“There is a very old Power here,” Carling said. “Did it come with you to the States?”
Grace sent her a shadowed glance. “Yes,” said the human. She didn’t elaborate further.
She led them across a meadow to an old doorway that had been built into the side of a rocky incline. The sense of an ancient Power grew stronger as she took a small rusted coffee can from the top of the wooden lintel and withdrew a key that she fitted into the weathered wooden door to open it. Rune studied the structure. It looked like the opening to a mine shaft. It must have been constructed when the Andreas family originally settled on the property over a hundred and fifty years ago.
Grace said over her shoulder, “Your weapons are not welcome. You need to leave them here at the doorway.”
“Okay,” Rune said slowly.
Carling had been content to remain silent and study the land during the walk. She could tell by the aggressive spike in Rune’s emotions that he didn’t like the idea of disarming, but he set their two bags by the door then he stripped off his short sword and shoulder holsters with the guns and set them with care on the bags.
“Are we going into a cave?” Carling asked curiously.
“Yes,” Grace said. “There are cave systems all over the area, from Bluespring Caverns, Marengo Cave, and Squire Boone Caverns in southern Indiana to the Mammoth Cave system in central Kentucky. This is a very small system by comparison.”
The human stepped inside the doorway and felt along the inside wall. She flipped a switch and a naked light bulb went on over her head. It revealed an area large enough for them all to step into comfortably with two sturdy Rubbermaid storage cabinets, and a roughly hewn tunnel that sloped downward.
Grace opened up one of the cabinets. She drew out two flashlights. She handed one to Carling and kept the other one. “I don’t know if you’ll need this or not,” she said. “Your eyesight is a lot more photosensitive than a human’s. It gets pretty black down there though.”
“We had better take it, just in case,” said Carling.
Grace reached into the cabinet for something else that was wrapped in a protective cloth. “Pull the door shut behind you,” she said to Rune. Then she turned on her flashlight and led the way down the tunnel.
“So much for talking over a cup of coffee,” Rune muttered. He pulled the door shut, and they turned to follow the Oracle.
“Talking over a cup of coffee is not what you asked for,” Grace said over her shoulder. The light from her flashlight bounced off the roughly hewn rock walls and the packed earth floor of the tunnel. The temperature dropped sharply as they went, and the cold air felt faintly damp and smelled of the river. “You wanted to consult with the Oracle. Well, this is how you do it. The Oracle has always spoken from the deep places of the earth. What we channel demands it.”
Carling got the sense of space opening in front of Grace before she saw the tunnel walls widen. She and Rune followed Grace to step into a large cavern. Rune turned in a circle with the flashlight and then he flashed the light upward. The light did not touch the cavern walls, and it only glanced off the nearest part of the ceiling.
“It’s remarkably dry for being so close to the river,” he said. His voice echoed strangely.
“It has the same basic structure as the Mammoth Cave system. There’s a strong solid sandstone caprock layer over limestone. On the far end of the cavern there’s a natural tunnel that leads a bit farther down. The sandstone layer is damaged down there, so there’s some stalactite and stalagmite formation and the river leaks in before the cave system ends. There’s been some falling rock too, so that area’s not safe. That’s why we lock the door, to keep out exploring kids.”
Grace set her flashlight down and unfolded the cloth from the item she had brought with her. She let the cloth drop to the ground and as she turned to them, she held the item up for them to see.
It was a Greek mask. Ancient gold gleamed in the beam of the flashlight. The face was androgynous, beautiful and blank, with holes for the eyes and the mouth.
Carling murmured, “Oh my. That’s stunning.”
“The Oracle has worn this mask for thousands of years,” Grace said. “As you can imagine, there have been many reasons for that and they have fluctuated over time. Sometimes it has been worn with a great deal of ceremony. My grandmother taught my sister and I that we now wear it for two reasons. The first is tradition and honoring our past. The second reason is to remind the petitioner, when you consult with the Oracle you will no longer be talking to me, Grace Andreas.”
“Do you remember what is said?” Carling asked.
