Sinners and Saints

by Jennifer Roberson

  I remembered the young woman who had emerged from the bruises, the blood, the swollen jaw. I remembered the pride, the certainty of what she knew, the frustration, even anger, that no one would believe her.

  Cassandra could have prevented the Trojan War. Had Paris believed his sister, had she not been mocked, been dismissed as “god-touched,” as she put it, locked away, punished, raped . . . then the Trojan War might have been avoided. Helen would have remained Helen of Sparta, wife to the king, Menelaus, and perhaps never known to the modern world. No Agamemnon with his massive navy in the Aegean Sea, no Trojan Horse, no sacking of the city.

  Would Heinrich Schliemann have found the ruins of Troy in 1870 without such a tale to drive multiple excavations? Would there have been ruins if Cassandra’s warnings had been heeded? Certainly Homer’s Iliad would have been substantially different.

  But it was Greek mythology. Mythology in and of itself is not a foundation for actual history. Yet because of Schliemann’s discovery, some now believed in a historical underpinning to the stories.

  Hell, we were dealing with angels. Why wouldn’t Cassandra tell the truth of Troy? Why wouldn’t she be real? Like Robin Hood, like King Arthur . . . fictional tales of composite characters based upon kernels of historical fact. But truth in the tales.

  Her icy blue eyes, as she held my hand and gazed at me, had been full of certainty. Of purpose. The woman had been given a gift, just as I had. I knew what I felt when my senses came alive to the world. It filled me up. It wasn’t false.

  She had given me her blessing. She had given me her trust. Cassandra was a woman who had been mocked, imprisoned. Trust, to the betrayed, is not something they do lightly. If she did it at all.

  Remi drew me back to the moment. “If she could tell you—would you want to find out what lies ahead?”

  I chewed at a lip as I thought about it. “I’m not sure I’d want to know what lies ahead. First of all, what she sees isn’t completely reliable because it’s in fragments. But I just think I’d rather take life as it comes.”

  The entrance to the parking lot was gated. Remi simply pulled up alongside the fence and parked; we could climb through the unbarbed three-wire fence. “But knowing in advance does allow you to put your affairs in order.”

  I looked at him. “Did you put your affairs in order when Grandaddy told you to come to Flagstaff with no prior warning—and no explanation why? I’m betting not.”

  Remi pulled the key, stared out the windshield as if lost in thought. Then he looked at me. “If I’d had any idea at all what we were comin’ to, the least I’d have done is told my little girl goodbye.”

  * * *

  —

  The trail was still muddy in spots, the residue of the morning’s hail and thunderstorm. Undergrowth and deadfall had kept the soil damp and, in some places, slick. The lug soles on my boots helped a great deal, but only until the channels got caked with mud. Then I was no better off than Remi in his smooth-soled cowboy boots.

  I wasn’t certain of the rules about hiking designated trails behind a locked gate, though I imagine if something happened we’d be legally liable.

  Because the moon was full, we at first avoided using flashlights and lanterns. But without, it was more difficult to see some of the twists and turns. Once we got up higher, well above the parking lot and road and looking for caves, we’d go with artificial light.

  We’d just reached the dual parade of immature oaks lining the trail when sparks went off in my eyes. Bright flashes of light, and odd pinging pains accompanying each bright pinprick. Opening my eyes wide or squinting made no difference. Colors were seeping in behind the flashes. Red along the edges, red bleeding in from the shadows. Red in its negative symbology.

  I stopped short. In my mind, red was flowing like paint across the floor. Or blood.

  I said, “Wait—”

  But Remi didn’t hear.

  The pinpricks of white light strobed crimson, reminding me of the orbs that had accompanied Shemyazaz that night in the Zoo.

  “Gabe? You coming?”

  I blinked hard twice, then twice more. The red flowed away. No more pinpricks, no more flashes. The night was the night again, darkness mitigated by moonlight, not red paint or blood.

