I See You (Oracle 2)

If magic was real, then what? Was it simply a form of energy? The energy I felt when I touched Beau, Chi Wen, and Blackwell? Energy from where? From some divine providence? From the very earth?

If magic came from somewhere godly, then why come to me? Why communicate through me? What purpose did the visions have?

Could I actually change the future? And if yes, would I change it for better or for worse?

Over a year and a half had passed since Jade Godfrey — aka the dowser — fixed my mother’s necklace. Since I’d thwarted the vision of the death of love. Since I’d made a deal with a devil and acquired a demigod for a mentor.

I still didn’t understand or control my power, my magic, but it had been a great year. A year of rest. A year of love and light.

But now the reprieve was over.

Now it was time to see.

Magic willed it so.

CHAPTER ONE

“There are zombies in Florida.”

I looked up from ironing butterfly patches onto my well-worn blue jeans just as Lina, the owner of the laundromat, plugged another quarter into one of the dryers in the bank she’d commandeered for the day. She was crazily talented at reading off her iPad and doing laundry at the same time.

We called it “the laundromat” because it didn’t appear to go by any other name. It was situated in the middle of Yachats, Oregon, though the coastal town was so tiny that there really wasn’t much of a middle to it at all. The underutilized laundromat got my business every Friday. I’d been going there weekly since Beau and I got into town. Today, I’d rented an old iron and an ironing board for an extra two dollars.

“Did you hear me, Sid?” Lina called out to her husband, who was doing some sort of paperwork behind the cash counter to my right. “Zombies in Florida?”

“That’s drugs,” he replied. “Weird drugs making people eat other people’s faces.” Normally Sid suffered from selective hearing, but apparently zombie-related topics were interesting enough to pull him away from his bowl of cheese puffs.

I dropped my gaze to the butterfly patches I was applying to the tear in the left thigh of my jeans. I’d already loosely darned and interfaced the rip from the inside. Beau had bought me the fuchsia, electric blue, and deep purple butterfly patches from Etsy because they were reminiscent of the butterfly tattoo on my left inner wrist. Also, money was tight, so patching jeans was way cheaper than buying a new pair right now. Not that I minded. I wasn’t big on the accumulation of clothing — or anything else, really. I was going to hand stitch the patches after I ironed them on, just to be extra careful. I didn’t want them peeling off.

“Drugs,” Lina scoffed as she crossed behind me and around the peeling laminate counter that held the squat cash register and not much else. She stole a handful of cheese puffs and settled back into her folding beach chair. “Who’d want to take something that makes them want to eat people?”

Zombies, huh? I knew that shapeshifters, werewolves, sorcerers, witches — and whatever Jade Godfrey was — existed. So why not zombies? Except, of course, it would be difficult for the Adept community — aka magical peeps — to keep flesh-eating zombies on the down-low. Yeah, I had figured out pretty quickly the Adept were big on secrets. Which made sense, since they were massively outnumbered by nonmagical people and all their pitchforks.

Sid didn’t answer. I could never figure out what he was working on all day. Yachats boasted a full-time population of six hundred and ninety people, all of whom probably owned their own washers and dryers. Even with the seasonal influx of tourists, the laundromat certainly didn’t do so much business that Sid needed to pore over the receipts with such attention.

I doubted, however, that he was the local pot dealer or anything. First, he just wasn’t the type — meticulous records or not. And second, weed was now legal in Oregon.

The purple butterfly was hovering — suspended in the air — about an inch above the gray, heat-resistant liner of the ironing board. I’d been about to press it into place, and now … this.

No, wait. I could see the butterfly patches — all three of them — still placed carefully over the darned tear in my faded jeans. It was my butterfly … my butterfly tattoo …

What the hell?

The translucent black butterfly tattoo flicked its wings as I slowly flipped my left palm up, confirming that the spot on my wrist was now blank. Yeah, my wrist was now tattoo free.

My stomach twisted, fear shooting through my chest and limbs in a cold wash, though the mid-July day was lovely and warm.

I carefully set the iron down. The butterfly flitted upward until it hovered a few inches from my nose.

Then, inexplicably, it … it … kissed my cheek … as if it were playing with me.

Oh, damn. Now I was hallucinating playful butterflies.

No.

Not hallucinating.

Seeing.

I saw.

Usually visions of the future. Though not my future. And not for the last year and a half. Not even a blip, not even a hint of white mist or a headache. Not since Portland and Blackwell. Not since meeting Jade Godfrey and Chi Wen.

I was an oracle. Well, usually.

Apparently, I now also saw my tattoos coming to life.

That wasn’t disconcerting at all.

I wrapped my fingers around the raw diamond necklace that hung over my black tank top, between and just below my breasts. The magic of the stone and the large-linked chain of rose gold from which it hung tickled my fingertips with tingles of static electricity. The necklace had belonged to my mother, who’d died twenty-and-a-half years ago — at the moment of my birth — from injuries sustained in a car crash just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Jade Godfrey had repaired the chain of the necklace and somehow tuned its magic to my oracle magic, which helped me control the visions. I told anyone who asked that the massive fifty-thousand-dollar diamond was just a crystal — but very few people talked to me voluntarily, let alone asked me personal questions. Yeah, I was a bit off-putting. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t a big fan of people anyway. Well, I liked certain people. A lot.

