“Even Samantha was surprised when people appeared and disappeared without warning,” she muttered. “And she was a witch too. I am not Darrin. I’m not.”
There was nobody around to argue with her, so she went to get the children up from their nap.
As entertaining as arguing with Khalil was, she had enjoyed talking with him even more. She tried not to dwell on that too much, either that evening or the next day.
After she put the kids to bed, she took the baby monitor and tackled the stairs to dig through her wardrobe for more clothes. She seemed to have broken through some sort of emotional barrier about the scars on her legs. Not only did she collect several pairs of shorts, she also rediscovered a couple of pairs of capri pants she had forgotten she owned. She shook her head, exasperated with herself. If she hadn’t been so frozen over examining her summer wardrobe, she could have been wearing those all along.
In the morning, she took the children to the library. The early learning program for babies Max’s age was at nine o’clock. It involved little more than sitting in a circle, playing with soft, plastic-coated books and singing nursery rhymes, but he adored it. Chloe declared she was too big to sit in the circle and sing with the babies and their caretakers, so she usually sprawled nearby with a coloring book and crayons, and hummed along with the songs.
On the way home they stopped at a few stores to pick up some essentials that Super Saver didn’t carry. Then it was naptime for Max, lunch, back to the library again for Chloe’s story time, home again and a nap for both of the children in the afternoon. While Max and Chloe slept, Grace finished polishing one resume and worked on tweaking the other version.
A knock sounded hesitantly at the front door. She peeked out the office window. A middle-aged couple stood on the porch.
She braced her shoulders and stifled a sigh. When an Oracle died, the witches’ demesne sent out a public notice to ask that people grant the new Oracle three months’ transition time before approaching her with a petition. For Grace, that transition time was now over. More and more people would begin to petition for a consultation. She went to answer the door.
The couple turned out to be a brother and sister, Don and Margie. Their mother had been deceased for many years, and their father had died of a heart attack the week before. Shocked and grieving, they hoped to say good-bye.
Grace couldn’t help but soften. She invited the couple in and called Therese, the next witch on the roster for babysitting duty. When Therese arrived, Grace took the couple out to the cavern. “I want you to understand, I can’t guarantee that your father will come,” she told them as they walked the overgrown path. “We can only try.”
“Trying means everything to us,” said Don.
They reached the back meadow where the cavern was located. The Ohio River ran along the western border of the property. Sparkling glints of blue water were visible through a tangled border of trees and underbrush.
Earlier in the summer, she had explored, briefly, trying to sell some of the riverfront acreage in order to raise some cash. The Oracle’s Power had bristled, clearly antagonistic toward the idea, but it wasn’t writing the checks for her monthly bills, so she shoved it aside and made some phone calls.
The venture quickly became too complicated to pursue with any real hope of financial return. The real estate agent she had spoken to had been blunt. Granting access rights to anyone who potentially built along the shoreline meant they would be driving past her house in order to get to their patch of land, and she would lose any hope of privacy. Also, the land had too much of a reputation for being haunted to have any wide market appeal. In the current housing slump, it was unlikely the agent could move the parcels of land at all.
The path to the cavern cut north through the meadow then veered a little east, where the land rose into a short, rocky bluff that was dotted with trees and bushes. The entrance to the cavern was set into the bluff.
When Grace was a child, she used to climb the bluff and have picnics on the squat, flat rock at the summit. The bluff was tall enough, and the land sloped downward at a steep enough angle, that she could see over the tops of the trees that grew down by the shoreline and watch the river for boats and barges.
She gave the bluff a wry glance. It was unlikely she would ever see the top again. She could probably take her time and climb up the way she climbed the stairs, using her sound leg to haul herself up, but that seemed like a useless expenditure of energy when she had so many other things that needed her attention.
She led Don and Margie across the meadow to the old doorway that had been built into the side of the bluff. The door was locked to keep exploring children out, and the key was stored in a small rusted coffee can that rested on the top of a wooden lintel.
The doorway opened to a tunnel that led down to the cavern. Grace was familiar with every inch of the property. She had played in the meadow, walked that tunnel and had been down to the cavern more times than she could count, but Don and Margie were wide-eyed and stared at everything.
Grace collected a couple of flashlights and the mask, from which the Oracle had spoken since the temple at Delphi, and that was when Margie broke down in tears. “I can’t do this,” the older woman said to her brother. “This is too much, too strange. I just can’t.”
Grace was unsurprised. It happened sometimes. People might travel from all over the world to consult with the Oracle, only to balk at the last minute. She said, “I’ll wait outside while you decide what you want to do. Just remember while you talk this over—you don’t have to try this right now. Your father just passed. You can give yourself some time and come back when you’re ready. The tunnel is quite roomy, and the cavern looks just like the ones at Mammoth Cave National Park or the cave systems in southern Indiana.”
Don said, “We read about it on the Oracle’s website, and looked at the photos.” He looked at his sister sadly. “I guess it’s all a bit much in real life.”