  “Yeah.” I frowned as I placed my boots more carefully. “Yeah, I’m good. Just—probably the altitude. Still.” I was moving again, walking steadily behind Remi. “How long does it take to adjust?”

  Remi turned his head to speak over his shoulder. “Guess it depends on how high. I know climbers at Everest spend something like thirty to forty days before they try to summit.”

  “But Everest is over twenty-nine thousand feet! This is, what?—seven thousand? You read up on all this stuff.”

  “Where we were when we met Mary Jane? About nine thousand. The taller peaks go up to twelve.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah. Maybe a few more days to adjust.” I was out of breath already. “Makes me feel old.”

  A streak of red suddenly shot across my vision. Inside my eyeball I felt something like a rubber band pop. It strobed white, then red. Another pop, and something like skin being peeled from the interior of my eyeball.

  “Wait,” I called. “Hang on a minute.” I closed my right eye, stood motionless. With my left eye I watched Remi come back down the trail.

  “What’s up?”

  “Flashes of light.” I blinked hard again. I looked at Remi, widened my eyes, let the lids go back to normal. All was well once more. Normal. “Seems okay now. You seeing anything?”

  “Nope. But if you need to, you can go back down. It might could be altitude.”

  “You go up, I go up. I go down, you go down. You don’t get to do this alone. I know you want to see if Shemyazaz has her, but you’re not going alone. We’re not doing the movie thing.” I put myself back into motion, actually passed him. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  “We’re not risking your vision.”

  I was in front of Remi now, blinking into darkness. “I don’t think it’s my eyes. I think I’m doing my thing. You know.”

  “Sensing something?”

  “I’ve got to come up with a cool name for it. Like Spidey sense. Maybe something like angel vision. I could work with th—”

  Red. Red red red.

  I hesitated, blinded by red, nothing, nothing but red-crimson-scarlet. My balance was decaying even as I halted and spread my legs to adjust my center of gravity.

  To my right were massive granite boulders. I could smell charcoal from old fires, wet mud, aged stone, stone that pressed down upon me, though when I reached out to touch it nothing but cool air met my hands.

  “You okay?”

  “It’s like—” I grunted, gritted my teeth. “It’s like an overload—it’s too much all at once, too bright, too much.”

  I reached for the turquoise, the yellow, the strength of a sacred mountain.

  Red is violence.

  Red is war.

  Red is hatred.

  Red is suffering.

  I was nearly frantic from it. Never had I sensed this. Never had the weight of it come down upon me.

  “Ambriel.” I sucked in a hard breath. “She said our gifts hadn’t manifested fully yet.”

  “And you think that’s what’s happening?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

  “Gabe?”

  Danger.

  Aggression.

  Pain.

  Murder.

  Was Kelly dead? Had our Ripper killed his fifth? Was our Ripper the original, or a copycat?

  “Gabe?” I felt his hand on my upper arm. His fingers pressed deeply into my flesh. “Gabe!”

  “Red,” I mumbled. “It’s red . . . red . . . rum. Redrum. Redrum.”

  Remi’s tone was tight. “Is she dead? Is that what you’re sensing?
Gabe—is she dead?”

  “Red room,” I said. “Red room, red rum.”

  And then his voice wasn’t tight anymore, but spilling fear and worry. “Is she dead?”

  I sat down hard, because Remi made me. He just shoved me down and planted my butt on a felled tree. I looked up into his face, then shut my eyes, closed tightly, leaned down, curled my fingers deeply into my hair, elbows on knees.

  Everywhere was red.

  “Gabe—is she dead?”

  “—the rivers . . . the rivers run red with the dead—”

  “Gabe, you with me?”

  “—blood and fire and billows of smoke—”

  “Gabe!”

  “‘The sun and moon will be darkened, and the stars no longer shine.’”

  I felt him then, felt him peeling one of my hands away from my hair. He uncurled rigid fingers, held them open, then filled the palm with something damp, something crumbly. He closed my fingers upon the substance and pressed them closed.

