When she lowered her eyes again, though, her rescuer was crouched on the ground before her—a spirit inhabiting the body of a raven with a fox’s head.
Trembling overtook her. “Why?” she asked. “Why did you help me?”
In answer, the creature simply bowed its head.
Jacob was right.
It was offering itself as her servant.
“No,” she whispered. Her sword was forming in her hand, but only halfway—as though it knew it wasn’t wanted. The dead bear haunted her. She felt, in some way that she couldn’t explain, that she should not have killed it. Evil it might be, but it had helped her—had done her a service she asked it for.
It had served her, as she had requested that it do, and she had killed it to cover her own sin.
“Go,” she said, gathering all the strength she could into her voice and directing it at the creature. “Leave me.”
It looked up, its eyes unnervingly full of intelligence. “If you do not want us,” it said, “why do you call for us?”
“I don’t!”
“You do,” it said.
And with a flap of its black wings, it flew away.
She watched it go and then stopped to take in her surroundings. She was in a desert. Twisted thorn trees and low ground scrub grew from sandy, rocky ground. Low hills surrounded her on every side. She suspected she was lost in the terrain somewhere between Lincoln and the mountains to the north, but other than that, she might as well have been on Mars for all she knew where to go from here.
“Great,” she muttered.
She could, of course, call for the demons and ask them to get her out of here.
They’d been rather helpful so far.
“Blast it,” she snapped. “Stop it, Reese.”
But what was she supposed to do now?
* * *
Tyler didn’t know if he simply lost his grip or if the horse bucked him off. He did know that he found himself pelting through the air toward a body of water, which he hit clumsily. Salt. He’d come home.
He swam to the surface and burst into sunlit air. A few feet away, Jacob was gasping for breath. The shore was an easy swim away, and Tyler struck out for it automatically, calling to Jacob to follow him.
Tyler reached the beach with Jacob on his heels, and as he staggered onto shore, Jacob grabbed his shoulder, swung him around, and punched him fully in the face.
Tyler went down, blood spurting from his nose and pain splitting through his head. Jacob stood over him panting like a bull, his knees bent in a fighter’s stance, waiting for Tyler to rise and fight him.
Tyler decided that was unwise.
“What are you doing?” he shouted through the pain, hoping his words were intelligible.
“Where is she?” Jacob roared.
“Reese? I don’t know! I didn’t lose her!”
Jacob went for a kick, and Tyler rolled away and got warily to his feet, keeping his distance.
“I don’t want to fight you,” he said.
“Of course you don’t,” Jacob shot back. “You’re a weakling and a coward. And a fool. What were you thinking back there?”
“I was thinking we could get to Lincoln faster,” Tyler said. “You wanted to!”
“You’re playing with powers you don’t understand,” Jacob raged, “and you’ve lost her—she’s my best hope for justice, and you’ve lost her. Maybe killed her. Are you proud of yourself?”
Tyler’s rising anger was checked when he realized Jacob’s eyes were full of tears, and he remembered the man’s response to Julie’s death.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still keeping his distance. Jacob seemed to be relaxing a little—he hoped. He touched his face, inspecting. His nose wasn’t broken, although his eye was swelling and he was sure he looked a bloody mess.
“Look,” Tyler said, “I don’t know what happened to Reese, but you beating me up isn’t going to help us find her.”
“Where are we?” Jacob asked, suddenly switching tacks. He looked around him wildly. “Do you know this area?”
“Maybe,” Tyler said, taking in the ocean, the beach, and the dunes. The sweeping cliffs of home were missing—this wasn’t his coast. “Not sure,” he confessed. “But I’m guessing we’re still north of Lincoln, so if we just keep the ocean to our right, we’ll head the right way.” He paused, his thoughts going in multiple directions. “Why did we fall?”
Jacob didn’t try to answer that. His voice was still choked with anger. “That would help if we knew Reese went to Lincoln.”
“She fell just before we did,” Tyler said. “Maybe she’s nearby.”
“Do you have any idea how fast we were travelling?” Jacob shot back.
“We . . . no.”
“Then you have no way to say how close she might be. Or how far.”
Tyler wiped the blood from his face and grimaced. Jacob had an amazing ability to make him feel like something scraped off someone’s shoe.
Jacob regarded him with an expression somewhere between aggression and cunning. “Well,” he said when Tyler had finished wiping most of the blood from his face and staunching the blood flow with his sleeve, “you got us into this, holy boy. Get us out.”
Tyler stared at him. Behind them, waves washed up calmly on the shore, rolling in rhythmically from a calm sea. “I can’t,” he said finally.
“You called up horses of fire to transport us through the air. Find Reese.”
Tyler found himself assailed with confusion. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t do that.”
Jacob raised his eyebrow. “Then who did?”
“Um. The Spirit.”
“Then tell the Spirit to find Reese.”
“I don’t tell the Spirit what to do.” His cheeks flushed hot.
