I See You (Oracle 2) (3 page)

“Will you commit any of these to your skin?” Chi Wen asked.

I shrugged. “Nah, I’m not all over any of them.”

The far seer ran his fingers across the sketchbook’s spiral spine and loosened a few flecks of paper trapped within the wire. The torn paper tabs were left over from a sketch Chi Wen had requested I rip out of the book a few months back. A charcoal of a centipede, which I had actually considered tangling within the barbed wire tattoo twined around my left arm.

I opened my mouth to ask the far seer what had become of that sketch, then just as quickly shut it. I already knew he’d given it to Jade Godfrey, and I really didn’t want to know the particulars. I was actually glad I hadn’t seen whatever transpired over the last year and a half. I had the sense that Jade couldn’t stay out of trouble if she tried. Based on Chi Wen’s devotion to my training and the gist of his questions, rare as they were, I was certain the guardian had plans for the dowser.

Static electricity danced across my left forearm, just below the elbow. I glanced down to where the far seer had turned his attention from the sketchbook to the tattoo of the skeleton key on my left arm. The barbed-wire tattoo passed cleanly through the intricate series of Celtic-looking knots at one end of the key.

“This will come in handy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know how sorcerer magic works?”

“No.” And apparently massive segues were the theme of the day.

“Your father was a sorcerer.”

“Was, eh? So he’s definitely dead?”

That was the wrong thing to ask the far seer … as were any questions touching on time. He fell into his staring-into-the-distance thing … or maybe he was counting the grains of sand roiling within each five-foot wave as it crashed onto the beach before us. I never knew with him.

Staying quiet was usually the best course of action as he sorted through whatever was going on in his head.

“I must go,” he said, so abruptly that I flinched. “The warrior calls.”

My blood ran cold. I’d pieced together enough background info to know that the warrior was Jade’s dad. Not that he scared me. I didn’t know him. But what I’d seen of his daughter freaked me out daily for the year or so that I’d had her in my head and thought she was a hallucination.

“Things are not clear between us,” I said. That was as carefully as I could phrase my frustration with the entire meeting, including the brief handshake with Drake.

“You will soon see, oracle.” Chi Wen brushed his fingers across my skeleton key tattoo again. “Trust the magic. Move where it wills, where it leads, but don’t try to alter the path.”

“I know,” I grumbled. “Interpret, don’t act.”

“You will survive.”

“Helpful,” I groused, only to look up to find the beach empty.
 

According to Beau, the old man simply moved too quickly for the human eye to track. Either way, the far seer had disappeared.

A wave rolled across the sand and lapped against the toes of my black-and-white Converse sneakers. As the water receded, it removed any evidence that the far seer had ever walked the beach.

CHAPTER TWO

“Fifty should cover it.”

I paused on the weatherworn sidewalk at the sound of Beau’s voice. He was talking to a customer in the two-car garage he rented from our landlady, Old Ms. McNally, from whom we also rented the concrete pad behind the garage for the Brave. I shifted my full laundry basket to my other hip as I listened to the customer laugh and clap Beau on the shoulder.

Yachats didn’t have a full-time garage or mechanic — or the population to support one — though there was a mobile guy who came through a couple of times a week. The mobile guy occasionally sent clients Beau’s way if he was too busy to get to them, and word travelled fast that Beau was good with cars. So he had a steady cash business within a couple of weeks of renting the garage.

The garage didn’t have a lift, but Beau’s shifter strength paired with a winch — behind closed doors, of course — took care of that if necessary.

The adjacent house lots were closely spaced, but not crammed together. The neighbors to the west were overly protective of their meticulous landscaping. But everyone else — kids, dogs, and the occasional morning jogger — were fairly friendly. To Beau anyway.
 