  “Green,” he said. “Green. All that is good of green, here in your hand. The green of the grass, the green of the trees, the green of new growth, of new beginnings. The green of health and of hope. Be at ease. Be renewed.”

  I opened my eyes and looked into my hand. Saw soil, and seed, and nothing at all of red.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  I looked into his face, saw a divided concern: for me, for Mary Jane. “I don’t know if she’s dead. But power is here. Power that doesn’t belong. Power that profanes.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Remi made me drink water, eat an energy bar. I told him I felt fine, which was the truth, but he wanted me to stay put a little longer. I tried explaining that this was not normal for me, this was not what I felt when I opened myself to the deeper workings of the world, but he came back around to what I had brought up: Greg’s statement that our abilities were not yet fully realized, and thus we were ‘weak’ in whatever power mature angels—real angels—could tap.

  “So it could be two things,” Remi declared. “Your super powers are bleeding out around the edges of whatever blocks them from full realization. Maybe they need more room. They’re gettin’ squoze, so they’re knocking at the door.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “You do know ‘squoze’ is not the past tense of ‘squeeze.” I paused. “Even if you are from Texas.”

  He shrugged. “Kind of like teeth.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. “Teeth? How did we get to teeth?”

  “You know. Baby teeth fallin’ out to make room for the adult teeth.”

  “Oh.” Okay, that made a little more sense. Sort of. “So what I felt, all the red, is an adult tooth coming through?”

  Remi looked thoughtful, as if replaying the exchange. “Well, you know. Might could be. All those adult teeth fixin’ to settle in and be what you’ve got the rest of your life, but they gotta make room for themselves.”

  I squinched one eye closed and stared up at him, expressing profound doubt. “What about you?” I asked. “You’ve got super powers, too. Are they starting to knock out your baby teeth?”

  He considered that. “Well, I did sense Molly at NAU. There was no doubt in me. She poked her head around that door and I just knew, with everything in me. But I don’t feel reliable yet. So I reckon I’ve got more baby teeth to get rid of.”

  “You know this is really stupid, don’t you?”

  “What is?”

  “Using teeth as an illustration.” I rose, tucked the empty water bottle into the gear bag. “Come on, let’s start climbing again.”

  “I thought you needed to go down.”

  “No, you thought I needed to go down. But I feel fine. Tired?—yes. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for a couple of days and we’ve been . . . well, ‘busy’ is an understatement, but it will do. I think the altitude is getting to me. Anyway, let’s go.” I hooked the gear bag straps over a shoulder and headed out again.

  * * *

  —

  We never made it to the caves. The higher we got, the more I was aware of flashes at the edges of my vision, little explosions of red, now intermixed with black. At first I just tried to blink it away, but a headache set in along with nausea. Apparently I started breathing like a bellows, but I was concentrating so hard on maintaining momentum that I didn’t realize it. Remi caught on and literally stopped me by standing in the middle of the trail, putting up both hands, and letting me walk into them.

  I wasn’t watching. Suddenly cowboy boots filled my field of vision and I bounced off Remi’s hands and stiffened arms, staggered backward. He grabbed a handful of leather jacket and yanked me back before I could fold and do a sprawled, inelegant butt-plant on the ground.

  “Whoa,” I mumbled.

  “Whoa,” he agreed, and walked me backward to a pile of granite boulders. “Sit.”

  I sat, steadied myself with braced arms on either side of me. Under the moon everything was rendered black and white, like an old photograph.

  “No red,” I said. “No colors. Not like before.” I thought about it. “Could throw up, though.”

  “How ’bout makin’ that a ‘no.’” Remi had squatted down before me, then thought better of it and scootched over a little. He turned on a lantern, set it on an adjoining boulder. “At least give me a warning before you spew.” He peered into my face. “You look like the cheese fell off your cracker. So tell me a story.”

  “It’s different,” I said. I rubbed the back of my hand against my brow, felt perspiration. Not being an actual superhero who always hides his true condition, I didn’t stint the details when Remi asked. “Headache,” I said. “Upset stomach. Little shaky.”

