Lucas spun around and faced me.
I stared back. I wasn’t afraid or intimidated by the SableFur Beta. Not when I had been in Gabel’s bed.
“Are you pregnant?” Lucas asked.
“What?” I asked blankly.
“Are you pregnant.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Lucas shook his head once. “Kiery, I want that checked. I want to know she’s not pregnant.”
The RedWater wolf hadn’t shown me this. Why would they care if I was pregnant or not? Distressed by the sudden question I didn’t understand, I asked, “Why? What does it matter if I am? I’ll be gone from here.”
“You don’t think Gabel’s going to come find you?” Matthew asked sarcastically.
“I think when he repudiated me he gave up any claim to anything in my belly.”
“Make it happen. Now,” Lucas ordered.
Kiery shrugged, unimpressed with his authority. “Fine. Not difficult.”
I dared not protest. Why did this suddenly matter so much to Lucas? Kiery, however, took my arm and pulled me out of the office.
Flint’s Song Redux
“Why did he want to know if I was pregnant?” I asked Kiery.
“I don’t know.”
Lucas held back secrets from her too. That street went both ways, even if Lucas didn’t want to accept it. He probably felt it wasn’t equal: Lucas dealt with the safety of SableFur, and Kiery didn’t... at least not directly.
Pregnancy tests were easy, and I, of course, wasn’t. I had been exposed to so much silver that if I had been pregnant, I would have miscarried. Assuming the Moon hadn’t had a plan for that.
Kiery shoved me back into my room. She slammed the door behind her and advanced on me, smelling of anger. “You hear the storm, don’t you. You know what all this is about.”
“All of what?” I wasn’t exactly lying. I wasn’t sure what was happening anymore either. I had just signed my family’s death warrant and reeled from the fact I wasn’t reeling at all. I knew what Gabel would do to them. Oh, by the Moon, I knew. I’d beg him to give my father a warrior’s death. The same death Hix wanted. Not that he really deserved it, because he had gone along with it all.
Oh, who was I anymore!
“This,” Kiery hissed.
“Ask Anita.” I wasn’t lying there either. Anita knew everything. Kiery could take her suspicions to her. Fat chance of Anita telling her anything. “I’m here because of Anita, so if Anita tells you, you let me know!”
Kiery snorted angrily. “I can only hear the storm, you’re standing out in it. Give me the weather report, Gianna.”
The storm pressed down on me too, the vastness of it, and for a moment it paused, like the eye of a hurricane passing by.
I couldn’t tell her.
Kiery needed to play her part in this as much as I did, and Magnes... no, the SableFur, having absolute faith in their Oracle and her loyalty was the most important thing. Kiery couldn’t betray what she didn’t know.
“I’m only here to vindicate myself and clear my name,” I said. “Ask Anita why it’s come to this. I don’t know.”
How this secret had been buried so deep, or why Anita kept it at all, or what had happened to Gabel’s mother, who she had really been. Hell, I’d like to know.
Kiery’s face pinched and her scent, for a moment, seemed like salt, water, and dead blood. The taste of a memory.
An ally in SableFur was something I wanted, but couldn’t risk. Kiery and Lucas needed to be exactly as they were, frustrated with me, angry with me, believing I was hiding a secret and lying to them, that Magnes had done something, that Anita reeked of a private agenda, that I was done with Gabel, actively entertaining going to IceMaw. If they wanted to know more they’d have to claw it from the Moon and the dirt.
Kiery growled at me, then turned to go.
“I want to see Hix,” I demanded.
“I don’t get a say in that.”
Kiery closed the door behind her. Time to deal with the tourmaline. I knelt, picked it up, and grimaced. I didn’t want to do this, but there was no choice. Gabel had to know, now, what he needed to do. It was still daylight. I might have a long time to wait in the spear if he only could access it when he was sleeping. Assuming that’s how it worked.
Assuming Gabel slept at all.
Time to try. If I had to wait, I had to wait. Better to wait in the void than not be there when he showed up.
