by Amir Lane
“What about Alistair? What about the boy?” she shouted, glaring down at what she assumed was Ice Breaker’s face.
“He was going to wake up and find his entire family dead. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, but it was less wrong.”
Lindy screamed and kicked her again. Less wrong? Less fucking wrong? How— Alistair had probably gotten into Necromancy to bring his family back! Or at least his sister. And he did it. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t want to, but he brought back a violent, murderous spirit! Every single life that Abigail and Alistair and Kenneth had fucked up was on Ice Breaker. It was on her, and she was making excuses!
“Lindy! Lindy, stop!”
The world was spinning now. It was black, but it was still spinning around her. The sounds, the voices, they blurred together, and she couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from. She fell back against the ice. The back of her skull hit the pavement with a sickening crunch. She heard someone scream, but it wasn’t her.
“Lindy! Lindy, no!”
Lenna.
Lenna was kneeling over her, shaking her by the shoulders and screaming in Portuguese. Dick struggled to pull her back, but she shoved him aside. Beside him, Ice Breaker was leaning up on her elbows, staring in horror.
“Len? Len, are you crying? Don’t cry, honey, I’m fine.”
“Dietelinde…”
Lindy’s head jerked up to the sound of Ekkehardt’s voice. He was dressed like he’d just come from work. Was that where he’d been? Through all this bullshit, he’d been at work? Typical! It was just like him to… to… Wait, was he crying, too? He sniffed, rubbing his mouth with one hand. His wedding band shone in the dim light.
Oh, God…
She looked back and stared down at her own body. Blood turned her hair black, almost the same shade she used to dye it. Dick had managed to pry Lenna off her, and he held her up as she screamed and howled in pain.
“Dad?” she swallowed. “I’m not— You can fix this, can’t you? I mean, you’re—” She still didn’t know his name. “You’re bigger than Shadow Maker.”
Ekkehardt looked up at the ceiling and blinked away tears. He wouldn’t look at her, either one of her. His teeth scraped over his lip.
“Dad?”
He choked on a sob. Blue eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his face. He shook his head. No, no what? No, he couldn’t help her? No, he couldn’t believe she was— she was bleeding on a parking garage floor? No, what?
“I can’t help her,” he whispered. “I can’t put her back.”
“And why the fucking hell not?” It was Lenna this time. She wrenched herself from Dick’s grasp and stormed over to them. Her body passed through Lindy, and she grabbed the front of Ekkehardt’s suit. With her makeup smeared across her face and her teeth bared into fangs, she was more of a nightmare than Lindy ever would have been. “Why the fuck can’t you put her back?”
“It won’t work. I’m sorry. I’m s-sorry.”
Lindy couldn’t look. She couldn’t bear to see Ekkehardt and Lenna crying. Both made her feel sick, not quite for the same reason. She wanted to puke.
“Dad. Dad, look at me. Dad! Dad!”
“He can’t hear you, Miss Lindy.”
Lindy turned again and came face-to-chest with a, well, very nice chest. She would have complained about being so short, except this was the tallest man she’d ever seen. He towered over Ekkehardt by at least two feet, putting him at a good eight feet tall. The winged sandals on his feet and golden staff in his hand were a dead giveaway to who he was. A white and gold chiton exposed his left shoulder and fell above his knees. She had to crane her neck to see his face, but he was pretty damn good looking. Chiselled features that looked like they belonged in a museum. They did, actually. Specifically the Greek and Roman art exhibit she’d seen at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto last year.
She swallowed, and her words came out hoarse.
“I, Hermes, stand here at the crossroads by the wind-beaten orchard, near the hoary grey coast; and I keep a resting place for weary men. And the cool stainless spring gushes out,” she whispered.
The Messenger grinned down at her.
“Anyte of Tegea wrote that,” he said, his voice bright and chipper and not at all what Lindy expected from a God. “Always had a way with words, that one. I take it that means no introductions are necessary.”