As the customer exited the garage to jog over to his car where it was parked up the street, I stepped off the sidewalk onto the long, brown grass that ran along the edge of the garage so I didn’t bump into him. I’d poke my head in through the back door on my way to the Brave, which was parked between the garage and our landlady’s overgrown backyard. Not that I could ever sneak up on Beau, but I liked to savor the moment before I laid eyes on him. It was a silly game, but I liked being prepared. Sometimes when I looked up and caught sight of him without realizing he was nearby, I would just stare at him like a blithering idiot. Yes, even after a year and a half, I had no defense against Beau’s beauty — and no idea what he was still doing with me.

A vision hit me halfway to the back door.

The white mist that flooded my mind left me sightless and breathless between one step and the next. I dropped the laundry basket onto the dead grass, belatedly hoping it hadn’t dumped over and strewn clean clothing everywhere. I pressed myself back against the rough, aged cedar siding of the garage, then slid down into a crouch as my legs gave out.

The vision didn’t hurt, but it was startling. Any weakness came from my own reaction, not the magic flooding through my mind. I hadn’t had to deal with this for long enough that it triggered all the old pain and fear I’d carried with me.

Fear of being different, of being damaged … broken.

I wrapped my hand around the raw diamond resting against my lower rib cage and tried to calm my breathing.

I had to accept the magic. I had to welcome it.

“Show me what you want me to see,” I whispered. Even though I had no idea if I could communicate with the energy that brought the visions, uttering the words calmed me.

The white mist shifted in my mind. I could still smell the neighbors’ recently clipped grass, which they’d kept green despite the summer watering restrictions. I could feel the heat of the afternoon sun on my face and the rough boards against my back. But I couldn’t see anything but the mist that always preceded the oracle visions.
 

The mist thinned but didn’t recede. A shadowed shape appeared before me, then resolved until I found myself crouched before a young woman with blond hair. I forced myself to lean forward into the vision rather than throw myself backward at the sight. Moving wouldn’t change what I was seeing, but attempting to be steady and rational would get me through it.
 

My immediate thought — based on the blond hair — was that I was looking at Jade lying before me. But I wasn’t. This woman’s hair was straight, and judging by the shadow of darker roots at her crown, it had been dyed blond. Her mud-brown eyes were open, staring blankly over my shoulder. Her head was canted to one side. She had a gold stud in the shape of a magnolia flower underneath her lower lip, but otherwise she was vanilla through and through.

As I watched, a pool of blood began to form at the back of her head, spreading across the dark asphalt on which she’d died.

“Dead girl,” I whispered.

I had no idea who she was.

The white mist reformed, taking away my glimpse of the bottle blond before I could look around for any further understanding or evidence of what I was seeing. Or why.

Beau was crouched before me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. I could practically feel the energy that constantly rolled off him. His magic, his presence, was a lower frequency than Chi Wen’s or Drake’s. It was a comforting hum that was uniquely Beau.

“Hey,” I said.

“Vision?” he asked. His tone was deep and intimate. His lyrical Southern accent thickened with concern.

I nodded as I reached for him. He gathered me up in his arms, lifting me effortlessly off the ground to carry me into the garage.
 

I still couldn’t see, but it was cooler out of the sun. I felt the breeze of the standing fan Beau always placed at the open back door as we passed through it.

“I left the laundry outside.”

Beau grunted like he didn’t give a shit about laundry.

“It’s practically everything we own,” I added.

He huffed out a sigh, then sat me down somewhere that felt high off the ground. The hood of a pickup truck — or so I assumed as I placed my feet on the bumper. “Stay put.”

“Well, I can’t exactly wander off blind while perched up here.”

“Exactly.”

I felt him move away from me, taking his energy with him as he stepped back outside to retrieve the laundry basket. The breeze from the oscillating fan brushed me again, and I closed my still-unseeing eyes against its cool gust.

Beau was back before I’d exhaled a second time.

“You smell like magic. Your magic,” he murmured as he set the basket down and closed the space between us. His voice was husky in that way that let me know, even without being able to see him, that he was turned on.

Ignoring that the slowly fading white mist still filled my mind’s eye, I reached for him, tracing my fingers up his neck, across his jaw and cheeks. I knew his face intimately. I didn’t have to see it.

