Page 2 of The Shadowed Oracle
It had been like that since she could remember. In the countless bedrooms she shared with her father, she’d sleep on her side with a pillow pressed over her exposed ear. In the group home she’d lived in later on, she asked to room with the younger, more restless children, hoping their crying would drown out the internal torment. Or, as her father had insisted on calling them, “the nightmares.”
The word stuck. It became a blanket code for all that ailed her, all that hunted her. Ingrid couldn’t go around calling them monsters, or shadows, or ghosts. It would draw too much attention. Her silky black hair and bright eyes drew enough of it. And the last thing her father wanted, it seemed, was attention.
The waking visions? Just nightmares. The shadowy creatures that would appear right in front of her terrified eyes? Just nightmares.
They never harmed her, not physically at least, but she did have the feeling that they were somehow alive. Not someone, butsomething. An amorphous force always lurking over her, waiting to strike when she was most vulnerable. Waiting for when she stopped running, following her every move, even when all else seemed to fade away.
At age six, her father finally gave up. He could no longer drag her with him on his endless escape, and those nightmares became the only familiar thing she could take with her into the group home.
So she endured them. She went to bed. She fought off the nightmares. She got out of bed. She went to work. She kept to herself, kept to her routine. Then she went back home to do it all again.
Until that night.
That night, when the second message appeared on her phone.
It hadn’t been some shameless tale from a young co-worker. It wasn’t a mistake. It was thatsomethingthat she had been waiting for, or at least a consequence of it—as if that madness keeping her awake at night might’ve also been drawing in other things that inhabited the darkness.
She was a magnet, always had been, for the vile, the foul and the wicked.
“Do not leave work alone,” the second message read.
Chapter Two
“What kindof backwards bullshit is that?”
“The threatening kind?” Ingrid shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know. I’m a lot more concerned withwhois following me than the… reverse psychology aspect of their message.”
“Hmm,” her boss hummed defensively. “Just thought it was odd, kid, that’s all.”
After her father left, Ingrid had many parental figures over the years. For better or worse, there was the nun at the church-run group home who had taken her in as a child. The older orphan girl with the black ribbon perpetually in her hair. A raspy-voiced bartender who taught her to make the perfect martini. And then there was the general manager of The Boneyard, Franky, a graying, bear-sized man in his fifties, always peering over his glasses and trying to solve Ingrid’s problems like it was part of his job description.
“Let’s think,” he said, raking at the patch of hair below his bottom lip. “It has to be someone who comes in here, right?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I don’t go anywhere else, so that would be the place to start.”
Franky didn’t catch the sarcasm. “Right, right. Now we’re getting somewhere.” His eyes were puffy, bloodshot andwandering as he slouched at the tiny desk in the back office. In front of him, there was a decade-old computer collecting dust and an ashtray that he’d turned into a receptacle for nicotine gum. He spent most of his time back there and, with the cramped size of it, the office retained his distinct scent—sandalwood cologne and the sweet, mango flavor of his cigarette alternative.
He popped in a new piece, tucking it into the corner of his mouth. “You don’t go anywhere else,” he repeated confidently. “No, it has to be someone here. What about that… that guy. What was his name? Real creepy looking?”
Ingrid was about to ridicule Franky for his complete lack of descriptive ability when the image of the man he was referring to flashed in her head. Although there were many to choose from, the most recent of Ingrid’s admirers was decidedly the creepiest.
“Kyle,” Ingrid said under her breath. “Kyle Twyker.”
Franky snapped his fingers. “That’s him! Hell, even the name gives me the chills. I should’ve known right when he’d come in. Something about his eyes, you know? I should’ve known.”
He’d come in for a month straight, staring at Ingrid as he sipped his diet soda, throwing out conversation starters that never stuck. He was tall but very thin, pale, almost sickly looking, and not at all threatening in a physical sense. Not at first. Not until the mask slipped. One night, when he’d swapped that diet soda for whiskey—possibly for a little courage, making it easier for him to ask Ingrid about her romantic status—he suddenly snapped without warning.
Ingrid had kindly declined his advances, conjuring some vague lie about a boyfriend, but harmless Kyle Twyker tensed, frozen in place before erupting. He’d lurched upward and climbed on top of a barstool, eyes like endless voids as he screamed. It was like he’d flipped a switch that had emptied him out from the inside.
“Did you insult him?” Franky asked suddenly, peering over his glasses. “That night, when you rejected him, do you remember?”
Ingrid waved him off, “No, I was a perfect lady.”
Franky wasn’t satisfied, giving her an interrogative, pointed look with slitted eyes. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” Though she couldn’t blame him for asking. The only way Ingrid knew how to get through to most of the drunken, persistent men that sat at her bar was to turn cold, hardened. And she’d done it so long that it became impossible to turn off. Even around Franky.
“Got it. So you didn’t insult him. But were you… I don’t know how to put this nicely,” Franky continued. “Did you have an attitude?”
