Rogue Oracle (11 page)

“There are no weird coincidences. Just synchronicity.”

“But this was beyond strange … I did a natal chart for the U.S., but picked today’s date and Washington for the location for the transiting planets. I got Pluto in retrograde, plus a whole lotta other badness.”

Tara’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know much about astrology, but that doesn’t sound good.”

“No. But I did a data search to find any similar charts using that computer program I built. And I found a really close match: Chernobyl in Ukraine.”

Tara’s thoughts raced to make the connections: Rogue Angel, loose and unaccounted-for nuclear matter … and Chernobyl. She plucked a card from her deck; it was one from her very first Celtic Cross reading on the case: the Tower. The Tower was a sign of total destruction, and it had been in the foundation position in her previous reading. Whatever was driving this case had come from there, from Chernobyl.

“Tara, you still there?”

“Yeah. Can you put the Pythia on?”

“She’s right here.”

Not surprising,
Tara thought. She was certain that there was very little that went on in that house that the Pythia didn’t eavesdrop on.

“Tara,” the Pythia’s musical voice filled her ear. “This thing … whatever it is you’re working on, is much bigger than you expected.”

Tara was reluctant to divulge much information, but it seemed that the Pythia would have clearer sight than most, in this case. She sketched the case in general terms. “Several government operatives who were sent to track and recover nuclear materials in the former USSR have gone missing, and their secrets have been sold.”

Without skipping a beat, the Pythia told her: “You must stop this. Or there will be a repeat of Chernobyl. Here.”

Tara’s knuckles whitened on the phone. “I’m trying.”

“I know that you are. Your cards—”

“These don’t seem to be my cards,” Tara said coldly, “are they? You went to a great effort to put these into my hands.”

There was a pause. “Those cards were meant to be yours.”

“Where did they come from?”

“It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that you’d better learn to control them before it’s too late.”

The Pythia hung up.

“Bitch,”
Tara breathed into dead air.

She scooped up her cards, and went to join Harry in the living room, which looked like a disaster zone. File folders with open papers were spread all over the couch and floor, circling an empty pizza box. Harry sat on the couch, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands dangling slack into space. His tie hung loose around his neck, shirt rumpled, and he stared unblinkingly at his cell phone on the makeshift coffee table of boxes.

Tara sat beside him on the couch, touched his knee. “Harry, what is it?”

He swallowed, stared blankly at the phone. “I’ve been … I’ve been thinking about last night. About that mugger. Called the local hospitals, just to make sure that nobody matching that description turned up dead. I couldn’t live with myself if … if …” He rested his forehead in his hands. “I got a call from the morgue.”

Tara’s heart stopped in her chest.

He couldn’t say anything else, blew out a shaky breath.

All she said was: “I’ll go with you.”

He didn’t refuse. He just silently gathered his keys and left for the car. Tara followed him, watching. He said nothing as he drove, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. All blood had drained from his face, and Tara couldn’t imagine what he was going through. Harry had always been an exacting perfectionist, had always demanded the best of himself and others. Now, he’d failed. He’d taken one step outside the lines, with disastrous consequences.

The DC medical examiner’s office was tucked away in a complex of brick buildings across the street from a dilapidated block of row houses and an STD clinic. Harry parked the car in a no-parking space, and tossed his DOJ parking placard in the window, as if daring someone to tow the car. Tara followed him through the glass doors to the ME’s office. He rang the service bell, and Tara waited beside him as he showed his creds to the night staff.

“I need to take a look at a body that was brought in early today,” he said. “This is the case number.” He shoved a scrap of paper through the window for the on-duty assistant to look at.

“Sign in here, please.” The morgue assistant shoved a clipboard back at them to sign.

Once the clipboard had been returned, the assistant buzzed them in through an airlock-like set of double doors. Tara wrinkled her nose at the smell and hot air. Rumor had it that the DC morgue’s air conditioners were plagued by gremlins; she believed it.

She followed Harry and the assistant down a long corridor with faded green industrial tile. The soles of her shoes felt tacky; she hoped that it was simply wax, but she doubted it. She smelled too much sour bile, piss, and blood.

“Wait here. I’ll get it out of the freezer.” The assistant left Harry and Tara in the main examination room. A radio somewhere played alternative rock music. Plastic buckets and steel cabinets lined the walls. The aluminum coroner’s slabs were full of figures covered in white sheets and plastic. An assistant was washing the body of an old woman with what looked like an industrial-grade vegetable sprayer. Tara realized that the music she heard came from the earbuds tucked under the woman’s hairnet and mask; she could see the wire trickling out of her collar and extending to her pocket. She picked up a bucket and sloshed away down the hall, leaving Harry and Tara alone with the bodies.

Harry stared at the floor. Tara reached for his hand, and it was cold and clammy, like stone.

The clatter of wheels echoed down the hallway, sounding like a shopping cart at the supermarket. The assistant wheeled in a flat cart containing a body wrapped in plastic. The assistant peered at the toe tag. “This one’s a John Doe. Inova Alexandria Hospital sent him down. Cops picked him up in an alley. Our guess on the cause of death is blunt force trauma. Somebody beat the living shit out of him.”

Harry winced. That hospital was the nearest one to Ariadne’s Web of Books.

Tara watched as the assistant cut the twine surrounding the plastic and opened the body’s head and torso up to the air, like someone unpeeling a sandwich from a wrapper. The body was badly swollen, face a black and blue mass with its eyes swollen shut. Blood was crusted on the body’s crumpled nose. Tara saw no Y-incision crossing the chest, indicating that the ME had not yet performed an autopsy.

She glanced sidelong at Harry, who was steadfastly refusing to look at the body, staring off into space.

“Can we have a minute?” Tara asked the assistant.

“Yeah, sure. Come back to the front when you’re ready.” The assistant left.

