I couldn’t have been more than an insignificant speck in the universe of magic that constantly flooded the far seer’s brain. Yet he had shown up in Yachats, Oregon, to chat with me in a laundromat.
Well, he had shown up, then disappeared.
∞
The far seer wasn’t on the sidewalk, not in either direction. He also wasn’t wandering down the middle of the street, but I wouldn’t have put it past him to be doing so. Yachats might be a tiny town built around two miles of Interstate 101, which was carved along the edge of the West Coast of the United States. But it was tourist season, so getting mowed over by a massive RV was always a possibility.
Chi Wen usually said goodbye if a conversation was over. I hated leaving my things behind unprotected, but I hazarded a guess and darted down Fourth Street toward Ocean View Drive and the Seaside Walk.
Yachats was pretty. Quaint, even, but in a real-life-real-people sort of way. Tourism might be the area’s biggest industry, but the town itself wasn’t overtly picturesque. A few dozen single-level homes on large lots, a couple of pretty white-painted churches, a small library, and a few restaurants made up the bulk of the town. What made the area truly beautiful was the raging ocean with its gray-sand beach a block to the west.
And that was where I was guessing the far seer of the guardians would head.
I’d taken only a few steps off the road and up the dry grass that bordered the dune blocking my sight of the sandy beach, when a tall, dark-haired teen wearing a green printed T-shirt and black leather pants fell into step beside me.
“Hi,” he said. “Rochelle.”
My sneakered feet slipped in the sand underneath the dry grass, but I managed to stop myself from following through with a face plant. A few more completely ungraceful steps brought me to the top of the dune. The cool wind blowing from the savage ocean pounding the beach twenty-five feet away hit me, actually buffeting my clothing.
Somewhat anchored on this sandy perch, I turned to look at the teen. His face was lifted to the wind, squinting into the sun. His dark hair was long enough to be wild in the breeze. He was tall and broad shouldered, though not as tall as Beau. He was also some-part Asian, as I was.
Magic rolled off him, prickling the exposed skin of my right arm, neck, and face. This power came with a different tenor than that of Beau’s or the far seer’s, but it was no less intense.
“Don’t know you, man,” I said.
He turned to look down at me, an easy smile spreading across his handsome face. “I’m Drake. The far seer’s apprentice.”
He held out his hand as if to shake. I hesitated to take it. I shifted my glasses up until they sat on my head and I snared his brown-eyed gaze. He didn’t flinch at my eyes — but then, he was the far seer’s apprentice, so I doubted that he would. I always liked to try to rattle intimidatingly powerful people, though.
Drake’s smile widened. He leaned into me with his hand still extended between us. “What do you see, tiny oracle?”
“You’re the apprentice. You tell me.” I dropped my glasses back down over my eyes. The sun was way too bright to bother with any further attempt to discomfort Drake. Plus, I got the idea pretty quickly that he wasn’t easy to shake up.
Drake threw his head back and laughed. I swore the sand underneath my feet shifted with the magic that now rumbled off him. I glowered at this display, but the expression didn’t have any effect on the teen.
“So you’re a dragon?” I asked.
“I am.”
“And you’re here why?”
“The far seer wished us to meet.”
“Why now? Are you new?”
Drake chuckled. “No. Are you going to shake my hand? I understand it’s a polite gesture between humans.”
“That matters to you?”
“It does.”
“I thought Adepts didn’t touch.”
Drake’s constant grin widened again. “I suppose that Adepts who fear their power or the magic of others might not touch.”
Taking his words as a challenge, I firmly wrapped my hand around his. Our pale skin was almost the same tone. Magic shifted between us, but he didn’t let go.
“Are we related somehow?” I asked.
He tilted his head, considering the question. “I don’t think so.”
I loosened my hold and he let my hand drop. I turned back to survey the beach.
Chi Wen had appeared from who-knows-where and was now standing a couple of dozen feet away at the edge of the surf. He’d lost his boots somewhere and appeared to be curling his bare toes in the wet sand.
