Oracle's Moon

16

Grace slid into a dream. She walked the property at night. It was so dark she couldn’t see where she was going. She had lost her flashlight. The stars fell and surrounded her with light. Then she was swimming in a dark sea, and the stars that surrounded her were the bright sparks of countless souls.

The water carried her forward, faster and more powerfully than she had expected. She was caught in a riptide. When she looked to either side, Petra and her grandmother were swimming alongside her.

You’re going the wrong way, Petra told her. Her sister sounded the same as she ever did, full of exasperated affection. You’ve got to turn back.

I don’t know how, she said. I don’t know where I’m going. I only know where I’ve been.

You’re almost out of tuna, her grandmother said.

No, I’m not, Grace said. I just bought two cans.

Don’t stay in the house when you bake the casserole. It’ll get too hot. Her grandmother smiled at her.

Gram, why don’t you come to see me? Grace asked. You would enjoy hanging out in the kitchen with the other women, and I’d really like to talk to you.

But her grandmother was gone. Then Petra was gone as well, and the water pushed Grace faster and faster, until she was tumbling down a black tunnel. It was like being born, except she was going the wrong way, into the cavern, not out of it. Then the water spewed her onto the cavern floor at someone’s feet.

A tall woman knelt in front of her. She held the gold Oracle’s mask in front of her face.

As soon as she looked at it, Grace knew that mask wasn’t a fake. It was the real deal, down to the tiny scratches from countless ages on the shining, precious surface. She studied the eyeholes, trying to figure out the identity of the person behind the mask. But there were no eyes. The holes were black but not empty. Instead, they were filled with something unbelievably vast and Powerful.

She said, That’s weird.

The vast woman considered her. What will a mere mortal do with an immortal Power?

I don’t know, Grace said. None of this is going the way I thought it would. Will you help me?

The gold mask’s perfect, inhuman lips curved into a smile. I will, but in order to reach me, you have to go the wrong way. You can only find me if you go very deep.

You’re Nadir, Grace said. Of course you are. Where else would the goddess of the depths be? How far down do I have to go to reach you?

Try drowning, said the goddess. The dark sea filled Grace’s nose and mouth, and she thrashed. Don’t worry about that, Nadir told her. You left your body once tonight. You can do it again if you want to badly enough.

“Grace,” said Khalil. And she felt it again, the conviction that when he called her in his unearthly, pure voice, she would go anywhere with him, anywhere at all.

Nobody should have been able to follow her, but Khalil could because he had no body. Black smoke swirled through the cavern, out of which crystalline eyes like stars focused only on her. He ignored Nadir completely.

The goddess looked amused. You’re right, Nadir said. He isn’t friendly.

Burning hands reached for Grace and pulled her out of the sea.

Grace plunged awake. She was lying on her back. Khalil must have turned on the bedside lamp. It threw a soft gold light over everything. He leaned over her. Black hair fell around his face. He was frowning sharply and shaking her by the shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she asked blurrily, as she stared at him.

She had not really seen him nude before when they made love. Or perhaps she had, since she had seen his real form. This body he chose to wear was perfectly fashioned, from the heavy ripple of muscle across his wide chest and shoulders, to his tapered stomach, lean hips and long legs. Her gaze fell to his groin where his genitals were as perfect as the rest of him, his penis lying in a graceful curve over the twin mounds of his testicles.

She stroked a hand down his smooth, hot chest as she realized that, except for the shining, black fall of his hair and the slant of his eyebrows, he had no body hair. He was completely, inhumanly beautiful, his ivory skin gilded with the soft gold light from the bedside table.

In sharp contrast, her body was imperfect in almost every way. The pink of her nipples were still a darkened rose from his suckling. A bruise was forming on her hip bone where she had banged it on the corner of the kitchen table earlier that day. She had a long, thin scab on one of her forearms from Freaky Bitch. And yes, of course there were the scars on her knees, yada yada, and she smiled to realize how little they had come to matter to her.

The peach tint of her human skin looked shockingly rich against Khalil’s marblelike hue. The soft, fine tangle of her pubic hair was a darker red-gold than the hair on her head. In her own way, she realized with a trace of embarrassment, she was as beautiful as he was. They were especially beautiful together.

You are my lover, she thought, as she blinked at him. She swallowed hard. My lover. At least for this one night.

