“I can’t go on any longer,” she muttered. She flung out a question. Daemon—are you there?
I am here. Hang on a bit further, the small presence said.
At least that’s what she thought it said.
Or maybe that’s what she hoped it said.
She scrubbed at her face, turned off the heat and rolled down her window. The resultant chill sank into her bones and made her abused muscles ache even more, but at least it slapped her awake.
She reached the north side of Kalamazoo and passed the turn for a town named Alamo. A few miles north of that she passed the intersection for Highway 89. She was taking in hard breaths like a runner at the end of a marathon.
Then she truly couldn’t do any more. If she didn’t rest, she would pass out at the wheel. She looked for the next exit, took it and drove half blind until she reached a quiet side road. She slowed and turned, took the next road and turned again, until finally she found an obscure one-lane gravel road dark with overhanging tree limbs.
She pulled onto it.
Trees, darkness, the cold night air and the rustling sounds of unseen creatures surrounded her. She stopped the car and put it in park. The cold was so bitter it forced her to roll up her window, daemon or no daemon. Shivering in violent spasms, she tucked her jacket around her torso and huddled against the door. She had passed the point of balance long ago and couldn’t unclench her rigid limbs. She felt as though she was bleeding out something essential, but she couldn’t make it stop.
“I need help,” she whispered.
Help help help.
The word went out from her in a gushing, rhythmic pulse.
She didn’t fall asleep as much as plummet into a pit.
The pit didn’t have a color. It was a wicked, lonesome black.
* * *
SHE WAS A daughter of one of the great houses in a city that sprawled like a lazy, tawny lion by the sea. Towers, minarets, domes and sails filled the horizon, all crowned by the gold and cerulean bowl of heaven.
The city was the center of civilization, turbulent with dust and heat and politics. The scent of spices, perfumes and rich foods mingled with the rank smell of animals and slaves. The cries of market hawkers were punctuated with the ululating call to prayer.
One of the five Pillars of Allah’s faithful, the prayer that saved and sustained the world.
There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.
In a place where beauty proliferated, the people called her mother the Jewel of the City. They called her the Flower. She had thrived in a progressive court filled with musicians, architects, mathematicians, scientists, theologians and philosophers, physicians and magicians. Once she’d been considered an accomplished physician in her own right.
Now she lay in her bed, restless from dreaming of what once was, and what might have been. She never quite fell asleep and only sometimes managed to fully awaken.
Pain redefined the evening of her life and became her entire world, her lover, her friend, her enemy, her bedfellow, the child of her heartbeats, companion to her breath and her sovereign lord.
He came to her daily, and each time she would rouse.
He would raise her head with skilled hands and help her to drink the wine spiced with medicines and poppy. Then as she began to drift, he would unlace her stiff leather corset and open it wide. He would part the edges of the deep, jagged wound that ran from collarbone to pelvis. Abdominal organs lay exposed to his intent scrutiny. After probing the wound he would sprinkle magical powders into the crevices of her body and whisper words, or prayers, or incantations.
The sum of her existence had come down to this irreducible place. He knew her with a greater intimacy than did any of her family. She should have long since died from the wound, but his powers kept her alive.
As she endured the unendurable, he whispered to her how her family had abandoned hope. They had stopped searching for a miracle cure for her mysterious wound that would not heal. He whispered other dark things, a corrupt and insidious councilor sowing anxiety and fear at kingdom’s fall. All the while he laced her tight in a perpetual bondage that held her torn body together and kept her spirit leashed to his hand.
Then he would leave and she would dream again, a bloodred petal drifting in twilight.
* * *
CRAMPED IN HER awkward position, her body aching, Mary surfaced from the black pit. She had a blurred impression of her car’s interior, the edge of the steering wheel that dug into her hip, the lush purple and green of the dark forest. Her mouth was dry and her heart hammered, a rapid, skittish feeling. She groaned and struggled to find a better position.
Then she slid into another space.
She stood up, away from her body and out of the car, into the cool velvety colors of the forest at night. She felt light and airy. Looking back in the car, she pitied the young woman in the driver’s seat whose abandoned body lay in an awkward huddle.
Mary held up her hands. She saw the shadow of tangled underbrush through her fingers.
She was like crystal.
She looked down at herself, or at least where her body should have been. She saw a transparent version of the woman that lay in the car, except in this version a jagged crack ran down the length of her torso. Light blazed like lava from the crack, illuminating the Toyota, the line of a tree, the gravel road. The crack didn’t hurt. She almost poked curious fingers inside it, but an instinctive aversion made her stop.
A delicate cloud of lavender mist came to settle around her torso.
She caught her breath. Daemon? Is that you?
Yes. The lavender cloud swirled around her. You must stop.
Stop what? I don’t know what you mean. She stretched, or perhaps she just pretended to, for her body was back in the car. Whatever she did, it felt as pleasurable and as expanding as a full-bodied stretch. She felt as if it was the first pain-free movement she’d had in days.
You are burning up. Her spirit companion turned in circles.
Am I? She glanced down at herself, at the crack in her torso that blazed like a sun. I don’t mean to be.