“The far seer rarely walks the earth these days. Except for visiting you, Rochelle Hawthorne.” Drake’s use of my birth name felt deliberate and pointed. Though only because it was odd to think of myself as anything other than Rochelle Saintpaul. I hadn’t even known my mother’s last name until Blackwell had informed me of my parentage over a year ago.
“And why am I so important?”
“I thought you might tell me.”
I turned to look up at the young dragon. He was watching the far seer. “Do you see?” I asked.
Drake rolled his shoulders. “Not yet. But I will.”
“Soon?”
“Hopefully not in your lifetime.”
“That’s nasty.”
He laughed. “I’m not wishing you ill. But even if your magic makes you long-lived, I hope to not assume the mantle of the far seer for a hundred years or so. That would be a long life even for a sorcerer-bred oracle.”
“Oh.” My mind reeled at the chunk of info he’d just delivered in a few dozen words. I was standing beside the next far seer. “So … Chi Wen isn’t immortal?”
“No.”
“Is Jade Godfrey going to ‘assume a mantle’ as well?”
Drake turned to look at me. “No.”
“Because she isn’t a full dragon?”
“Not all dragons become guardians.”
“What makes you so special?”
“You tell me. You’re the oracle.” He laughed as he half-stepped, half-surfed down the other side of the dune and crossed toward the far seer.
“I’m not playing games!” I yelled as I scrambled after him.
“Neither am I,” he called back, raising his voice over the wind.
Chi Wen stepped back from the water’s edge and turned to us as we crossed to him — me still trailing after Drake. I couldn’t see the far seer’s boots anywhere nearby. In fact, the beach was empty, which was strange for the middle of July. It felt like I was walking toward the edge of the world, pressing into the wind and finding my footing more easily on the hard-packed wet sand.
Drake bowed formally before the far seer, which gave me pause. I hadn’t really known I was supposed to do that sort of thing in the presence of the guardian.
They exchanged some words that I thought at first I couldn’t hear properly because of the wind. But then as their voices filtered through my brain, I realized they weren’t speaking English. Cantonese, maybe.
Drake turned back to me, bowing swiftly and more shallowly than he had to the far seer. “We are well met, Rochelle Hawthorne, Oracle of the Brave.”
I narrowed my eyes at the young dragon, not at all amused by whatever joke he was making at my expense. Then I realized he was referencing the 1975 Brave Winnebago I called my home, combining that with my magic to give me a formal title of sorts. Feeling like an idiot, I bowed back and mimicked his formal address. “We are well met, Drake, apprentice to Chi Wen, the far seer of the guardian nine.”
“I’m at your disposal. A call to Jade Godfrey will bring me to your side.”
“I don’t exactly have the dowser on speed dial.”
“You will,” Drake said.
My stomach bottomed out at this assertion. Jade equaled chaos and mayhem. I preferred to keep her out of my head and my phone for as long as possible.
Drake smiled as if he might be picking up on what I was feeling. Then he nodded toward the far se
er and stepped past me the way we’d come. I turned to watch him walk away.
“Your apprentice, eh?” I asked Chi Wen.
The old man didn’t answer. He’d turned back to the raging surf.
“Why did you want us to meet?” I raised my voice against the wind, spitting a hank of hair out of my mouth. “Why now?”
The far seer took so long to answer that I thought he might not have heard me. Then he said, “I didn’t care for the meeting I saw.”
“Sorry? You saw us meeting and you decided to change it? You told me the future was immutable. You told me it was dangerous to try to manipulate it?”
“Destiny is immutable. The future is fluid.”
I snorted. “For you, you mean. And the dangerous part?”
Chi Wen turned to look at me. His Buddha smile was firmly in place. “What is dangerous for some isn’t dangerous for others.”
“Drake, you mean. He’s powerful, strong. I could feel his magic.”
