Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. She didn’t usually dwell on her many brushes with death, but this had come so close. If she hadn’t been outside, rescuing Aleister’s midnight fishy snack, she and the cat would have both died. Vaporization and fire were two sure ways to kill her. As it was, her poor koi had been boiled.
Ninon pulled her mind back to the present and worked on keeping it calm and blank. Strong emotion was bad. It seemed to work like a sort of beacon, calling her enemy to her if he were anywhere nearby. Once she could have controlled her feelings, but her mind was every day less and less her own. She couldn’t risk leaving any sort of a mental pathway that he could use to track her now that she knew—more or less—where she was going. She had been careful not to leave any electronic or paper trails for Saint Germain or others to follow, used no credit cards, debit cards, or cell phones. But that wasn’t the only way they tracked her.
“I’m sorry. That is banal. So, I shall choose a new name for you, yes? How about Corazon?” she asked, and then realized that in her mind she had already named him this. “It’s pretty, and it would be an excellent disguise for you. You must not be a gender bigot.”
The cat closed his eyes. He was not a sweetheart, and it was a matter of indifference to him what his mistress called him so long as she produced proper sustenance at regular intervals and scratched him under the chin.
Ninon understood this and didn’t judge him harshly. Though her closest friend, he was an animal and had an animal’s experience of the world. He needed food and shelter and an occasional physical display of affection. She was not so simple. Not any more. For a long while—since a form of immortality had been visited upon her—she had been plagued by a complex question: Was she just a thinking animal who occasionally had glimpses of a spiritual realm; or was she in fact a creature of spirit, trapped on earth so that she could learn from earthly experience before moving on to another life? If it was the latter, then she had certainly miscalculated when she allowed her enemy’s father to extend her life with his Promethean fire. How could one move on to the next world if one could not die at the appointed hour?
It was not like her to dwell on unhappy things, to second-guess herself. She agreed with Charlotte Brontë that regret was the poison of life, and did her best to never sip from that cup. But having someone’s hate endure unto the second generation and then a good deal longer—hate grand enough to prompt a man to multiple murders and to hurt a cat—that was just cause for momentary reflection, and perhaps even to review one’s life choices.
But not right now.
Ninon sighed and shifted in the Jeep’s less-than-luxurious seat. How she missed her Cobra! But that much-loved car and her other house were both in New Orleans where she could not go without risking Saint Germain’s spies finding her. Had he not sent his minions to open the already weakened levees after the terrible hurricane? He had drowned her beloved New Orleans in another attempt to kill her, and also to hide the evidence of his own systematic looting of the old graveyards.
Her nose wrinkled. The smell of exhaust was strong. It was expected. The tailpipes had smoke like that from a fire-breathing dragon. Her current vehicle was a probably reject from a demolition derby, but that was proving to be handy in a place where nice cars were like friendly dogs, tending to wander off with any passing stranger who knew how to hot-wire an engine. It was also faster, more stubborn on hills, and more loyal than any other desert vehicle she might have asked to face this Hell at high noon.
And it seemed to always be high noon—all day, every day—in this land suspended somewhere between what had been once and what was yet to be. Man was an unwanted intruder here. Sometimes gray clouds appeared on the horizon and hinted at cooling rain, but Mother Nature never followed through with her promise. Ninon had come to suspect that She was on the enemy’s payroll, trying to degrade his victim’s will by frying Ninon in the sun while denying her the renewing fire of the storm. That would be one way for Saint Germain to kill her. Not as quick as decapitation, but just as sure.
Of course, the nine-millimeter pistol Ninon had tucked under her leg didn’t help her comfort either.
Corazon chuffed. He didn’t care for the smell of gun oil or exhaust.
“We must endure,” Ninon muttered.
The Americas were a strange place. She had been in the New World off and on for nigh on three hundred years, but her eyes had still not adapted to all the varied landscapes. The scenery was simply too bright, too bold, too big. And this land was too dry. Por Dios! Would it never rain?