What a calamitous, incredibly spectacular first date. And why in the world would she have expected anything else from him?

Her heart squeezed, or maybe it expanded. Whatever it did, it wasn’t behaving normally at all. She felt light-headed and giddy, truly happy for the first time in she couldn’t remember when, and absolutely, utterly terrified.

His long fingers came underneath her chin. He tilted her head up. “Pay attention, I’m talking to you,” he said irritably. In contrast to his tone, the expression in his gaze was concerned.

“So that’s the noise I keep hearing,” she said. She glanced at the bedside clock, which read 1:42 A.M. She hadn’t even slept an hour and a half. She yawned hugely until her eyes watered, and her eyes drifted closed as she sank back against the pillows. While it was wonderful to stretch out on her bed, and frighteningly awesome to be in bed with him, the upstairs of the house was stifling, and he was far too hot.

Hey, she had a check in her purse. She could afford a higher electric bill. She muttered cagily, “I’ll have sex with you again if you close all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning.”

She was trying to bargain away something she would beg for anyway. For someone who always chose the dumb route, that was actually pretty smart thinking. She turned her face into his bicep and sniggered, even as her eyes watered more.

Oh gods, what he had done. Even more than the sheer physical impossibility of the lovemaking, he had broken her wide open.

He hissed a curse. She jumped as all of the upstairs windows slammed shut, and the ancient air-conditioner unit that was propped in her bedroom window clacked on.

Her eyes flew open as he took her by the shoulders and hauled her upright. “I said pay attention,” he snarled.

He looked entirely disturbed, and despite their nudity, not at all loverlike. Suddenly she felt wide awake. “I’m paying attention,” she told him. She frowned as her mind kicked into gear. “I was having a weird dream before you woke me up.”

“I woke you up,” he said between his teeth, “because you were acting weird.”

“What happened?”

“That old Power you inherited. You know how you said it sits deep at the edge of your consciousness?” She nodded. Now that she was really paying attention to him, his hard grasp on her relaxed. He smoothed back her hair. “I can sense it. It feels just as you described, very deep, like it sits at the edge of thought. While you were asleep, it…rose up.”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean, it rose up?”

“It filled you up like you were an empty glass. Then it spilled out of you and filled the room. That’s when I woke you.” His sharp diamond gaze searched her face. “What happened?”

She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know. I just had a dream.”

“About what?”

“It’s hard to describe. It was very dreamy.”

“Try.”

The air-conditioner was running at full blast. The window unit blew frigid air on her exposed skin. Shivering, she pulled the bedspread and top sheet down and climbed under the covers. After a second’s hesitation, Khalil joined her. He pulled her into his arms, and she settled against him gladly and rested her cheek against his smooth, hot skin.

It wasn’t just that his heat had suddenly become welcome. He chose to hold her. Maybe he did it for her, but he did it unasked, so he must have done it for him as well. His presence wrapped her up as securely as his arms did, and he didn’t try to take her strength away. He offered her a chance to rest against his, and it felt so good.

Once she started talking, she didn’t stop. She started with the dream and worked her way backward, and she told it all wrong, because everything came out in a tangle.

The dream. The goddess. Hitting Phaedra with an expulsion spell that knocked her across the cavern. How everyone acted earlier that day, everyone except Olivia. Either Brandon or Jaydon or somebody had lied, or she simply didn’t understand, or maybe she had misheard, but it was strange how the story had shifted from eighteen people who had planned to come to work that day to twelve. The talk she’d had with Isalynn, postponing her duties as the Oracle, practicing with the Power until she could call it up at any time, whether it was daylight or not, no matter where she was.

Talking to him was as beyond perfect as his lovemaking had been. It was such a relief to unburden herself. Although he occasionally asked her for clarification, he didn’t rush her or appear impatient in any way, and he didn’t try to stop her.

At least not until she told him about the ghost of the serpent woman.

His physical form dissolved, and caught by surprise, she fell forward. Her nose squashed in the pillow he had been leaning against, and the hair at the back of her head whipped around as a cyclone rampaged her room. Cautiously she braced herself on one elbow and lifted her head to look around.

She had never been very interested in knickknacks, and earlier her small jewelry box had traveled downstairs along with her dresser. That was probably a good thing, since her bedside clock, along with three somewhat dusty paperbacks and the lamp, crashed to the floor. The window curtains blew into knots, all the upstairs doors banged shut then blew open again, and the windows rattled.