“And now you will see him.”
“Because you think my oracle powers pick up on the strongest magical signatures I come into contact with?”
“Or those most relevant to you. May I look at your sketchbook?”
“Here?”
“If you please.”
Grumbling, I pulled my sketchbook out of my hand-painted satchel. How he was going to look at it in all this wind, I didn’t know. But our conversations got way too convoluted if I questioned him too much.
I handed the almost-full book to the far seer, barely keeping its pages closed within my grip. But as soon as he touched the sketchbook, those pages stilled as if the wind didn’t exist.
I grumbled some more as Chi Wen flipped through my latest tattoo ideas. I didn’t really get how magic worked at all. You’d think there’d be some sort of manual for newbies, though I got the impression that oracles were pretty rare and usually trained by a family member. Since I didn’t have any family — other than Beau — that wasn’t an option for me. And Beau was enough anyway. I could pick up all the other stuff I needed to know slowly, steadily. If I even really needed to know it.
“Will you commit any of these to your skin?” Chi Wen asked.
I shrugged. “Nah, I’m not all over any of them.”
The far seer ran his fingers across the sketchbook’s spiral spine and loosened a few flecks of paper trapped within the wire. The torn paper tabs were left over from a sketch Chi Wen had requested I rip out of the book a few months back. A charcoal of a centipede, which I had actually considered tangling within the barbed wire tattoo twined around my left arm.
I opened my mouth to ask the far seer what had become of that sketch, then just as quickly shut it. I already knew he’d given it to Jade Godfrey, and I really didn’t want to know the particulars. I was actually glad I hadn’t seen whatever transpired over the last year and a half. I had the sense that Jade couldn’t stay out of trouble if she tried. Based on Chi Wen’s devotion to my training and the gist of his questions, rare as they were, I was certain the guardian had plans for the dowser.
Static electricity danced across my left forearm, just below the elbow. I glanced down to where the far seer had turned his attention from the sketchbook to the tattoo of the skeleton key on my left arm. The barbed-wire tattoo passed cleanly through the intricate series of Celtic-looking knots at one end of the key.
“This will come in handy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know how sorcerer magic works?”
“No.” And apparently massive segues were the theme of the day.
“Your father was a sorcerer.”
“Was, eh? So he’s definitely dead?”
That was the wrong thing to ask the far seer … as were any questions touching on time. He fell into his staring-into-the-distance thing … or maybe he was counting the grains of sand roiling within each five-foot wave as it crashed onto the beach before us. I never knew with him.
Staying quiet was usually the best course of action as he sorted through whatever was going on in his head.
“I must go,” he said, so abruptly that I flinched. “The warrior calls.”
My blood ran cold. I’d pieced together enough background info to know that the warrior was Jade’s dad. Not that he scared me. I didn’t know him. But what I’d seen of his daughter freaked me out daily for the year or so that I’d had her in my head and thought she was a hallucination.
“Things are not clear between us,” I said. That was as carefully as I could phrase my frustration with the entire meeting, including the brief handshake with Drake.
“You will soon see, oracle.” Chi Wen brushed his fingers across my skeleton key tattoo again. “Trust the magic. Move where it wills, where it leads, but don’t try to alter the path.”
“I know,” I grumbled. “Interpret, don’t act.”
“You will survive.”
“Helpful,” I groused, only to look up to find the beach empty.
According to Beau, the old man simply moved too quickly for the human eye to track. Either way, the far seer had disappeared.
A wave rolled across the sand and lapped against the toes of my black-and-white Converse sneakers. As the water receded, it removed any evidence that the far seer had ever walked the beach.
CHAPTER TWO
“Fifty should cover it.”
I paused on the weatherworn sidewalk at the sound of Beau’s voice. He was talking to a customer in the two-car garage he rented from our landlady, Old Ms. McNally, from whom we also rented the concrete pad behind the garage for the Brave. I shifted my full laundry basket to my other hip as I listened to the customer laugh and clap Beau on the shoulder.