“A lot of good you are, then,” Jacob said. His eyes were flaring dangerously. He turned and began to stalk up the beach—purposefully. Tyler watched him go for a few minutes, then started to run after him when Jacob turned inland and started up the dunes.
“Wait!” he called. “What are you going to do?”
He thought he knew the answer to that question.
Jacob was going to do what he’d been urging Reese to do.
He was going to call on the demons.
Chapter 7
Julie woke to the sound of a clock ticking. She was lying on something cool and soft and damp—moss.
She opened her eyes. A canopy of leaves and branches overhead rustled as a pair of goldfinches flickered through it.
The ticking was her own watch.
She checked it. Four o’clock in the afternoon.
What afternoon, she didn’t know.
She didn’t sit up. She was gripped by an irrational fear that if she tried to move, she would discover some terrible injury. This despite the fact that as she lay there, she felt no pain, nothing wrong—just peace and restful comfort.
But the fear wasn’t irrational, she remembered. It was entirely rational, because she had been shot. Hadn’t she?
And the men who did it had been holding knives and were leering at her with promises in their eyes that she didn’t care to remember.
So where in the world—
And what—
“I’m dead,” she said out loud. “This is the cloud.”
Maybe. But then why could she hear her watch ticking?
She closed her eyes again and tried to remember. She remembered Miranda’s screams, and going into the night to try to save her—but Miranda hadn’t been there. She’d only found the men, and felt an undeniable demonic presence in the air, and they had been brandishing those knives and one of the men had shot her.
Could she remember the bullet hitting?
That was a stupid question, she told herself. He had fired at almost point-blank range. There was absolutely no way he had missed.
One way to settle that, she decided. She lifted her head and opened her eyes and inspected herself. She was still wearing long pajamas and a sweater. The cuffs
of her striped pajama pants were a little dirty—from running across the street, she supposed. There was no blood, no tears in the fabric, no bullet holes.
She was fairly sure she wasn’t dead and still in pajamas.
But there was something in her memory. A moment—an encounter—death.
She sat up slowly. Nothing hurt. She reached for her feet and stretched. The goldfinches overhead had been joined by a second pair, flashing in and out of the branches overhead.
And something else.
Something else was up there.
She focused her eyes on the branches, trying to catch it—trying to see clearly what was just teasing at the edges of her vision. Glints of light, movement. The more she tried to focus, the harder it was to see. She stood slowly, wanting to get closer, and the birds flew away, leaving bobbing branches behind them.
A rustling behind her made her whirl around.
Nothing.
She was in the woods. Trees, not too thick, surrounded her on every side, letting in golden and green light from above. The ground was mossy in places, stony in others. Although the trees overhead and on every side were mostly deciduous, the air smelled heavily of pine. The whole feel of the woods was friendly. It might be any stretch of land in cottage country, welcoming and probably not far from water. Except for her bizarre memories—and the fact that she had been in Lincoln at night last she knew—nothing about this place was threatening.
Something rustled again—this time on the other side. She wheeled around once more and this time saw a movement of light in the trees.
What was she seeing?
She closed her eyes. Concentrated on breathing slowly, methodically. Somehow she felt that whatever presence was here with her, she would not see it with her eyes alone.
A voice spoke into the silence of her heart.
Hello.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
You know.
“How did I get here?”
I brought you.
“Why?”
She opened her eyes. The presence was still invisible, but as she listened for the voice again, she felt a sense of someone smiling.
And the voice said:
I have a plan.
* * *
When Chris reached the safe house, the street was blocked off on both sides with caution tape. A squad car with its lights going sat at one end. He parked a street over and walked to the scene, looking for Lieutenant Jackson.
He spotted the man talking to a couple of other officers across the street from the house. Chris raised his hand to get his attention as he approached.
A woman officer cut off his approach. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I need to talk to the lieutenant,” Chris said. “I can help . . .”
Jackson walked up behind the woman, making further bluffing unnecessary. “I’ll talk to this young man,” he said, dismissing her with his tone. She backed off, and Jackson lowered his voice—its vehemence undeniable despite the lower volume.
“What are you doing here? Where’s your girlfriend?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that.”
“She took off with my star prisoner,” the lieutenant said.
“You let her.”
“She was supposed to come back by now. Instead she called and told me nothing helpful. At the time I was still willing to play along, but things have changed. I traced the call back to a pay phone a few days’ drive up north, but we haven’t been able to track them down. I need that guy back here, now, or you know what’s going to hit the fan.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, taken aback. “I don’t know where she is. I thought she would come here when she heard about the . . . the murder.”
Hope flashed in Jackson’s eyes. “You think she will?”
“She cares about these people,” Chris said. “She’ll come for Miranda.”
The look on Jackson’s face grew darker. “I wish I could say she’d find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“The kid’s gone.”
“What?”