Somehow the lightbulb in the lamp hadn’t broken. The light shining from the floor threw elongated shadows over everything. The familiar surroundings looked ominous and strange.

And he felt absolutely furious.

Was he having his version of a shit fit?

She sank back down on the pillows and put an arm over her head. She said to the cyclone, “I hope you know you’re picking everything up again and replacing anything you break.”

He cursed, and the light flickered wildly as the lamp jerked off the floor and landed back on the bedside table. “You tell me that your sanity and your life might have been in danger, and I find this out days later?”

Yep. Shit fit. She told him, “Stop yelling.”

Still disembodied, he plummeted down on her. The entire cyclone seethed with rage on the space of her double bed. The air felt heavy, far too dense, and the change in pressure made her ears pop. Was this her problem? Yeah, she thought this one probably was. She pulled the covers over her head.

He yanked them down again. “Gods dammit, Grace, how could you do something so dangerous? Why didn’t you call me? You’re supposed to call me!”

Her nose prickled, and a tear leaked out. She swiped at it with the back of her hand. She said, “You’re making some pretty big assumptions.”

He snapped, “Like what!”

“I didn’t know it would be dangerous,” she said softly. “The petitioners were having a problem with going into the cavern, and I just thought if the Power came out once in the daylight, I could make it come out again. I had no idea the ghost existed until she showed up. By then it was too late to do anything but deal with the situation. I certainly didn’t have time to think about calling you or anyone else, and even if I had…”

“And if you had?” he prompted when her voice trailed away.

“Even if I had thought of calling you, it wouldn’t have done any good,” she said. “Because you wouldn’t have been able to do anything. Nobody would have. Everything that happened, the conversation with the ghost and the whole struggle was internal. By the time I had anything to say to anybody, it was all over.”

He took form behind her on the bed and turned her so that she lay on her back. His hands were so gentle that when she opened her eyes, she was completely unprepared for the severity of emotion that transformed his face. He said coldly, “I’m calling in the favor you owe me.”

Jolted, she said, “What, right now?”

He interrupted her. “Are you able to pay your debt?”

“Of course,” she told him. “As long as it doesn’t affect the kids—”

He cut off her words by simply putting a hand over her mouth. Eyes blazing, he leaned closer until the only thing she could see was him, and the only thing she could feel, all around her, was him.

“You will call me,” he said. “For the rest of your life, you will call me. I don’t give a shit whether or not you’re in the mood. I don’t care if your cause is useless or if I am too late or if you can fix the whole damn problem by yourself or if you just get scared. You will call me, Grace. You will call me.”

Her eyes widened. He was not quite in control of his physical form. It rippled, or his hand simply shook with the same emotion that shook through his voice. His eyes weren’t just blazing. They were too bright, even for him. She listened to not only what he had said, but to what he had not said. Underneath his anger was another emotion.

You scared me, he had said earlier, and he wasn’t used to experiencing fear. He was too arrogant and Powerful, too accustomed to the complacency of living a very long life.

She curled her fingers around his wrist and urged his hand away from her mouth. His jaw worked, but he allowed her to shift his hold. The tips of his fingers stroked across her lips.

“I love you too,” she said, because her sense of direction for picking out all the dumb routes in her life was pretty much infallible. She watched as the impact of her words changed his expression drastically, and she started to babble. “I know it’s stupid. I thought the age difference between Hugh Hefner and his girlfriends was bad. And who has time for this sort of thing, right? I think it happened when you put Max on your lap for the first time.…”

She never finished the sentence. Khalil slid his hand to the back of her neck. He lifted up her head as he lowered his face, and she got caught in the middle, as his mouth settled over hers, and it didn’t matter if the Oracle wasn’t supposed to be able to prophesy for herself, because in that moment Grace knew she would love him unconditionally for the rest of her life.

He kissed and kissed her, like he had before, gently, hungrily, spearing into her with his hot tongue, and she burned everywhere he touched her, all over her body and deep in her soul. “You will call me,” he said against her lips. “Swear, Gracie. I cannot stand it if you do not call me.”

“I swear it,” she murmured. She felt desire take fire in him again. He had cracked her wide open before, and it was too soon, too much for her to reach that insane, intense outpouring of passion again. She wasn’t ready for it, but at the same time she needed it and him. She dug her fingers into his hair and started to shake.