Agitation. You must find a way to stop.
I don’t know what I’m doing. Do you?
You’re dying.
Goodness. She looked around. She didn’t feel like she was dying. She had no idea dying could be so beautiful. Okay, she said. What do I do to stop?
The spirit wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. It twisted into endless, agitated knots.
She felt sorry for all the trouble she had caused it and started to apologize, but then it shot into the forest, disappearing so fast she couldn’t tell where it had gone.
Saddened, she wondered if that was the last she would see of it, but then she realized that if she were dying, it wouldn’t matter. She hoped her actual moment of death would be as painless and as pleasant as this. She experimented with walking, or pretending to walk. She loved the sensation of lightness and freedom.
Afrit.
The word popped into her mind, along with the memory of a mythology class she’d taken in high school.
Or was it afreet? She couldn’t remember. Djinn. They were Middle Eastern mythological spirits of air, immortal, unpredictable, often mischievous and amoral, and not to be confused with angels or demons. That didn’t seem like a fair way to describe her companion, which, if anything, seemed like an anxious, kind little thing. She preferred to think of it as a daemon, a supernatural being somewhere between a god and a human.
She heard a whisper of noise, a sound so slight that her physical ears would not have detected it.
She whirled. A wolf came out of the forest and took mincing steps toward her. Its head was lowered and its yellow eyes fixed on her—the crystalline, ethereal her and not the abandoned battered body in the car.
Oh, she said, or pretended to say, aren’t you gorgeous?
Lady, the wolf said. You called.
Did I? She blinked. I don’t remember.
Another wolf
stepped out of the forest, then another, and then three more. Overcome with astonishment, she stared. What a lovely but incomprehensible dream. More wolves poured onto the gravel road. Soon her car was surrounded.
The one that had spoken was the largest and most powerfully built. It approached and sat near her transparent leg. It said, You asked for help. We have come. We will do what we can to protect you.
She flashed back to the cloud of hawks that had attacked her abductors. Some had fallen and hadn’t risen again. You mustn’t try to help me, she said. She looked around at the pack of wolves. They were so beautiful. Don’t risk yourselves. It isn’t worth it. Apparently I’m already dying.
The alpha wolf fixed its intelligent, lupine gaze on her. Sister, we stay.
Overcome by their generosity, she said, My heart is full of gratitude.
Only much later did she realize how stylized her words had been, as if they belonged to another place and another time.
Chapter Ten
THE PAIR OF hawks that followed Mary rode thermals high above the rolling landscape. They had hurtled in pursuit of the car as she turned east, falling back only after fresh hunters swooped in to take over the chase. If an ornithologist had been asked whether the aerial predators were capable of such a sophisticated tactical interaction, he or she would have laughed the questioner out of the room.
The hawks weren’t finished with their task after they had been relieved by newcomers. Instead they winged west until they located a nondescript, battered blue Ford with a transplanted, meticulously maintained BMW engine.
Michael drove south on Interstate 94, which took him out of Wisconsin and along the outskirts of Chicago. As he wove through the crowded traffic, he rarely let the hybrid Ford’s speed fall under a hundred miles an hour, even if it meant that he sometimes had to plunge onto the shoulder to pass snarls of slower vehicles. The pace was suicidal in the greater Chicago area and required absolute concentration and prescient reflexes.
While he drove he maintained a cloak of secrecy around the car, projecting a kind of psychic null-space, a void where the mind’s eye preferred not to look. Troopers patrolling I-94 had radars flash with something inexplicable but their minds slipped away from the occurrence and they forgot it almost at once.
The man maintained minimal contact with his fellow hunters and companions, just enough to sense their presence without glancing away from the road, and to hear the simplest of messages. None had spoken after the first hawk had returned to make its presence known to him.
We have found her, it had said. Follow.
They came. They made contact.
It was enough. He followed.
All other questions and all other answers could be gleaned at a later time. If they lost her again, none of the questions or answers would matter, anyway.
As he drove, he thought back to another life and time, and another trip he had undertaken with almost the same desperation as this one. Another one of their group, Ariel, had been betrayed, captured by Burgundians and sold to the English.
She had begun that life as a peasant girl and fallen prey to the pitfalls their group faced as they grew to adulthood. Confused by her abilities and imperfect shards of returning memory, she became consumed by the voices she heard in her head. When Michael first made contact with her, she believed him to be a saint, and she laid claim to a holy vision. Even as a teen she had been a charismatic and formidable warrior, rousing the countryside to defeat their enemy both at Orleans and Patay.
Then their enemy’s spies spread their poison well. Abandoned by her king, she had been tried for witchcraft and heresy by French clerics who worked in service to the English.
Spring in France had been a messy business that year. The roads to Rouen were churned to thick mud from the downpour of several days of rain. He remembered the heavy strike of hooves as his horse thundered along the treacherous route, and the stomach-churning sound of bone snapping.
He had roared with frustration as his horse went down and threw him from the saddle. He had been forced to slit the suffering beast’s throat in the mud and the rain. And though he scoured every stable in search of another mount, and he had hurtled forward with every ounce of his considerable strength, he had arrived too late to prevent anything.