Jackson growled. “Listen, kid, this is off the record. You understand? I am telling you because you and your kind have made this hot water hotter, and if there’s anything you can do to help me, you owe it to me by now.”
“Agreed,” Chris said, not bothering to correct Jackson’s perception. The Oneness were not his kind. But they did owe the man something.
“The kid is gone,” Jackson repeated. “She disappeared last night. Your girlfriend’s got nothing to see here.”
“She might need to see the body,” Chris said.
“Good luck.”
That one caught him completely off guard. “What? What do you mean?”
“We don’t have that either.”
“What are you talking about? The news said Julie had been murdered.”
“I know what the news said. It said what we told them—and as far as we know, it’s true. We found blood—hers—and a murder weapon, and we’ve got an eyewitness—neighbourhood kid—who saw her get shot at point-blank. What we don’t got is a body.”
“The murderers took it?”
“Not according to the eyewitness, they didn’t.”
“Then what?” Chris asked. “It got up and walked off by itself?”
“Under normal circumstances, my best guess would be that the killers came back and took the body to dispose of it. But scouring the usual places has turned up nothing so far. All we’ve got is a witness who saw someone killed and the killers run away, leaving the body, and then no body. And these aren’t normal circumstances. As I don’t have to tell you.”
“And Miranda?” Chris asked. “Did anyone see what happened to her?”
“No. Somehow she got taken from the house without any of the guards noticing. And the kid who saw the murder didn’t see a girl.”
Chris frowned. “Maybe she just ran off. Heard something, saw something, got scared.”
“Either way, we’re looking for her.”
Chris nodded. The conversation hadn’t left him much room to process the fact that Reese wasn’t here.
But she would come. She’d be here. The murder was all over the news; she’d have to hear about it. And from the reports he’d heard, the media didn’t know that the body was missing, or that Miranda was.
If Reese knew that, she might not come here at all, leaving Chris without a lead once again. A thought he hated.
“So,” Jackson said, spreading his feet and folding his arms, “What can I do for you?”
“I need to find Reese.”
“You and me both.”
“I think she’ll come here. If you can just give me some kind of authorization to hang around . . .”
“Suits me,” Jackson said. “I’d rather have you waiting for her here than somewhere I can’t keep an eye on you. I might as well tell you, because you seem like an intelligent man, that your girlfriend is two steps away from some serious hot water. Jacob is suspect number one in this murder. If Reese doesn’t bring him back, she’s going to look like an accomplice.”
Chris nodded. “I understand.”
“You tell me if she shows up.”
“I’ll do the right thing,” Chris said, and added, “sir.”
Jackson looked him hard in the eye. “I believe you will. Just make sure the right thing is right for all of us. Stick around, if you like. Don’t touch anything.”
The lieutenant went back to work, and Chris wandered up the street. The air was remarkably cooler today—like autumn had suddenly come into the area, unannounced but more than welcome. The houses were quiet. He guessed at least some folks had vacated.
Stepping back onto someone’s lawn, he surveyed the scene. The safe house was across the street from a dark alley where most of the cops were concentrated—the murder site, he guessed. The house to the left sported a window looking down on the scene. Must be where the witness had been.
On an impulse, he crossed
the street to the house, looked around to make sure he wasn’t being noticed—the cops were ignoring him—and knocked.
The door cracked open immediately, just long enough for whoever was on the other side to get a good look at him—and then the door opened and the person practically hauled him inside and shut the door behind them.
Slightly bewildered, Chris found himself facing an old woman with a small boy tucked behind her. “Uh, hi,” he said. “I’m—”
“You’re not a cop, are you?” the woman asked.
“No.”
“Sit down,” she said, waving at him to sit. He lowered himself cautiously onto a love seat. The living room was crowded and dark, the street blocked out by dusty blinds and stacks of paper and other clutter. He didn’t get the feeling that this woman ever really let the sun in. “Sonny,” she said to the boy, “go get this man a drink.”
Chris started to protest, but the boy was already off to the kitchen. He folded his hands in his lap, uncomfortably aware that the woman was scrutinizing everything about him.
“Why did you bring me in here?” he asked.
“Why did you knock on my door?” she shot back. Her quickness surprised him.
“I wanted to talk to whoever saw the murder last night,” Chris said. “I realize it might not be easy to talk about, but—”
She cut him off. “He’ll tell you everything. Everything. What he didn’t tell the police. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”
It took him a moment to respond to the unexpected question.
“Well?” she insisted.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, that’s what I want to hear. But why do you want to tell me?”
She looked, he thought, remarkably like a witch from a children’s cartoon. White hair, slight hunch, long nose. She was quick like one, too.
Her words did nothing to alleviate the effect.
“Because you smell like them,” she said.
The boy was back, handing Chris a glass of tepid water. He took it and tried to set it down, but there wasn’t a clear surface in the room that he could see. “Um,” he said. “Like who?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “You know who. Sonny, tell the man what you saw.”
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