“Shh, be easy,” he said. He gripped her by the hip, gently, as he rested his forehead against her collarbone. His desire remained steady, banked. “Your Power is still roused. I do not like how it has been dangerous for you.”

His own stern control helped her to find hers. She rubbed her face as she checked the strange landscape she had become. “It doesn’t feel roused,” she said. “Maybe it feels stronger to you because today is the Oracle’s moon. The Power flexes with the lunar cycle.”

He lifted his head, frowning down at her. She could feel him scanning her carefully. It felt delicious, like he was physically running his hands gently down her limbs. Underneath the weight of his body, she stretched and sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “It is stronger than it was last night. But it’s more than that. It’s different. I don’t think that difference is because of the lunar cycle.”

She confessed, “I’m starting to lose the sense that it’s something separate from me. It feels like we’re knitting together.”

His mouth tightened as he shifted to her side. He settled his body alongside hers and propped his head in one hand. “You are.”

She watched his face curiously. “How does it look—or feel?”

“It’s beautiful,” he said with obvious reluctance. “But then you were beautiful before. It’s a dark vein marbling your energy. If this continues, I don’t see how it will pass on to Chloe or to anybody else.” He met her eyes. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

She smiled. “Yes. That’s exactly what I wanted.”

“It’s changing you,” he said. His own gaze was shadowed with worry. “Are you sure that you’re all right with that?”

“It changed me the moment it left my sister and came to me,” she told him. “I’ve kicked against it, cursed and yelled at it, then finally accepted it. Now I’ve claimed it, and I want to know what I can make of it. And what it’s making of me.” She bit at a fingernail. “That means I need to keep experimenting. That expulsion spell I threw at Phaedra was meant to get rid of dark spirits. I only threw it at her because I lost my temper and got desperate. That spell never would have had the strength to physically throw anybody before. She bled a light-colored liquid that soaked back into her. I didn’t know you could bleed.”

“We don’t, at least not in the way humans bleed. When the bodies we create sustain damage, the part of our Power that has become physical leaks until we fix it.” His hand resting on her hip tightened. He growled, “You don’t experiment alone anymore, do you hear me? Forget that, you don’t experiment without me. In your dream your grandmother and sister said you were going the wrong way. You need someone else present to help you in case things get out of control again.”

She nodded as she curled against his side. Her eyes felt dry and gritty. She closed them and turned her face into his chest. He cupped her head, holding her gently against him. “That might have been what they meant. I’ve certainly been doing things differently from how I’d been taught.”

“I see another truth,” said Khalil quietly. “You’re discarding the rituals your family has used for generations. You exorcised the ghost, or at least you persuaded the ghost to leave you, and you claimed the Power. It is as though the Oracles that came before you needed all the rituals and the steps in order to access the Power, because they were substitutes, while you are actually becoming the Oracle.”

She held her breath as she considered his words. Was he right? She couldn’t tell. Exhaustion weighed her down again. She muttered, “I’m tired of thinking about all of this right now. Khalil, I had a long day, and I need to get some more rest. I have to pick the kids up in the morning.”

“Then stop thinking.” He kissed her forehead. “While you pick up the children, tomorrow morning I am going to do what I should have done before this.”

She pressed her lips against the smooth skin of his chest. “What’s that?”

“I am going to find out where Therese lives,” he said. A stiletto of malice crept into his voice. “I would like to know how she enjoys it when someone looks through her things. I’m also interested in what I will find when I do so. And after that, I think I will find this witch Brandon. I might even introduce myself to Jaydon Guthrie. Then we will see what tale this Oracle’s moon tells.”

She snorted, a small exhalation of air. “I have another human saying for you,” she said drowsily.

“What is that?” he asked.

She smiled and told him, “Just let me know if I ever piss you off, so I can have a chance to apologize.”

Amusement danced through his energy. “Sometimes you have made me very angry,” he said. “And I have not noticed that you are overly eager to apologize for that.”

“Mmm.” It might be time for a strategic distraction. She stroked his presence with hers in a lavish, languid caress.

He caught his breath then whispered, “Go to sleep, dearest.”

Her heart kicked and pleasure rippled through her at the oddly archaic, beautiful endearment. Then she sighed and did just that.