They start calling me The Oracle two days after I help them right.
Not by name. Not as a person. As a thing.
A headline flashes across a TV in the hospital lobby while they're running routine tests on me:
"MYSTERIOUS 'ORACLE' HELPS POLICE PREDICT KILLER'S NEXT MOVE."
I feel something cold crawl up my spine when I read it.
Oracle.
Like I'm not a man who's losing his grip on memory. Like I'm not a patient. Like I'm not a suspect who was in a jail cell less than forty-eight hours ago.
Like I'm a tool.
The nurses start looking at me differently. The cops do too. Not hostile anymore. Curious. Measuring. Like I'm a weapon they're trying to understand the weight of.
Sarah hates it.
"They're stripping you down to a circus act," she snaps when she sees the news. "You're not some supernatural freak who sees the future."
"I don't know what I am," I mutter.
"That's exactly why they shouldn't be using you."
But they already are.
The next crime board they show me is extensive.
Photographs. Timelines. Locations pinned with red markers. Strings crossing, overlapping, looping in a chaotic web meant to represent logic.
The other officers talk around me. Patterns. Escalation. Signature wounds.
I don't listen.
I look.
Something itches at the back of my skull.
Not a vision.
Not a prediction.
Recognition.
I lean forward slowly. My fingers hover over one of the photographs—a man in his early forties, throat torn open, eyes frozen in surprise.
"Where was he found?" I ask.
"Dockside warehouse district," the detective replies. "Why?"
My stomach tightens.
Another photograph. A woman in her twenties.
"Her?"
"North side alley."
Third.
Fourth.
Fifth.
I don't need the cords and pins anymore. I see it.
Not geographically.
Temporally.
My voice comes out hollow. "These people didn't know each other," I whisper.
"No known connections," the detective says, watching me closely. "Different jobs. Different lives."
"But the same year," I murmur.
Silence.
I look up slowly.
"They all disappeared for a short time when they were children," I say. "Not long enough to be labeled missing. Days. Sometimes weeks. Then they returned. No charges. No official reports."
Sarah's breath catches beside me.
The detective stiffens. "How would you know that?"
My pulse spikes. I didn't mean to say that out loud.
YOU ARE READING
Blame my Shadow
Mystery / ThrillerEthan wakes up with blood on his hands and no memory of how it got there. As a series of brutal murders shake the city, he begins to realize that the crimes follow a pattern only he can see-sometimes before they even happen. With his mind fracturing...