He licked the tips of my fingers as they found his lips, and a familiar, comfortable desire rolled through my lower belly.

“Is the door closed?” I whispered against the sweaty skin of his neck.

He stepped away, pulling the overhead garage door closed and locking it with a click. Then he had his hands up underneath my tank top before I’d registered that he’d moved at all.

I laughed as he tugged off my top, but my amusement immediately dissolved into a gasp, then a groan as he applied all his attention to my nipples.

Beau’s focus was epic, and he never played favorites.

The mist of the vision had cleared the next time I opened my eyes, but my head was now swimming with desire.

Making quick work of my sneakers, Beau started tugging off my jeans. I yanked his sky-blue T-shirt over his head, revealing miles of smooth, tightly muscled, mocha-colored skin as he lowered his head between my now-bare legs. As his tongue made contact with my very center, I cried out and arched backward, momentarily worried that I was going to slip off the hood of the truck.

The afternoon light in the garage was muted to whatever could seep through the imperfectly sealed doors, but Beau and I didn’t need to see each other to do our dance.

I brushed my fingers against the back of his neck, enjoying his ministrations but impatient for more. With a grunt, he tugged me forward until I was half-hanging off the slightly sloped front of the truck and he was buried deep inside me.

“Whose truck is this?” I asked with a breathy gasp.

Beau laughed. Obligingly, he lifted me off the hood and hobbled over to a metal stool near the grease-spattered workbench. His pants were down around his ankles, but they didn’t seem to hamper his movements. He settled down on the stool with me in his lap and our bodies still entwined.

“Better?”

“I wasn’t interested in leaving an ass print on the hood.”

Beau laughed huskily, settling his hands over my hips to lift and lower me at a languid pace.

I didn’t have much leverage in this position, with my arms around his shoulders and legs around his waist, but I knew Beau pretty well now. I knew he always liked to be face to face. I knew he liked to be kissing me when I orgasmed. And that he liked it when I talked to him while we were connected on this level.

My lips brushed his ear as I whispered, “Do I taste as good as I smell?”

His reaction was instantaneous. A fierce groan rumbled through his chest. His grip on my hips tightened and his rhythm became erratic for a few beats, then picked up.

I cried out, arching my head, neck, and chest away from him, even as he corrected the angle of my hips to maintain perfect contact.

Pleasure lapped up over me, first as delightful shivers, then as almost-painful convulsions as I orgasmed.

At least I managed not to scream.

I wrapped myself back around Beau as he groaned into my neck and came. I lightly scratched my nonexistent nails up his spine and the back of his neck as he shuddered with the final pulses of pleasure.

“You do,” he whispered. “You taste even better than you smell.”

“But not in a weird, woman-eating way, right?”

Beau threw his head back and laughed. “You know the pack frowns on man-eaters.”

“Well, that’s one of their more reasonable rules.” I tugged his head down so I could reach his lips, then pressed a light kiss against them. “Thank you.”

“Thank you. Bathroom?”

“Yes, please.”

Beau obligingly carried me to the tiny bathroom at the back of the garage. I cleaned this about once a week, because otherwise it got so disgusting I couldn’t set foot in it. He left me there to wash up in the sink and went back to retrieve our clothing.
 

The cold water — there was no hot option — was shocking against my sex-warmed skin. For a moment, a glimpse of the vision took my eyesight again.

I shook away the mist-shrouded image of blood seeping across dark asphalt and the life fading from murky brown eyes. I shouldn’t know what life fading from someone’s eyes looked like, but apparently I did.

Beau appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, passing me my discarded clothing. The mere sight of him was always a welcome distraction. If only I could fill my mind’s eye with pictures of him as he looked now, leaning against a paint-challenged doorframe and looking terribly satisfied with himself. That would be bliss. His work pants were still undone and his discarded T-shirt dangled from his long, very talented fingers. He was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen — again and always. All I could do in the face of his utter beauty was to return his grin.