Rogue Oracle (7 page)

The gunman’s wrist shattered under the torque of the impossible angle. Harry didn’t hear him howl, just heard the blood pounding in his own ears. Harry’s shoe slammed into the punk’s ribs over and over.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
he could hear himself yelling.

The mugger was on his side on the ground now, and Harry slugged him. That felt so good that he balled up his fist and struck him again. The hat fell to the sidewalk, and red spattered on the pavement. Like loose gravel, a tooth rattled away.

“Who—”

Harry kept hitting him.

“—the fuck—”

He couldn’t stop himself.

“—do you think you are?”

Didn’t want to.

But Tara wanted to stop him. He felt her hands winding around his shoulder, dragging him off the punk. Harry staggered back, breathing heavily. His hands were covered in blood, and the punk was spitting out teeth into the shrubs.

“Harry, let’s go.”

“His gun—” Harry gasped.

“I’ve got it. Let’s go.”

She dragged him down the street. The humidity in the summer air finally broke, and it began to rain. Harry looked back over his shoulder. The punk stumbled off into an alley. Only Tara’s hands tangled in his jacket kept Harry from going back to beat him into the ground.

Tara flagged down a cab, shoved him inside. Harry sat, dripping on the ancient leather interior, his bloody hands before him. But he could only see the blood when streetlights flashed past overhead. When he looked at his hands, they shook. But only when he looked at them.

Tara overpaid the cabbie in cash and shoveled Harry out of the cab a couple of blocks from his apartment. Dimly, he knew that if the punk filed an assault report or showed up in the ER, they didn’t want to be easily found.

Rain rinsed the blood from his hands as they walked in the darkness, without comment. Tara took his hand in hers, fiercely tight, and wouldn’t let it go, even though it was sticky.

He tried three times to get the key in the lock before she took it from him and did it herself. He let her pull him into the apartment, into the bathroom with that harsh bluish light.

She wiped the specks of blood off his face with a washcloth without saying a word. He’d expected her to be disgusted with him, to pack her suitcase in the face of that brutality and leave him alone. But she didn’t. She tenderly washed his hands and dressed a cut on his knuckle. He thought she’d leave when she undressed him and pushed him into the shower. He strained to hear the sound of the door closing over the hiss of the water.

But she was still there when he got out. She took his face in her hands and said: “What the hell happened to you?”

He shook his head wordlessly. He couldn’t explain what these last months at the Little Shop of Horrors had done, what the years of chasing killers and living in unreality had created. He felt it chewing at him, gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. Until something broke.

He just shook his head. “I don’t know.”

But she knew. She’d been there before. She’d let Special Projects literally chew her up and spit her out. And she didn’t ask any more questions.

She put him to bed, spooned up behind him. He sighed, feeling her hands wrapped around his chest.

And slept.

T
ARA DREAMED OF THAT TWILIGHT WORLD AGAIN, THE WORLD
of the Tarot.

Her boots sank deep into the sand as she walked, and the lion walked before her, the sinewy muscles of his back undulating like the ripples in the desert surface. Their tracks ran together in the sand, footprints and paw prints sinking together. Tara was no longer afraid of the lion. She knew he was leading her. Once or twice, he looked back with his golden eyes, as if to make sure that she followed.

Tara knew she was searching for something. For someone.

There.
In the sunset, she saw something shining. A figure in golden armor stumbled across the landscape, dragging a heavy golden pentacle behind him in the sand. It was lashed around the knight’s throat, strangling him. A tattered red cape streamed behind him like the banner of a defeated army.

Tara recognized the figure. Her Knight of Pentacles. She began to run toward him.

The knight collapsed to his knees, fell over in the sand in a magnificent glittering heap, with a sound like pots crashing to the floor.

Tara fell to her knees beside him, struggling to remove the noose from around his neck. The sand was soft and sucking, and the knight’s armor was scorchingly hot from the sun, dented and scarred as if from a terrible battle. The heavy pentacle, large as a millstone, was dragging the knight down. He was limp when she touched him, his helmeted head lolling to the side. The armor burned her hands. She succeeded in freeing the rope around his neck, but the sand tugged at him, dragging him down into the hot belly of the desert.

She cast about desperately. She could feel the sand trap blistering in, hear the hiss of sand as the grains fell in on themselves, like the well of an hourglass. The lion stood at the edge of the trap, growling.

Tara wrestled with the rope holding the pentacle, succeeded in unfastening it. The pentacle disappeared below the surface of the sand. Tara awkwardly cast the rope to the lion. It landed short, disappeared under the surface of the sand. The lion roared in frustration.

With one arm, she tried to keep the knight’s scorching head above the sand. She reeled the rope back in, flung it out again. This time, it slapped down beside the lion.

The lion knew what to do. He grasped the rope in his powerful jaws. Tara tied the other end of the rope under the knight’s arms. He’d half-disappeared in the quicksand, limp as a rag doll dressed in tin cans. She wrapped her hands around his neck, shouted at the lion.

The lion pulled, trotting away with his end of the rope, as effortlessly as if he were tearing a leg from a gazelle. With a sucking sound, Tara and the knight were dragged free of the sand pit, landing in a filthy heap on more solid ground.

Exhausted, Tara lay on her back staring up at the blazing sky. She rubbed sand from her eyes. A shadow fell over her. The lion. He dipped his head and began licking the sand off her face with a tongue as rough as a cheese grater. Her cheek was burned where it had come into contact with the knight’s searing breastplate, but she didn’t want to offend the lion by pushing him away.

“Thank you,” she told the lion. He sat back on his haunches as she sat up, and began batting at the end of the rope.

