretly laughing at a joke I’d missed.
She smiled that secretive smile again now and said, “We’re all grateful you weren’t hurt. Have you caught up on the mail-in auguries?”
That irritated me a little. I supposed, in a sense, she had the right to check up on my job performance, but the question made me feel like a child being nagged about her homework. I waved the envelope in my hand at her. “They’ve gone so fast today. I’m glad having to shut down for a few days wasn’t more disruptive.”
Ariadne nodded. “I have a few requests from the Board, but they can wait until you’ve finished that one.”
“No, it’s all right. The Accords say I have to take walk-in requests before mail-ins, and I think that’s sensible.”
Ariadne’s smile grew into a real one. “I bow to your knowledge of the Accords.”
I laughed. My knowledge of the Accords had gotten me into trouble with the Board and then out of trouble again. “I’ll have to take those one at a time, so it may be a while.”
“I’m free all afternoon.” Ariadne looked at the folding chair beside the door as if she were considering the possibility it might dump her on her butt, came to the conclusion that the odds were not in her favor, and leaned against the counter with the air of someone prepared to wait all day.
Inside the oracle, I unfolded the paper she’d given me. How many intelligent invaders are presently in our world? An interesting, direct question, and not one anyone else had ever asked. I set off looking for the blue-lit augury. Knowing how many of the enemy there were migh
t help when it came to knowing if the Wardens had eliminated all of them, though that assumed no more intelligent invaders would enter our world. Probably the Board would make use of the information in ways I hadn’t thought of.
I pulled the book Blake’s Complete Writings off the shelf, feeling the electric tingle of a live augury, and flipped through the pages before remembering it was against the rules to read someone else’s augury. Tucking it under one arm, I returned to Ariadne’s side and handed her the book. “I think we can do all of these and add up the total at the end,” I said.
Ariadne nodded. She was already engrossed in studying the book. I took the next request—How can we best defend the named Neutralities?—and left her to her reading.
There were five augury requests in all, most of them related to protecting the remaining named Neutralities. It felt a little weird reading the questions, like listening to a conversation between two people discussing my personal habits. I reminded myself this wasn’t about me, at least not directly, and set the last book on Ariadne’s stack. “Looks like $10,725,” I said.
“I’ve got a check,” Ariadne said.
“That’s fine. I’m not worried about the Board stiffing Abernathy’s,” I said with a smile.
I wrote the receipt out, only then wondering where Judy was, and found Ariadne a box to carry her books in. “I hope those are helpful,” I said.
“So do I,” Ariadne said. “Just between us, the Board is looking for a new approach to counter the new tactics of the invaders. Please let us know if the oracle gives you any hints.”
“I will.”
The door swung open, making us both turn. “Hi,” Viv said. “Can you believe I’m here on business?” She didn’t look like a businesswoman compared to Ariadne, who wore a lightweight sky-blue suit and open-toed pumps; Viv had on striped green and white shorts, a cropped lemon-yellow T-shirt that matched her hair, and gray suspenders decorated with colorful buttons bearing cute sayings.
I tore my gaze from one that read I CAN KILL YOU WITH MY BRAIN—all right, that one wasn’t so cute—and looked past her at the other person coming through the door. “Mr. Wallach, hi,” I said.
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