Dark Oracle (20 page)

“Like you said, the Pythia is a pretty determined bitch. No one ever leaves Delphi’s Daughters. . . for any reason other than death.” Adrienne balled up her fist. “And I will be happy to release you from that obligation.”

“It’s good of you to keep me company, Adrienne.” Tara lifted her foot and stomped down on Magnusson’s watch with all her strength. She felt the crackle of the circuit breaking, a low hum almost beyond the range of her hearing thundering through the floor.

Light swelled up under her foot. She backed away, staring in fascination as the violet light escaped the confines of the watch, pushed her out in a shock wave, ripped open the air in a terrible weal of sound. . . and exploded in a cold flash of dark brilliance.

I
T WAS STILL DARK
. A
LWAYS DARK
.

The darkness weighed heavy and cold against Tara’s body. She smelled the dreaded scent of earth, crushed irises, and the warm copper tang of her own blood. Her nose and mouth were packed with dirt, and the weight of the earth kept her aching limbs from stirring.

Despair and panic overwhelmed her. She had been here, before: buried alive. She was stuck in an infinity loop, sucked over and over again into this situation, like a Tarot card coming up in draw after draw, unable to escape. It seemed this was her destiny, to be committed to the earth, to feed it with her lifeblood. Her judgment in this life. This unavoidable knowledge paralyzed her. She could feel her heart pumping faster, wasting air and shoving blood through wounds that burned brightly in her flesh.

“Fight.”

This time, she could distinguish the voice. It was clearly the Pythia.

No. This was not her destiny. She squeezed her eyes shut, thought of the Judgment card she’d drawn, just hours before, how it depicted a woman rising from a coffin into the daylight, into the embrace of an angel. She remembered the Strength card, the slight woman taming the jaws of the lion. And she remembered the Knight of Pentacles, Harry, how much she wanted to see his face again. And Cassie, the Star, whom she’d promised to protect.

“Fight.”

Her mother had raised her to be a fighter. She would not allow Corvus and his sweet-smelling Death to win.

She wiggled her fingers in the dirt, forming an air pocket. She worked her hands back and forth until she could feel her wrists move, then her elbows. Her bad arm howled in protest, sending shock waves of pain to the soles of her feet. She worked against the gravel, the weight of the earth, until she could shrug her shoulders, turn her head. She clawed her arms up over her, as if she were swimming, pulling clods of earth up, opposite the direction where gravity seemed to tug the debris. She imagined this was how Strength felt, struggling against the jaws of the lion, ignoring her own wounds.

Up. Up. She kept that thought foremost in her mind. She glimpsed fading sparks of the violet dark energy as they slid through the earth, unencumbered by the mass of the soil. She envied them, how quickly they moved out and away, as easily as fireflies navigated air.

But she was not like them. She was bound by mass and form, and couldn’t phase through matter at a wish. Her energy flagged. She was buried much deeper than she had been in the Gardener’s flower bed, hopelessly deep in a mine. She forced herself to continue, promised herself she would go as far as she could until she ran out of air.

Something compressed the earth above her, shook the gravel. Through crusted-shut ears, she could hear the rain of dirt, the sluice of earth moving. She reached up for it, feeling furtive scraping, movement, shouting. . .

And she was being dragged free of the debris. She cried out in pain, her leg twisted beneath her, dirt crusting light that was suddenly agonizingly bright.

“Shh, babe. It’s okay.” She felt Harry’s arms around her, wiping dirt from her face. “Just breathe. . . long, slow breaths.”

She sucked in lungs full of air and stared up at his swollen eyes. Gabriel had given him one hell of a shiner. “How did you find me?” she asked, spitting around the dirt in her mouth.

Harry gestured to the scene around them. The mine had partially collapsed in on itself. Emergency crews scurried around the sunlit site, hauling people and precious bits of metal out of the disaster zone. The land was littered with scraps of paper, torn pieces of insulation, candy wrappers, chunks of concrete. . . the lightweight random litter of an explosion. In this area, though, at the northwest edge of the mine, she could see it was scattered with the torn debris of Corvus’s iris petals, glinting white in the sun.

“I found this, right over where I found you.” He showed her a torn and filthy Tarot card, the one depicting the wounded woman closing the jaws of the lion: Strength.

T
HE EARTH KNEW HER
. I
T KNEW HER LIKE A MOTHER KNEW
a child, lovingly wrapping its arms around Adrienne. She felt the rumble of the pulse deep within its breath, sensed the weight of the earth’s love as it drew her near.

She’d come home.