Niko had created a simple website in an attempt to prepare petitioners. It had a brief section on the Oracle’s history and another one on what to expect when they arrived. There was also a page that explained the ancient social contract, that while the Oracle acted in service and did not ask for payment, donations were essential for the upkeep and maintenance of the property. He had even set up a PayPal button. The website pulled in between two and three hundred dollars every six months.
Grace said again, “You don’t need to do this right now. You can come back when you’re more ready.”
She stepped outside and waited in the sunshine while Don and Margie talked. While she tried not to listen, she could still make out snatches of their conversation. It was difficult to hear their struggle, and their grief touched too close to home. She crossed her arms and scowled at the tall grass. The meadow was dotted with bright colors, mostly yellow from dandelions, but also white and purple wildflowers.
Going into the cavern was strange for people who were not used to it. The old stories told of petitioners approaching the Oracle of Delphi in awe and supplication.
But the Power had come so strongly the other morning. She could not think of a single reason why it could not do so again.
She felt along the edge of her consciousness, and there it was, nestled inside of her, deeper than gut instinct, an ancient well running through her like a dark subterranean sea. Was it really a gift from the goddess of the depths, or was it from some other strange, Powerful creature? The oldest stories her grandmother had told were a tangle of superstition and myth. The earliest Oracles had worshipped the Power and believed they spoke the words of the gods themselves. Over thousands of years, that attitude had evolved and changed, but Grace’s grandmother, and even Petra, had talked about serving the Oracle’s Power as if they were subservient to it. Without having any real experience herself, Grace had listened and accepted what they said, pretty much without question.
Until now. She patted along the edges of the Power with her awareness, really exploring it for the first time
since it had come to her. It felt unruly and untamed, almost as if it had a mind of its own, except it wasn’t quite a person. She knew what personalities felt like from the ghosts she had encountered and the dark spirits she had driven off the property. Growing familiar with Khalil’s presence had only sharpened her understanding. She could see clearly that even though the Oracle’s Power seemed vast, it was too incomplete to be a personality.
She thought, how could you have Power without a person? You couldn’t, like you couldn’t have the ability to draw without someone to manifest it. But families carry inherited abilities and traits that manifested through generations.
She wasn’t the first person in her family to have an affinity to spirit. The difference between the two was, the Power she was born with felt just like a part of her, while this Power felt old.
Maybe it had been part of a person once, someone who had died or been killed a long time ago, and their Power had sheared away. Only, because it couldn’t exist without someone to manifest it, it had grafted onto someone else. Then someone after that. The thought felt right to her, somehow true. She felt again the sense of a dark ocean that flowed everywhere but seemed to recede from her touch.
She focused all of her attention inward and reached for it again. It receded again, as if pulling back from her.
Something clicked over in Grace’s head, the same way it had when she had heard Khalil talking with the kids in their bedroom or when Chloe had said she was bad.
Oh, no you don’t, she said to what had come to live inside of her. I’ve put up with a lot of shit in my life because of you. You chose me. Well, that makes you mine. Do you hear me? You will come when I call, because you are mine now.
Maybe she wouldn’t have done it if she had paused to think about it. But she didn’t pause to think. Instead, she reached deeper and harder inside of herself, and much as she had with the connection to Khalil, she grasped the Oracle’s Power and pulled.
She connected. For one wild moment the Power bucked in her hold, stronger and fiercer than she had expected. It rushed up in a roaring wave and threatened to engulf her entirely.
Oh, no, she thought. You don’t own me. I own you. She wrapped her awareness tighter around it and held on.
It tried to recede again.
No. She would not let it go.
The sunlit meadow disappeared. Everything went dark. She held steady as the Power thundered and crashed in her grip, a feral, undisciplined storm. She got a feeling of immense connectivity again, the dark ocean flowing everywhere, touching everywhere, where the veil of time and space grew thin. Losing her grip and falling into it would be crossing a threshold to drown in a constant state of epiphany. She had heard stories of Oracles getting lost in the Power and babbling madness for the rest of their lives.
And she simply refused to do that. If nothing else, she was stubborn. She had dishes in her sink that needed to be washed. She had to change the oil in her car. Max and Chloe needed to be tucked into bed that evening. There was also something else she had said she would do. She couldn’t think of what it was, with all the crashing and heaving going on in her head, but she knew she had promised to do it, so she wrestled the Power down.
As she did so, she glimpsed a ghost.
She stared, confusion tumbling through her thoughts. She could “see” ghosts, such as the elderly women in the kitchen. They looked like indistinct, transparent smudges overlaid on normal reality.
Oracular visions were an entirely different experience. Those streamed directly from the Power, and like the vision that came for Cuelebre, they overwhelmed her regular senses.
Seeing this ghost felt like a true vision. It was another anomaly. According to what she had learned, the Oracle’s visions came for other people, but at the moment no one else was around. Wasn’t anything going to go the way it was supposed to?
The ghost certainly wasn’t Don and Margie’s father either. It was either Wyr or Demonkind, a strange creature with a face like a human female’s, except its features were too sharp and elongated, and it had more of a snout than a nose. The face flowed back to a hooded cobralike flare of a neck before falling to the body of a serpent as thick as a man’s waist.
