Rogue Oracle Read online

  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.”

  THE 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.

  SHE WOKE UP, FREEZING, WITH HARRY’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.”

  “Coming from an oracle, that’s a strange statement.”

  “That’s my best guess.”

  Harry gathered Tara’s cold fingers in his hands and blew on them. Her fingers brushed his lips, and his warm breath traveled down her wrists, stirring blood that had lain cold for months. She looked away, but it rose in her cheeks. She could feel them flaming in the darkness, hoped he couldn’t see.

  With one hand, Harry pressed Tara’s hands to his chest. The other pushed her hair away from her face, and he tenderly pressed his lips to her forehead, to the bridge of her nose. Where he kissed her, the heat followed: from her temple, to her upper lip, the point of her chin. His hand on the back of her neck felt like sunlight on a summer’s day.

  She wanted more of that light, that heat. Like him, she was dro
wning in her own darkness. Tara felt herself losing touch with the real world through her dream-visions, as much as Harry lost touch with his humanity through his work. She tipped her head forward and kissed him back. Harry’s mouth chased the chill from hers.

  Her fingers wound in his T-shirt as his kisses drifted down her shoulder over the exposed scar on her collar. She didn’t fear Harry’s judgment; he’d seen these marks before. He brushed her hair away, fingers sketching the scars between her ribs.

  Like a cloak, Harry and the bedspread enveloped her. Her cold hands traced over his spine and the hard muscles of his back. Their clothes tangled in the bedspread, kicked to the bottom of the sheets. Tara sighed, feeling the blissful heat of his bare skin down the length of her body, skimming her hands across his chest.

  “God, I missed you,” he murmured into her shoulder. He reached down to part her legs, slipped his hand between them. She moaned, arching her back, as his fingers teased heat from her body. He pressed swollen and heavy against her inner thigh. Harry teased her until her nipples scraped his chest and she grabbed his buttocks to pull him inside her.

  He wrapped his arms tightly around her as he thrust into her, grasping her hips. With a nearly violent crush of flesh, he drove into her over and over, thrust her up against the wall behind the bed. Tara clung to him with both arms wrapped around his neck, crying out as the orgasm overtook her. And it overtook Harry. His hands clutched her hips as he plunged into her one last time, growling as he came.

  Tara slid back down the wall, her knees gone weak and gelatinous.

  “Are you all right?” Harry had come back to himself, and his eyes were wide with worry that he’d lost control again.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  He took a deep breath, seemed to consider it. “Yeah. I am, now.”

  He kissed her soundly, wrapping her in his arms and the blankets. She pressed her ear to his warm chest, feeling it rise and fall and his heartbeat settle into sleep. When she looked up at him, he was as she’d seen him in desert effigy: a knight at rest in the darkness. This was the first peacefulness she’d seen in him in months.

  She laid her head back down, slipped into a dream of the desert. In her dream, Strength and the Knight of Pentacles, stripped of his armor, slept twined together on a sarcophagus while a lion kept watch over them.

  Chapter Nine

  AS MUCH as he hated to admit it, he needed her.

  Harry shuffled through the papers on his desk while he was on hold with the U.S. Marshals. Though the Marshals had some irritating on-hold music that sounded like a tortured xylophone version of “Muskrat Love,” he felt calmer this morning than he had in a long time, as if he’d sworn off caffeine. He glanced over at Tara, scribbling notes at a nearby desk filched from the Library of Congress. The stolen chair squeaked relentlessly, but she didn’t complain, absorbed in her work. Harry had been mysteriously unable to procure a desk for Veriss, who was wearing a hole in the carpet in the conference room, pacing before a whiteboard. Harry liked him better over there, behind soundproof glass like a fish in a bowl.

  Maybe Lockley was right. Maybe only people like them understood other people like them, could fathom what it was like to have the underlying tension of a more important mission every day. A duty that was more important than desire, love, or friendship. Lives were always at stake in their line of work, and everything else had to be sublimated to it. No one else would understand, no one but Tara.

  Anderson from Forensics wound her way through the bullpen, making a beeline for Harry’s desk. She was dressed in a white Tyvek hazmat suit, clutching a clipboard stuffed full of papers. Only too relieved to be free of the Marshals’ “Muskrat Love,” Harry hung up.

  “Anderson, what’s up? And is it Halloween already?”

  Anderson’s eyes glowed in excitement. “We’ve found something new. Something interesting.”

  Tara squeaked her chair around to face them, winced at the sound. “Did you re-run the DNA from Lena’s disappearance?”

  “Yes. And the previous samples. We consulted with a genetics expert at the University of Virginia, and he’s very excited.” Anderson grinned. “We didn’t screw up the lab results, after all. The expert thinks that we have a chimera—of sorts—on our hands. There is more than one genetically distinct type of cell, but this isn’t anything that anyone’s ever seen before.”

  “How is that possible?” Harry leaned forward in his chair. “The DNA is from people that we know to be distinct … separate entities.”