Lindy wracked her brain for everything she knew about Hermes the Messenger. Stole Apollo’s sheep, gave him the lyre to make up for it, played tricks, made little deals with everyone until he was the God of Miscellaneous and the certified Messenger to the Gods. Gods who included Hates, Lord of the Underworld. Hermes… Hermes was the one who guided departed souls.
She grabbed the gold lyre around her neck and tried to look up at him sternly despite her trembling jaw.
“I’m not going with you. I’m not dying today.”
What were the odds he didn’t hear her voice shake? She expected him to be angry, or at least to ignore her. Instead, he laughed. It echoed off the walls. He moved towards her, shrinking with every step until he was her height. Damn, that must have been convenient.
“Oh, I missed your soul, my friend. It’s always nice to see you.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Am I dead or what?”
What the hell was she doing? She was talking to a God. And not just any God, but one of hers. She should have been kneeling or bowing or my lord-ing. She was definitely getting dragged to the Underworld now.
“Miss Lindy, do you know how rare Oracle souls are?” the Messenger asked.
“Very? But I’m not an Oracle.” She hesitated. “My lord.”
The Messenger laughed again, doubling and slapping his knee in the most un-God-like way she could imagine.
“My lord! Oh, that’s a good one! Stop, you’re going to make me cry. My lord… Miss Lindy, you obviously don’t remember this, but your soul and I are very old friends. We go way back. I’d say a few thousand years, at least. Gosh, maybe longer. I would never stand above you.” Well, he had made himself her height. He obviously meant it literally if not metaphorically. “You’re right, though. Oracle souls, true Oracle souls, are very rare. About as rare as they come. Why, they only make a handful every millennia, max. Far from efficient, let me tell you.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said, because she had to say something.
She was still stuck on very old friends.
“Mhm. Next question: what do you know about reincarnation?”
“Pretty sure in Hinduism, if you fu— If you’re a bad person, Karma follows you into the next life. I think the same goes for most Nordic myth— most Nordic people.”
He hummed.
“Could be. That’s not what I’m talking about though. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Oracles are all favourites of Apollo. Some of you also caught the attention of other Gods, too. Athene, for instance.” He winked at her. “You lot are the only ones who get to skip the line and go straight to the Elysian Fields.”
She did not know that, either. That was good to know. She was going to hang onto it for future reference.
“Miss Lindy,” the Messenger continued, “it isn’t easy to make an Oracle soul from scratch. Most of them are, well, recycled. By choice, of course! Gosh, we haven’t made a new one since the fall of Troy, I believe. Wasn’t that a hell of a decade. We lost a lot of good ones.”
He sighed sadly, shaking his head.
She was still trying to wrap her head around it all. She’d never considered herself special enough to be considered an Oracle. It was a huge deal in itself. But the thing about the Fields? About— Reincarnation? Holy crap. That was… That was way more than she’d signed up for. The only way she could rationalize it, absorb it, was to assume it was hypothetical. She’d take it literally when — if — she got out of this.
“What does that mean about me? About— About now?” she stammered.
Was he giving her the option to be
reincarnated? She wondered if she could get out of high school this time.
“Well, you said it, you aren’t dying today. I mean, the whole process of getting you to the Underworld and up to the Fields, sending you back to Earth, waiting until you’re old enough to develop precognition, it takes forever. And that’s assuming the body you end up in can handle being an Oracle. Not all of them can, you know. It’s so much easier to just keep you around here. So consider this your get out of jail free card.”
This… was not what she had expected the Messenger of the Gods to be like. She liked him, though. She could see why they were friends.
“Does that mean—”
“Now, don’t go getting any ideas. We can only get you out of so many jams before the Fates are fed up with you. You don’t want them making a point. They won’t care if your line is protected by Hades and Apollo, and whoever else likes you.”
“Hades?”
Her family was full of Necromancers.
“Just stay out of trouble.”
“Trust me, I am done with trouble. How do I—”
She glanced back at her body. Time had seemed to stall while they were talking. Only Aldo was moving.
