“Yes, dear,” the woman replied. Jim was walking around the front of the car to the driver’s side, and for an unsettling moment Trix felt complicit in something of which she had no knowledge.
“But you can help us find them?” she whispered.
“I can help you.”
Jim opened the door and climbed in. He slipped the keys into the ignition and placed his hands on the wheel, ten to two. “So will you start telling me now?”
“I will,” Veronica said. “Now that I know for sure, I will.”
“Good. Where to?”
“The North End,” Veronica said. “Home.”
“We’re going to your house?” Trix asked.
“Like I said, dear. Somewhere special.”
Trix stared from the window and watched Boston passing them by, and thought about who they were with and where they were going. For some reason she’d never imagined the Oracle of Boston even having a home. Her grandmother had told her that story when she was barely into her teens, and the Oracle had taken on the hue of someone mystical and mysterious, one of the city’s own shadows, a breath of Boston’s unique air, a ghost. The story had been remarkable and felt very real, and Trix had always believed it was this, more than a thousand childhood dreams and a love of books, that had given her the open mind she had grown up with. She’d toyed with various prescriptive religions before settling into the comfortable embrace of her own beliefs. She’d once heard a ghost, and remembered the way sadness had settled around her for a brief, shattering moment as the wraith walked by. And now here she was in a shiny new Mercedes with the woman who knew Boston, and whom Boston knew.
“A long time ago, there was a man called Thomas McGee,” Veronica said. Her voice had changed somewhat, as if she used different tones and inflections to relay stories, and Trix felt herself settling in to listen. “He was the Oracle at the end of the nineteenth century,” the older woman continued. “The first Irish Oracle, in fact, since the Boston Brahmins had dominated up until then.”
Trix frowned. “Brahmin” was such an outmoded word to describe Boston’s first families and their English Protestant ancestors. She wondered how old Veronica really was, and how long she had been the Oracle.
“By all accounts McGee was a proud man,” Veronica continued, “an older Irishman who’d seen his countrymen struggling toward equality against a background of bigotry and resentment. Since the middle of that century they’d filled most of the unskilled-labor jobs in the city, household domestics and the like, but as the years went on they became the backbone of Boston’s industrial boom. Yet they were still looked down upon. They lived in squalor in the North End and other areas. The all-Irish neighborhoods housed whole families living in single rooms. McGee grew up through that, and after he took on the mantle of Oracle he became more determined than ever to ensure that his people lived better lives in the future.”
“But as Oracle, weren’t all Boston’s people his people?” Trix asked. Maybe she had a rose-tinted view of what being Oracle meant; maybe she’d set Veronica on a pedestal higher than the position justified. Just because it was a little beyond and outside the perception of most normal people, did that mean that being Oracle implied perfection?
“Of course,” Veronica said. “But McGee… well, no one becomes Oracle without maintaining hold of his or her earlier experiences. We are a product of our experiences after all. He was as human as I, and I’m as human as you, dear.”
“So what happened?” Jim asked. He was driving quickly, paying close attention to the road, hands gripping the wheel tightly. He’d moved the rearview mirror back to its original position, and Trix had to lean to the left to catch sight of him now. But he was no longer glancing back to see if she was all right. His focus was elsewhere.
“The longer he remained Oracle, the more he witnessed events in the city around him, the more determined McGee became to ensure that the Oracle of Boston was always Irish.”
“Are you?” Trix asked.
“No,” Veronica said. “My father was English, my mother Italian. I do have some Irish in me, many generations old. But if Thomas McGee were alive today, he’d view me as his…”
“Enemy?” Trix finished for her.
“Perhaps,” Veronica said, smiling enigmatically.
“What does any of this have to do with Jenny and Holly?” Jim asked. Trix knew that tone; he was barely holding back his impatience. She’d heard him like that a few times before-usually when Holly was being difficult and deadlines pressured him into being a lesser father than they all knew he was.
“Plenty,” Veronica said. “Didn’t I say I’d tell you what was happening?”
The car was silent, and neither of them responded. And she shut down his rising anger just like that, Trix thought, seeing how much more loosely Jim sat in his seat.
“Well, then,” the woman continued. “Thomas McGee spent a long time planning how to pass on the responsibility of Oracle. It’s not a title, as such. It’s not a position that you can interview people for, or place an ad in the newspaper for when you feel your time in this world is coming to an end. The Oracle is you, as much as you are the Oracle, and it makes decisions through you.”
“It’s something separate?” Trix asked.
“Yes and no. The Oracle shares the soul of the city. It exists within me just as my own soul does. Though the city does not control the Oracle, it influences.” Her voice was lower, darker. “It becomes a corner of your own soul, when your soul has no corners.
“McGee was the city’s heart and soul for over forty years. In that time he saved countless lives, settled hearts, calmed ghosts, protected the city from dangers. He was, as far as I can tell, a good man. But he also spent a long time studying magicks that no Oracle should ever need. Druid ceremonial chants, Native American magic, Chinese and Eastern European spells, and much, much more. He accumulated a whole library of texts and parchments, purchasing them when he had to, procuring them by other means if he could. Though he could never leave the city, he sent people out to fetch what he sought. He studied and planned, and made it his aim to secure the Irish lineage of Oracles from his life forth.”
“He wanted Boston to remain Irish forever,” Jim said.
“Yes. He witnessed the Italians flooding the city, lessening the Irish majority, and though he was the Oracle, I believe there was always a small part of him that was still too much of what he had been before. He’d suffered hardships and discrimination, and that twisted parts of him that not even being Oracle could completely erase.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Jim said.
“Have you ever heard of me?” Veronica asked.
In the backseat, Trix smiled. That had been a question she’d asked her grandmother, all those years ago. If the Oracle’s so awesome, how come everyone doesn’t go to her? And her grandmother’s answer had stuck with her forever: She’s there to help people who come to her with open minds and open hearts, and who are truly in need. Others will never believe in her, and if they don’t believe, they’ll never find her.
“Fair point,” Jim said. “Which way?”
“Left here. Five minutes. I’ll show you more then, but for now all you need to know is this: McGee tried something that no one had ever tried before, and he failed. And his failure had dire consequences.
“He performed a ritual to try to secure Boston for the Irish, to make sure the influence of Irish culture would remain and that the Oracle would always be Irish. But he toyed with magicks far beyond his capacity to control, and his meddling splintered the city. No one since has discovered just how he did this, because everything he used in the process was destroyed. But his ritual created a schism, splitting Boston’s reality into three distinct paths: one where a Brahmin Oracle would exist, and the city reflected those influences; one where an Irish Oracle persisted; and one, this world we know, where the Oracle is chosen by the city, as was always intended.”
“What happened to McGee?” Trix asked, though she thought the answer was almost inevitable.
“I believe he died,” Veronica said. Trix hadn’t been expecting that. Doesn’t she know for sure? she wondered.
“And these Bostons,” Jim said, gesturing at the windshield as if to indicate all three. “What are they? Where are they?”
“They’re here and now, but beyond the reach of most,” Veronica said. “Alternate paths. Histories, presents,