  “We don’t know. The DNA strands are all tangled together. But the strands are degrading at different rates. Look.” Anderson perched on the edge of Tara’s desk and showed them a printout. The first page showed three staccato lines. “In the first DNA samples taken from Carrie Kirkman’s disappearance, we found three sets of DNA: Gerald Frost’s, Carrie’s, and an unknown. Gerald’s DNA had degraded.” She pulled out another page, including four lines. “In the samples taken from Carl’s disappearance, we found four sets: Gerald’s, Carrie’s, Carl’s, and the same unknown. Carrie’s and Gerald’s had degraded, though.” She pointed out broken and faint third and fourth lines and flipped to the next page. “In Lena’s disappearance, we found four sets of DNA: the unknown, Carrie’s, Carl’s, and Lena’s.” She pointed to two faint lines. “Carrie’s DNA has degraded to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable, and Carl’s is dissolving, too. We think Gerald’s degraded to the point that it no longer exists.”

  “What would cause that kind of degradation?” Harry asked, his eyes tracing the multicolored lines.

  “Only one thing would cause degradation in this way. Serious radiation exposure.”

  Tara leaned forward. “Did you find radiation in the samples?”

  “Once we looked for it, yes. Loads.” Anderson inclined her head to the lab. “We found thirty microroentgens per hour in the lab, and are decontaminating it now. That’s more than five times the normal background levels of radiation. Lena’s house is soaked in cesium-137, iodine-131, and strontium-90 particles, and so is the evidence from Carl’s car. We’ve stuck that in a lead-lined box. Nobody’s seen residual levels of that type since—”

  “Since Chernobyl,” Tara finished.

  “Yeah. Exactly.” Anderson seemed stunned at Tara’s intuitive leap. “We’d expect someone with this degree of residual radiation to have experienced serious physical damage: thyroid cancer, serious deformities, and invasive cancers. But whoever our unknown subject is, he’s apparently well enough to be skulking around in the shadows.”

  “Are the levels enough to cause harm to you guys, or people working the case?” Harry asked, envisioning somebody somewhere suing him for something.

  Anderson shook her head. “Unlikely that you’d get thyroid cancer from one-time vicarious exposure. But I’d advise anyone who worked those scenes to turn their clothes in for proper disposal. If any new crime scenes emerge, we’ve got more moon suits on order.”

  Harry drummed his fingers on his desk. “Where the hell did this come from? Is our kidnapper sitting on a stockpile of dirty bombs?”

  Before Anderson could answer, Tara said, “No. Our subject is from Chernobyl.”

  Anderson blinked. “Damn, you’re good. We don’t know for sure, but the combination of radioactive materials is fairly specific. You could be dealing with a refugee, with someone who was bombarded with radiation for a long period of time.”

  “But why would a victim of the worst nuclear disaster in history be selling secrets to cause more destruction?” Harry wondered. “Is he doing this for the money?”

  Veriss had swum out of his fishbowl and wormed his way into the conversation. Harry groaned inwardly. “Economic advantage is the single most powerful motivator in my models. I don’t see why someone wouldn’t sell those secrets.”

  Harry stared at Veriss. Hard.

  Veriss backed up. “Absent any internalized societal norms to the contrary, of course. And being tried for treason might have an additional dete
rrent effect.”

  Tara shook her head. “I don’t think our subject is in it sheerly for the money. I think it’s about revenge.”

  Harry frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She rolled forward, and her chair squeaked. “I think our subject has experienced hell. And he wants the rest of us to know what it’s like.”

  Harry picked up the phone. “Get me Homeland Security. I need them to sweep every major airport with Geiger counters. We need to figure out where this guy got in.”

  TARA’S HELL WAS DIFFERENT FROM HER UNKNOWN SUBJECT’S hell.

  And she felt it would serve her best if she could understand it.

  The elevator up to the Library of Congress grated slowly on its cables. Tara looked at the flashing lights, notebook tucked under one arm, and a coffeemaker under the other. The Little Shop of Horrors had filched it from LOC, despite the LOC inventory sticker on the bottom. She hoped that if she brought it back, as a peace offering, she might be able to dig up some information.

  Maybe.

  The elevator doors opened on one of LOC’s long-term storage areas. Rows and rows of moveable bookshelves stretched back as far as the eye could see—which wasn’t far. The lighting here was on motion detectors to save energy and keep the documents from fading; a light flicked on when she stepped out of the elevator. They lit up as she wandered down the long, spotless corridors of documents that stretched into darkness that was air-conditioned and humidity-controlled.

  “Hello?” Tara called into the stacks.

  A light flickered on in the distance. Overhead lights winked on as someone approached; Tara could hear heels clicking on the concrete.

  A young woman wearing a paper jumpsuit and pink latex gloves rounded the corner. Tara recognized her from the elevator; she’d been the one to filch Veriss’s projector. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion upon seeing Tara.

  Tara held up the coffeepot. “I, uh, found something of yours. I thought I’d bring it back.”