The Woken Gods (12 page)

But I’m also the
only
person who sets her off by existing. I make her worse. That’s a fact. So I haven’t spoken to my mom in over a year, and that last time was a mistake. She saw me when she shouldn’t have. It destroyed her equilibrium. Dad yelled at me afterward.

It was a bad scene, which sent me back to hovering at the edge of her life. Dad brings bags filled with each week’s crop of subsidy groceries to whatever squat she’s living in, takes her to the doctor when she needs it, helps keep her semi-stable. Unlike Bree’s absentee dad, I always get a birthday card from her. Dad brings it to her, has her sign, leaves it under my bedroom door. I have all five of them in a drawer in my room. I look at them an embarrassing amount.

These are the things I can’t bring myself to say out loud.

The street opens up on the abandoned traffic roundabout and circular park that gave first Dupont Circle and now Oracle Circle their names.

“What now?” Oz asks.

Bree examines the crush in front of us. “Do you know where she’ll be?”

I, too, take in the throng of people in the tree-covered space. Stalls and tents and tables are arranged one after the other in a jumble of noise. Candles and strings of fairy lights illuminate the market, which I’ve never seen at night. Besides fortunes, people come here to get charms to stave off the evil eye, amulets to hide someone from the attention of the gods. The effects are probably make-believe, but I wouldn’t say no to one of each to loop around my neck, pin to my sleeve, hide in my pocket.

This isn’t normally the time that I come here, but given the brisk trade I assume she’ll be working. Dad being in custody means I don’t have to be sneaky. Not this time. He’s not around to yell at me.

“I guess we’ll have to look around,” I say. “Ask if anyone knows where she is?”

“OK,” Bree says. “What’s her name?”

Oz answers, “Hannah Locke.”

I nod.

Tam finally speaks. “We’ll split up and ask for Hannah, then.”

“You split up,” Bree says, and ignores Tam’s hurt look. “If you get a lead, then come find us. Otherwise, we’ll meet you guys at the fountain in the middle in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t know–” Oz says.

But Bree shakes her head. “Twenty minutes.”

It’s hard to argue with Bree when she’s in command mode. Spending chunks of her childhood in a TV studio has given her a well-developed talent for bossiness. I can’t help smiling at her as the boys head into the mix together. Tam isn’t the only one scowling.

“Thanks,” I say, “for not bolting or abandoning me. You may regret it, though.”

Bree dips her head in acknowledgment. “I figured you might not want them there… if we find her first,” she says. “Now, come on.”

We walk toward the market. “How’d you know about the fountain? Have you been here before?”

“Once. Remember Mark?”

I do. He was one of her mother’s boyfriends.

“He thought I’d love to get my fortune told for a birthday present. I was thirteen.”

The pavement beneath our feet is cracked, and I go wide to avoid the worst of the split. “Did you love it?”

“A creepy lady told me I was going to die alone,” Bree says. “Not the best birthday fortune ever.”

“That sucks. Con artist.”

“Mark was a tool. I think she did it to make him look bad. It worked. Mom dumped him. I have no issues with oracles.”

A bent woman stands at the edge of the market stalls. Her arm crooks, urging people inside. I suspect her stoop is for effect. The hat at her feet overflows with bills.

Now that we’re closer, the tall fountain at the center is visible. It spews water from a bowl lifted by three carved beauties. The city leaves it on so the oracles will have a ready source of clean water. Something about the Circle feels different tonight, and I don’t think it’s the time of day or my nerves. I never come here calm.

The Society’s position on street oracles is that the average person can’t wield relics with such skill and so they’re not legit. Dad has always disagreed and claimed that an innate gift and a found relic – even a rock with the tiniest smidgen of divine energy – is enough to give people visions of
something
real. He doesn’t want me to think of Mom as a phony. I assume most of the oracles are charlatans, a few genuine. I’ve never been sure about Mom, but
she
believes she’s one of the few. If she was an oracle of Delphi, I guess she’s right.

An old woman at one table shakes a teacup in her hand, reading the leaves for a tourist on break from the revels. The woman beams, happy with her fate. I don’t want to interrupt, so I wait until we reach two women who are clearly mother and daughter, with painted Tarot decks laid on their table. They beckon me forward.

