Oracle's Moon Read Online Free

felt good. The sun was perched high in the sky and beat down on her head, and she dripped with sweat.
    An immense black dog climbed at her side. He was easily twice the size of a mastiff, all muscle and power, yet he climbed up the side of the bluff with impossible agility. As she stared, he turned to look at her with radiant diamond eyes that startled her so badly, she lost her grip on the rocks.
    Gravity yanked. She fell, and the ground hurtled toward her.
    She woke with a start, her heart hammering. Her clothes were clammy with sweat. The sun had shifted, and she was alone in the living room. The television was off. So many things were not right with the scene, but before she had a chance to panic, she heard Max and Chloe giggling in their bedroom.
    “I want you to be a doggie now,” Chloe said.
    A male voice said, “But at the moment I am a cat.”
    Grace knew that voice. She had only heard it for a brief time, but she would never forget it. It was the voice of the Bane of Her Existence. It sounded deep and clear, with a kind of purity that somehow hurt the heart, and it held the power of a cyclone.
    It belonged to a creature whose whirlwind arrival on her doorstep had heralded confrontation and violence.
    And the killing.
    And it was visiting with her kids.
    She was off the couch and moving down the hall before she fully knew what she was doing.
    Chloe said, “I want to ride the doggie!”
    “I believe what you want would then be called a horse,” said the Bane.
    Max shrieked, a happy sound that escalated so high it could shatter glass.
    Sharp pain shot up her leg. Just as it threatened to give out from underneath her, she reached the children’s bedroom and grabbed on to the doorway as she looked inside.
    Max stood in his crib. He couldn’t walk on his own yet, but he could stand when he held on to something. The single wisp of dark brown hair at the top of his head waved as he bobbed up and down. He was grinning from ear to ear and watching Chloe, who sat on the floor along with a black cat, who sat in front of her.
    The cat had to be the Bane of Her Existence. The Djinn. Khalil Somebody Important. Visually, it looked like a normal, fairly large cat, perhaps twenty pounds or so, but to her mind’s eye, it felt immense with a shadowy, hazardous Power.
    The cat said, “For something so small, you emit a great deal of noise.”
    Chloe grabbed the cat’s tail and yanked on it. “Doggie!” Chloe shrieked. “Doggie! Doggie!”
    “That is my tail,” the cat remarked. The little girl stabbed at his furred face with a plump finger. “Now you have discovered one of my eyes. Oh look, you have discovered the other one. I think you have awakened your aunt. I told you we should be quiet.”
    The trio turned to look at her as she stood frozen. Two delighted children and what appeared to be a normal black cat but was instead an alien, enormously Powerful, infinitely dangerous creature.
    “Look, Gracie!” said Chloe. “It’s the doggie-cat! You said we can keep him.”
    The cat’s strange, wrong eyes narrowed. “Did you?” he said. His triangular face looked distinctly unfriendly, whiskers held awry. “That wasn’t what you told me earlier.”
    Grace lunged forward to snatch up the cat, and he allowed it. His body hung boneless from her grip just like a real cat would. “I had no idea you meant this doggie-cat, Chloe,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That changes everything.”
    “Which other doggie-cat could she possibly have meant?” said the cat. “You don’t exactly have a plethora of them hanging around.”
    Grace growled to Chloe, “Stay here.”
    Chloe pushed to her feet and whined, “But I want to play with him.”
    Grace looked at the little girl. “I said stay here, young lady.”
    Something in Grace’s expression must have made it clear she meant business, because Chloe kicked her toys on the floor. “You never let me do anything fun. I’m never going to live here again.”
    “Fine,”