The people were different too—brash, uncivilized, disinclined to play by any rules. Even rules they themselves made.
Like you’ve ever played by anyone’s rules? a voice that might have been her conscience asked.
I had rules. They were just my own.
The cat lifted an eyelid and glared. He seemed to know whenever she started talking to herself, though the dialogue was strictly internal. The voice had always been there, but it was only in recent weeks that it had taken to visiting daily, forcing her into a slightly insane Socratic dialogue. Maybe it would go away when her concussion healed—when all of her healed in the heavenly fire.
Hoping to stop the voice in her head, Ninon pushed a tape into the player and the sounds of Sourdough Slim filled the Jeep. The cat glared some more. He did not care for yodeling.
Ninon glanced down at the gas gauge. She was still fine for fuel and she was in sight of a major highway—the 111, if the map was correct—and there was a town located at the outskirts of a nature preserve that would be at the junction of this highway and the 30. There was at least a quarter of a tank and she had begun seeing signs for a place called Cuatro Cienegas. Four Lakes—that was good. Of course, after the Sierra del Muertos—Dead Man’s Mountains—anything sounded good.
Oui, but you still do not know why you are running or even where.
Nonsense. She was running to…She looked down and read the words she had scribbled on the map: Hotel Ybarra.
That’s not what I mean, cherie.
I know. But you also know that we have to…to do something. There is no one left in Europe who can help—Saint Germain has killed them all. The lead in Greece was faulty, and the only other place we have heard any reference to people being resurrected by fire is here in Mexico.
They were being resurrected by other things as well, if legend were to be believed. Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, God of the Night, was apparently big on vampiric priestesses culled from women who died in childbirth. These creatures were scary, not like the usual necksucking Euro-trash so popular in movies. They liked brains as much as blood. This was a bit of a drawback, but Ninon needed help badly enough to brave brain-sucking fiends. She just wished the ancient stone tablet she’d sought hadn’t been stolen from the museum before she could see it. She would have had a clearer understanding of what she was up against.
So now you seek out the blasphemous Aztec gods to aid you?
Look, I’d seek out the Dev—she started to say and then paused.
Not the Devil? the voice asked. But why, if he can help?
You know why. I think it may have been the Devil who got me here. Or at least one of his henchmen.
Perhaps. Regardless, we are now touring the hellholes of the New World looking for a way out of troubles. Is that wise? Have we exhausted all other options?
Yes, they are exhausted, most dead and buried. I wish the answers were in heaven—do you really think I wouldn’t rather be in Cancun sunning myself on a beach? But I tried paradise for a savior, and all I found was a serpent. And no rain—no storms even where there should be. It has to be Saint Germain’s doing.
The voice didn’t answer. Perhaps because the cat had stuck his claws in her leg. Corazon looked worried. He seemed to know that his mistress’s mind was going somewhere bad.
Actually, when she thought about it, Ninon’s paradise had been free of serpents for a long while, and there had been plenty of rain if no
lightning. But as always happened, the modern world had started intruding on her Eden, and paradise had been slowly losing its allure. Before, where there were lush crops of tropical flowers, the land had sprouted expensive homes—which would have been lovely architectural sculptures if people hadn’t come to live in them.
Her end of that island had been inhabited mainly by American expatriates with money and relaxed personalities—trust fund babies mostly, who had no urge to follow in Mummy and Daddy’s well-shod footsteps, or to provide them with kids who would have an III or IV tacked onto their names. Some were unfortunate first wives bought off when their former hubbies went accessory shopping for their midlife crises and came home with new girlfriends—invariably younger and dumber—instead of hot cars or Rolexes. A few were retirees from Silicon Valley who were tired of fending off corporate raiders who treated acquisitions as a kind of blood sport now that the dot-coms were a bust and the dying companies were chum in the water that attracted sharks. Though, now that she thought about it, one of the men on the island had been a retired Silicon Valley dot-com hit man himself.
