The Oracle jumped into the frame, leaning against the mound of pillows, chomping on a burrito in a silver foil wrapper. His head was shaved with a faint black stubble, but he was still too young to need to shave his chin, being about fifteen or sixteen. He had a tattoo on his neck and wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans.
“Jo, Norm! What up, homes?” he said.
“Can you turn the music down? We can barely hear you,” said Joanna.
“Oh, sure.” He took another bite of the burrito, then searched for something on the bed, found a remote, and clicked it. The music went off.
“Thanks,” said Norm with a frown.
Joanna pushed in beside Norm and spoke at the laptop. She noted how tired she looked on the screen. “I don’t know if you’ve heard but Freya is stuck in the seventeenth century, and we need to get her back. We believe she’s in Salem Village at a very dangerous time. Last time, well, you know what happened—”
“I know, I know,” said the Oracle. “She’s not the only one who’s trapped in the passages. It’s all messed up. There are damn sinkholes everywhere. Magic’s all out of whack, there’s not enough here, but it looks like there’s a huge concentration of it in other parts of the time line. Salem in the seventeenth century is lit up like Christmas. A ton of magical energy there for some reason. But for now”—he took another large bite of his burrito so he had to chew awhile before he could speak again, and Joanna and Norman were forced to wait—”time’s stuck. Something screwy is going on with the wolves and the Fallen and the underworld. It’s thrown everything into chaos. I would be there, but I can’t even teleport over to you guys, so that’s why we’re having to chat like this.”
“Okay,” said Joanna, “but what does that mean for us? We can’t just sit back and wait.”
Norm placed his arm around Joanna’s shoulders. He needed to keep her calm. The Oracle was in one of his cheery moods, but he could get cranky and gloomy like any teen and he was not above pulling a mean prank to amuse himself.
“She just means we’re here if you need us,” Norm said.
The Oracle grinned. “Oh, and I forgot—with time broken, if something happens to that saucy, hot daughter of yours while she’s back there, it’ll stick for all eternity. Time’s all screwed up so that even our immortality is in question. If someone dies while this shit is going on—they’re donzo. Never coming back to mid-world.” Here he leaned off the bed and disappeared from the frame, then popped back in, sipping from an oversize soda cup. “Doomed to the underworld for eternity and all that.”
Joanna gasped. The Oracle was saying that if Freya was hanged, as she had once been hanged before, during the first time they had endured the Salem trials, this time she would never return. Never. It all clicked into place.
This was all an elaborate plan to kill Freya.
The Oracle must have seen the desperate expressions on their faces, because he leaned in and said, “But you’re in luck because there is something you could do to get around it…”
Joanna and Norm huddled in closer to the screen.
chapter eighteen
Gone Baby Gone
It had been a relatively peaceful day at the fire station—boisterous, carefree high jinks among the firefighters as they performed their routine housekeeping duties, washing windows, cleaning walls, sweeping floors. Freddie enjoyed the spirit of camaraderie but he also liked the structure and discipline it brought to his life. It was nice to be part of a smoothly working team, a cog in a well-oiled machine. They checked and inventoried personal protective gear, tools, and equipment for readiness: bunker jackets and trousers, gloves, boots, breathing apparatuses, rescue equipment, hoses, hand tools, and portable fire extinguishers. Freddie wrote out a report listing damaged and nonfunctioning gear. Next came checking the emergency medical-care equipment and replenishing the first-aid supplies in the trauma boxes. Then, after a training a session, it was time to break for lunch, and Freddie found his buddies Big Dave, Jennie, and Hunter.
He was in an excellent mood. Things with Gert had been ultrasmooth since his accident. He and his friends were still fixated on what happened at the last big fire and that was the usual lunch-hour conversation. The rescued college girl, Sadie, was alive and well.
“What happened, man? You’re usually our main guy,” Big Dave asked.
“Happens to everyone at some point. Even fire whisperers,” Jennie said sagely.
Freddie took a swig of his Pepsi and gave them a crooked smile, shrugging his shoulders.
Jennie winked at him, and for a second it did cross his mind that Jennie liked him more than just as a fellow firefighter. Now that he thought about it, she was kind of cute with those freckles and oversize blue eyes. What was he thinking? He loved Gert. Things were awesome at home.
“You healed friggin’ fast,” noted Hunter, reaching over the lunch table to push at Freddie’s head so he could see the burn mark on his neck. The towheaded Irish kid whistled, impressed. “It’s looking good, my man!”
Freddie’s burns had healed faster than an ordinary mortal’s would have, but usually such healing was near instantaneous for him. His neck still appeared red in spots.
After lunch, the lieutenant eventually sent them on a call—a rather innocuous one, it turned out. An old man had tripped down some stairs in his apartment building and pulled the fire alarm. He was fine, a tough, grumpy old guy who kept refusing their emergency medical care, pushing them away, muttering unkind epithets.
Work ended at five thirty, and Freddie walked to the gym to do laps in the indoor Olympic-size pool. It had occurred to him that swimming would revive his lungs, which had felt singed from that fire and had also been slow to heal. He had taken to going to the pool in the early evenings and gotten hooked. Fire and water were his favorite elements—his elements as the god Fryr—but fire had betrayed him. If his powers were diminishing he needed to compensate somehow. He had been thinking that if they were slowly becoming mortals, then so be it. He and Gert would live happily ever after and die of old age together. It wasn’t so bad. They had each other. Once Freya returned, and she would—he didn’t doubt it—then life would be back to normal. He’d called Ingrid the other day and found his older sister sounding awfully blue. With Freya gone, they were all on edge.