Her lungs filled with blackness, and she sensed metal twisting and breaking below her. A ley line trembled somewhere far below. She sensed the cold veins of silver, still sleeping miles underground. The glitter of quartz and geodes shimmered in her sight, as they shifted and settled. Dirt dug into her skin, permeating it. Fragments of silver and dark violet light melted and flowed through her veins, scorchingly cold. The border between her body and the earth dissolved, and she and the ground became one. Distantly, she wondered if Magnusson had known this bliss when he fell in the field at the bottom of the caldera.

Home. Synthesis.

The roar of silence suffused her. After hours, days—she couldn’t mark the passage of time in this still place—she felt the rumble of earth-moving equipment above her, the scrape and sloughing of shovels. She shrank away from the sounds of digging, burrowing deeper into the cool black.

But the machines found her, eventually. Daylight washed over her, burned her eyelids.

She howled.

Leave me here.

Men stood over her in white suits, Geiger counters clicking and zinging. Their voices fell over each other in alarm. A man she recognized as Gabriel bent over her; she could see his horrified eyes behind the mask.

“Dig her up,” he said.

Other voices buzzed. “How in the hell are we supposed to do that?”

“Do it,” he ordered savagely. “Uproot her like a turnip.”

The blade of a shovel cut into her body, fused with the earth, and she screamed.

Chapter Nineteen

O
N A
visceral level, Tara understood the principle of dark energy. . . understood it to be the natural, polar opposite of the solid matter comprising her world, that it was not subject to any of its laws, save gravity. For every action, a reaction; for every thing, an equal and opposing force. Magnusson had left a scrap of it behind, to balance the equation he’d set into motion. But it still didn’t make things easier for Cassie.

Tara had come to tell Cassie about her father in person. It had been nearly a week since she’d seen her, but it seemed much longer. Tara drove up the long, straight road to Sophia’s farm with empty hands and a heavy heart. Spring had begun to touch the fields. . . The earth would be turned in the coming weeks, waiting for seed. Blades of new grass had begun to prickle through frost. The apple trees were studded with pale green leaf shoots, and a touch of fickle warmth had begun to permeate the March Tennessee air. She had not been here since she was a child, with her mother, and she wondered what it would be like to see this familiar landscape without Sophia in it.

The farmhouse was the same as she remembered: a yellow two-story house sprawling under the weight of slate shingles. Chickens milled through the yard, muttering to themselves, as Maggie stalked them around the corner of a shed. Tara pulled up in the driveway before the barn. Maggie thundered up to the car, claws scraping against the door. She fell upon Tara in a hail of doggie kisses and snuffling.

To her delight, Oscar sauntered down the porch steps and pressed his body up against her leg. Tara kneeled down to scoop up the cat with her good arm as he purred like a chain saw.

“Oof. Oscar, you’ve put on some weight.”

Oscar nipped her ear, kneaded her wounded shoulder with his claws. She shifted him over her shoulders, where he lay like a stole, well out of Maggie’s reach. His purring vibrated through her skull.

On the porch, the Pythia sat in the swing, smoking. Her bare feet pushed her colorful skirts back and forth, and her ankle bracelets jingled in time with the squeak of the chain suspending the swing. In the shade, the bright gleam of her cigarette burned like a star.

“How are you feeling?” the Pythia asked. She frowned at her cigarette, as if it told her something she didn’t want to hear. She stubbed it out and lit another.

Tara frowned at her arm in a sling. “Better.” She was sore all over, bristling with stitches and bruises. And her radiation sickness had returned, perhaps retriggered by the explosion of Magnusson’s watch. She felt weak and pale. But it felt immeasurably good to breathe the fresh, open air. It even wiped away some of the uneasiness of the truce between Tara and the Pythia. “How’s Cassie?”

“She’s in the shower. I told her you were coming for dinner.” She shrugged. “My cigarettes say so, anyway.” There was a twinkle of humor in her eye that Tara had long forgotten.

Tara hesitated. “Is there dessert?”

“Of course. The Daughters of Delphi know how to bake. Most of them, anyway.” The Pythia blew a smoke ring to the ceiling of the porch, like a wizened dragon. Tara sat down on the other side of the porch swing.

“I am glad you are safe,” the Pythia said.

Tara rubbed the sweat from her hand on her jeans. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“What Adrienne said. . . that I’m to be your successor? The next Pythia?” Words fell over each other. “I don’t want it. No way in hell. You’ll have to pick someone else.”

The Pythia looked at her and burst out laughing. It was not the reaction Tara had expected.

She took a drag on her cigarette and touched Tara’s arm, bracelets jingling. “You are not my successor. You’re good, but you’re not
that
good.”

Tara blinked. “But. . .”

