She smiled at him and he smiled back. Then he slipped through the door and was gone.
There was a small single bed in the corner of the room. She sank down on it, the hard mattress giving only a little beneath her but the white cotton sheets releasing the comforting smell of fresh laundry. She wondered whose room it was. Had Maria spent her last night as herself in a room like this?
"As a matter of fact, yes," Raven said.
He leant against the door, legs crossed at the ankle.
"You knew," she said. "Why the hell didn't you just tell me?"
"I could have, I suppose. Then I imagine you would have felt obliged to come here yourself, all guns blazing. Except for the fact that you didn't have a gun. Or any back-up. And then they would have captured you - or just shot you. No, I think they would have taken you prisoner. And then they might have tortured-"
"Jesus - stop!"
He grinned at her, unrepentant.
Despite herself, she felt better for his presence. She could still hear the muffled sound of gunfire and she couldn't tell if it was approaching or receding. She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. "Morgan's got no spirit self," she told Raven. "What does that mean?"
"That's a good question."
"Are you going to answer it?"
"Nope."
"Right." She lowered her head until it was resting between her palms. "Are you my spirit self?"
"Ha! Now that's a very good question. But you know the answer - you know who I am."
"Then who am I? You said you didn't choose me, but that could just mean I was already chosen."
He cocked his head. "Do you worry about where you'll go to when you die?"
Alex blinked, unprepared for the question and not sure how to answer it. The only church service she'd ever attended was midnight mass. She'd never worried about heaven and hell because she'd never believed in them. And now... she hadn't taken the time to think through what the things Morgan told her really meant.
Where was she going when she died? She hadn't been a terrible person but then she hadn't been a terribly good one either. She thought about Lahav, the man who contained a being inside him straight out of the Bible. I have to trust him, Morgan had said, and she thought she understood why: because his very existence proved the promise of heaven and the threat of hell real. But Raven existed too, and he wasn't a part of Lahav's book.
"When I die, I want to go where you are," she told him. "I think I belong there - in the spirit realm."
"You do," he said. "And that's why I came to you."
"OK. I guess I can live with that."
"That's the plan."
She studied him, the face which was so expressive and yet gave so little away. He was still here, and she knew that meant something. "There's something else I've got to do, isn't there?"
"The only thing you have to do is the thing that you do."
"I see the spirit world, but I can't see much here - just those walls."
"Then look at them and tell me what you see."
She blinked her eyes closed on the mundane world and opened them again on the other. The inner walls were like the outer with complex woodwork inside them, spirals and radiating lines that seemed breakable but held fast against her hand when she pushed against them.
"What do you see?" he asked. "What does it look like?"
She tried to see what he wanted her to, but there was nothing beyond the wood, the delicate swirls almost like a spider's web.
Suddenly, she understood what he meant. She sprinted through the door, careless of the noise it made as it slammed behind her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Coby handled the hire car awkwardly, his left hand reaching for a gear stick that wasn't there and his foot tapping at a nonexistent clutch pedal. He'd never been to the Mojave when he lived in America and he found that he liked its stark simplicity. It was a land that could kill the careless.
Was he being careless, though, following a stranger's instructions? Whoever left the recording had saved his life. And he was sure the Croatoans had the shofar. They had it, but he didn't think they understood how it could be used. He had something to offer them, and he suspected they knew it. If they didn't... He felt the lump of the Glock 9mm holstered under his arm.
As it always did, the thought of killing sped his heart and caused a warmth in his groin. He indulged himself in memories of the old man he'd strangled, then put the fantasy away. He wasn't an animal. The things that gave him pleasure didn't control him.
The road that led to the Croatoan centre was narrow, only one lane wide. It dead-ended outside the fenced perimeter of the compound. One way in, one way out and it would be easy to block it.
The fence was high and razor-wired, clearly intended for more than show. The gate was sturdier still with huts for security guards to either side of it. But as he cruised closer he saw that it had been forced open, the metal buckled by some strong force.
He stopped the car and drew his gun, debating simply reversing and leaving.
But the shofar might be here. He had to find out.
He kept his gun in his hand as he slipped out of the car into the parched desert air. As soon as he was clear of the air-conditioned interior he smelt blood. His gut clenched, half in pleasure and half in fear, but he'd made a decision now. He would go on.
The first body was only a few feet inside the fence. A high-calibre weapon had taken him out, the exit wound a bloody mess in his back, white ribs and torn muscle glistening in the midday sun. There were a dozen or more bodies in the fifty yards between the fence and the stuccoed building, but after Coby had watched in silence for a long minute he was sure they were all dead.
He knelt beside one and flipped him over. Blood oozed over his fingers and he tried to wipe them clean on the man's own khaki T-shirt, but the fluid was too tacky, sticking to his skin like glue. He looked at it a moment, red against white. Most of his recent kills had been bloodless. He'd forgotten how much he liked to see his hands this way.
He shifted his attention from his own hand to the dead man's face. It was broad and wildly bearded, the eyes a little too small so that it seemed piggish, not fully human. There was a swastika tattoo on his neck and SS lightning bolts on his arms beneath the ragged sleeve of his T-shirt.