Grace felt a pulse of recognition that went deeper than knowledge, past instinct. It came from the Power she held. She said to the ghost, This was once yours. This Power came from you.
The ghost stared at her in astonishment. Then it gave her a merry, feral smile. Very good, child. Very, very good.
She knew the ghost did not speak English, but she still understood every word. Blood thundered in Grace’s ears, or maybe it was the sound of the dark ocean. The ghost came clearer, and Grace seemed to see her in a cavern. Struggling with astonishment and an odd sense of betrayal, she said, I thought we were human.
You are, said the ghost. Mostly. Your many times great-grandmother found me after an earthquake on Mount Parnassus. My body had been crushed from tons of falling rock. She tried to help me, but it was too late.
Grace asked, How did we inherit this?
The ghost’s smile widened to reveal long, sharp fangs. I gave her the serpent’s kiss as my thanks. I meant to give her the Power to walk the night, but I died while I kissed her. I gave her all of my Power instead.
Another vision came to Grace. Although the image was born from a far distant past, it was also as sharp and clear as if she were truly present. Grace watched the serpent creature convulse in death throes as she bit a screaming human woman.
Grace said, We’re an ACCIDENT?
You are a thing of beauty, the ghost whispered. Although your ancestress went a little mad.
Good gods. Grace shuddered and almost lost control of her hold.
The serpent-woman ghost coiled on itself. Your grandmothers created a history of prophecy and service out of the legacy I gave them. You should feel proud.
I don’t need you to tell me how I should feel. Grace noticed how the Power pulled toward the ghost. She said, You didn’t mean for any of this to happen, so you never really let go.
The ghost came up to her. You’re strong. You pulled the Power up in daylight, and you called me to you. You’re very strong for such a young one.
Well, I didn’t call you on purpose, Grace told her. Gripping the Power while talking with the ghost took all of her strength. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold on without it sucking her into that dark, endless sea. She said, I wanted to see if I could pull the Power up in daylight, but since we’re having this nice chat, you really need to let go now. Or take it back. I don’t give a shit which one you do, just do one thing or the other.
The ghost turned away, and her coiling grew agitated. What if I can’t take it back? I’m no longer alive. I cannot contain my own Power.
Then let go, dammit. Your connection to it is too strong. I can’t get full control while you hold on. Grace injected all her strength into the words. In the back of her mind, she was turning frantic. If she couldn’t get control, she didn’t know if she could release it safely.
The serpent woman looked at her. Her smile had faded away to be replaced by something much darker. What if I don’t want to let go? My Power is alive in you. As long as my Power is alive, something of me is alive as well.
Realization struck. You’re the reason why the Power doesn’t bond with any one person, why it jumps from Oracle to Oracle, Grace said. It’s because you won’t let go. But you’re not alive. You’re dead. You’re only pretending.
While they were speaking, she searched for how the Power connected to both her and to the ghost. Now that she knew she was haunted, she could try to get rid of the ghost in the ways she had been taught, but she didn’t know if she could do that while she still held on to the Power. She might have trapped herself with her own impetuousness. Dumbass.
Holding on is the only thing I have left, said the ghost.
Fury welled. Grace said, You didn’t “kiss” my ancestor. You didn’t mean to give her a gift. You just fuckin
g bit her.
The ghost hissed, I give life to all of my children!
Grace had begun to shake. Her grip was close to slipping. We’re supposed to be your CHILDREN? she gritted. No decent parent I know would ever put their child in jeopardy.
I haven’t put you in jeopardy! the ghost roared as she recoiled. You did that to yourself when you tried to control something you were never meant to control!
Really? said Grace. You mean when I tried to take what had come to me, what was supposed to be mine? That doesn’t sound like much of a gift to me. She grew calm as she told the ghost, It’s not too late. I’m sorry you died, but you died. Maybe you didn’t mean for this to happen, but you can still make good on the gift you tried to give my ancestor.
The serpent woman stopped coiling on herself, and that feral, beautiful face turned wistful. The ghost asked, What would you, a mere mortal, do with an immortal Power?
Don’t you think it’s time we find out? Grace said. If she couldn’t persuade the ghost to let go, she was going to have to take her chances and exorcise it, whether she was struggling to deal with the Power or not.
The serpent woman’s wistfulness grew. She held a hand out, as if she would caress Grace’s cheek. You’re not only strong. You’re more impertinent than the others were.
Grace didn’t know what to do. She wanted to cry or laugh or scream. She said, Maybe I’ll grow out of that. I’m still pretty young. Give me this chance. If I am really supposed to be one of your children, let me become your heir.
The ghost’s hand dropped. She faded away. Grace felt the ghost let go.
Instinctively, she braced herself. Afterward, she realized that might have saved her sanity and maybe even her life as the dark sea rushed toward her in a tidal wave. She threw everything she had at it, straining to hold on. All thought burned away in a gigantic, formless roar.
Gradually the roar quieted as the tidal wave receded. The darkness in her mind faded until she could see sunlight again.
She looked around wildly, soaking up the sight of the meadow drenched in sunshine. Then she bent at the waist, shaking as she drew in deep gulps of air, as wrung out as if she had just sprinted a mile.
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