They reached out again, tapping my forehead with one finger.
The touch was light, barely there, but it burned. A new marking appeared on my skin, I couldn't see it, but I felt it searing into my forehead between my eyebrows. Different from the others. Sharper. More purposeful.
"What did you do?" I touched my forehead, feeling the raised lines of a symbol I couldn't identify.
"Gave you a choice the Harbingers don't want you to have." Their form was fading faster now, becoming translucent. "When the time comes, you'll understand."
"Wait!" I lunged forward, but my hands passed through their dissolving shape. "I don't understand any of this! What choice? What ends?"
Their laughter echoed as they vanished completely, the chains that had bound them clattering to the floor empty.
"Everything. Or nothing. That's always been the choice, hasn't it?"
Then I was falling, the vault dissolving around me, bones scattering into infinite darkness.
I woke with a gasp,my body jackknifing upright on the apartment floor. Hands caught me before I could topple over. Rook's large palms steadying my shoulders, Zane's fingers at my back, Milo's hand finding mine, Fenric kneeling beside me with that expression of controlled terror that meant he'd been seconds from completely losing it.
"You stopped breathing," Rook's voice was raw. "For three minutes. Your heart stopped."
"I'm okay," I rasped, though my throat felt like I'd swallowed glass. "I'm?—"
Then I saw their faces. Really saw them.
All four of them were staring at my forehead with identical expressions of horror.
"What?" I touched the new marking, feeling the raised lines. "What is it? What did they put on me?"
Fenric's hands were shaking as he pulled up his tablet, activating some kind of scanning app. The screen reflected my forehead, and I finally saw what had them so terrified.
A perfect eye, rendered in intricate blue lines. But not a normal eye. This one was surrounded by symbols that seemed to writhe when I looked at them directly, patterns that hurt to perceive.
And in the center, where the pupil should be, was a spiral. The same spiral the Harbingers had marked me with, but inverted. Reversed. Unmaking itself.
Milo made a small, choked sound. "That's the Oracle's Mark," his voice barely audible. "The symbol they used when they ended things. When they chose to terminate a prophecy, a life, a timeline."
I stared at my reflection in Fenric's tablet, watching the new marking pulse in time with my heartbeat.
"The Oracle said they gave me a choice the Harbingers don't want me to have." My hand trembled as I lowered it from my forehead. "What choice?"
No one answered. They didn't need to.
I could see it in their eyes, in the way Rook's jaw clenched, in the slight tremor in Zane's usually steady hands, in the tears gathering in Milo's eyes, in the way Fenric's perfect composure cracked around the edges.
The Oracle of Endings had given me the power to end things. Including, potentially, the prophecy itself.
Including myself.
"We need answers," Fenric managed after a moment, his voice tight with forced calm. "Immediately. I'm contacting Dr. Thornwick."
But even as he spoke, I felt the new marking on my forehead pulse once. The Oracle's final gift, burning beneath my skin like a brand.
Like a promise.
Or a warning.
Chapter
Forty-Nine
