Rogue Oracle by Alayna Williams

tangled in his jacket kept Harry from going back to beat him into the ground.
    Tara flagged down a cab, shoved him inside. Harry sat, dripping on the ancient leather interior, his bloody hands before him. But he could only see the blood when streetlights flashed past overhead. When he looked at his hands, they shook. But only when he looked at them.
    Tara overpaid the cabbie in cash and shoveled Harry out of the cab a couple of blocks from his apartment. Dimly, he knew that if the punk filed an assault report or showed up in the ER, they didn’t want to be easily found.
    Rain rinsed the blood from his hands as they walked in the darkness, without comment. Tara took his hand in hers, fiercely tight, and wouldn’t let it go, even though it was sticky.
    He tried three times to get the key in the lock before she took it from him and did it herself. He let her pull him into the apartment, into the bathroom with that harsh bluish light.
    She wiped the specks of blood off his face with a washcloth without saying a word. He’d expected her to be disgusted with him, to pack her suitcase in the face of that brutality and leave him alone. But she didn’t. She tenderly washed his hands and dressed a cut on his knuckle. He thought she’d leave when she undressed him and pushed him into the shower. He strained to hear the sound of the door closing over the hiss of the water.
    But she was still there when he got out. She took his face in her hands and said: “What the hell happened to you?”
    He shook his head wordlessly. He couldn’t explain what these last months at the Little Shop of Horrors had done, what the years of chasing killers and living in unreality had created. He felt it chewing at him, gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. Until something broke.
    He just shook his head. “I don’t know.”
    But she knew. She’d been there before. She’d let Special Projects literally chew her up and spit her out. And she didn’t ask any more questions.
    She put him to bed, spooned up behind him. He sighed, feeling her hands wrapped around his chest.
    And slept.
    T ARA DREAMED OF THAT TWILIGHT WORLD AGAIN, THE WORLD of the Tarot.
    Her boots sank deep into the sand as she walked, and the lion walked before her, the sinewy muscles of his back undulating like the ripples in the desert surface. Their tracks ran together in the sand, footprints and paw prints sinking together. Tara was no longer afraid of the lion. She knew he was leading her. Once or twice, he looked back with his golden eyes, as if to make sure that she followed.
    Tara knew she was searching for something. For someone.
    There. In the sunset, she saw something shining. A figure in golden armor stumbled across the landscape, dragging a heavy golden pentacle behind him in the sand. It was lashed around the knight’s throat, strangling him. A tattered red cape streamed behind him like the banner of a defeated army.
    Tara recognized the figure. Her Knight of Pentacles. She began to run toward him.
    The knight collapsed to his knees, fell over in the sand in a magnificent glittering heap, with a sound like pots crashing to the floor.
    Tara fell to her knees beside him, struggling to remove the noose from around his neck. The sand was soft and sucking, and the knight’s armor was scorchingly hot from the sun, dented and scarred as if from a terrible battle. The heavy pentacle, large as a millstone, was dragging the knight down. He was limp when she touched him, his helmeted head lolling to the side. The armor burned her hands. She succeeded in freeing the rope around his neck, but the sand tugged at him, dragging him down into the hot belly of the desert.
    She cast about desperately. She could feel the sand trap blistering in, hear the hiss of sand as the grains fell in on themselves, like the well of an hourglass. The lion stood at the edge of the trap, growling.
    Tara wrestled with the rope holding the pentacle, succeeded in unfastening it. The pentacle disappeared