The Last Oracle

by Colvin, Delia

  Mani shook his head, irritated with himself. He looked at Alex. “I am sorry, my friend. I will do better.”

  He wiped the inside of Alex’s arm with an alcohol pad. For some reason, the smell of the alcohol made her head start to spin.

  Camille shouted back from the front, “Val, why don’t you come up here. Caleb can get in the back.” Valeria shook her head. “Alex wants you to come up here. He doesn’t want you to watch this.”

  Brushing his face, Valeria said, “I’m not leaving you.”

  Mani withdrew the hypodermic needle, replaced the cap over the needle and tossed it into his medical bag, and then pulled off the oxygen mask. The mask left a white mark around Alex’s mouth and nose where the soot had been. His eyes fluttered and then opened for a moment. He moved his mouth and she could hear that he was trying to talk to her. She leaned down and his eyes looked at hers for a moment. He whispered, “Be back…” His eyes began to roll, and then closed. “Can’t...miss...” he murmured.

  He mouthed another word and she played it over in her head and then realized it was, “Honeymoon.”

  “Don’t you die on me, Alex Morgan!” she said.

  “Alex will survive this. But not right now. I had hoped that we might be able to keep his body alive, so that the recovery would be easier, but there was too much damage. Still, he will recover.”

  Valeria fought back the tears. “I don’t understand this. You said it was from…from…”

  “From smoke inhalation. Yes.”

  Valeria felt the need to argue the point. “But Mani, he was breathing when he came out. Shouldn’t we put the mask back on? Maybe it’s not too late.”

  As he returned the supplies to his bag, Mani said, “Smoke inhalation can kill in several ways.” The vehicle turned and a streetlight briefly lit up the back of the car. “The smoke from the cottage contained enflamed particles and they damaged the walls of the lungs. Also, he may have breathed in toxins from the chemicals, from the art supplies.” Setting his hand on Valeria’s arm, Mani said calmly, “Valeria, Alex will die...but he will also recover.”

  A cry escaped her throat. She looked down and tried to understand the reason to all of this. “Okay…okay…you said that immortals come back within twenty-four hours?” She swallowed, wondering how she could stand to see Alex die—even if it was for only a short while.

  Mani nodded as they passed a car on the road. “Yes, but the healing process is not easy.”

  “That’s why he needs the morphine—for the pain?” Valeria asked.

  “The morphine was for your benefit,” Mani said as he shifted and began to wrap Alex’s other arm.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “For some reason, the morphine,” Mani looked up from the bandages for a moment, searching for the right words, “seems to quiet the healing process.” He returned to his work and Valeria waited for him to continue.

  “When oracles return from death, their bodies seem to go through some agony. They cry out and writhe, though having personally been through that process numerous times, I don’t recall it being particularly uncomfortable. The morphine remains in the body through the death and rebirth and quiets the process. The disadvantage is that the drug is another injury, so to speak, that we must recover from. So it will take Alex a little longer to recover.”

  “How much longer, Mani?” Valeria said with a gulp. The thought of more than twenty-four hours of seeing Alex like this—or worse—seemed incomprehensible.

  Mani finished working on Alex’s hands and chest, and crawled to the back of the vehicle to look at Alex’s feet. He pulled a large shard of glass from Alex’s foot and Alex made a slight sound. “This must wait until later. The car is moving too much and there is not enough light.”

  Alex’s eyes were slightly open and wandered until they finally found Valeria’s for just a moment.

  “I love you, Alex,” she whispered, as she brushed her hand over his face.

  Alex blinked his eyes, weakly. She leaned down to kiss him and, for a moment, his mouth moved toward hers; then he drew a deep breath as his eyes rolled up into his head and back to hers, releasing a long and final exhale as his head lay lifelessly on her lap.

  “MANI!” she choked.

  “Yes, I know,” he said softly, and then moved back toward her.

