My phone buzzed. Just a single buzz, but I heard it even though it was buried in my satchel in the bathroom and the bedroom door was closed.
I thought I’d been sleeping, but I guess I wasn’t. Because when the phone buzzed, I realized I’d been staring at the darkness of my bedroom ceiling.
The candle had burnt out.
Warner was asleep next to me, pressing his naked shoulder and hip against me, but with his head turned away. His breath was deep, exhausted. I was lucky he hadn’t collapsed immediately after the transportation spell. Lucky that being placed in stasis for only a few hours affected him much less than four hundred and fifty years had the first time.
The phone buzzed again. The interval told me I had a text message waiting for me.
I wanted to wake Warner, to shower and romp a second time, but I didn’t.
I was sandwiched between him and the wall — my room wasn’t big enough for the queen bed to fit without being pressed against the wall. But I sat up and climbed over him without waking him.
I retrieved a bra, T-shirt, underwear, and yoga pants from the clean pile of laundry on the chair in the corner. I padded barefoot out into the hall, then cut immediately left into the bathroom.
I retrieved my knife in its invisible sheath, tasting Gran’s witch magic for just a moment before I strapped it on and my own magic neutralized hers.
The text message was from Kett.
>I have survived.
I stared at these three words for many minutes, trying to decide what to text back. Whether to make a joke, or tell him how terrified I’d been, or to thank him for the jet … and the chocolate.
Applying my thumbs to the phone, I simply typed:
I’m pleased.
He’d like the simplicity of that. He knew all the other stuff anyway, but his cool vampire demeanor would get ruffled if I mentioned it. He’d know what to read into my message.
He didn’t text back. I didn’t expect him to, but I waited for a few minutes anyway.
Then I went to fulfill the duty I no longer wanted. To void an obligation I never should have taken on in the first place. An obligation currently attached to my necklace.
The obligation had been an adventure, once. But now it only filled me with unwanted anger. A fierce, fierce anger that the lovemaking had only reinforced.
Anger at having been given the almost impossible task of collecting artifacts that could kill guardians, who I’d thought to be indestructible. Anger that Shailaja had been allowed to run around for three months and trash my bakery. Anger that the guardians had lost track of her in the first place, over four hundred years ago.
Anger at the tone of reprimand in my father’s voice.
And guilt. Guilt because I’d been fully prepared to kill Shailaja — assuming that was even in my power. Guilt because I’d felt she needed to die. Who was I to judge such things?
Shailaja was dangerous. I knew that much, and I certainly didn’t want her coming after the instrument of assassination currently sitting on my bedside table.
So no matter how torn I felt about it, and how much I just wanted to crawl back into bed — sleepless or not –– I left Warner to return to the nexus.
The dirt of the bakery basement felt warm and welcoming underneath my bare feet. I didn’t bother with the overhead light when I could open the portal with a mere thought. As always, its golden magic — even if just for the moment of crossing — filled all the dark places in my soul.
Chi Wen was waiting for me on the other side.
He was wearing his gold-trimmed white robes as usual. Nothing about the far seer ever changed. He actually blended so thoroughly in with the white marble floor and gilded columns of the nexus that for a brief second, I thought I’d dreamed him up. That my eyesight was more damaged than I thought.
But I wasn’t so lucky.
I saw his eyes. They were full-blown white-gold. Terrifyingly bright orbs of gold.
I stumbled.
The portal shut behind me.
Instead of bowing, I fell to my knees before the far seer. For one beyond-petrified moment, I’d seen my future in his eyes. In his presence and his stoicism.
“Far seer,” I cried, stopping myself from reaching for the edge of his tunic, stopping myself from begging for absolution. For what I didn’t yet know, but I was terrified he was going to show me.
“Dragon slayer,” he murmured as he touched the unruly curls on the top of my head. His guardian magic blew through me like a hurricane, electrifying my spine until it poured out of my fingers and feet.
But he didn’t send me a vision.
He dropped his hand from my head. “I would see what you’ve collected.”
“But is it safe? Shailaja …”
“Is under the watchful gaze of the healer and the treasure keeper.”
I reached down and unhooked the centipedes from my necklace. They came undone with the simple thought of undoing, lying dormant across my palm.
I raised my hand and the instruments of assassination to the far seer. He peered down at the artifacts, then he nodded.
“It’s not every day you see your own death offered to you on the hand of a beautiful young woman.”
I wrapped my fingers around the centipedes, holding them protectively against my chest. I suddenly wanted them as far away from the guardian of Asia as I could get them without running back through the portal.
God, I really, really wanted to run. But I was scared as hell that the far seer would give chase.
He chuckled.
“I … you … see your own death?” I managed to ask.
“No,” he answered. “I cannot see my path, nor do I see the nine. Our destinies are hidden from me.”