“Hannah Locke?” I ask. “Do you know where she is?”

“If you’re not buying, get out of here,” the mother says, and the daughter cackles.

“Charming,” I say.

We move on. The next stall houses two Yoruba diviners at a low table. A small shrine to Legba sits at the back of the tent, a cane wound with green beads propped against it. The women consult with a client in a Hawaiian shirt, leaning over a round tray where a handful of the small brown nuts they use for divination form a pattern.

Bree notes my pause. “Here?”

“No,” I say.

One of the women tilts her head at me in what might be recognition. The tray with the nuts has a face impressed on the rich brown wood. A bloodless imitation of Legba’s.

The woman shrugs one shoulder and reaches out to gather the nuts. She rattles them in her palm and tosses them again. We keep going.

“Hey, did you and Tam say anything about Legba showing up yesterday?”

Bree thinks for a moment. “No. They never really asked. Did you?”

I shake my head no. “And I don’t think we should in front of them.”

“Wonder what he wants with you,” she says.

“He’s destined to be disappointed, whatever it is. But I’d rather keep any info we have that they don’t, just in case.”

“He could be the one, you know,” Bree says.

I don’t know who she means for a moment, until she says, “Your dad. The one who beats the odds. Who gets off clean.”

“He has to.” But I feel less sure than I sound. He’s not even fighting for his freedom, but
I’m
going to win it somehow? The unlikelihood isn’t going to stop me from trying.

A pale woman in a flowing white top and a crimson headdress catches my eye. She sits beneath a small tent, a lone card chair beside her. She holds a bowl in her lap, and water laps the sides. But so does fire. Or maybe that’s a trick, some reflection on the water. Whichever, her fingers stroke the fire in the bowl, pulling it through the air like taffy.

She smiles at me. Her hand hovers over the bowl, and flames cling to her skin as she waves to us.

“Let’s go,” Bree whispers.

But I’m not sure. “Wait.”

The woman keeps smiling. “She is waiting for you. Next street over, fourth door. The red one.”

Of course Mom knows I’m coming. She’s an oracle. Maybe this message means she isn’t going to turn me away. I dig in my backpack for a large-ish bill, place it on the ground beside the oracle. “For your trouble.”

“Be careful, girl,” the woman says, her hands dipping back into the water, the fire dying. The thin coating of liquid on her skin that allows the trick is visible with the flame extinguished. She picks up the money. “Secrets are like wolves. They have sharp teeth.”

Bree steers me away. “She’s probably just messing with you.”

I don’t respond.

The boys are waiting for us at the fountain, not talking, with their backs to the naked stone goddesses. Leery children with smudged cheeks race around them. I’d bet anything they’re thinking,
Should we try to jump these guys or just pick their pockets?

“We struck out. You guys have better luck?” Tam asks.

“Think so,” I say, hooking my thumb in the direction of the street that burning-hands lady told us. “Sounds like one of her regular spots.”

“Let’s get going then,” Tam says.

I start to shake my head, but Bree holds up her hand. “I’m going to save us an awkward conversation. We’re walking you there, but we’ll wait outside.”

Acceptable. I nod, but I should prepare them. “She may not let me come in.”

“I bet she does,” Oz says.

I shrug a shoulder. In mutual silent agreement, we head toward the street. Usually people try to sell charms or predictions nonstop, but there are no interruptions on our way. At the corner, we can see the buildings ahead. They’re rundown, mainly squats, because who wants to live in the middle of Oracle Circle otherwise? But this was pricey territory once upon a time.

Graffiti is everywhere, but not the same type as in other parts of town. An ankh sprayed on a two-story townhouse marks it as a place for Egyptian divination, three slashing runes for the Norse on the blue house next door, a knotted symbol for the Celts on red brick, blocky Aztec symbols on the front of a dirty cream apartment building. The graffiti here is advertising.

The red door is about halfway down the block. Mom moves around, which is why I started looking in the market. I rarely tail her to the same place twice. This house is three dilapidated stories of faded maroon, with no pantheon markings. Wide alleys on each side are colonized by thick, curling vines of ivy.

The red paint on the door bleeds onto the edges of the wood frame, sloshed on carelessly.

