I tore open the next envelope with enough force that the paper inside tore too. Cursing myself, I unfolded it carefully so as not to damage it further. Where should my team hunt for the next month? There’d been a lot more augury requests along this line lately, ever since the Wardens had destroyed the traitorous Mercy and struck a powerful blow against the invaders. Malcolm said the victory in Montana had given everyone fresh hope. I tried not to think about Montana and what had come of it. It had been a victory, sure, but it had come at a high personal cost.
Footsteps sounded, echoing through the room, and soon Judy emerged from the stacks. She was dressed in a vividly colored smock and her favorite Mary Janes and looked fresh and alert in a way that made me feel like the Wolfman from a ’50s B movie. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Want me to open the rest of those?” She brandished the letter opener in the direction of the envelopes.
“Sure,” I said, handing them over. “And you’re not late. I’m early.”
“Still, I live just upstairs. It’s not like it’s a long commute.” Judy slit open the next envelope and set it aside. “Are you all right? You look a little down.”
“Just tired.” I had to be careful not to use the “tired” response too often with Judy or Viv. They’d eventually figure out that something was wrong, and then I’d have to actively lie. I hurried off into the oracle, clutching my torn paper.
To my surprise, the light had gone from a peaceful, calming bluish tint to blood red. “No augury?” I said, feeling relief followed by anxiety. “Are you sure? This could be an important one, directing a team’s efforts, I mean.”
Two aisles over, a blue star flashed into being. The ambient light didn’t change. “I don’t understand,” I said, making my way over to the augury. “There’s an augury, but you’re giving me the ‘no augury’ warning?”
The augury glowed brightly on a lower shelf. I bent to remove it and examined it closely, turning it front to back and over again. It looked like a fantasy novel, an ordinary mass market paperback titled Old Tin Sorrows. “Huh,” I said, and opened the front cover.
On the title page, in silver ink, was written Helena Campbell, No Charge.
My whole body went numb for a few seconds, during which I gripped the augury tightly to keep it from falling, and my heart lurched painfully once before falling back into its normal rhythm, though faster than before. “I see. No augury for this team, just one for me.”
I looked the book over again. A fantasy, yes, but a murder-mystery fantasy in which the killer was taking out the members of a household one by one and turning them into zombies or something. I couldn’t see any way in which it was relevant to me. I hoped it had some sideways meaning, and that the oracle wasn’t predicting painful deaths for my friends and family. “Thanks, I guess,” I said, and headed for the exit.
Helena. Something comes.
I stopped. “I know that! You told me already! Stop reminding me unless you’re going to be more specific. It’s driving me crazy!”
The oracle’s attention hovered on me, a feeling like having a giant thumb press me like a thumbtack into a wall. Finally, I thought, They strike. Two are gone. Four remain.
“That’s an improvement. Two of what? Four of what?” I was being testy, but I didn’t care.
We remain. Four remain. The guardians fall.
The oracle’s attention drifted away, just as if it didn’t care about what it had told me. Or maybe it had more faith in my ability to figure things out than I did. I closed my eyes and practiced breathing calmly, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I’d done a lot of calming breathing over the last four months.
When I emerged from the stacks, Judy was gone. I set the torn augury request on the counter and went to the office, where I found her intently staring at the computer screen and typing furiously. “Anything wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The oracle gave me an augury.” I wasn’t sure if I should mention the warning. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with its premonition that it would end, but if I was wrong about that, telling Judy would open up all kinds of questions I didn’t want to answer.
Judy looked up, her hands pausing. “Did you have a question?”
“Not really. That’s what’s strange.” I showed her the paperback.
She turned it over, read the cover copy, and handed it back. “Weird,” she said. “Murders, the undead…you’ll have to study it, because nothing’s coming to mind. Unless there’s another serial killer running around.”
“That one belonged to the Mercy. Those guys don’t exist anymore.” I shoved the book into my capacious purse. “And I don’t think the undead are a thing.”
Judy went back to typing. “Not that I’m aware. Girls’ night tomorrow? Tonight Mike and I are having dinner with my father.”
I whistled. “That’s brave.”
“They have to learn to get along eventually. Mike might be a permanent part of my life now. And if he can be friendly to my father, and vice versa, maybe that means good things for all of magery.”
“That’s uncharacteristically optimistic of you.” Mike was an Ambrosite, and Judy’s father William Rasmussen was a Nicollien—two factions the Wardens had been divided into for the last seventy-odd years. In the time I’d been custodian of Abernathy’s, I’d seen the factions’ animosity grow from mutual dislike to full-on hatred, and I doubted Judy’s hope was reasonable. Even if the Nicolliens stopped using familiars—the sticking point on which the factions’ disagreement was based—both sides were so used to seeing each other as the enemy I wasn’t sure anything would change.
“They can talk to each other for five minutes at a time without shouting,” Judy said, “and if they know what’s good for them, they’ll manage to be civil for the length of dinner.”
Judy’s fierce scowl amused me enough that I was able to smile naturally. It had been a long time since I’d done that. “I hope it works out.”
Back in the front of the store, I did two more mail-in auguries before I had to open the doors to the waiting Nicolliens. The oracle ignored me both times. I wished I didn’t have the tangle of emotions that assailed me every time I entered the oracle: fear of what it might say, guilt and sorrow over losing the closeness with the oracle I’d come to take for granted, anger that it wouldn’t just tell me what it meant.
I remembered how it had felt when the oracle had been under the influence of an illusion intended to destroy it, how devastating it had been to watch it effectively descend into madness. This was worse, because the oracle was in its right mind as far as I could tell, and that meant the problem might be me. If I was the weakness, and something happened to the oracle because I failed it…I didn’t complete that thought.
I opened the door and held it for the first Nicolliens. A breath of warm summer air entered with them, smelling of sunshine and exhaust and hot popcorn from the theater next door. “Welcome to Abernathy’s,” I said. I managed another very realistic smile. “Please form—”
“Helena,” someone called out, and Harry Keller pushed past the Nicolliens filing in, causing a young man to protest. Harry ignored him. He no longer stood as tall as he once had, thanks to an attack that had drained his magic and left him no longer a magus, but his voice was as firm as ever and his hand on his cane was steady. His wife, Harriet, followed in his wake, plump where he was thin. She looked like a stereotypical small-town librarian, down to the glasses perched on her nose, but she’d fought in the Long War years before I was born, and I knew better than to underestimate her.