There were some accountants, also victims of the tech bust, who had official people looking at the books they’d cooked and deciding things were neither rare enough nor well-done enough for their tastes, and who were issuing warrants in complaint. There was even one guy who made a living as a urine donor for professionals who couldn’t quite pass company drug tests on their own. They’d been fun neighbors, easygoing, having many of the same appetites as the rest of the modern world but possessing slower metabolisms. They reminded her a bit of the society in which she had been raised, people who came from families where “summer” and “winter” were used as verbs—as in “We’ll summer in the Hamptons and winter in Vail”—but they had left much of that behind in favor of smaller, more private lives. They understood that geographical proximity did not mean friendship.
However they’d come, most were now Jimmy Buffett’s spiritual children, laid back and fond of margaritas. And they’d also been incurious about her. That had been a huge plus. True, there wasn’t a great depth of intellect in those neighborhoods and that had left her feeling a bit lonely, but she had been mostly content with her situation. Certainly she had liked it better than the way she was living now. Being homeless sucked. Ninon sighed and the cat did too.
It was unfair, actually, to say that every place they had visited since was a hellhole—though she had begun her most recent stay in rural Mexico at a small hotel in Guanajuato near the Museo de Momias, and that had to be listed somewhere in Hell’s zip code.
What had prompted her gruesome impulse to visit that museum she could not say, since there was no particular resurrection myth associated with the mummies, and as a rule she avoided places like it, cemeteries and churches that served up feasts of corpses for the morbid. She’d had more than enough of that on her eighteenth birthday. Still, something had guided her into the dreadful glass house raised for the dead.
The back story of the museum was partly appalling and partly, if you had a dark sense of humor, amusing. The poor corpses in the cemetery of San Sebastian had actually been dug up in 1853 because of back taxes due the local government—though how the dead were expected to pay taxes…
You managed it, the voice in her head spoke up. And you’ve been dead for centuries.
The words prompted from her a horrified giggle.
The franchise tax boards should try this, the voice went on. A yearly cemetery tax levied on every family in America. It could be added to the property tax bill. And if you fail to pay, the penalty would be to have Grandma dug up and put on display in a museum.
Ninon clapped a hand over her mouth to still her horrible laughter, which transformed into a cough. Death and taxes weren’t something she usually found amusing, singularly or in conjunction. It was one more sign of her weakening mental state.
There had been one hundred and ninety-nine souls disinterred that first year, their bodies buried in carbon and lime, pulled from their crypts and moved to a new building at the edge of town, the guide gleefully informed the museum’s visitor. Once they began looking, other cemeteries were found where natural mummification had taken place, and they, too, were dug up. One thousand, two hundred and eighteen in all. They had continued to be dug up until the law was amended in 1958 and put an end to this practice of charging a cemetery tax.
If Ninon had properly understood the guide, whose Spanish was as far removed from formal Castilian as it was possible to be, there was evidence that several of the corpses had been interred prematurely and the poor souls woke in grim boxes in the suffocating darkness of those severe vaults where they were stored. One poor woman had her arms raised overhead and there were long claw marks on her face. Living inhumation—that’s what it was called. It didn’t happen much in these days of modern medicine. Unless it was on purpose, of course. Sometimes during revolutions the soldiers got a little hasty with shoveling the bodies of their enemies into mass graves. And there were always psychopaths with certain kinds of tastes.
Ninon shuddered at the thought. She knew about waking up from death alone in the dark.
All the exhibits in the museum were depressing, many corpses wearing nothing but shoes and socks, but she’d found the dried body of a pregnant woman to be the most disturbing of all. The guide had talked on about natural salinity and nitrates that caused mummification, oblivious or inured to his visitors’ horror at the sight. Then, as Ninon leaned over the display case containing the world’s youngest mummy, she had felt the now familiar weight of someone’s hostile gaze, and since the only person in the room was a man long dead and eyeless to boot, she had known familiar dread. Sickness crawled up through her body, making her as cold and weak as vampire’s prey. It never occurred to her that her fear was irrational, a bit of imagination run amok. Instinctual awareness had come calling too many times for her to be mistaken about the danger that shoved this cold alarm before it like a sickly shadow. She had always known when Saint Germain stalked her dreams. Sleep became a twilight of fearful shadows, an endless corridor lit by the sinister light of stolen Glory Hands harvested by his father. But this was the first time he had found her during the day since she had fled New Orleans. That was not good news. It meant that his search was narrowing in on the same areas she was traveling.