“You never were,” the Pythia said mildly. “Cassie is the one I want for Pythia.”

Tara’s jaw dropped, dumbfounded. “But she’s not an oracle. . . She’s a scientist. . .”

The Pythia smiled. “We are all many things. I wanted Sophia to bring you back to the fold, in order to guard her and bring her here. I foresaw that the next Pythia will need to guard the secrets of darkness, to keep that knowledge safe from the hands of men. And Cassie has that knowledge, the power of dark energy.

“You’re a warrior, at heart, Tara. Fighting is what you do best. . . whether it’s with men in the outside world or with me.”

Tara stared at her. “Was that you talking to me. . . in the Gardener’s box?”

The Pythia wouldn’t answer, just smiled like the Sphinx with an unanswerable question.

“This Pythia business. Cassie can’t see the future. . .” Tara sputtered.

“Not yet. Not well, in any case. But she’s got an aptitude for astrology, for reading the stars. I could feel it when you brought her to me in the trance. She’s a few years behind in training, of course, but she’ll catch up.”

“Hang on.” Some part of her wanted to protect her, to keep her safe from the Pythia’s grasp. “How the heck does Cassie feel about this? We’re talking about her like she’s a thing.”

“She hasn’t made her mind up yet. She wants to talk to you about it.”

“You’re not going to force her into it?”

The Pythia shook her head. “I can’t force anyone into anything. Even when I see the future, as you do, it’s a possibility that never trumps free will. She can stay with me, or she can go.”

“That’s generous of you.”

The Pythia ignored the dig. “You have news about Cassie’s father?”

Tara nodded. “It’s not good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry for Cassie, especially.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

The Pythia swung for a moment, her painted toes moving across the floorboards of the porch. “I think Magnusson’s time had passed, but he gave what he needed to give to his daughter. It was. . . his legacy that was important.”

The screen door banged, and Cassie thumped down the whitewashed steps. Tara was startled at her transformation. The dark makeup had been scrubbed from her face, and a few pounds had been added to her too-gaunt frame. . . the Daughers of Delphi did, apparently, know how to cook. With the light-brown bob, she reminded Tara of her own mother, beautiful and glowing.

Cassie threw her arms around Tara, and Tara smiled into her embrace. Tara saw how her eyes slid to her empty car.

“Where’s Harry?” Cassie asked.

“Harry’s back in New Mexico, being deposed by the state’s attorney.”

“Is he in trouble?”

Tara’s mouth thinned. She hadn’t seen Harry since she’d been discharged from the hospital. He’d come to tell her Corvus was dead, but that no trace of Gabriel or Adrienne had been found. At least he had enough sense not to send her flowers. “I think the Pythia has set him up with a very good attorney. He should be fine.”

“And Martin?” Tara could see Cassie was working herself up to the big question, warming up to ask about her father.

“Martin’s back home. When Gabriel’s men came for him, he faked a heart attack, then wound up in a psychiatric hospital. He faked dementia all too well, and Harry had a hell of a time getting him released.” Tara smiled. “But while in the psych ward, he apparently managed to set himself up as the dictator of an imaginary empire of followers who worshipped him as a god.”

Cassie’s eyes were anxious, and her voice was lower than a whisper. “And my father?”

Tara rubbed the girl’s arms. She hated to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it was best it came from her. “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but your father died in the explosion. He destroyed his research to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

The girl’s face crumpled, and she buried her face in her hands. “I thought so,” she whispered, through tears.

“Why did you think that?” Tara asked, stroking her hair.

Cassie sat down heavily on the step. “He had been so secretive about his work, as if he was trying to protect me from it. When it was clear that he gave the laptop to me, I knew something was terribly wrong.”

“You destroyed the laptop’s hard drive.”

Cassie nodded, wiping her nose. “Yeah. I just felt. . . that was what he wanted me to do. And it’s all in my head, anyway.”

The Pythia came to stand beside the girl and put her arm around her shoulders. “That knowledge is your father’s legacy. It will live and grow through you.”

But her eyes were on Tara when she spoke.

T
HEY DUG HER UP AND PUT HER SOMEPLACE BRIGHT, A PLACE
that smelled like chrome and piss and disinfectant. A place full of the chatter of people and machines, far removed from the soft, organic silence of the ground.

Adrienne was furious.

Through eyes taped shut, she could sense the shadows as they stretched over her bed. Some came to stare at her—she could feel the weight of their gazes on her. Others brought blessed oblivion in the form of drugs. . . but it was an incomplete oblivion. She always woke with pain and fury. The crinkle of plastic, the beeping of machines—nothing could disguise the wariness she heard in their voices. And the pity.