Tara struggled to get the rope disentangled from the knight. She got it off him, then turned her attention to the golden helmet obscuring his face. The red feathers on the top of the helmet had been destroyed by sand, broken like the plumage of a dead bird.

She pulled the helmet away, as carefully as she might pour the yolk from a cracked egg.

Harry’s battered face was under the helmet. She pressed her hand to his hot cheek. He was unconscious, but she could feel the movement of breath across his cracked lips.

How had this happened to him? What terrible enemy had chewed him up? Her tears sizzled on his breastplate. She bent her head to kiss him. His eyelids fluttered, and his fingers twitched, but he did not come to.

Tara turned to the lion. “I need to take him to water.”

The lion padded over to Harry, nudged him with his nose. He lay down beside the fallen knight. Tara thought she understood. She dragged Harry over the lion’s back. As effortlessly as if he carried a kitten, the lion stood up and began to walk east.

Tara wound her fingers to pick up her skirts to follow.

The lion would lead them to water. She was certain of it.

T
ARA WOKE TO FEEL SOMEONE SHAKING HER
.

At first, she thought it was the lion, that she’d stumbled somewhere along the journey, and that he was nudging her awake.

But it was Harry.

“Tara, wake up.”

Her eyes fluttered open to find that Harry had grasped her arms and was shaking the dream out of her head. A twinge of fear flickered through her, seeing the concerned expression on his face. The bedside lamp was on, and Harry’s hair was mussed from sleep.

“I—I’m awake.” She shivered. She was suddenly cold, and when she spoke, her breath made ghosts in the air.

“Are you all right? You were mumbling in your sleep and kicking the covers like they were trying to eat you.” Harry bundled the blankets around her. “You’re freezing.”

“I was dreaming,” she said, allowing Harry to wrap the covers around her and turn out the light. He curled up behind her, wrapping his arms around her to keep her warm.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“I’ve been dreaming about the Tarot,” she said. She felt guilty burdening Harry with these … visions. Especially when she hadn’t fully digested them herself. She sensed that her relationship with the cards was changing, and that it wasn’t just this deck. Something deep inside her was stirring … She could feel it uncoiling like a snake. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“I swear.”

For the moment, Tara allowed herself the luxury of the warmth of Harry’s arms, of feeling his heart beating against her back.

Harry had enough problems of his own. Her dreams were right—he was the one in need of saving. Not her.

This new twist in her power, these vivid dreams … This was something she’d have to work out on her own.

S
OMETIMES
, G
ALEN DREAMED OF SLEEPING IN THE ARMS OF A
woman.

He wasn’t alone in those dreams.

He wondered what it would have been like, to fall asleep beside a woman and wake up to find her still there. Rifling through the memories of Carl and Lena, he had the sense of the two of them whispering in the darkness of train cars, desolate landscapes rushing by outside. They lay twined together like snakes on a caduceus, finding some kind of healing and solace over those foreign miles.

Galen longed for that, too. That warmth of another human being, connected but separate from his experience. But, to him, the lines always seemed to blur.

He remembered when he was a teenager, hitchhiking through Belarus. He’d asked to be let out of the car when he’d seen a girl walking through the streets of a muddy town. She was walking down the street in a gray wool coat, long blonde hair loose over her shoulders in waves. Her hat was pulled low over her ears to ward off the early spring chill, but there was something about those eyes when she looked past the car. They were steel-gray, haunted.

Galen knew that look, that emptiness.

He slogged through the mud, trying to catch up with her. “Hey!”

She turned, the mud sucking at her shiny black boots.

Her eyebrow lifted at him. His heart leapt. Maybe she saw the same thing he saw in her. A spark of something kindred. Something that would keep him warm.

Galen spread his best smile on his face. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She looked him up and down, doubtful at the sight of his shabby coat. “You have money for a drink?”

“Yes.” His fingers clutched a roll of bills in his pocket. He’d robbed the last person who’d given him a ride. “I’ve got plenty of money.”

She leaned forward, and her breath steamed in his face. It smelled like cinnamon. “You don’t need to buy me a drink.”

That was okay with him. He wanted warmth. He wanted companionship. Just this once. Even if he had to pay for it.

The girl led him back to her tiny flat. Galen stood awkwardly inside the threshold, watching her kick the radiator. The paint was peeling off the walls. But everything was orderly. The futon in the center of the room had a newish looking bedspread on it, and the dishes in the broken cabinet were all clean.

“It’ll warm up in a minute,” she said, sticking her hands under her arms to make small talk. “Where are you from?”

“Nowhere.”

The girl’s crimson lips smiled. “Me, too.”

Heat had begun to creep out of the radiator, plinking as the hot water began to circulate. The girl pulled off her hat and coat. She began to unbutton her blouse. When she turned around, Galen could see that her shoulders were a bit uneven, that the vertebrae of her spine didn’t line up straight. His mouth thinned. She was indeed like him, from nowhere.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I’m Yeva.” She crossed the room to him in her bra and skirt. Her fingers fluttered up to unfasten his coat. She opened the first two buttons, skipped the missing third, and continued on to the fourth before he answered: “Galen.”

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “That’s an odd name.”

“It was the name of a famous healer.” He felt his mouth turn downward. “My mother had great hopes for me.”

“You are a doctor, then?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not anything.”

She stood up on her tiptoes, pressed her finger to his mouth. “Never say that,” she said, fiercely. “We are all someone.”

She kissed him then, and she tasted like mulled spices. He sank into the kiss, felt Yeva tugging off his clothes and drawing him down to the futon. His fingers wound in her hair, and he relished the sensation of her warm mouth on his, her breasts pressed against his chest. His heart hammered in his chest as she straddled him, drew him inside her. As she rocked back and forth, he moaned.