She had left Guanajuato immediately after contact, heading for the Chihuahua Desert because there had been reports of strange ceremonies being conducted during the summer lightning storms—resurrections of the dead, shape-shifting, levitations—and because it was away from where she had told the hotel clerk that she planned to be. Nothing concrete prompted her precipitous departure from town, skipping a long-anticipated shower at her hotel, except this well-developed sense of danger that said her pursuer was close, and that she again needed to run as fast and as far as she could.
Aleister—no, Corazon—wasn’t enthused about further travel that day in their Jeep, which was one of the early, primordial models that didn’t have much use for things like shock absorbers. But for a while he seemed entertained by the birds in the spiky agaves and the odd appearance of an alarmed Mexican prairie dog. When they passed a long pipe-organ cactus, sentinel of the true desert, he ceased watching the wearying landscape and returned to his nap. He was wise this way, knowing he needed a solid eighteen hours of sleep to be at his very best.
Ninon had groaned in understanding and reached into her purse for a piece of black licorice to soothe her cough. It reminded her of the aniseed dragées she used to take at bedtime to sweeten her breath for her lovers. The taste of licorice exploded on her tongue and flooded her mouth with sweetness. It was a strange counterpoint to the rest of the world around them. This place was certainly more bitter than sweet. In fact, it actually hurt the eyes and furred her tongue as it dried her tissues. Some soft lands appeared almost edible, every plant a possible culinary delight. Her childhood home had been like that—fields of sweet strawberries filled with sunlight, o
range groves living in glass houses, dairy farms of tender grass where farmers made vast wheels of goat cheese and baked rustic brown bread that they would offer to travelers and runaway school girls. And then there had been the vast flower fields of Grasse…
Corazon twitched and gave a soft growl.
But this was not such a place and even the cat knew it. Everything here was hard and came with thorns. A person lost in this wasteland would starve or be poisoned, if not killed by the sun first. Best to simply sleep through this hell if a siesta was an option, even if sometimes you rolled over and smelled Fate on the pillow next to you, and you knew that Death had come and lain beside you while you dreamed of demons and ghosts.
She needed to rest. Still, respite from worry proved elusive. That night, though exhausted in mind and spirit, she and Corazon lay unsleeping in a shabby, sweltering hotel in a town too small to have any name—though hotel was an elevated word for the two-bedroom, rotten adobe sweatbox built against a crumbling cantina erected with short-lived hopefulness in 1929. Neither the hotel nor the cantina where she risked having dinner—and risk was the word—seemed to have seen a dust rag or a mop since. The yellowed sheets in her room were also suspiciously fuzzy and she had stripped them off the bed, preferring to sleep on her sleeping bag on the bare mattress. The bed was probably more bug-ridden than the floor, but there was clear evidence in the corners of the room that the floorboards were a highway for rodents of various types and sizes. A few scorpion tails suggested what the preferred meal was.
Yes, sleep eluded her, but safe behind her thick walls and heavy door, locked by the expediency of a chair shoved beneath the door knob, Ninon finally took the time to stop panicking about what had happened in the museum and to think sensibly about what she should do. Living the rest of her life in places like this was not acceptable—if this could even be called living. What had become of the woman she had been? All she now did was run, never confronting her enemy. Worse still, she hadn’t allowed herself a friend—a human one anyway—for the last two decades. And there had been no close friends or lovers since Saint Evremond died. She was alone except for the mice and flies—and her cat.
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