Harry turned his attention to the body on the table. He stared at the swollen face, puffed up beyond any recognition. Tara could feel his hand shaking in hers.

“Is that him?” he whispered. “Jesus, he’s busted up so bad that I can’t tell if it’s fucking him.” He leaned over the cart, staring at the body, eyes devouring the wounds on his face. It had been dark, the guy had been wearing a hat, and the attack had lasted only moments. Even under the best of conditions, an ID would be difficult. But this was too much of a coincidence … “It’s him. It has to be him.”

Tara looked under the cart. A brown paper bag was stapled shut. Had to be his property. She snagged some latex gloves from a nearby counter. She reached for the bag, pulled at the staples.

“It’s him. It’s fucking him.” Harry punched one of the metal cabinets, denting it. A fly, startled by the bang, flew off the surface.
“It’s him.”

Tara dumped the contents of the bag on the plastic wrapper. Her hands danced over the items: a pair of shiny black shoes, a white dress shirt speckled with blood and cut apart, an empty wallet, black pants, and a crusty brown tweed jacket. The ruins of a tie were stuck to the bottom of the bag, and she had to peel it out.

“It’s him,” Harry was mumbling over and over. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he leaned against the wall, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I fucking beat a thug to death.”

Tara snapped off her gloves. She spun Harry around, grabbed him by his collar.
“It is not him,”
she hissed, dragging him back to the cart. “This guy was mugged. His wallet’s empty. He was dressed in business clothes … Those shoes cost more than you make in a month. He’s not a petty thief. It’s not him.”

Harry blinked, staring at the corpse.

“It’s not him,” she repeated, more gently, as Harry sagged against her.

He closed his eyes, muttered: “Oh, shit.”

T
HE LANDSCAPE OF TARA’S DREAMS HAD SHIFTED
.

The sun had lowered on the horizon of the desert, allowing blue shadows to creep beyond the dunes. Stars were beginning to prickle through the violet sky, and the full moon had risen in the east. She and her lion were walking along the sand, tracks intermingling. Strange, how she had become used to his presence, like her shadow. She wondered if this was what it meant to have a familiar. The lion’s eyes glowed in the darkness, holding captured sunshine, and his fur still retained the heat of the day. Her skirts swished along her ankles, blurring her tracks in the sand with sidewinder marks.

Something broke the soft line of the sand ahead, something man-made. A ruin of a structure was nearly obscured in the sand. It was without a roof, staggered, crumbling walls open to the ceiling of stars. Broken lintels suggested that there had once been windows. And the door had been destroyed long ago. All that remained was space and open stone, half-buried in the sand and dark.

Tara picked up her skirts and stepped over the stones, into the footprint of the small, crumbling building. Inside, she could make out stones that might have been benches, before erosion had toppled them and sand had swallowed them. Perhaps this place had been a church, in some other time and place. A monument to someone’s belief. Moonlight poured in through the open windows. The lion, seeming disinterested in the place, padded back to the door. He lay across the ruined doorway, staring into the night like a guard with his shining golden eyes.

Her gaze roved to the far side, where an altar would have stood. Sand skimmed around a raised structure, the size of a table, half sunken in the sand. A snake swished away, startled at her approach. She scooped sand away with her hands, and her heart hammered.

This was no altar. It was a sarcophagus. A knight lay in effigy on top of the sarcophagus, his eyes closed, clutching a sword to his chest. He was cast in stone, bits of rust streaking his armor. It was the image of the Four of Swords.

Harry. Her fingers skimmed over the familiar planes of his face.

Tears sprang to Tara’s eyes. She leaned forward, her hair brushing away the sand from his chest, and kissed his unyielding lips.

The stone was cool under her mouth, but warmed under her breath and her touch and her tears. She felt something shifting, something warm and alive, if only she could awaken it. The stone began to yield, melt. She kept her eyes closed, daring to hope that somehow she could break the spell he’d been under …

… until she felt Harry’s breath on her face.

She drew back.

Harry’s eyes fluttered open. He was no longer hewn of stone, but of real flesh and blood. He reached up for her with fingers tangled in her hair and kissed her with a mouth as warm as sunshine.

S
HE WOKE UP, FREEZING, WITH
H
ARRY’S HANDS STILL TANGLED
in her hair.

“Tara, wake up.”

She shivered violently, curling involuntarily against the warmth of Harry’s chest. Her fingers and toes ached from the cold, stiff as talons. Her ear throbbed against the thunder of Harry’s chest as it began to warm. She was wrapped in blankets up to her chin, but she felt as if she’d been walking outdoors in January, not asleep in Harry’s bed in summer.

“You’re sick,” Harry concluded. “There’s an urgent care clinic just down the street. They should still be open.” There was something reassuring about that decisiveness in his voice; he sounded like the old Harry.

Tara shook her head. “No. I’m okay.”

“You’re not. ‘Okay’ does not include shallow respiration, a drop in body temperature, and a pulse like a rabbit.”

“It’s not …” Tara took a deep breath that seemed to pull warm summer air into her lungs. “I don’t think I’m sick. It’s something to do with the cards. I …” She shook her head, struggling to explain. “I’m feeling them more intensely, dreaming about them. It’s like … stepping into another world.”

Harry looked at her suspiciously. “You’re telling me this is a … trance of some kind?”

She nodded. “I think so. The information is very vivid, experiential.”

“I didn’t think your, uh, talents worked that way. I thought you free-associated with the card images … something about that collective unconscious.”

“They don’t. At least, they never have, before.” She bit her lip. “I think my power is changing.”

“Is it supposed to do that?”

“It’s not unheard of. Power doesn’t remain static over an oracle’s lifetime. It waxes and wanes, depending on experience and circumstances. But it’s not something that’s predictable.”