Full darkness had descended. The sky was a latticework of thin clouds and clear starlight, hung over a dark, quiet countryside dotted with farmland and clustered lights from the occasional neighborhood. There was a half-moon. She glanced at the moon a few times to see if it was surrounded by the Van Gogh effect, but it was partly obscured by clouds so she couldn’t tell. She gave up and concentrated on her driving instead.
She kept a back window cracked open. She was traveling at a speed that made the frigid wind knife through the interior but rather than close her window and perhaps trap her daemon outside, she turned up the heat. Welcome warmth blew over her damp hair. She sipped coffee and tried, as much as she was able, to let the tranquil scene soothe her jangled nerves.
She needed to regroup and gather her energy. It was difficult to do when she felt like someone had scraped her insides raw with the jagged edge of a grapefruit spoon. Whatever else happened next—and she truly could not imagine what that would be—she knew she was in for a long, hard night, and another long, hard day tomorrow.
Soon she reached the exit for Highway 131. She suffered a few bad moments as she pulled up to pay at the tollbooth. Her fingers were shaking as she handed money to the attendant, but the middle-aged man seemed bored and sleepy, and he hardly spared her a second glance.
Giddy with relief, she pulled up to the intersection and turned north. She made good time for a while as she passed through the small towns sprinkled throughout southern Michigan. Soon the highway broadened into four lanes. Then she picked up speed again, soaking up a fugitive sense of safety she felt at increasing the physical distance between her and South Bend.
Close to an hour later, she came to the outskirts of Kalamazoo and the traffic increased, and a horrified realization swept over her. I-94 was another fast highway. It hugged the southern part of Lake Michigan like a lover, curved north to St. Joe and then sliced due east across the width of Michigan.
It was a quick route, easy to drive. Someone could have traveled directly from St. Joe and already be in the Kalamazoo area, lying in wait for her arrival.
Wait. Did that even make sense? If she didn’t have any idea where she was going, how could anybody else know? Was she panicking unnecessarily? The problem was, she didn’t understand how they had found her in the first place.
Her attackers were somehow connected to the police, and she was vulnerable through the license plates on her car. But if someone had traced her that way, wouldn’t they have already pulled her over? Or could somebody be following her even now? How could she tell in the dark?
She felt as if she had slammed into a guardrail doing ninety miles an hour. The lingering energy from caffeine and adrenaline drained out the soles of her feet, and her body began to shake. Her eyesight blurred, and she had to keep blinking hard to keep the heavy traffic in focus.
She didn’t have a mind for this kind of existence. She glanced around, trying to spot any anomalies. All the traffic was traveling more or less at the same speed and going in the same direction. That’s what people did on highways.
Her body reminded her that she’d been on the losing end of a fight and dropped to the pavement more than once. Her hands, wrists, arms and shoulders throbbed with a ferocious ache. Between the open window and the blowing heat and her own whirling senses, she couldn’t sense whether or not she still had her airy presence.
“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 h
ip, 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.