Eye of the Oracle (57 page)

Gabriel slid farther. Puffing and grunting, he let out a loud, wordless moan.

Stooping carefully, Sapphira grabbed Jasmine’s wrist. As she pulled, her vision sharpened. Far below, the skeletons of several dragons lay scattered in the midst of a black fog. A huge red dragon stood among the bones and called out, “Please do not abandon me!”

“Don’t listen to him!” Sapphira reached for Jasmine’s flailing arm. “Give me your other hand!”

Gabriel screamed. “I can’t hold on much longer!”

The voice erupted again. “Roxil, I need you! Do not trust the humans. If you climb into Makaidos’s arms, you will be in his clutches forever.”

Sapphira glanced up at the statue’s horseman. Its open arms seemed ready to welcome the company of another rider. As the pedestal tipped further, she reached her free hand down as far as she could and shouted. “You have to make your choice right now!”

Jasmine looked down one more time, then swung up and grabbed Sapphira’s hand. As Sapphira pulled, tongues of fire erupted from the pit and swirled around Jasmine’s feet. With a final grunt, Sapphira hoisted her, and they scrambled up to the side of the rider. With their feet planted on top of the pedestal, they clung to one of his arms.

A huge plume of twisting fire shot up from the depths and swirled around the statue, creating a tall, spinning cylinder of flames. The hangman’s rope ignited and burned to a charred thread, and the statue slid down the side of the chasm wall.

Pushing her snowy hair from her eyes, Sapphira looked through the circular opening at the top of the fiery cylinder. Several feet above her head, Gabriel clung to the lip of the chasm, digging his shoes into the slope.

Sapphira cupped a hand around the side of her mouth. “Gabriel! Jump! It’s your only chance!” As hot wind from the whipping fire snatched her words into the cyclone, the cylinder’s opening squeezed shut. With a loud crack, the statue plunged downward.

Suddenly, Gabriel burst through the wall of fire. He caught the horse’s head and swung up to its back in one motion. Now riding in front of the soldier, he took Sapphira’s hand. “Are we in a portal?”

Sapphira squeezed his fingers. “I think so!”

“Did you make all this fire?”

“No! I have no idea who did it!”

Dry air and streaming flames flowed upward all around. Jasmine locked an arm around Sapphira’s waist, and Gabriel slapped the thigh of the sculptured rider behind him. “Ready to hunt for our father?”

As Jasmine held her dress down with her free hand, a trembling smile broke through, and her voice cracked. “You humans . . . have a strange way . . . of beginning a new adventure.”

Gabriel grinned. “Hang on tight, Sister. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

The downward plunge slowed to a gentle drift. A rectangular hole opened in the fiery wall, revealing a screen similar to the museum room’s viewing port. It displayed Merlin standing at the edge of a precipice with his hand wrapped around the neck of a huge raven. At the bottom of the chasm, a river of magma churned, bright orange and steaming. Merlin struck the bird’s head with a glowing sword, and its feathers burst into flames. He released the raven’s neck, and it immediately attacked him, pecking and clawing his head. Tongues of fire lashed his shoulders and ignited his clothes. Merlin transformed into a glittering lion, snatched the raven in his great jaws, and dangled it over the chasm. With a mighty shake, he cast the raven downward, and it morphed into Morgan’s dark silhouette. Screaming and flailing her arms, she plunged into the boiling river of fire. The splash ignited a towering blaze, and Morgan’s face melted into the stream.

Merlin gazed down at the river and whispered, “Checkmate.” Then, with a turn and a bow of his sparkling lion head, he smiled. “Sapphira Adi, your tormentor is no more. May you live the rest of your years in peace and joy. I will see you again in Paradise.”

Sapphira sniffed and waved. “Good-bye, Merlin. Thank you . . . Thank you for everything.”

Merlin faded away. The screen disappeared, and the hole in the fiery wall closed. The cyclone’s spin suddenly accelerated, whipping the hot air into a frenzy. Sharp pain dug into Sapphira’s arm. A set of claws dragged across her skin and scratched down the side of the statue. A pair of wide red eyes flashed in the center of a scaly brow as a dragon’s face slowly shrank into the darkness below.

Sapphira bent over and grasped a foreleg. “Roxil! Hang on!”

Wings sprouted from Roxil’s back and spread out toward the spinning fire. When the tips brushed against the flames, she pulled her wings tightly against her body.

