Thea Harrison - Oracle's Moon

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.

Burning hands reached for Grace and pulled her out of the sea.

Grace plunged awake. She was lying on her back. Khalil must have turned on the bedside lamp. It threw a soft gold light over everything. He leaned over her. Black hair fell around his face. He was frowning sharply and shaking her by the shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she asked blurrily, as she stared at him.

She had not really seen him nude before when they made love. Or perhaps she had, since she had seen his real form. This body he chose to wear was perfectly fashioned, from the heavy ripple of muscle across his wide chest and shoulders, to his tapered stomach, lean hips and long legs. Her gaze fell to his groin where his genitals were as perfect as the rest of him, his penis lying in a graceful curve over the twin mounds of his testicles.

She stroked a hand down his smooth, hot chest as she realized that, except for the shining, black fall of his hair and the slant of his eyebrows, he had no body hair. He was completely, inhumanly beautiful, his ivory skin gilded with the soft gold light from the bedside table.

In sharp contrast, her body was imperfect in almost every way. The pink of her nipples were still a darkened rose from his suckling. A bruise was forming on her hip bone where she had banged it on the corner of the kitchen table earlier that day. She had a long, thin scab on one of her forearms from Freaky Bitch. And yes, of course there were the scars on her knees, yada yada, and she smiled to realize how little they had come to matter to her.

The peach tint of her human skin looked shockingly rich against Khalil’s marblelike hue. The soft, fine tangle of her pubic hair was a darker red-gold than the hair on her head. In her own way, she realized with a trace of embarrassment, she was as beautiful as he was. They were especially beautiful together.

You are my lover, she thought, as she blinked at him. She swallowed hard. My lover. At least for this one night.

What a calamitous, incredibly spectacular first date. And why in the world would she have expected anything else from him?

Her heart squeezed, or maybe it expanded. Whatever it did, it wasn’t behaving normally at all. She felt light-headed and giddy, truly happy for the first time in she couldn’t remember when, and absolutely, utterly terrified.

His long fingers came underneath her chin. He tilted her head up. “Pay attention, I’m talking to you,” he said irritably. In contrast to his tone, the expression in his gaze was concerned.

“So that’s the noise I keep hearing,” she said. She glanced at the bedside clock, which read 1:42 A.M. She hadn’t even slept an hour and a half. She yawned hugely until her eyes watered, and her eyes drifted closed as she sank back against the pillows. While it was wonderful to stretch out on her bed, and frighteningly awesome to be in bed with him, the upstairs of the house was stifling, and he was far too hot.

Hey, she had a check in her purse. She could afford a higher electric bill. She muttered cagily, “I’ll have sex with you again if you close all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning.”

She was trying to bargain away something she would beg for anyway. For someone who always chose the dumb route, that was actually pretty smart thinking. She turned her face into his bicep and sniggered, even as her eyes watered more.