“He can put you back,” the Messenger said. “He’s got a bit of a touch with spirits.”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s Aztec.”
“Maybe, but she’s got Mayan blood.”
Lenna? Well, the connection went both ways, didn’t it? Lenna could borrow power from Aldo, and Aldo could borrow power from Lenna. Damn. Mayan? That was new.
“Mrow.”
Lindy looked back at the Messenger. Her soul certainly felt like she knew him. She felt so much older than she was when he looked at her.
“Well, Miss Lindy, it was nice seeing you again. I would love to stay and chat a little more. You would not believe what’s been going on! But I have to get going. Messages to deliver, souls to guide. Always busy!”
“Wait! Before you go… Who— Which one am I? You said they haven’t made an Oracle since Troy. Can you tell me her name?”
“His, actually. You know, you’re a son of one of Athene’s favourites, too, if I’m remembering right, and that is one picky lady.” He smiled at her. “Tiresias.”
The name was like being punched in the chest. The story had always fascinated her. Blind Oracle? How could it not? Hearing the name from a God… It awoke something inside her, something that had been trying to push through for centuries, something she’d been fighting to suppress, something she’d been afraid of. But she wasn’t afraid of it anymore. Afraid of him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Aldo rubbed his head against her legs. She reached down to scratch his ears. She could see the Messenger fading out in her periphery.
“You aren’t going to eat me like you ate Abigail, are you?”
“Mrow.”
Aldo moved between her legs, then paced back to her body. He sat next to it, mewing loudly, drowning out the sound of Dick reading Ice Breaker her rights. Nobody reacted to him. She wasn’t the only one who could see him, was she? When she didn’t move, he roared at her for her attention.
“What? What? I’m coming.”
Surreal would have been putting it mildly. Lindy’s own eyes, overrun with black and tiny white specks that probably did look like a galaxy when they weren’t… dead and staring vacantly. Most of her face was covered in blood courtesy of a blow she'd apparently taken to the face. She kept expecting herself to start laughing as the adrenaline caught up to her. She didn't. She just… lay there.
Aldo let out an annoyed sound and pawed at her hand. What was she supposed to do? Hold her own hand? What was she going to lose? She was already dead, she thought dryly. She crouched down. The rough pavement should have hurt her knees. It may as well have not even existed.
Her skin was still warm. There was a slight twitch in her fingers — the dead her — but she couldn't be quite sure it wasn't her imagination.
“So how do we do this?” she asked.
Her hands melted together. She looked over at Aldo, laying down next to her. His tail moved back and forth in a lazy motion. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head a little, still waiting for an answer. He lifted his head, just slightly, and pounced. She threw her arms up to protect herself. His weight hit her like a truck, and the impact against the pavement knocked the wind out of her. She gasped uselessly for a few seconds until her lungs remembered how to work. Someone — multiple someones — screamed. The hysterical sobbing sounded like Ice Breaker. What the hell was she—
Wait.
Lindy was breathing. She was breathing. Her trembling hand reached up to touch the back of her head. It came away wet with blood and melted ice.
‘Holy shit.’
She twisted her body as much as she could, and dry heaved onto the ground. Bile burned her throat with the reminder that she hadn't eaten in hours.
“Call an ambulance!” Dick shouted. “Combat boots, call an ambulance. Suit, come put pressure on the back of her head. Siobhan, shut up! For the love of God, shut up!”
Lindy reached into her pocket. Her fingers swept over the broken screen. She held it out toward Dick’s voice with a shaky arm. It only weighed her down for a few seconds. She couldn't tell if he took it or if she dropped it.
“Is it still recording?”
“What?”
She motioned with her hand. Because that would totally clarify what she meant. Everything hurt. Focusing on the one spot on her body that didn't feel broken took all of her strength. She couldn't even keep her eyes open, though it was hard to tell through the blackness and the haze if they were open or closed. All she wanted to do was curl up under her blanket, maybe with her stuffed penguin, and sleep for the next hundred years.