“Poor thing,” she heard a woman say. “They should just let her die.”

Pages on a chart flipped like a deck of cards being shuffled.

“No,” another voice responded. “They’re going to keep her. Study her. No one’s ever seen anything like it.”

“It just seems inhuman.”

“Well, she does look horrific, but. . .”

“Not
her.
Keeping her alive is what’s inhuman.”

Adrienne felt a needle slide under her flesh. Another drug that brought the false darkness.

When she awoke again, she smelled tobacco. She flexed her fingers, feeling them curl against the sheet. At least she still had fingers.

“Gabriel,” she whispered, with malice. Her throat was raw, perhaps from the scrape of a feeding tube. Her mouth tasted like dirt and blood.

She opened her eyes. Something was wrong with her vision. . . Her field of view was speckled with fragments of tiny prisms and dirt. Her brain struggled to adapt, to frame Gabriel’s image in her wobbling perspective. He stood over her in a white hazmat suit, head cocked to one side like an inquisitive bird.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Where the fuck am I?” Her mouth felt numb and warped, and her tongue swelled. The word came out sounding like “thuck.”

“In the isolation wing at Los Alamos Medical Center. You took on some dark matter.” He said it as casually as if she’d taken shrapnel, his eyes tracking up and down her body. “Now that you’re stable, our scientists can’t wait to get their hands on you.”

“Take me back,” she pleaded. She wanted nothing more than to be returned to the earth.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

He gestured somewhere beyond a clear plastic curtain, and she could hear the wheels on her bed being unlocked. Someone pressed an oxygen mask over her face, and white-suited men zipped a plastic bubble over her. With the clatter of IV poles, they began to wheel the gurney out into the hallway. Through the warble of plastic, dingy ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights flashed past. Adrienne’s thoughts were sluggish with the aftereffects of drugs. She struggled to focus, to pull the head-clearing oxygen deep into her lungs. She had to think of a way to escape. She would not be their science project.

They wheeled her into a service elevator with padded walls. Gabriel crowded in with two nurses, and the numbers blurred on the way up. The elevator ejected them into fresh air and blue sky. The roof of the structure, Adrienne guessed.

The sounds of helicopter blades sliced the air, thrumming at a low whine. A black Huey perched on a helipad like a giant black mosquito, ready to whisk her away to an unpleasant fate, under Gabriel’s microscope.

Adrienne took a deep breath. The plastic bubble over her rattled. She felt something dark and lightless roiling in her chest. Something strong. She reached up for the zipper as men in camo uniforms rushed forward to pull the gurney into the gaping maw of the copter. They were going to devour her.

For the moment, she let them. Her bed was lifted into the back of the copter, IV poles and machines trailing like the tentacles of a squid. Adrienne took a head count: a pilot, two guards, a medic in white, and Gabriel. Her odds were improving.

They milled around, securing the gurney and blinking equipment. One of the cabin doors had become jammed open by a rock. Gabriel gestured for the men to secure themselves, and to leave it. Adrienne waited for the sickening lurch that told her the helicopter had lifted off, waited for it to bank left and peel away into the sky, before she struck.

The zipper ripped open, and the wind from helicopter blades snagged the plastic bubble like a kite. Adrienne twisted and reached for the gun at the hip of the nearest man in camo. She felt IV lines tear out of her arm and the oxygen mask rip from her face. She grasped the cool metal, flopped like a fish on land, and pulled the trigger.

Blood spattered on the outside of the bubble.

Wind ripped through her hair, nearly blinding her. She heard Gabriel shouting for them not to shoot her. Must’ve been part of his latest mission: bring back the dark matter without damaging it. She wondered what he was willing to sacrifice in order to do it. Adrienne launched herself out of the egg of the plastic-covered bed, feeling cold air skimming through her hospital gown against her raw skin.

Her. . . skin. She hesitated for a moment, glimpsing mottled, warped skin that glistened like granite.

But only for a moment. She rolled beneath the cart, ripped away the Velcro straps holding it anchored to the helicopter frame, and kicked it as hard as she could. The cart slammed into the medic and kept rolling. Both tumbled out of the open cabin door of the helicopter in a rattle of plastic and white sheet.

“Adrienne.” Gabriel said something more that she couldn’t hear; she just recognized the shape of her name on his mouth.

No more words. No more stupid, simpering, deceitful words. She was tired of people talking to her.

She shot the remaining guard.

The pilot pitched the helicopter forward, trying to throw her off-balance. Adrienne skidded in bare feet, snatching at a cargo strap. She leveled the 9mm at Gabriel, saw he’d drawn down on her.