I stared into its blue depths, half-believing it would take me somewhere else, that it wouldn’t take me anywhere at all—
The blue roared up around my mind and yanked me into the tunnel.
~*~ Through The Stone ~*~
It wasn’t the grove. It was a marble box.
A box? An urn? I was in an urn?
No. A small, rectangular room, with three torches on each of the walls. There was no wind, so the light was steady and a cheery yellow, and the room was warm, but the back of the room from where I emerged was pitch, inky blackness. I stepped forward into the yellow-red light, and the blackness slid off my shoulders like tatters of silk.
At the end of the room was a raised stone dais. At first I thought it was a sarcophagus, then I realized it was just a simple block of solid marble.
On the platform were the shattered pieces of my obsidian bowls, arranged in a swirling pattern of many arms in the shape of an extravagant but unfinished necklace.
I touched one piece. The power was still intact. That shouldn’t be right. They should be dead and broken.
A gap appeared in the wall, rectangular and tall, like a window. Light punched its way into the room, and a gust of fresh, humid air. I moved to the window and saw I was once again in a jungle, almost level with the green tree tops, and facing west. It was the pyramid from the first vision, complete with Flint’s song calling a Queen to war, echoing across the air.
The sun set low over the lush tree tops, bathing everything angry red and orange.
As I listened the song faded.
I needed to be in the void-grove. I needed to find Gabel.
I hefted myself onto the wide window sill and leaned out. It wasn’t exactly a pyramid, but looked like a step pyramid built as part of an ancient temple complex, covered in lush jungle growth and flowers, with a few lazy afternoon birds sailing about overhead. No bugs, curiously, and the air was hot and thick and pungent with the scent of green things, and rotting things that would one day become green things once more.
“Gabel!” I shouted. “Gabel!”
I looked back at the carefully arranged necklace. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there were other shards on the dais. Not all my bowls had been obsidian. Like most Oracles, I preferred the dark, reflective surface of obsidian, which was most like the night sky. But a few of the smaller ones had been clear quartz. I had used them mostly for purification and rarely for scrying, but Gardenia had shattered those too.
I didn’t remember Gabel taking those shards. There weren’t so many of them, but they were lined up separate from the necklace, wrought with platinum wire into a brooch or hair comb (I couldn’t tell) in the shape of the Balance rune.
Where the hell was I? What did the Moon want?
My hands were still bandaged and hurt, but I retrieved one of the torches from the wall and wriggled out the window, and dropped onto the ledge below.
“I’ll probably set myself on fire,” I muttered about the fire flickering perilously close to my head.
It was very, very quiet. The echo of Flint’s song had faded, and there wasn’t any noise from the jungle below. The sun didn’t seem to be getting any lower in the sky.
The next ledge up was over my head, and probably more than I could manage with my wrecked hands.
“Oh, hello,” I said when I inched around a corner to the next side. That face had, right in the middle, stone stairs overlaid onto the steps.
The top of the structure was flat, like before. In the
center, on an ancient, raised altar, were the runes from my first vision, and tangled around it the string-of-fangs necklace, and set to the eastern side of the altar was a circlet of bleached, polished white wood, and from the upraised tangles of branches it clutched pieces of obsidian, blue tourmaline, and clear quartz. It was carved with deep, but narrow grooves all over, very fine and intricate, and the grooves were stained carmine red. I picked it up to examine it.
It wasn’t bleached wood. It was bleached bone, and those little grooves weren’t stained red, they were tiny channels of blood.
Blood trickled out of the grooves and down my hands, staining my bandages.
It was not a large crown. I did not think it was intended for a male’s head.
Trembling harder, I set it back down.
The tangle of fangs caught my eye again. A simple piece of black thread, looped around the widest part of the fangs. The fangs had been cracked off, like Gabel had de-fanged the RedWater wolves. There seemed to be so many! Fang, fang, fang, fang. I tried to count them all but by the fiftieth I couldn’t see anymore from the tears and had to stop.