“I’ve heard that sometimes we can, but sometimes we just go blank.” Grace’s head was bent. She said quietly, “But I’m no expert. I’ve only been called to do this once since Petra died.” She lifted her head. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Rune said.
Grace raised the mask to place it over her face.
Something vast stirred the cavern air. The ancient Power that haunted this land began to coalesce. A dry sound scraped at the edge of their hearing, like the sound of scales sliding along the cavern walls. The sound surrounded them as the Power coiled around.
Already unsettled, Rune’s hackles raised. He found himself growling low in his chest. Carling moved near until her shoulder brushed his arm. In the slanted beam of the flashlight, her face was composed but her eyes were wide and wary. Rune turned so that he stood back-to-back with Carling, facing outward.
A voice spoke from behind the golden mask, but it was not Grace’s voice. It was something else, something older and much wilder than a human’s voice.
“There you are, gryphon,” said the old wild Power. “I have looked forward to this conversation we have had.”
Looked forward, to a conversation in the past. Rune shook his head sharply. Yeah, there was that bad dose of LSD again, tripping on his ass like a flashback.
“How you doing?” he said to Python. “You old crazy, dead whack-job, you. Long time no see.”
The Power chuckled, a sound that brushed against their skin. “Have you seen Schrödinger’s Cat yet, gryphon?”
Rune knew of Schrödinger’s Cat. It was a famous physics hypothesis that described the paradox of quantum mechanics. Place a cat in a box with some poison along with some twisty scientific mumbo jumbo. Rune had lost patience with the mental exercise long before he bothered to learn all the physics involved. What he remembered was, the cat was supposed to be both alive and dead in the box, until it was observed to be
either
alive or dead.
Part of what the hypothesis was supposed to illustrate was, in quantum physics, the observer shapes the reality of what he observes. What did she mean by asking him that question?
Behind him, Carling hissed and bumped into his back. She said in his head,
How could she possibly know to refer to Schrödinger’s Cat? That hypothesis wasn’t invented until the 1930s, and she died—if she really did die—thousands of years ago.
He said,
I’ve lived a whole long life filled with weirdness
.
But this is weird even for me.
He said aloud, “I’m not nearly drunk enough for this kind of conversation, Python.”
Something rushed up to his face. He jerked back, staring at the pale indistinct lines of a face. The transparent face bore a resemblance to a human female, but only in the same kind of way a chimpanzee or ape might. Its features were too sharp and elongated, with more of a snout than a nose, and it flowed back to a hooded cobra-like flare of a neck before falling into the body of a serpent as thick as a man’s waist.
He steeled himself and passed his hand through the apparition. “You’re a ghost. You’re not really here.”
The woman’s smile revealed a wicked curve of fangs. “I am not here,” she said, “like a dimly seen island overlaid on the ocean. I am not here, so perhaps I am there, lost in some Other land.”
“Are you dead or aren’t you?” he demanded. Cryptic ramblings—gods help him, his head might spontaneously combust.
“Like Schrödinger’s Cat, I am both dead and alive,” said Python, coiling and recoiling her ghostly body through the cavern. “I was alive in the past. I died in the past. Who knows what I will be next?”
Carling gripped Rune’s arm before he could explode. She had turned to face the apparition too. She asked, “Are you traveling through time?”
The ghostly apparition turned to her, and Python’s smile widened. “I have traveled. I am traveling. I will travel.”
“Is that why, even though you have died, you’re not altogether gone?” Carling asked.
“Either that,” said Python, “or I’m just a crazy whack-job ghost.” That feral transparent face drew closer to Carling and softened. “You’re one of mine. My children are so beautiful. I want you to live forever. That is why I gave you my kiss.”
“Your gift has lasted a very long time, and I am grateful,” Carling said. “But now I am dying, unless we can figure out how to stop it. We came to ask for your help.”
“I can’t give you the kiss again,” said Python. “That time is past.” Her coiling and recoiling increased in speed as though she were agitated. “I took away the day but gave you an unending, gorgeous night. What you make of that is not up to me. A mother cannot live life for her children.”