  “But nothing like before?”

  “No. A few flashes of red a bit ago, but that’s all gone back to normal. I’m seeing just fine. It’s kind of like when you’re so hungry you’ve got a headache and upset stomach.”

  Remi’s phone rang, which startled both of us. It was a regular ringtone, though, unlike the familiar five tones from Close Encounters that played when the angel phones rang. His was something country, of course.

  He answered, then shot bolt upright to his feet. “Mary Jane?—hang on, I’ll put you on speaker.” He did so. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay. I’m fine.” Her voice sounded unsteady, and we could hear noisy breathing. “It was Yaz. He took me to a cave, but Ganji found me and talked Yaz into letting me go. I’m coming down now. He didn’t hurt me. Actually, I feel a little sorry for him. Anyway, where are you guys? Can you maybe come pick me up?”

  I was puzzled. “She feels sorry for him?”

  But Remi was just so relieved he didn’t even try to answer. I was less relieved not because I didn’t care, but because I was trying to keep my belly in line. “We’re halfway up the mountain,” he told her via speaker. “We thought—” He broke off, swore, repositioned himself to improve the signal. “We thought of the caves. We’re right near a big ol’ pile of granite formations, over by the oaks.”

  Park ranger Mary Jane knew the trails intimately. “Okay, I’m not far.” Her tone had a weird echoey sound. She came around a turn in the trail and damn near fell over us. She looked tired, but then she hadn’t had much opportunity to sleep, either.

  Remi disconnected, too. They stared at each other for a couple of moments, both smiling, but they weren’t quite to the point where I’d suggest they get a room. Hell, Remi was so polite he’d probably want to ask her father if he could kiss her on the cheek.

  Kelly asked about Cassandra. “What happened with her? Is she okay?”

  I thought back over the last few hours. “Long story.” But then I frowned, remembering again how Greg had simply assumed Cassandra would go with her. I wish I had asked Cassandra why she was so willing. I’d told
her she didn’t have to go, that she could choose to stay, but there never had been any indication she truly considered it, that she wasn’t willing to go.

  Kelly sat down abruptly on the rock next to the lantern. She emitted a whooshing breath, stretched out shorts-bared legs and rolled her ankles in circles. “Tired.” Then she rubbed at her temples. “Anyone got any ibuprofen on them?”

  “We’ve got stuff from the bathroom.” Remi squatted, unzipped the bag, fished out the bottle, tapped two tablets into his palm, handed them over and followed with the remaining bottle of water.

  Kelly swallowed the tablets with a couple of slugs of water, nodded her thanks. “Now, who is this Ambriel person? He went on and on about wanting her—and I don’t mean in the romantic way. He was angry. Frustrated. Mad about her, not at me. In fact—” she smiled faintly “—he actually apologized. Once his temper cooled, I think he regretted abducting me. Or, as he put it, borrowing me. He kept going off on tangents in a foreign language, and he wasn’t clear in English, so I have no idea what he was so pissed about. He did say he wanted you to find this Ambriel, and then you’d trade me for her.”

  “Remi can tell you about Ambriel later.” I figured they’d be spending a little more time together, while I crashed. As Remi bent to put down the gear bag, I gestured, caught it when he slung it to me. I dug out the ibuprofen and took a couple. Kelly handed me the water bottle, then winced in apology. Most of the water was gone. I waved the regret away. “‘S okay.”

  “You two ready to go on down?” Remi asked. He studied me more closely. “You good to go? We can stay put a little longer, if you want.”

  Kelly looked at me more sharply. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “Kinda.” I shrugged when she kept staring at me. “We are complicated guys,” I said, “with complicated stories and even more complicated explanations. More to come. But right now, yeah, I’d like to motivate out of here and go get up close and personal with my bed.”

  Remi reached down, pulled me to my feet as we gripped one another’s wrists. My sore hip twinged, but I waved that away, too. Before anyone asked further, I said I’d walk it off.