Had Gabel done it? Were these the souls Gabel had desecrated?
The runes were different this time. There were three sets: one made of obsidian, one made of quartz, one made of blue tourmaline, and there were one for each rune: Balance, Courage, Love. They were arranged in a neat, tight line, with the tourmaline sitting between its obsidian and quartz companions. Nine stones.
The sun still hadn’t set.
In the east, the full moon peered just over the horizon, and the sky was red, melting to violet, to darkness.
“I get it,” I said to the sky. “Balance. I think. I just don’t understand what it means.”
And if the crown was out here on the altar, why was the necklace still down below in the little antechamber?
“A crown.” I picked back up the crown again, shuddering at the bone and blood. “A crown for a female head. But where is Gabel’s?”
No answer.
Was Gabel going to die?
What was the fate of comets that slammed into the Earth? They incinerated.
“No,” I said, shaking. “No. How can I wear that crown if he’s not here to win it for me?”
Being King-Alpha was Gabel’s wish. If he died, then I would never be a Queen Luna. He had to triumph and survive long enough to crown me. It couldn’t be the right answer. It couldn’t be my crown.
“No. You didn’t send Gabel here as your Comet to die once he served your purpose.”
A large enough comet, a heavy enough one, one made of metal, might not blow apart. It might embed itself into the Earth.
Gabel. I had to find my way to the grove, and tell Gabel about what he needed to do.
I left my torch burning on the altar and hurried down the ancient stairs. I scrambled over the side down to the third ledge, and slipped around the corner, and I half-expected the window to not be there, but it was. I hauled myself up through the window, flopped over onto the stone floor and smashed my shoulder and hip falling into the room.
“Ouch,” I whimpered.
At least it hadn’t been my skull.
The unfinished necklace was still there, along with the inky darkness. I got up and walked to it, and it engulfed me.
The Grove: Sing Of Love
Battered and exhausted, I woke to the scent of flowers.
“Buttercup.”
“Gabel!” I opened my eyes, realized I was cradled against him, in the dark, silent grove.
He looked equally battered. Gaunt, drawn, scratches healing on his face, and bruises, and his knuckles were like raw meat, and he was missing two fingernails, the nail beds bloody. He was naked, sliced across the hip and burned with silver on his left chest, the burns and bruises blooming like flowers across his skin.
“Anders put up a fight,” I said with understanding.
“His Luna put up a better one. Buttercup, what’s happened to you?” he gripped me with his hands and peered at me.
“Ow.” I flinched as his hand closed over my shoulder. He brushed my hair away, revealing a huge blue contusion where I had hit the temple floor.
“Your neck isn’t healed. Your hands.” He lifted one and examined the blood-soaked wraps. “Buttercup, what have they done to you?”
“Nothing. I haven’t been harmed but they have Hix and—” I choked.
“I know. Aaron told me.” He kissed each of my hands, then turned his attention to the necklace of still-healing wounds around my neck.
I needed to tell him before it was too late. Before the Moon sucked us back into the world. “Gabel. You need to attack Shadowless.”
“Why?”
“Because I told First Beta Lucas that would be your next move. The SableFur think you’ll attack Aaron over RedWater, and will get suspicious when you don’t.”
“Shadowless is your birthpack. I was going to hold off.”
“Hold off?” I laughed miserably. “I know you’re going to go for them eventually! Just give my father a warrior’s death.”
“He doesn’t deserve one. He should have demanded his Alpha act like an Alpha, and not like a belly-crawling coward.”
“Please.”
“No,” Gabel said coldly. “I will not give him the death you want for Hix. He doesn’t deserve it. Hix deserves it. I’ll give your father a quick death. I’ll kill him before I confront Jermain.”
I wept. “Don’t talk about Hix dying! I won’t let it happen!”
“How will you stop it?” Gabel asked. “He is a warrior, Gianna. Warriors die. It is an inevitable truth.”