“That’s not what she’s asking you to do,” Rune said. Desperation edged his voice. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he sure had not expected this. To actually be able to talk with Python was more than he could have hoped for, but it might end up being one useless, psychedelic nightmare. “She doesn’t want you to live her life for her. We’re asking you how to keep her from dying.”
“Wait,” said Python. “I’m confused. Hasn’t she died yet?” Her face came around to Rune. “Why have you not gone back to save her?”
Python’s words seared him. She’s crazy, he thought as he stared at her. She’s a crazy ghost. That’s all. He fought to find his voice and said hoarsely, “She hasn’t died, Python, she’s standing right here in front of you. But she is my mate, and she will die if we don’t find a way to stop it. So will you please, just fucking please make some fucking sense for once in your
goddamn fucking life
!”
The feral ghost looked at him with surprise. “Well, you don’t have to yell at me,” she said in a plaintive voice. “You’re not as far along as I thought you would be by now.”
“Where am I supposed to be?” he asked dully.
“Right here, gryphon,” said Python. “Remember what we are. We are the between creatures, born on the threshold of changing time and space. Time is a passageway, like all the other crossover passages, and we have an affinity for those places. We hold our own, steady against the interminable flow. That’s what I tried to give all of my children. That’s who you are. The Power of it is in your blood.”
“It’s all about the blood,” Carling whispered. “The key is in the blood.”
“The key has always been in the blood,” said Python. “You are perfect for each other. Nature could not have created a more flawless mating. You have everything you need to survive. If you survive.”
Python faded as they watched. The Power that had filled the cavern ebbed away.
Rune threw the flashlight to the ground and dug the heels of his hands into his burning eyes. He felt demented.
“We have everything we need to survive—if we survive?” He roared, “
What the hell did that mean, you crazy whack-job bitch!
”
Carling came around to face him. She grabbed his wrists to drag his hands away from his face. Her eyes were shining. “Rune, I think she told us everything we need to know.”
He stared at her, breathing hard. After a moment he was able to speak more or less sanely again. “Well, do you mind explaining it to me?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything earlier,” Carling said. “Seremela and I had talked about looking for ways to get me into some kind of remission, at the very least try to reach a holding pattern to buy us some time to do more research. She said it was possible that becoming a succubus had been a defense response from my immune system when I could no longer keep down the blood I drank.”
“A defense response,” he said, frowning. “When you frame it that way, the transition would not have been a good thing.” Victims of prolonged starvation ate things out of desperation, often things that had no real nutritive value. Their bodies started to consume themselves until eventually their organs began to shut down.
Carling nodded. “Seremela suggested I try to find some kind of physical nourishment that I could tolerate, in the hope that it might slow down some of the symptoms. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to drink blood again, but I’m willing to do just about anything, so I said I’d think about it. Python just said you hold your own against the flow of time, Rune, and that it’s in your blood. The key is in the blood. Those are the exact words Seremela and I said to each other.”
Gradually he calmed, stroking her hair as he listened to her. “Could you have been starving all this time?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Eventually I stopped feeling hungry, then I began to sense emotions from living creatures and started to feel better whenever I did. From everything I had heard, that sounded like a natural progression of the disease.”
“Well that might be so, but it still sounds a lot like starvation to me,” he said. “Much as I want this, I’m afraid to believe in it. It sounds too good to be true.”
“But it could fit,” she said. “Your blood could have what it takes to put me in remission. This whole strange journey you and I have been on has been as a result of your Wyr attributes coming into contact with my Vampyrism.”
He closed his eyes. “And that has never happened before,” he whispered. A sliver of hope worked its way into his chest, lightening the dull panic that had taken him over when Python had disappeared. He bent his head to kiss her, savoring the soft curve of her lips as she kissed him back. “We need to start trying this.”
“Yes.”
“We’re not going to give up if you hork a couple of times,” he said sternly. He yanked her close to hug her fiercely. “You haven’t eaten for a helluva long damn while. It may take some doing to get your system to accept anything. We’ll keep at it.”