All was right in my world.
Damn, I adored this woman. Utterly. Absolutely.
“You do have a good start there.” I motioned toward her laptop, stretching my legs out and crossing them at the ankles. “We know that I triggered an ancient Etruscan curse and ended up trapped in the twilight world between life and death. Branwell somehow accessed power reserved for the Etruscan oracle, Tages, and his descendants to create a door between the two worlds and pull me out—”
“I know we’ve talked about Tages in the past but could you go over it again. I want to see if I missed anything.”
I sat back. “He was a human oracle who founded the Etruscan religion due to his ability to communicate with the afterlife.”
Chiara typed away, eyes trained on her computer. “And he did normal oracle stuff, like the Oracle at Delphi in Greek records of the same time period?”
“Exactly. Kings and rulers would come to Tages and his descendants requesting information about future wars or deceased loved ones. In fact, the Etruscan oracles were so revered, the Romans continued to support and consult them even hundreds of years after conquering the Etruscans. The oracles themselves didn’t die out until after the fall of Rome itself—”
My name is No. My sign is No . . .
Chiara growled.
“Hello. Chiara D’Angelo speaking.” Her face might have been scowly but her tone was polite.
She listened for a moment, thunderclouds gathering.
“I appreciate your offer, Mr. Rittenbaum, but I will not be aiding any member of the paparazzi in obtaining photos of Jack Knight-Snow, scandalous or otherwise. He is a client of D’Angelo Enterprises and that is all I will say on the matter. Goodbye.”
Click.
Chiara glared at me. My expression was surely too innocent.
“Assistant, Jack. I mean it.”
I nodded. She didn’t need to be fielding my phone calls. But . . .
“So just a client, am I?” I had to ask it.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t.” Words said warningly. “Or the next person who calls will get a detailed description of your bathing habits.”
“Blackmail. How very . . .sexy.”
She may have growled. I wasn’t stupid enough to comment on how darling she was when she was angry.
Though for the record, the answer wasadorably cute.
My gaze may have lingered on her pursed lips a little longer than was strictly appropriate. Frustration churned through my chest, rising sharply as I looked at her.
“Back to our research.” She swirled a finger over her laptop. “How do you think Branwell figures into this? The connection with the Etruscan curse and Tages seems to be tied only to Branwell. Neither Dante nor Tennyson could interact with you when you were in the shadow world. Neither of them could open the door to get you out. And now that you’re out, the door doesn’t open at all.”
I wiped the smirk off my face. “The descendants of Tages melted into history. So it’s not outlandish to suppose that the bloodline still exists. We know the D’Angelos are of noble lineage and have lived in Tuscany since time immemorial. It’s not a stretch to think your family could be the remnant of long lost Etruscan oracles. The triplets’ GUTs do bear a striking resemblance to what oracles of old would see and do.”
“But that doesn’t explain why the oracle stuff only reacts to Branwell, not the other two.”
I sighed, sitting back. “It doesn’t, though it is possible we merely don’t understand how oracle powers manifest themselves.”
“True,” Chiara scrunched her mouth. “Or the D’Angelo curse could be entirely unrelated to Tages and oracles, and Branwell simply can tap into some universal power. Your presence here, Jack, proves that other supernatural things exist outside my brothers’ gifts. Nothing, and I meannothing, in our family history points to their GUTs being anything other than a gypsy curse from the Middle Ages. It’s not a foregone conclusion that all supernatural things have to be interrelated with one another.”
Chiara clacked away at her computer, entering notes about our conversation. Damn but I loved her intelligent mind.
“Talk to me about the scar and the black, oily sludge,” she said. “Tell me how it feels, et cetera.”
I described for her the sense of dissonance I got from the scar, the opposition like repelling ends of two magnets. As for the oily slime, it felt ominous.