“I won’t let it happen”
Gabel glared at me. “Foolish. You’d ruin everything to save the life of one wolf who had already agreed to die, but you want a warrior’s death for a wolf who wasn’t willing to die?”
I shoved at him. He didn’t move. “Shut up, Gabel! Shut up!”
“Your father’s soul will know he didn’t die a warrior. Be grateful I don’t dishonor him further. He gets a clean death, and I’m being generous. They betrayed me, they lied to me, and they sold you. I would never sell one of our daughters.”
“And if they had fought you how many would have died?!” I lashed out.
“That’s the point of warriors. To fight and die. Jermain is a warrior, and his choices were fight or surrender. He chose dishonor. You want me to give your father a warrior’s death, but he is a warrior who let his Alpha give away his own honor. He should have bled in your name. That’s what honor costs. It costs blood.”
I shuddered.
He lifted my hands in his. “Is this your blood, buttercup?”
“Some of it,” I whispered, shuddering over the bleeding crown’s memory.
A smile. “Buttercup, have you been bloodying up SableFur? What have I told you about your temper?”
I managed a watery smile. “They haven’t let me train. I get no indulgences there.”
“That I approve of. Flint humoring you is not going to continue.”
“We’ve argued about this.”
“A King needs his Queen, and they need their heirs.”
“Don’t get too hasty,” I said automatically, not wanting to talk about pups. Not after I had already been exposed to silver, pregnancy tested, wandered around a jungle temple, and handled a crown of bleeding bones.
“Yes, yes. I have other things to do. Like attack Shadowless while being conveniently elsewhere so Aaron can strut around like a bird of paradise.”
Aaron.
“I’ve seen him,” I told Gabel. “He was at SableFur.”
“Yes, I know. Not that I trust him, but I can deal with him later.”
“That’s what he plans to do with you.”
“I am not surprised. You were able to speak to him in private?”
“Ah... he ah...” I fumbled. “He made it clear to Magnes and I that he... he wants me to come to IceMaw. You... will probably hear rumors on how he came to my room.”
/> Gabel gripped my chin between his thumb and forefinger, and forced me to look up at him. “So he still wants you, and without my Mark, he thinks he can have you. What happened in your room?”
“Not that! He told me what his agreement with you is.”
“But everyone thinks he was taking what is mine. That perhaps he laid you down on your bed and made sweet, tender love to you?” Gabel leaned close to me, growling his words. “Is that what happened?”
“How can you even say that!” I shoved him back. He didn’t release me and his grip wrenched my neck. “First Hix, now Aaron? Are you jealous of every male who talks to me?!”
“Yes,” he growled. “I enjoy having what everyone else wants.”
“Hix doesn’t want me.”
“You are blind if that’s what you think, Gianna. Don’t insult the man. He’s going to die for you.”
“Not if I can help it!” I flailed, but Gabel held me firm. He yanked me to him, the pressure a dull ache on my face. “I won’t let him die, Gabel. I won’t, I swear I will find a way to save him!”
“You are naïve. They are just playing with their prey.”
“And that’s what I’m doing with Aaron! To everyone, I am not yours. Aaron says I smell of the night-blooming cereus as loudly as you talk of punching Her Eye!”
Gabel snarled, “You are mine, buttercup.”
“It is safer if Magnes thinks that I will have somewhere to go after I leave SableFur,” I whispered.
“You are mine and you will return to me.”
“It’s just part of the plan!” I pleaded.
“Curse the plan! He seems to think because I permit him take my territories that it means he takes my mate?!”
“My Mark is gone. My scent has returned,” I whispered.
“And you’re defending him?”
“I’m defending the situation! If Magnes thinks that I will become the IceMaw Luna then he won’t be so quick to kill me!”
Gabel’s dark fury multiplied. “She takes the Mark, but then gives you back your scent and now I must suffer mongrels sniffing you like they matter?! The Bond still lives, Gianna. How dare the Moon-Bitch, I swear I am going to gouge out Her damned Eye! And then, I am going to kill Aaron for daring to touch what is mine!”
Iron Oracle Page 20