“But another sees,” I murmured, remembering the far seer’s words about Rochelle, the oracle, and the task he’d laid at Kandy’s feet. Dread soured my stomach.
“Not yet, but soon. She has been resting. But now you have come, so she must wake.”
“I don’t understand.”
He nodded, not unsympathetically. Then he held his hand out to me, as if he wanted me to give him the centipedes.
I shook my head so fiercely that the room blurred behind my own curls as they flapped around my face.
Chi Wen chuckled again as a silver box appeared in his hand. It was smaller than the box in the mountain cavern, and covered in raw diamonds, not runes. Dragon alchemy. And the metal was presumably platinum, not silver.
Still kneeling, I opened the box’s hinged lid and placed the centipedes inside. They didn’t wake as I snapped the lid shut.
Chi Wen raised the box to eye level and spoke directly to it. “To the treasure keeper.”
The box disappeared, leaving me with the taste of lemon … Blossom’s brownie magic.
The far seer turned and walked away. “Come. Come, dragon slayer.”
I stood unsteadily, then followed him out through the arch that led to the dragon residences.
The far seer escorted me to an austere room that held a single bed, a paper-strewn desk, and a wooden stool. It was a room fit for a monk … or the eldest of the guardian dragons.
Though the desk was overly full, the room was tidy. The bed was made with a precision that spoke of ingrained ritual.
Every single inch of the walls was covered with Rochelle’s charcoal sketches. Every inch.
I stepped forward — completely involuntarily, because I wanted nothing to do with Rochelle’s visions. But they looked different somehow.
“Photocopies?” I asked.
“Ah, yes. Photocopies,” Chi Wen said. “That is the word. I had no need of originals, and the collectors would not have parted with them easily.”
“Blackwell,” I spat. I found a sudden anger — sparked by the thought of the sorcerer — burning deep within my fear.
Chi Wen tilted his head questioningly.
I lifted my hand and pointed to a sketch that clearly showed Blackwell with the edge of his castle in the background. He was touching the amulet he always wore around his neck. A power source. One of many, I assumed.
Chi Wen waved his hand dismissively. “The figure in black is of no immediate consequence. It is you I see, Jade Godfrey. In here …” — he tapped the side of his head — “… and here.” He swept his arm to include all the sketches.
Except for the solo image of Blackwell, which was attached to the wall at the lower left of the desk, every single one of the sketches included me … or some aspect of the last year and a half of my life.
I turned my back on the room, only to see sketches also attached above the door. I couldn’t bear to look at the far seer either, so I twined my fingers through the wedding rings of my necklace and stared at my hands instead.
“This has all come to pass,” I said.
“To study the past is to understand the future, dragon slayer,” Chi Wen said.
“You keep calling me that. Dragon slayer.” The words rushed out of my mouth without thought or edit. “And Pulou has me collecting … instruments … and you said … you said. The centipedes.”
Chi Wen reached for me and I knelt before him again. I wasn’t strong enough to stand in the face of the truth I was sure he was about to show me.
He laid his hand on my head. A gesture intended to be purely comforting. He didn’t show me a vision, nor did he offer me enlightenment.
“That … this …” — I flung my hands out to the sides as I lifted my bowed head to look up at the far seer — “… please. It’s too much.” All the tears I’d tried not to shed since Peru now fell freely across my cheeks. “Please. This can’t be my destiny. And yet …”
“And yet,” Chi Wen murmured.
“And yet, you call me dragon slayer.”
I was shaking now, terror and fear riding my adrenaline rush. The energy was forcing itself out through my limbs because I wasn’t strong enough to hold the emotions within any longer. Give me something to fight, and I’d find my courage — along with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Give me something to conquer, and I’d find my way in, over, or through. But this … the future I could feel unfurling before me — the future I’d almost embraced in the cavern, and then again in the alley when I tore the shadow leech apart …
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it.
“The path might be set, but how you choose to walk it is your decision, Jade Godfrey.” The far seer lifted his hand from my head. “I will see you soon.”
He turned and walked out of the small bedroom, leaving me surrounded by Rochelle’s prophetic sketches. Pictures pasted on every wall. Snapshots of the darkest moments I’d ever suffered.
I looked.
I couldn’t move or fight any longer. So I knelt there and I looked.
I studied each stroke, every smudge and line.
The tears dried on my face. My knees started to ache.
I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t one specific image. It wasn’t a clue. It wasn’t enlightenment. It wasn’t good versus evil.
It was endurance.
I had endured.
I endured.
I will endure.
I got up and walked back through the nexus without seeing another soul. I crossed through the portal, back to the bakery. I climbed the stairs to my apartment, then climbed back into bed with Warner.
I would walk the path as I chose to walk it, with not another inch of it dictated by friend or foe.
Keep reading for a preview of book two of the Oracle Series and to download the Dowser Series cookbook for free >>>