The Croatoans weren't neo-Nazis, or at least that wasn't their public face. Coby guessed this man must have been part of a group attacking the cult. He examined a few more bodies, finding one more like the first - bearded, over-muscled and heavily-tattooed - and the rest young and clean-cut.
So. The neo-Nazis seemed to have got the best of the fight out here. The Croatoans had been foolish to step outside when they had a defended position within their own building. Coby wondered what had driven them to do it.
Gravel crunched beneath his sneakers as he walked towards the building. The door was ahead of him, open onto gloom, but he went to the left of it, towards the floor-to-ceiling windows which took up a large section of the wall. The glass was crazed in places but unbroken, almost certainly bullet-proof. Coby's heart sped as he walked, knowing how exposed he was to anyone inside. But bullet-proof glass worked both ways.
The windows reflected the desert back at him as he approached, and his own face, pale beneath his brown hair. The gun was a blur of darkness in his hand. When he was only inches away from the glass he cupped his hand over his eyes and peered in.
He guessed the place was a canteen of some sort. Tables were ranged at one end in front of a series of silver serving hatches, and cushions lay on the floor in rings. Plates were scattered about, as if the residents had been interrupted in the middle of their meal.
There were bodies scattered over the floor, too. The pools of blood looked black in the gloom. Coby saw that one of the bodies was twitching, some life still left in it. Not for long, though. The man's left hand dangled from the wrist by a thread - a knife wound, probably. And there was another cut beneath his ribs. It must have missed his heart, but it had caught s
omething else essential, the liver or a kidney. It would be a painful death.
It took Coby a moment to register the one living figure in the room. The man stood by the door, more still than the dying man on the floor. He was looking straight at Coby and when their eyes met he smiled and beckoned before turning and leaving the room.
Coby stared at the slaughter for a moment longer then turned and headed for the door. The man had been expecting Coby and whatever he wanted to say, Coby wanted to hear.
He was waiting for Coby in the hallway just inside the front door. "Shaman," the man said. "It's a miracle."
Coby frowned as the stranger bowed to him. If there was a trick here, it escaped him. The man seemed to know him, though Coby was sure he'd never seen him before in his life. Was it possible that, by some bizarre coincidence, he resembled the cult's leader?
"Stand," he said, injecting an authority he didn't feel into his voice.
The man squared his shoulders like a soldier before his commanding officer. He was young and startlingly handsome with thick black hair and crystalline blue eyes. But there was something... wrong about his face. The animal part of him sensed it and it prickled the skin on the back of his neck.
"The shofar," Coby said. "Do you know where it is?"
"Of course." The man looked puzzled, as if Coby wasn't behaving quite the way he expected.
"I need you to bring me to the shofar," Coby said, trying for a gentler tone. "It's very important."
The man nodded. "Yes, we organised it the way you asked. There's been a high... price." He looked to his left, through a doorway that led to the canteen and the corpses on its floor. "But they - well, they're replaceable We've funnelled the intruders through the building. They're trapped - but they're near the shofar. It seemed... but those were your orders."
"I had my reasons," Coby said, unable to imagine what they were.
Morgan stood in the doorway to a small bedroom. The room was windowless, ensuring no threat behind him. He had line of sight to the cross-corridor ahead, and he'd cleared the way back of all hostiles.
It was a perfect defensive position, but moving forward meant exposing himself to fire from an unknown number of enemies. He could feel his heart racing and his blood surging. He'd long ago learnt to find a kind of pleasure in the risk. Soldiers like him were gamblers and it was the possibility of losing which made the game worth playing.
Which didn't mean he wanted to die. He held himself still, gun braced and aimed at the corner where his last assailant had disappeared with a yell of pain after Morgan winged him.
Nothing. Morgan let the seconds stretch into minutes, aware of how waiting could wear on a person during combat. The fearful anticipation of action would eventually turn into a gnawing compulsion to do something right now. Inexperienced fighters could often be lured out of secure positions by that impulse.
After ten minutes of waiting, his own patience had been exhausted. He eased out of the door, footsteps silent on the tile floor. He slowed and pressed his back to the wall as he neared the corner. Then he listened, extending all his senses like an animal. But he still heard nothing, not even the betraying whisper of breath.
He counted one heartbeat, then two - then leapt and rolled, bringing his gun to bear as he rose.
There was nobody. He could see blood, tacky drops drying on the ochre tiles. If the Croatoans truly meant to stop him, they'd have set up their own defensive position here. He should have been unable to move on without exposing himself to their fire. But they weren't here. They wanted him to follow - to lead him onward, as they had been since the moment he first crossed the fence.
"Fuck!" he said, already running back. He leapt over the corpses of the men he'd killed, pawns someone had sacrificed in a larger game. There was a door at the end of the corridor and he rammed his shoulder against it, sucking in a breath at the pain.
It held fast. He grunted, angry but not surprised, then stepped back to put a bullet through the lock. It shot through clean, but when he pressed against the door again, it failed to shift. A kick jarred his knee but achieved nothing. The way back had been barred.
