reason in the world not to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt my daughter. I didn’t figure that Venna would really be able to stop me.
What changed was that the three of us were no longer alone.
Venna took in a deep, gasping breath-more reaction than I’d ever heard from her-and moved slowly back, until her shoulders fetched up against the polished wood of the side of a pew.
And then she slipped down to her knees, put her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.
“Oh,” she said faintly. “I see now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought them here.”
And there was someone sitting in the blackest shadows of the room, an outline of a person, nothing more, but a sense of presence and power sent little shocks up and down my spine.
I hesitated, staring at that dark shape, and then I sat up, grabbed Ashan by his filthy collar, and yanked him to a sitting position. “Who is it?” I asked Venna.
She didn’t answer.
“Venna!”
Whoever it was, Ashan looked destroyed. The expression on his face was horrifying in its vulnerability. His eyes filled with tears, and his whole body trembled with the force of something like grief, something like rage, more toxic than either one of those. I let go, because he didn’t even know I was there, and he crawled away from me,
“You can’t be here,” he said. “You can’t.”
But whatever the shape was, it didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t seem to notice him at all. I got slowly to my feet and watched Ashan tremble, and suddenly killing him didn’t seem like a priority. He was suffering, all right. Suffering in ways I couldn’t begin to understand.
Good.
All around the chapel, candles came alight-one after another, a racing circle of warm flame.
And I saw who was sitting in the pew. I guess I should have known, from Venna’s reaction, and from Ashan’s, but I still wasn’t prepared.
She looked human, but there was no way she was anything like it; she had a stillness to her that not even Tibetan monks could attain. She was wearing a full brickred dress, shifting and sheer in some places, solid in others; it fluttered in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and her full lips were parted on what looked like a gasp of delight, as if she’d seen something truly wonderful that none of the rest of us could grasp.
And then her eyes, a brilliant shade of hot gold, shifted to fix on me.
Ashan pressed himself down on the floor, totally abasing himself, and I thought,
Because it was my daughter. My Imara, the Imara of the memories I’d gotten from Cherise and Eamon. And yet…not her at all.
Not until she smiled, and shattered my heart into a million pieces.
“Oh,” I whispered, and felt my knees go weak. “Oh, my God…” I didn’t know what to say, how to feel. There was this storm of emotion inside of me, overwhelming in its pressure, and I wanted to laugh and cry and scream and, like Ashan, get down on my knees in gratitude and supplication. But I wasn’t Ashan, and I didn’t. I braced myself with both hands on the back of a pew and stared at her until my eyes burned.
She didn’t speak.
“Imara?” I asked. My throat felt raw, and I could barely recognize my own voice. “Are you…?”
Venna said, “The old Oracle was dying after the Demon wounded her. The Mother made a new Oracle in her place from the energy that was lost. I didn’t know it would be Imara.” Venna sounded very quiet, very small. “Does it help?”
Help? My daughter was there, smiling at me. How could it not help? I swallowed. “Can she…can she hear me?”
“Not the way you think. She hears who you are, though. And she knows.”
“Knows what?” I felt a bizarre mixture of pain and grief and anger fizzing up inside, overwhelming the relief.
“Everything,” Venna said soberly. “She knows you still love her.”
There was something about Imara that kept me from rushing to her, touching her, babbling out everything I felt. Something…other.
But that look, that smile…those were pure love.
“It’s why you could do what you did on the beach, when you made the Earth obey you,” Venna said. “And how you can touch people’s memories. Because through her, you touch the Earth. You’ve got all three channels now. Earth, Fire, Weather. You’re like Lewis.”
She didn’t look particularly happy about it. Imara’s smile faded, and she looked down at Ashan, cowering near her feet. Her eyes shifted color to a molten bronze.
I didn’t need words to understand that look, and it chilled me.
If Venna noticed, she didn’t mention it. She was frowning now, looking as disturbed as I’d ever seen her. “This isn’t going to work.”
“What? What do you mean?” For a terrifying second I thought she was talking about Imara, that there was something wrong, but no; Venna looked too calm, too still.
“She’s new,” Venna said, and rested her hands, palm down, on her thighs. “She hasn’t come into her full power yet. And that means she can’t help Ashan-even if she wants to.”
I doubted sincerely that what Imara had on her mind for Ashan could go by the description of
“So that’s it?” I asked. “We just give up?”
Venna threw me an all-too-human look of exasperation. “No,” she said. “We take him to another Oracle, that’s all. I’ll-take him out of here.”
I didn’t watch how she did it, but I heard Ashan scrambling, and heard him cry out, once. Then they were gone, and the door shut behind them.
I didn’t take my eyes off my daughter, the Oracle.
“Can you hear me?” I asked. “Imara?”
Her eyes slowly swirled back to that lovely shade of gold, but she didn’t smile this time.
I waited, but the candles began to dim, slowly winking out one by one. While I could still see her, I said, “Please say something. Please, baby. I need to know that you’re okay.”
She was just a dim shadow against the deeper shadows, a glimmer of gold eyes in the dark, when she whispered, “Hang in there, Mom. I love you.”
And then she was gone.
I sat down hard on the pew, put my face in my hands, and prayed. Not to my daughter. Not to the Earth, whoever that was.
I prayed to God, whose chapel it was. Who’d built this glittering, beautiful, hurtful world with all its magic and deadly sharp edges. I needed a higher power to get me through the rest of this, because I didn’t think I could do it by myself.
I don’t know if He answered, exactly, but after a few minutes I felt a kind of peace inside, a stillness, and an acceptance.
My child wasn’t suffering, and she wasn’t totally beyond my reach.
Maybe that was enough.
I scrubbed my face clean of tears, got up, and went to find Venna.
Venna had Ashan-actually, he was on his knees, and she had one hand on his shoulder. It didn’t look like restraint, exactly, but I was sure it was. He looked worse in the merciless glare of the motion-activated spotlights on the concrete stairs-bleached, grimy, with an unpleasant light of madness lurking in those blue eyes.
He’d killed my daughter. And if he’d gotten his way, she’d have been completely dead, not sitting in there in the chapel, elevated to some level I couldn’t understand. In a very real way, he’d still taken her away; Imara the Oracle wasn’t Imara at all, not the way I’d known her.