“She’s your mom,” Tam says, an attempt at kindness. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

I wonder what he sees on my face. “You guys have to stay outside. No matter what.”

Bree squeezes my upper arm. “Promise.”

Oz looks at Justin, then me, and says, “As long as it’s safe.”

We continue down the block. Across the street, the door to the house with the Norse runes on it swings open. A man with a bushy beard stands in the doorframe and watches us. Down the line of marked houses, the doors open, one by one. A woman with kohled eyes and looping golden chains around her neck stares at me from the Egyptian squat, a robed woman with wild curls in the Celtic one, a man with tangled hair in the next…

They track our progress. I focus on the red door until all I see is it, the color of a fresh nosebleed. Everything else fades. And then I’m right in front of it. I check over my shoulder. The others wait, uncertainly, a few feet away. Anzu lands on the street beside them. His claws scrape the pavement as he turns and roars at the gawking oracles. They don’t move.

“Don’t kill anyone, Anzu,” I say.

I turn back to the door, but before I can knock, it swings open. The hand that holds the door has short, ragged fingernails. I assume it’s her. There may only be seconds to make my case. “I’m so sorry to show up like this. But I need to see you, if it’s you, Mom, and if it’s someone else, look, I need to see my–”

“Come inside,” a woman’s scratchy voice says.

The door conceals her, but it’s Mom. I know it the way I know who I am when I wake up in the morning. Without question, without thinking.

Looking behind me, I find the other oracles watching from their thresholds. Bree and Tam frown at me. Or toward me, at least. Oz and Justin watch, neutral. Well, Oz is watching me. Justin has his eyes trained on Anzu.

Beyond the door is darkness, and my mother. I take a breath and go inside.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Bree Norville’s best friend disappears inside one of the shadiest places she’s ever seen. The line of creepy oracles lingers across the street, attention trained on the closed red door. That red is the shade of her dreams last night, mixed with ever-lengthening black shadows and stinging clouds of golden sand. She’ll paint the images soon. She wants to get them out of her head. Today’s visit to Enki House will be lined up right behind them.

Her forearms have tiny abrasions from the sand yesterday, from when she lifted them to protect herself. She absently touches a tender place beneath her right elbow. The monster the Sumerians have sent to guard Kyra tracks the movement, and Bree hopes she doesn’t look tasty.

“How can you be so calm about this?” Tam presses her. “She’s been keeping this from us for years.”

Bree is amazed by how little Tam seems to know her sometimes. They were friends, the three of them, since way before Kyra and Tam started dating. She knows a shocking amount about him. There’s a sketchbook hidden in her closet with nothing but drawings of Tam. Long lines to capture his lean body and messy black hair. She draws him in motion, usually advancing some argument at a Skeptics meeting. That’s the best place she has to study him without anyone noticing.

Tam has no way of knowing any of that. Neither does Kyra. He was drawn to Kyra. Case closed. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s not me, it’s you. Friends. Fine.

Except she thought he and Kyra were over, until those scaled nightmares in the tank showed her the two of them. It had only taken a heartbeat to realize
when
she was seeing – the night before. The light coating of sand on both their clothes gave it away. They were kissing. Again. Not that it matters.

But, still, it bugs Bree that Tam can’t see she’s reeling from everything that’s happened. Including the news that Kyra has a Mom. An
oracle
Mom. A
Delphic
oracle Mom. Bree says, “You’re just mad she didn’t tell you. I’m worried about
her
.
She’s barely keeping it together – can’t you tell?”

Tam hangs his head, and she regrets being so harsh. Part of his charm is how intense he is.

“I know this is hard,” she goes on. “This whole situation is crazy. You know Kyra – she’ll believe it’s all on her shoulders. She keeps secrets, but I don’t think she likes to.”

Tam runs a hand through his hair.

Bree has considered doing the same, many times. “You know, there’s this miraculous invention known as the comb and you can use it on your hair. It doesn’t even need batteries.”

Tam ignores her needling. She holds back a sigh.

“Did you hear Kyra ask him to leave? Just leave here,” Tam says.

Oz clears his throat. Tam frowns at him, and maybe that’s why Bree cares what he has to say. It doesn’t hurt to hear him out, that’s for sure. “What is it?” she asks.