  Suddenly, she released a long, agonized cry as she clung to Alex. She couldn’t breathe, and felt an intense pain as if her heart had been ripped in two. She grasped her chest and struggled to breathe.

  “This may help.” Mani pressed the oxygen mask to her face. “The pain will pass in a moment. Try to breathe.”

  It was several minutes before the agonizing physical pain passed; then all Valeria felt was the extraordinary loss of her beloved husband. Mani soothed her, but underneath his calm, Valeria felt the pain of someone who also loved Alex, and that of a man who could sympathize with losing his symbolon. Once she was breathing again, Mani pulled the sweater off from Alex’s chest and wrapped it around Valeria.

  Leaning down to Alex, she kissed him again, and whispered through her tears, “Hurry back to me—okay?”

  Mani was quiet for a moment. “He requested a lethal dose of morphine. He did not wish for you to witness his slow death nor the painful healing. Once the body of an oracle has sustained what it considers a terminal injury, it will continue until that process is complete before the spirit will rejuvenate it.”

  Leaning against the back of the driver’s seat, Valeria pulled Alex into her, knowing she wouldn’t hurt him now. She could feel his body cooling and ached at the silence in his chest. She pulled his jacket around both of them and closed her eyes, trying to believe that perhaps, when she awoke, he would be whole again.

  The sun had just crossed the horizon as Camille pulled into Shinsu’s estate. It would have been a beautiful morning. She should have been waking in his arms in their bed, in their cottage…which was now gone, along with all the pictures and belongings that Alex had collected over centuries. Another round of tears arose as several guards took Alex from her and carried him on the blanket and into the house. Valeria was consumed with a loneliness she could never have imagined. The world was foreign and cold in a way that it had never felt before.

  “Take him to the main guest room,” Shinsu said softly, and then hugged Valeria after she exited the SUV. “It was such a beautiful wedding, dear.” Shinsu smiled, but it lacked her characteristic spark.

  Following Shinsu inside the house and up the stairs, Valeria felt heavy with exhaustion. The guards entered the room and laid the blanket, which held her husband, on the center of a white fluffy feather bed. She brushed her hand over his forehead and then saw the soot on her hands.

  “I suggest you shower and then sleep. It will help the time to go by quicker,” Mani said.

  Nodding, she took the black duffle bag into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess of debris. Her face was covered with almost as much soot as Alex’s. In the duffle, she found toiletries. She brushed her teeth and then turned on the shower.

  It took several times of washing and conditioning her hair before she felt the debris and knots clear from it. Then she leaned against the wall of the shower and released all the sobs that she had held tightly inside, as the hot water poured over her neck and back. Still, she moved as quickly as her body would allow, fearing that Alex would wake up and she wouldn’t be there.

  Then the unbidden thought struck her—what if he didn’t wake up? What if they were wrong? She wondered how she could ever bury him as he had buried her. How could she live with this pain and emptiness?

  She shook her head violently. She couldn’t permit herself to think that way—it allowed it to be a possibility and that was unthinkable! She forced her mind to other thoughts; he would wake up in hours—only hours, now. Then they would be on their honeymoon.

  Drying herself, she found a lotion that Camille had packed for her. She sniffed it and nodded. Alex would like the smell.
She dried her hair and put on a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt. When she picked up her clothes from the floor, she realized that they reeked of smoke.

  As soon as she opened the bathroom door, the overwhelming smell of smoke, singed hair, and death hit her. She choked at the vision of Alex on top of the blanket, his hands and feet bandaged, wearing only the slacks from the night before, with no movement of his beautiful chest.

  Mani and Camille sat in matching overstuffed chairs that they had moved near the bed.

  “You look better,” Camille said. “Is there anything you need?”

  “I need some help.”

  “Anything! What?” Camille asked.

  “I don’t want him to wake up like this,” she choked, as she gestured toward his face covered in soot.

  “It would be easier to wait until he is healed,” Mani said softly.

