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It might even force her mother to call for her blood squad, cleaning the stain from her family’s honor.
“Do you really want to test that?” Lila asked. “I can’t recall the oracles taking in a highborn criminal, not in a hundred years.”
“I don’t want to, but I will. As I said, the oracles need you if we are to survive.”
“Why do you need me this time?”
The oracle folded her palms behind her back and stepped off the dock, leading the group across a path of beaten weeds, a path Lila had created over the last month. A dozen grackles quieted as they approached, the blue-black birds flapping away from a tree limb nearby. One iridescent feather fell like a leaf in their wake.
The naked trees rustled overhead, filling the quiet.
“My people and I have spent the last six weeks interrogating the Italian mercs you and your friends subdued in the warehouse. You’d think sixteen mercs would provide a great deal of information. Let me assure you. They did not.”
Lila recalled more than sixteen mercs at the warehouse, but not all had made it out alive. She’d killed. She’d ended souls. Being tried for sneaking into a government database seemed so small in comparison. It didn’t matter that she’d acted in self-defense, that it had been the first battle in a resurgence of war, that two young oracles as well as Oskar and Maria Kruger had been saved.
She had still killed.
She still had dreams.
But at least the math had worked out okay.
“We’ve interrogated them with truth serum as often as Dr. McCrae allows,” the oracle explained. “They knew far too much about us, and they didn’t learn what they knew by bugging a few offices.”
“Where did it come from then?”
“Headquarters. I haven’t gotten any more than that.”
“So they don’t know, and you suspect a mole.”
The oracle jammed her hands into her coat pockets. “Yes, and on my compound.”
“An Italian mole inside an oracle’s compound?” Lila shook her head. “That doesn’t sit well with me.”
“Nor with me,” Connell growled.
“I need to find the mole now before they do more damage than they already have,” the oracle said. “My people have not been able to get any further in the investigation. You already know what the Italians have been up to, and you have the skillset to find them. More importantly, I trust you.”
“What about Tristan and Dixon?” Lila asked.
“They’ve tried, but it’s been a month with no results. My sisters and I are in danger, and the truth serum cannot tell me what the Italians don’t know. I need you to tell me who I’m trusting wrongly.”
“You haven’t had a vision of your betrayer?”
“I’m not magic. I can’t just close my eyes and force myself to dream of whatever I wish. I’m subject to the will of the gods, and right now their will is for us to focus on larger issues. Perhaps they believe we other have methods of sorting this out, and I’m inclined to agree. After all, they did lead me to your location.”
“They can’t just pop a picture of the mole inside your head?”
The oracle snorted. “That would be convenient, but I suspect they have other motives for getting you involved and keeping you close.”
“What motives?”
The oracle did not answer.
“Now look who’s quiet.”
She shrugged. “I live to serve the whim of the gods.”
“An inconvenient whim at an inconvenient time,” Lila said as the group stopped before the oracle’s car. “You do understand that I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself right now.”