Yachats didn’t have a full-time garage or mechanic — or the population to support one — though there was a mobile guy who came through a couple of times a week. The mobile guy occasionally sent clients Beau’s way if he was too busy to get to them, and word travelled fast that Beau was good with cars. So he had a steady cash business within a couple of weeks of renting the garage.
The garage didn’t have a lift, but Beau’s shifter strength paired with a winch — behind closed doors, of course — took care of that if necessary.
The adjacent house lots were closely spaced, but not crammed together. The neighbors to the west were overly protective of their meticulous landscaping. But everyone else — kids, dogs, and the occasional morning jogger — were fairly friendly. To Beau anyway.
As the customer exited the garage to jog over to his car where it was parked up the street, I stepped off the sidewalk onto the long, brown grass that ran along the edge of the garage so I didn’t bump into him. I’d poke my head in through the back door on my way to the Brave, which was parked between the garage and our landlady’s overgrown backyard. Not that I could ever sneak up on Beau, but I liked to savor the moment before I laid eyes on him. It was a silly game, but I liked being prepared. Sometimes when I looked up and caught sight of him without realizing he was nearby, I would just stare at him like a blithering idiot. Yes, even after a year and a half, I had no defense against Beau’s beauty — and no idea what he was still doing with me.
A vision hit me halfway to the back door.
The white mist that flooded my mind left me sightless and breathless between one step and the next. I dropped the laundry basket onto the dead grass, belatedly hoping it hadn’t dumped over and strewn clean clothing everywhere. I pressed myself back against the rough, aged cedar siding of the garage, then slid down into a crouch as my legs gave out.
The vision didn’t hurt, but it was startling. Any weakness came from my own reaction, not the magic flooding through my mind. I hadn’t had to deal with this for long enough that it triggered all the old pain and fear I’d carried with me.
Fear of being different, of being damaged … broken.
I wrapped my hand around the raw diamond resting against my lower rib cage and tried to calm my breathing.
I had to accept the magic. I had to wel
come it.
“Show me what you want me to see,” I whispered. Even though I had no idea if I could communicate with the energy that brought the visions, uttering the words calmed me.
The white mist shifted in my mind. I could still smell the neighbors’ recently clipped grass, which they’d kept green despite the summer watering restrictions. I could feel the heat of the afternoon sun on my face and the rough boards against my back. But I couldn’t see anything but the mist that always preceded the oracle visions.
The mist thinned but didn’t recede. A shadowed shape appeared before me, then resolved until I found myself crouched before a young woman with blond hair. I forced myself to lean forward into the vision rather than throw myself backward at the sight. Moving wouldn’t change what I was seeing, but attempting to be steady and rational would get me through it.
My immediate thought — based on the blond hair — was that I was looking at Jade lying before me. But I wasn’t. This woman’s hair was straight, and judging by the shadow of darker roots at her crown, it had been dyed blond. Her mud-brown eyes were open, staring blankly over my shoulder. Her head was canted to one side. She had a gold stud in the shape of a magnolia flower underneath her lower lip, but otherwise she was vanilla through and through.
As I watched, a pool of blood began to form at the back of her head, spreading across the dark asphalt on which she’d died.
“Dead girl,” I whispered.
I had no idea who she was.
The white mist reformed, taking away my glimpse of the bottle blond before I could look around for any further understanding or evidence of what I was seeing. Or why.
Beau was crouched before me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. I could practically feel the energy that constantly rolled off him. His magic, his presence, was a lower frequency than Chi Wen’s or Drake’s. It was a comforting hum that was uniquely Beau.
“Hey,” I said.
“Vision?” he asked. His tone was deep and intimate. His lyrical Southern accent thickened with concern.
I nodded as I reached for him. He gathered me up in his arms, lifting me effortlessly off the ground to carry me into the garage.
I See You (Oracle 2) Page 2