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The youngest Oracle nodded. “He is.”
“One last thing. Why did you keep stealing the maps?”
He sighed. “The cauldron must sit on the crossing of three roads. It won’t shrink for the Fomorians, so they had to physically drag it somewhere. There are only so many places where three roads cross. The cauldron of plenty doesn’t shine with magic the way the cauldron of rebirth does. Hard to sense where it is. I was misting to each crossing of the roads near the pit, trying to find the cauldron.”
That made sense. “Okay. The Pack has the lid,” I told him.
He grinned. “This shouldn’t be too hard.”
Thin tongues of mist swirled around his feet and dissipated into the air. Leaving him standing in the same spot.
“You’re still here.”
“I know that!” He rocked forward. Mist puffed and vanished. Again. Again. “Something is wrong.
You!” Bran pointed at the youngest Oracle. “Find the Shepherd!”
A hint of a smile brightened the youngest Oracle’s face, highlighting her fragility. At first I thought she was laughing at the absurdity of Bran’s order, but her eyes glazed over, gazing somewhere far, past us, into the horizon only she could see, and I realized that using her gift filled her with joy. She leaned forward, focused, smiling wider and wider, until she laughed. The music of her voice filled the dome, exuberant and sweet. “Found him.”
The dome quaked. Steam rose and the far wall faded into early dawn. Under the gray sky, mist drifted, caught on familiar steel spikes that thrust from the ground littered with metal refuse. A Stymphalean bird perched on a twisted spire of railroad rails, crushed and knotted together, as if some giant had tried to tie them in an angler’s knot. The Honeycomb Gap.
The mist parted and I saw Bolgor the Shepherd perched on a mound of rusty barrels. A faint breeze stirred the cloth of his monk’s habit. A huge hulking silhouette towered behind him, still shrouded in mist, holding a cross. Ugad, fully regenerated. How nice, I could kill him again.
A tall form strode through the mist. The metal refuse crunched and groaned, protesting the weight, and a monster stepped into the clearing. Tall, broad shouldered, wrapped in steel-hard muscle and clothed in gray fur, striped with slashes of darker gray.
Curran.
What the hell was he doing?
“You first,” he said. His jaws were big enough to enclose my skull, his fangs were longer than my fingers, but his diction was perfect.
Behind the Shepherd, Ugad shifted the cross forward, setting it down with a heavy thud. I saw a small, thin body stretched on the pole, legs tied, arms spread wide on a cross-piece. Julie. Oh God.
I grabbed Bran by his shirt and dragged him to me. “Take me there now!”