She should have been fine. He had told her to recant and keep quiet, to wait until he could break her out of prison, but their enemy had captured and tortured Uriel, her mate.
It had broken her. She had pleaded and demanded to be freed, had insisted the voices she heard in her head were real, and the frightened ecclesiastical court had burned her for it.
There had been no last-minute Hollywood appearance or rescue as the flames licked at the bottom of the woodpile. When he had arrived, there had been nothing left of her but the smear of ash and the memory of an outcry on the wind.
Thus was the sum of a noble life: loss and pain and defeat in a foreign place, and the strange, empty gift of sainthood almost five hundred years later, long past when she and her mate had been destroyed, and their real stories and original identities had been buried under the weight of human superstition and history.
Goddamn, he had forgotten how much he had loved that horse. He had raised it from a colt. It had given him everything it had, including its life.
Michael was forced to stop just past East Chicago to refill his depleted gas tank. The pause was agonizing.
Throughout the day as he traveled, the psychic realm rustled and whispered. Ethereal energies were more agitated than usual by the day’s disturbances. Dark beings as well as lighter ones crossed the landscape at the edge of his awareness. Once something fled past him, sobbing inconsolably.
Through all of it, he could feel the woman’s psychic presence radiating with uncontrollable force, a star blazing into a supernova before it died. Creatures attracted to such extremity moved with purpose and stealth toward her, hopeful for an easy kill.
Murder was a child’s picture drawn in bright crayon compared to the savagery he felt. In contrast to his current mood, his former state of rage had been pastel.
Night fell. His speed never lessened except once, briefly, to make the turn north. After an agony of waiting, his current feathered guide said, Turn here.
He was traveling at such a high speed that he shot past the exit. The Ford screeched onto the road’s shoulder. He reversed and gunned the engine until he could take the ramp. Then he drove the side road with more care as he followed the terse commands, for he had to translate everything from a hawk’s perception into information that he could use on the ground.
At last he cruised down a country lane. In the sweep of headlights a red-tailed hawk sat motionless on a low-lying limb of a huge oak. Huge golden eyes flared as the hawk turned its head and stared at his car. The oak tree grew beside a one-lane gravel drive.
He made the tight turn gently onto the gravel road. The forest was thick with night sounds, tangled underbrush and overhanging trees. His headlights picked up a dark parked Toyota yards ahead. At least thirty wolves surrounded the car. They rose to their feet and turned to face his vehicle with bared teeth. A few were half-grown pups.
He took a careful breath, put the Ford into park and killed the engine. Whatever he might have expected, it hadn’t been this. He touched the nine-millimeter in his shoulder holster then opened his door and got out, leaving the car’s headlights on.
Along with the quiet rush of chill spring air came the flutter of a small wind spirit. It batted around him like a trapped and bruised butterfly.
Dying, it said. She’s dying—
Hush, he told it. He brushed it away gently with his mind.
The alpha wolf of the pack paced toward him. He stared down into the powerful male’s steady gaze. The wolf said, Warrior.
He replied, I will pass. Let me do so in peace. I do not want to hurt you.
The alpha male said, We have answered her call for help, and we have promised to protect.
It was another loyal beas
t. His mouth tightened. Your clan is an honorable one. Can you heal her as well, or save her life?
The wolf remained silent.
I will pass, he repeated.
The alpha male turned to his pack. One by one the wolves moved out of his way. He walked to the Toyota and looked at the woman who curled in a crumpled heap in the driver’s seat. She was small with a snarled braid, her shoulders two thin, vulnerable points under her jacket, but he couldn’t make out any other details in the indirect light.
The old woman had taught him well. Staring down at the woman, he remembered the eight-year-old boy he had been. He thought of all the reasons that his old mentor had for being ready to kill him should it become necessary.
Those same reasons applied to this young woman.
He must be prepared to kill her if she wasn’t salvageable.
Chapter Eleven
DRIFTING.
A bloodred petal in twilight.
She felt as empty and dry as a drained chalice. An abundant golden river flowed into her. Her parched soul soaked up the current. It was as strong and rich as burgundy wine, and as warm and nourishing as summer.
She surfaced from the black pit and became aware, as if from a great distance, of details around her. She was no longer hallucinating an out-of-body experience. Instead, she lay on the cold gravel between her Toyota and another parked car. Her body felt heavy and weak on the sharp rocks.
The unfamiliar car’s headlights threw a slant of harsh illumination on the scene. A pack of wolves ringed the area. Someone knelt over her, dark head and broad shoulders silhouetted against the angled light. Large, heavy hands rested flat on her torso, one at her sternum and the other on her abdomen.
The car headlights seemed thin and white, and as dim as shadows, compared to the man who shone from within like the sun.
The golden river poured into her.
A powerful sense of recognition flooded her, along with an incandescent joy. She took a breath and sighed, an easy expanding movement, for the moment free from fear and pain. Moving one hand across the uneven gravel toward the man, she smiled with relief at waking up from the long dark.
Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) Page 10