Sapphira looked upward. “Jehovah-Yasha!” She grunted as she strained against Roxil’s growing weight. “Help me! I can’t hang on much longer!”

The wall of fire contracted and spilled over them. The statue burned away, and all three plunged into a black void. Sapphira’s body erupted in flames. Gabriel, falling next to her, also burst into a fiery column.

The surrounding darkness crumbled and blew away. Sapphira pressed her feet down on a cool stone floor. The flames crackled and shrank into dwindling sparks that scattered around the familiar museum chamber. Standing at her side in his winged form, Gabriel batted away the remaining sparks as if they were pesky gnats. The portal column swirled in front of them, white and shining.

Sapphira clasped her hands together. “We made it! Thank God!”

Gabriel smiled and flicked his thumb toward the rear. “Our hitchhiker made it, too!”

Sapphira spun around. Sitting on its haunches, a tawny dragon stretched its wings and shook off a coat of ashes. It wagged its head back and forth and groaned. “I hope that was just the longest nightmare in history!”

Sapphira laughed. “Wake up, sleepy dragon! It’s time to search for your father.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, giving his wings a vigorous shake. “We need you to heat up the coffee.”

Roxil breathed a steam-filled sigh. “Very well. I can put up with a couple of humans for a while.”

Gabriel shook a finger at her. “Listen here. You might be a powerful, fire-breathing dragon, but to me you’re just my overgrown, scaly sister. I should ”

“Shhh!” Sapphira grabbed Gabriel’s wrist and whispered. “Just be patient. At least she didn’t go with Goliath, and we might have a long journey ahead of us, so we have to deal with what we’ve got. Besides, sister or not, you shouldn’t argue with a fire-breathing dragon.”

Gabriel firmed his chin and nodded. “Good point. Don’t stoke the dragon.”

Sapphira patted him on the back, and the two walked together to the dragon’s side. “Roxil,” she said, pointing back at the spinning portal, “are you ready to carry a couple of riders to another dimension? I’m not sure what Gabriel’s going to look like when we get there, but we’ll figure out a way to work together.”

“If I must.” Roxil lowered her head to their eye level. “Where will we begin?”

Sapphira pressed a palm against her chest. A fiery glow spread from her fingertips down to the heel of her hand and radiated pulsing white light in a soft elliptical aura. “We’ll begin wherever my dance partner leads me.”

Waving her hands around a spinning column of fire, Acacia guided the vortex down toward a book that lay open on a wooden table. Inside the column, a miniature boy and girl clung to a statue and descended with the flames. Acacia clapped her hands over the top of the column, and the vortex collapsed, setting the pair inside on fire. The two burning figures hovered above the book for a moment, then crumbled into glowing embers that fell onto the pages.

Another pair of hands, larger and wrinkled, closed the book. The hands belonged to a white-haired man who sat across from Acacia. His bushy eyebrows rose high on his broad forehead. “Well done, my child. You have saved the lives of your friends, and you have given a dragon a second chance, an opportunity not normally afforded anyone, whether human or dragon.”

Acacia took the hand of a little girl who sat on the bench next to her. The girl’s eyes gleamed in the dim light cast over the table by a flickering lantern. With only a stack of books piled against one of the stone walls, the stuffy chamber raised memories of her long, pain-filled days in the stark caverns of the underworld. “What happens now, Father Enoch? Will Paili and I go home?”

“I do not know for sure.” Enoch rubbed his hands across the weathered cover of the book. “Time is not like a story. You cannot turn to the back and discover the end of the tale. You have to suffer through life one page at a time.”

“But aren’t you a prophet? Can’t the Eye of the Oracle see the future?”

Enoch shook his head. “I speak only what Jehovah commands me to speak. Whether he writes the final page, reads every page from front to end at the same time, or perfectly predicts what we will write there ourselves, I do not know. It is a mystery far too great for me to comprehend.” He lifted the book’s cover and flipped to the back. “But this much I do know. No matter what happens, Jehovah-Jireh will provide for all your needs, Jehovah-Shammah will be there from the first to the last, and Jehovah-Yasha will deliver you to safety, whether at home with Sapphira or at home with him. You will never be forsaken.”

Paili slid closer and clutched Acacia’s arm. Acacia smiled and laid her hand on the book’s final page. “Then the Eye of the Oracle has spoken?”

Enoch laid his hand over Acacia’s. “Yes, my child. The Eye of the Oracle has spoken.”