“Is it… recording?” Lindy croaked.
There were a few seconds where all she could hear were the sounds outside and the approaching wail of a siren.
“Uh— Yeah. It looks like there's a voice recorder going.”
She fell back against the ground and the hands fussing over her with a choked laugh that made her ribs rattle.
“Got you, you bitch.”
24
The first thing Lindy did when she was released from the hospital was hand in her resignation. Kevin, her boss, urged her to think about it, but the hours she'd spent in various machines having her brain scanned and reliving the year she'd started having visions were more than enough to think about it. And when Dick almost grudgingly admitted that she'd done good and that he could maybe find her a place in homicide, she told him to go fuck himself.
“Fair enough,” he'd said, and she could almost hear the smile in his voice.
There wasn't enough to get Ice Breaker on the Cudmore murders but while sobbing in an interrogation room, still hysterical after thinking she’d killed Lindy, she’d confessed to way more than just homicide. She didn’t make it to trial, though. The night she’d spilled everything, there was a fire in the jail where she was being kept. She didn’t make it out.
The truth was out there, though, and that had to be enough. Ice Breaker and certain members of Kitchener-Waterloo’s Mohr’s Circle had been involved in human trafficking. The city had had a runaway problem. Teenagers, mostly witches, mostly girls, sold to the highest bidders. The Cudmores had known. They were going to take it to the police and Toronto’s Circle. Ice Breaker… just couldn’t have that happen. She moved to Lorelle and soon, the rest of the involved had followed suit and left either to Lorelle as well, or Guelph or Toronto, to keep away suspicion. Of course, she’d had the composure to keep witches and magic out of her story, but Lindy could put the rest together.
Selina promised her that the confession was enough to open an investigation into both the Lorelle and Kitchener-Waterloo police departments.
“What about Kenneth?” Lindy asked. “None of this is entirely his fault. Abigail overpowered him.”
“His attorney is very good. If he tells the truth, he can maybe g
et an insanity plea and do his time in a health facility,” Selima said.
After being possessed, at least partially, for months, some time in a psych ward was probably the best thing for him. Still, Lindy felt bad.
“Will I need to testify?”
“We’ll do what we can to make sure you don't have to.”
Lindy wasn't sure she wanted to talk about her part in either case.
The investigations and the trials dragged on, and in the end, after months of being prepped just in case, it turned out she wasn't needed. The internal police investigation was way above her head. Kenneth’s lawyer skipped the song-and-dance and immediately put him and his psychiatrist on the stand. Even Lindy, sitting at the back of the court with her white cane folded across her lap and Dieter at her side, thought he was crazy. She didn't stick around for the sentencing.
In fact, she didn't plan on sticking around for anything much longer.
The months she'd been forcibly confined to Lorelle on the off chance of having to testify had given Lindy plenty of time to clean out her books. It had taken very little coaxing to get Lenna to set up her computer with text-to-speech and dictation software, but getting her to help sell her entire bookshelf of rare and old books had taken some convincing. It wasn't like Lindy could use them anymore. They'd both been surprised how much people were willing to pay for them; way more than she'd got most of them for. But, again, old and rare.
She felt eyes on her back as she packed. The suitcase was brand new and still had the tags. It had been forever since she'd taken more than just a day trip to Toronto. Lindy looked back at the electric blue lights outlining her twins’ veins. They were going to have to have this conversation sooner or later.
“You're leaving?” he said quietly.
“Just for a couple months. You know I've always wanted to visit Greece. I'm going to visit Delphi, and there's this temple of Apollo near the Albanian border I want to see. Well, you know. Check out.”
There was a bitter taste at the back of her throat. She'd put off this trip for years, and for what? She was still deciding whether she was going to leave an offering or give Apollo a piece of her mind. She did want to visit Hermes the Messenger at Mount Kyllini. According to her glorious screen reader and the Internet, it was an important place for Tiresias, too. It seemed like a good place to stop. The part of her soul that was remembering who she had been wanted to talk to their friend.
