When they were gone, I accepted the first augury slip and said, “I’ll try to make this quick.”
The bluish light of the oracle comforted me. I hadn’t realized I’d been subconsciously expecting the oracle to be gone, which was stupid of me. “Do you know what happened?” I said, feeling my reluctance to speak to the oracle evaporate in the face of this tragedy. “Do you have a connection to the others?”
My skin tightened, and I thought, Two are gone. Four remain.
I stopped just around the corner from the blue glow of the augury. “You mean…you were talking about the named Neutralities? But there’s only five of them. Four, now. How can two be gone?”
Four remain. We remain. Seal the cracks.
“I don’t understand.”
The pressure on me intensified. One path. The guardians remain.
I backed into one of the tall bookcases to support myself, because the oracle’s attention had started to bear down on me, crushing me the way it did just before I became the oracle. “I’m sorry, but I don’t get it,” I cried out. “Two Neutralities—two guardians?—are gone, and four remain to seal something? Block the cracks?”
Abruptly, the pressure vanished, and the oracle’s attention went elsewhere. I calmed my breathing and smoothed out the augury slip, which I had crushed. The augury still glowed placidly on a shelf around the corner. I collected it and returned to the store’s front to hand it over. Judy gave me a narrow-eyed look when I said she’d take payment, but since taking payment for auguries was one of her jobs, I had to conclude there was something about my appearance deserving of her scrutiny. I took the next augury slip and headed back into the oracle.
By 11:33, there were only three Nicolliens waiting for auguries. I was about to take the next augury slip when the bells over the door jangled. “Welcome to…oh,” I said, my voice trailing off as I registered who’d just entered the store. She wore an elegant salmon-colored linen pantsuit with a triple string of pearls, and a matching hat straight out of the ‘50s perched over her left ear. More pearls in fat clusters hung from both earlobes.
“Helena,” Madeleine Campbell said. Her neutral tone put me on edge. As usual.
“Madeleine,” I said. “What brings you to Abernathy’s? You know this is Nicollien time.”
My mother-in-law regarded the three Nicolliens like they were a trio of roaches she expected to see scuttle off into the darkness. “This is beyond the factions,” she said, her French accent heavier than usual. “I am here to see to Abernathy’s’ wards. Lucia Pontarelli insisted.”
“She sent you?” My surprise was maybe a little too pointed, because Madeleine’s smile went wooden. I felt unexpectedly guilty. My relationship with Madeleine was tense at best and actively hostile at worst, given that she’d done everything she could to break me and Malcolm up, but most of the time we managed a superficial politeness. “I mean…this is Nicollien time, and I sort of expected her to send one of her own people.”
“I am the best,” Madeleine said without a trace of modesty.
I didn’t know if that were true or not, but I figured Lucia wouldn’t have asked Madeleine to come out of some weird desire to force the two of us to overcome our differences.
“Um…okay,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Access to your basement, and privacy.” Madeleine’s attention turned from me to the store. Her casual appraisal of the shelves, as if they didn’t meet her standards, irritated me. I caught Judy glancing at me with an expression that said Madeleine had irritated her, too.
I concealed my emotions and gestured to her, nodding at my customers in silent apology. Madeleine followed me through the stacks to the short hallway at the end of which was the staircase leading to the basement. I pulled the string to turn on the bulb lighting the stairs. “Is this good enough?”
“I will return shortly,” Madeleine said. She descended the stairs without touching the rail, like she thought it might soil her pantsuit. I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t dressed down for what I was sure was dirty work, but I’d never seen her less than perfectly turned out, so maybe it was just who she was. I didn’t really care. Sometimes, when I was in a generous mood, I felt sorry for her—how she’d let her grief over her husband’s untimely death warp her into a bitter, controlling woman. But that didn’t happen often.
The final three auguries went off smoothly. When we were alone in the store again, Judy said, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Lucia asked Madeleine to come. She was a powerful stone magus before she retired—still is, I guess. I heard she raised a sunken ship, a big one, all by herself off the bottom of the Columbia.”
“If she can strengthen the store’s wards, I can put up with her rudeness. At least she’s stopped hinting that Malcolm and I should have kids already.”
Judy whistled. “That’s a major attitude shift.”
“Yeah, well, I might have hinted back that nagging me on the subject might delay the blessed event indefinitely. I don’t know. She might have moved on to nagging Ewan and Cathy about it.” Malcolm’s brother and his wife were on better terms with Madeleine than I was, mainly because Ewan had married the woman his mother had picked out for him. That they were genuinely in love was a nice bonus.
My phone rang. It was Malcolm. “I’m sorry I couldn’t return your call sooner, love,” he said. “Are you all right? We’ve been deluged with calls all morning, from people wanting their wards checked or strengthened.”
“I’m fine. Just shaken. Have you heard any more about what happened? How it happened?”
“Nothing more than what everyone now knows—that the invaders were able to overcome the wards on the Fountain of Youth. We still don’t know how they managed that, but I suspect, purely for your ears, that the intelligent invaders were behind it.”
“That makes sense.” It was also terrifying. Most of the invaders attacking our world from their own reality were mindless, but a few had human intelligence—maybe better than human intelligence—and correspondingly greater power. “Except it doesn’t explain why now.”
“Unless it does. We don’t know how many of them made it through the node in Montana before it was shut down. The invaders might now have the strongest presence they’ve ever had in our world. And that might mean they have the power—” He stopped speaking, then went on, “All of this is speculation. Lucia will learn more, and she will pass on what information she thinks we need. But I suggest you talk to the other custodians. If the Fountain was targeted because it was a named Neutrality, you may all be in danger.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Don’t be afraid. We will protect Abernathy’s, and you, with our lives.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.” I still hadn’t forgotten how Malcolm had looked when he was nearly killed by the Mercy. Sometimes it featured in my nightmares, when I wasn’t dreaming about…the other thing. “I’ll see if the others are available. Samudra might be asleep, though I don’t know how anyone could sleep after this. And I’d like you—Campbell Security, I mean—to do something about the alarm on the front door, so it’s obvious it’s been turned on.”