My demigod mentor, Chi Wen, was the far seer of the guardian dragons. He said I should be able to ‘pull forward’ the ‘focus’ of the necklace to help me ‘navigate’ the visions. Yeah, I had no idea what the hell that meant.

I narrowed my eyes at the manifestation. The butterfly was impervious to my glare, though, so I considered whether I should try it without my tinted, white-framed, bug-eyed glasses. Everyone else seemed put off by my weird pale gray eyes. Though I seriously doubted the butterfly cared about appearances.

I glanced over at the cash counter. Sid and Lina were still wrapped up in their electronic devices. The laundromat was otherwise empty.

I looked back. The butterfly was gone.

No. It had flitted away to dance over top of the grubby glass entrance.

“Ah, geez.” Sid spoke from behind me.

My stomach bottomed out as I turned to look back at the counter. Could Sid see the butterfly? How the hell was I going to explain my tattoo flitting around the storefront windows?

“That old guy is back,” he said.

“What guy?” Lina didn’t look up from her iPad.

“The Chinese guy who just wanted to watch the dryers last week and kept asking for Oreos.”

I snapped my head back to the front door, actually hurting my neck with the sudden movement.

An ancient-looking Asian man was grinning at me from the sidewalk beyond the door of the laundromat.

Chi Wen, the far seer of the guardian dragons and my old-as-ass mentor, had apparently decided that his typical gold-embroidered white robes and sandals would stand out too much in Yachats. So he was now clothed in a baby blue, oversized short-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with a fuchsia pink
Cake in a Cup — Taste the Magic
logo. The shirt hung almost to his knees, his cargo pants ended at his lower calves, and he was wearing black combat boots to complete the ensemble.

“Don’t call him Chinese like that,” Lina snapped as she stood to cross back to the dryers she was manning. “You don’t like people calling us Indian.”

“He’s homeless.”

“How does that make any difference?”

Chi Wen opened the glass door, triggering the bell as well as allowing a warm gust of the sunny day inside.

The chime of the bell mystified him, and he paused — still grinning madly — as he looked around for the source of the sound. Instead, he saw my butterfly tattoo fluttering over his head. He lifted his hand and the butterfly landed in his palm.

“No, no!” Sid called out from behind the counter. “No sit here. No watch. Go. Go!” For some reason, his previously perfectly-articulate-though-accented English broke down as he confronted one of the nine most powerful beings in the world.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s my … grandfather.”

Sid eyed me distrustfully. He was wearing a canary-yellow turban today. I was fairly certain it had been tangerine orange last week. I wondered if there was a religious significance to the color. I’d been coming to the laundromat for a few weeks now, and Sid and Lina accepted my business but didn’t particularly like me. It might have been my full arm-sleeve tattoos, or the weird white streak that wouldn’t take the jet-black dye with which I colored my hair, or maybe they didn’t trust anyone under twenty-five. Which was cool, because remove ‘under twenty-five’ from that misgiving and neither did I.

Apparently, being my grandfather rather than the ‘homeless Chinese guy’ didn’t elevate Chi Wen by much in Sid’s estimation.

“Fledgling,” Chi Wen said as he shuffled over to me, carrying the butterfly. “Is this your drying?” His English was heavily accented. He pronounced the word ‘drying’ as if he’d just learned it. He was pointing at my final dryer load.

“Yes,” I answered. I always answered when Chi Wen questioned me. I always listened when he answered a question of mine — especially on the rare occasions he did so straightforwardly. He didn’t understand sarcasm and sass, or maybe he just didn’t have time for such things, and he had a habit of not showing up for months between our training sessions.

So yeah, going against every defensive mechanism I’d carefully employed to get this far through life relatively unscathed, I attempted to transform myself into a receptive sponge around my mentor.

Settling down on the gray-painted bench that spanned the area between the rows of washers and dryers, Chi Wen began to observe the laundry in my dryer as if it were one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Sid grumbled something to his wife. She grumbled back and settled into her folding chair with her well-used iPad. Hundred to one it was streaked with cheese-puff dust.

I turned off the iron, ignoring that my stomach was now churning like the dryers before me. The laundromat was a peaceful place, full of comforting, homey noises and fresh scents. A visit from the far seer was the exact opposite. Not that he smelled. Just that I was now waiting for the ‘epic’ thing I was sure he had to tell me.

I’d been waiting for this anticipated revelation for over a year and a half now. Which also happened to be the exact amount of time since I’d had my last vision. A vision of Beau dead at the sorcerer Blackwell’s feet. A vision I thought I’d thwarted, but was never one hundred percent sure that it wouldn’t come to pass some other day, or month, or year.

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