He had no choice. He had to go the only way they'd left open for him: forward, into the jaws of the trap.
Alex followed a trail of corpses. Her gun trembled in her hand and a distant shot caused her finger to tighten reflexively on the trigger and put a bullet in the floor only inches from her foot. She yelped and holstered her weapon.
The spiderweb runes in the walls were all around her. If she stared at them too long, she began to feel their power drawing her in. This whole building was a trap designed for a spirit traveller, and she wondered why it had been built that way, when Hammond claimed she was the only spirit traveller in the country. Had the place been designed specifically for her? But it wasn't new, or not entirely - it had to be a few years old. Could someone really have been planning to draw her here for that long?
A shot rang out, somewhere behind her this time, and she heard a shout of rage that might have come from the big, bearded leader of the militia. They were all being herded towards the centre of the compound and whatever waited for them there. There was more gunfire, even nearer this time. A shock of adrenaline liquefied her guts and tensed her muscles, urging her to run. She gritted her teeth and fought it, focusing on the walls and the runes inside them, trying to understand what they meant.
When she looked more closely, she could see the pattern in them, loops and swirls repeated from floor to ceiling, but no two quite the same. She thought about a concert she'd been taken to by her father - some political function where he thought his chances of re-election would be improved by the presence of his pretty young daughter. The music had been by Bach, a tune that circled round and round but never quite returned to the beginning, always a little changed. She remembered feeling frustrated as she listened to it, silently willing the melody to complete - to finally end.
She pressed her hand against the wall but it remained unyielding. Understanding it wasn't enough; she needed a way to get past. To end it, she supposed. How had the Bach ended? She seemed to recall that eventually it had returned to the beginning, bringing a sense of completeness that had been oddly satisfying. But where did this place begin? She studied the endlessly repeating pattern and sighed. She didn't know.
Another volley of shots sounded behind her, and this time she obeyed her animal instincts and ran. She'd been running for a very long time, she realised. And the compound was large, but it wasn't that huge, was it? The pattern in the walls was twisting the space inside them, turning the corridors into the same endlessly repeating loop, like one of those Escher prints her second-grade math teacher had liked so much, stairs you could climb forever and never reach the top.
She tried to wrench herself out of it, to return to the finite building in the mundane world. It was useless. Something held her here, either the building's power or her own undisciplined abilities.
Her footsteps slapped against the tile, a hypnotic rhythm. She lost herself in it and only slowly realised there was now a syncopated beat. Other footsteps were approaching - but these people were in the real world. They were all around her now. She could hear the desperate rasping breath of men who were exhausted and very afraid.
She grasped hold of the sound and pulled herself towards it. For a moment she felt herself suspended, neither here nor there. There was a tearing sensation as something inside her ripped itself free, and she found herself exactly where she'd started, but no longer alone.
Jimmy cursed and turned his gun on her as all around him his men yelled in shock. She raised her hands. There was a killing rage in Jimmy's eyes and she waited for the bullet and the pain, but after a second he lowered the gun.
"Where..?" he said.
She smiled, though she knew it looked sickly. "I told you I can walk through walls."
His men muttered and he stared at her. "That's... some power, lady. The good Lord don't give gifts like that often."
S
he thought about Raven, but that wasn't the lord Jimmy was talking about. "Yeah, I know I've been blessed."
She'd emerged into the real world in a meeting room. The carpet was scuffed beneath a glass-topped table and the lights in the ceiling were the harsh neon kind that made everyone look unwell. Jimmy's men were pale and blood-spattered and there were far fewer than she knew he'd brought to the compound. One man clutched his arm against his chest, its wrist mangled and red. Another was supported between two of his fellows, his head nodding down towards his chest as his eyelids drooped.
"We've walked right into their trap," Jimmy said.
She nodded. "Do you think the shofar's even here?"
"Lahav said it was."
"He could be wrong."
His men didn't like that, but Jimmy took time to consider it as he scratched a finger through his beard. "He coulda been mistaken," he said eventually. "What he is lives inside a man, and no man's perfect. But close up he can sense it, and he sensed it here. That's why he couldn't come hisself - it's lethal to him."
"Then they must be using it to lure us in."
"Why? What do they want from us?"
"Not hard to figure, is it?" one of the other men muttered, a redhead with an acne-scarred face. "They want to kill us."
Jimmy shook his head. "I don't buy it, brother. We lost half the men they did and we're in their base. If they wanted rid of us, there musta been an easier way.
"But they wanted us here," Alex said, looking at the runes swirling through the walls around them. They wanted me here, she thought.
"Then here's the last place we wanna be," Jimmy said. "Think you can walk us through these walls, lady?"
His small blue eyes bored into hers, more intelligent than she'd given him credit for, and she could only shake her head. "I'm working on it."
"Work faster," he said as a sudden explosive shock shook the door on its hinges. One of the men grabbed Alex and they rolled together to the side of the room as the door exploded inward in a shower of wood-chips and shotgun pellets.
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