  Drawing a rough breath, Valeria went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet, adjusting the water’s temperature. She pulled a hand towel from a stack of rolled towels under the counter. She held the towel under the faucet until it was soaked, and then wrung most of the excess water out of it. She picked up two large bath towels and went back to the bedroom. Mani and Camille glanced at each other and Camille rose to leave.

  The sun had just risen, but there were a few clouds and it left an eerie glow in the room. Valeria sat on the edge of the bed and lovingly wiped it across her husband’s face. The towel was immediately covered with a dark, intense hue, a blend of blood red and black from the soot. She thought of the line from Les Miserables, “Red, the color of desire! Black, the color of despair!”

  She turned the towel again as Camille returned with a washbasin filled with warm soapy water. “Do you want help?” she asked.

  Valeria offered a slight shake of her head. Camille was leaving when Valeria remembered her manners and said, “Thank you, Camille.”

  “All right, I’m going to give you some privacy.” She turned at the door. “Do try to get some sleep! You really are going to be honeymooning soon, and this part will all be only an awful memory. But Val, as Alex will tell you soon, he was willing to pay this price.”

  “I wasn’t willing to pay this price…” A sob interrupted her. She was in no shape to argue. Her husband was dead. He had been in extreme pain, and perhaps he would heal—she had to hang on to that piece of hope. But their beloved home was destroyed, along with memories of eons. Still, if Alex was recovering, nothing else truly mattered except that the people whom she loved were safe.

  The water in the pitcher had a wonderful warmth with a hint of lemon scent as she wrung out a fresh cloth and stroked it across his neck and chest, where hours before she had tasted the sweetness of his skin. She realized that, although it could be easy to get over-emotional about the cottage, the only thing that mattered was seeing her husband alive again.

  “I’ll be back in a little while. You really should try to sleep,” Camille said, patting Valeria’s shoulder before she closed the door and left

  It was difficult to get her thoughts around the idea that he wasn’t dead. Death was not a complete stranger to her. She remembered giving her father the obligatory final kiss goodbye. People had expected it. But he was a man who had been cold and distant to her, long before his death. Still, he had been her father and she always felt that she should have felt more—despite his inadequacies as a father.

  With her father, it had been no more emotional than kissing a doll. There was nothing that had been him there. Although, the only time she had ever kissed her father was on Christmas, in front of the crowds when he had insisted, while he played Santa. Otherwise, their relationship had been impervious to emotion.

  But this was very different. Touching Alex, though it was a shock to feel the coolness of his body, it also soothed her knowing that, soon, it would be warm again. She closed her eyes, praying that her husband would soon be alive and smiling at her. That dream was only a day away. She could close her eyes and try to make the day disappear.

  Suddenly, Valeria was exhausted. She crawled under the sheets next to him and cried herself to sleep.

  When she awoke, the sun was nearly to the horizon. Early evening—twelve hours left. She rolled away from Alex and sat up. In the rocker next to the bed, she saw Mani. “Have you been here all day?”

  “I rested after you fell asleep this morning. I replaced Camille a few hours ago,” Mani said, as he stretched his long frame. “I still need to attend to his feet, but I did not wish to wake you.” He rose and pulled several instruments from his bag, and then, with a trash container next to him, he began pulling shards of glass from Alex’s feet.

  “How did he do this with me?”

  Narrowing his eyes, Mani paused in thought.

  “I have often wondered. I believe hope has carried him through the difficulties.” He thought for a moment, and then continued examining Alex’s feet under a bright light. “He sometimes waited centuries for you, many times finding you too late. There have been countless times that he has watched others hold you as you took your last breath; each time wondering if he would ever see you again.” Mani narrowed his eyes. “I do not know how he has survived. As you now know, losing your symbolon is very painful. Camille says that it takes a piece of your heart and I believe that to be true.”

  Realizing that Mani had been alone for so long, she felt ashamed of her reaction. “I’m sorry Mani. I know you have faced more with your wife, than I have with Alex.”

