“I’ve got you,” he whispered into her hair. He rocked her. “I’ve got you.”
She put her head on his shoulder. She got a sense of movement as he took her up the stairs. She was fairly certain he didn’t walk. Then they reached her bedroom. Her long unused bed was simply made with sheets and a bedspread. He eased her down on the bed. She turned over to curl on her strong side.
He settled into place behind her and wrapped an arm around her, spooning with her.
He didn’t have to. His presence was absolutely in her bedroom, with or without his physical body. He must have wanted to. He must have known she needed it. She felt his lips against her shoulder. Then he put his face in her hair.
He rubbed her thigh gently. Eventually her shivering stopped.
They didn’t speak. She, for one, had nothing to say.
She had learned another thing she couldn’t unlearn now that she knew it. Her slippery slope hadn’t thrown her down a hill. It had, instead, shoved her into an entirely different dimension. She had always scoffed at people who fell in love when they had sex. She’d always been convinced that they confused an intensity of experience with the real emotion.
But Khalil had shattered her understanding of what it meant to make love. She had reformed into someone else, a humble stranger to herself.
That stranger knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had been falling in love with him for a while. And she could not imagine ever wanting to make love with anyone else again. He had taken all of her desire with such complete effortlessness she had not even been aware at the time that she was giving everything she had to him.
She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
Even in her sleep, she felt the last miniscule shift in the lunar cycle that brought the Oracle’s moon.
Grace slid into a dream. She walked the property at night. It was so dark she couldn’t see where she was going. She had lost her flashlight. The stars fell and surrounded her with light. Then she was swimming in a dark sea, and the stars that surrounded her were the bright sparks of countless souls.
The water carried her forward, faster and more powerfully than she had expected. She was caught in a riptide. When she looked to either side, Petra and her grandmother were swimming alongside her.
You’re going the wrong way, Petra told her. Her sister sounded the same as she ever did, full of exasperated affection. You’ve got to turn back.
I don’t know how, she said. I don’t know where I’m going. I only know where I’ve been.
You’re almost out of tuna, her grandmother said.
No, I’m not, Grace said. I just bought two cans.
Don’t stay in the house when you bake the casserole. It’ll get too hot. Her grandmother smiled at her.
Gram, why don’t you come to see me? Grace asked. You would enjoy hanging out in the kitchen with the other women, and I’d really like to talk to you.
But her grandmother was gone. Then Petra was gone as well, and the water pushed Grace faster and faster, until she was tumbling down a black tunnel. It was like being born, except she was going the wrong way, into the cavern, not out of it. Then the water spewed her onto the cavern floor at someone’s feet.
A tall woman knelt in front of her. She held the gold Oracle’s mask in front of her face.
As soon as she looked at it, Grace knew that mask wasn’t a fake. It was the real deal, down to the tiny scratches from countless ages on the shining, precious surface. She studied the eyeholes, trying to figure out the identity of the person behind the mask. But there were no eyes. The holes were black but not empty. Instead, they were filled with something unbelievably vast and Powerful.
She said, That’s weird.
The vast woman considered her. What will a mere mortal do with an immortal Power?
I don’t know, Grace said. None of this is going the way I thought it would. Will you help me?
The gold mask’s perfect, inhuman lips curved into a smile. I will, but in order to reach me, you have to go the wrong way. You can only find me if you go very deep.
You’re Nadir, Grace said. Of course you are. Where else would the goddess of the depths be? How far down do I have to go to reach you?
Try drowning, said the goddess. The dark sea filled Grace’s nose and mouth, and she thrashed. Don’t worry about that, Nadir told her. You left your body once tonight. You can do it again if you want to badly enough.
“Grace,” said Khalil. And she felt it again, the conviction that when he called her in his unearthly, pure voice, she would go anywhere with him, anywhere at all.
Nobody should have been able to follow her, but Khalil could because he had no body. Black smoke swirled through the cavern, out of which crystalline eyes like stars focused only on her. He ignored Nadir completely.
The goddess looked amused. You’re right, Nadir said. He isn’t friendly.