  After pulling a final shard of glass from Alex’s foot, Mani began bandaging it.

  “Even now, centuries later, I wonder when Lita will return to me—knowing it is not possible.” Mani drew a breath and then changed the subject back to Alex. “Somehow, Alex has always been very patient with you. He feels an urgency, due to what has been your very fragile mortality; knowing the torturous pain that lies just on the other side of it. Yet he is always concerned about stifling your exuberance. He forces himself to allow you the opportunity to live and experience life, as on the safari, while he pushes his fears aside. It is really quite noble.”

  Valeria nodded and they were quiet for some time. Finally, Mani finished working on Alex and sat back down.

  “I still smell like smoke,” she said. “I think I’ll take another shower.” The truth was that she felt the tears welling in her again and she was too ashamed to cry in front of Mani.

  She turned the knobs on the faucet until the water was steaming and stepped under the showerhead. This time, she let the hot water run down her shoulders and neck for almost thirty minutes while she attempted to wash away the sobs. Despite the fact that she had slept all day, she was exhausted. Thinking it through, she realized that although the night before…before the fire, had held an extraordinary luxury, it had been days since she had slept well. Excitement and stress was now taking its toll. She was comforted by the warmth and softness of the towel. Then she dried her hair, and changed into a tank top and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, pulling on a robe over it. She padded back to the bed and lay down next to Alex; pulling his lifeless arm under her neck, she curled against the silent hollow of his chest.

  “I wish you would come back to me,” she said, kissing the place over his heart as quiet tears blurred her vision and she fell back asleep.

  Her mouth was parched when she woke. She turned to the nightstand and felt for the glass that was always by her bedside. It wasn’t there. Then she remembered where she was and what had happened. Something was different and she couldn’t put her finger on it. She turned back to him and touched his chest, his face. He seemed to feel warmer, and she felt a thrill. Leaning toward him, she brushed his face and then leaned her ear to his chest. It was quiet, but she heard the weak beating of his heart. Ripples of gratitude rushed through her.

  “Thank you.”

  Pulling her cotton robe on, she went to Mani’s room—although she hated to wake him. When there was no response to her tapping, she went to the staircase. From the living room, she could he
ar voices and quickly discerned that they were having a family meeting.

  She didn’t want to pry, but on the other hand, this most certainly was now her business. Down the turn of the staircase, she could see the entry; to the left was the living room.

  Lars said, “We need to convince Alex that it is in all of our best interests to go after them now. It’s obvious that…” His voice faded out. Ashamed of herself for eavesdropping, she started to turn, but then justified that it was her business. She wondered about what Lars had said, it was obvious that…what?

  Without permitting herself to listen further, she headed down the stairs and cleared her throat. All eyes went to her on the staircase as if they were concerned about what she had heard.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt…it’s just…Mani, I just…” Mani immediately rose.

  “What is it, Valeria?”

  “It’s Alex—he’s…he’s back,” she said, surprised that she choked when she said it.

  Mani was already walking toward the staircase. She glanced down and saw that all of the family, except Daphne and Paolo, were in the formal living area.

  As they returned to the room, Mani checked Alex’s vitals.

  “This is a very good sign.” Mani glanced at Valeria. “Have you slept?”

  “Yes.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You still have circles under your eyes. I suggest you sleep in the other guest room. It will be a few hours before he is alert.”

  “Thanks, Mani, but I’m not leaving him.”

  Mani hooked up an IV above the bandages in Alex’s elbow. “This will assist the healing process.”

  “What’s he going through?” Valeria asked.

  After tapping the IV line several times, Mani sat down next to her on the bed. “Bodies take a very long time to die—even mortal bodies. Cells continue to live some time after the vital organs have stopped. With an oracle, our soul sometimes steps away in extreme conditions. These bodies require a very narrow parameter of conditions to survive.

  “For oracles, the difference appears to be what our souls do with these bodies. The DNA of an immortal oracle is different from that of mortals.