Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  Leticia didn’t answer It didn’t matter, because Kyra was mad now . . . mad enough to tempt fate. “Face it, Pocahontas—you couldn’t stop me then and you can’t stop me now, because this is only a fucking dream, isn't it? This world is only as real as I make it, and right now I think it’s way past time for me to open my eyes."

  “They’re not your eyes, Kyra. Remember that."

  The blade pricked Kyra’s eyelid, and just that fast she shut up.

  “That real enough for you, Kyra?"

  It was.

  A hot needle of pain bloomed on Kyra’s face.

  A single red teardrop rolled down her cheek.

  She didn’t say another word.

  “That’s better," Leticia said. “You were getting a little carried away there. Doing the white girl thing . . . speaking with a forked tongue. That’s what this little red girl thinks, anyway.”

  Kyra clenched her teeth, hit that tongue. It was forked, all right. . . or it should have been. Pocahontas was right about that. Kyra’s tongue had been forked a long time ago, genetics laid down bad and brutal by a big bad monster of a daddy and a mama who just didn’t care, and if she could just open her mouth she 'd tell the Crow woman that her cactus- hugging, dirt-kissing, blanket-wearing mojo wasn’t anything when you went up against the eternal power of the dark side.

  But Kyra wouldn’t do that.

  She’d go the dead woman one better

  She’d show . . . not tell. That was the way Kyra would do it. She’d show Pocahontas the error of her ways The little Injun was babbling like the ubiquitous brook. Talking and talking when she should have gone into slice ’n’ dice mode right from jump.

  ‘You think you’re pretty smart,” Leticia said. “But you're not smart, Kyra. You're not in control of this situation.”

  Let her talk. Kyra closed her eyes. Felt the knifeblade there on her cheek. But she wasn't going to listen anymore. She didn't have to listen because she was certain that she was in control of this situation.

  Leticia Hardin was just a picture in her head. So was the knife. None of this shit was real.

  Real was Las Vegas.

  Real was a bathtub in the Skull Island hotel.

  Real was her physical body.

  Kyra had to find a way to connect with it.

  It was simple, really. All she had to do was open the eyes she'd stolen from Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin.

  In a bathtub in a hotel room in Las Vegas, Kyra’s body jerked, eyelids fluttering.

  “It's not that easy, Kyra."

  The knife wasn't against her face now, but Kyra didn't open her eyes. She concentrated, tried to wake up.

  “You see, you're not alone in this anymore. Your vision belongs to me, too. You sucked me into it the second my heart stopped beating."

  The dead woman’s hands dropped onto Kyra’s shoulders.

  “Listen to me—I’m part of your vision now. You can’t just wish me away.”

  She had stronger hands than Kyra imagined.

  “Dan Cody is part of your vision, too.”

  Those hands pushed her down.

  “So is the Crow.”

  Kyra didn’t want to listen to the dead woman’s words anymore. She couldn’t concentrate. But she had to concentrate, because she couldn’t think straight. . . she couldn’t escape this fucking illusion . . . she knew that’s what it was, that’s all it was, but she couldn’t shake free of it because she couldn’t fucking breathe . . .

  She was underwater, invisible hands pressing her lower . . . lower . . . and lower still in a Fiberglas skull brimming with water as warm as blood . . . and Kyra gasped for air but that was a big fucking mistake because all she got was a sick swallow of H2O scented with yarrow and attar of black roses and clary sage.

  She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. A torrent of bubbles escaped her mouth, and she writhed beneath the water—twisting, fighting against hands that seemed to be everywhere . . . pressing her shoulders, covering her mouth, squeezing the blood from her heart. . .

  Napalm flared in Kyra’s lungs.

  The scar ringing her neck shone like a garrote made of scarlet silk.

  The scar pulled tighter . . . tighter . . .

  And darkness came . . .

  Dan opened his eyes.

  The vision was a part of him now. He could feel it, deep inside, a pulse beat of memory that wouldn’t be denied. He wondered if it were this way for the others who shared the vision: Kyra Damon, and the Crow, and—

  He heard a voice in the distance.

  No more than a whisper riding the chill fog, but Dan recognized it.

  “Leticia!” he shouted.

  The Crow cawed and spread its wings. ‘‘No, Dan! Wait!”

  But it was too late for warnings. Dan Cody had heard Leticia’s voice, heard it distinctly. He was already moving, running through the fog. Leti was just ahead . . . she had to be . . .

  Dan sprinted through a maze of tombstones and leaning monuments, heavy boots thudding over turf that was never meant to be marked by the tread of man. There was no path to follow, and he couldn’t have seen one through the low-hanging fog even if it had been there for him to see. He darted between thick tree trunks, knocking off scabs of bark as he hurried onward, into deeper tangles where arthritic branches clawed at him like the gnarled fingers of fairy tale witches, and—

  “Leticia!” Dan called. "Leticia! Where are you?”

  He stood in the fog, waiting for an answer. The cold wind washed his back, and his hair crossed his face in a tangle. He wasn’t even sure if he was heading in the right direction—

  No. This had to be the way. Leticia was up there somewhere. He’d heard her.

  And now he could feel her presence.

  She was there. Just ahead . . . Dan hurried on, the rising wind shifting course, coming at him now. Brittle leaves twisted through the air like huge bats. Twigs and branches broke free of the trees and tore at Dan’s face and hands. But still he kept moving, still he tried—

  "You can’t stay here, Dan,” the Crow called. ‘You have to go now . . . You can’t see Leticia yet . . . It’s not possible . . . We have things we must do . . .”

  "No!” Dan screamed. "NO!"

  The fog streamed over him, cold and damp as death’s own hand. . . then warm . . . and dry . . . and hot as the blazing ramparts of hell. . .

  A blistering wind slapped Dan Cody’s face.

  He opened his eyes.

  He stood in the desert.

  No fog, no trees, no lady love.

  Only the Crow.

  The enchanted bird was perched on Dan’s outstretched arm. A brittle caw broke from the animal, and it took wing.

  Dan lowered his arm. It ached terribly. He stared down as his hand brushed his thigh, numbly, like it wasn’t a part of him at all.

  The back of his hand had been scalded by the desert sun. Trickles of blood wept from deep scratches torn by branches that didn’t exist in this world.

  The scratches healed over in an instant.

  The sunburn faded just as fast.

  But the pain remained.

  It was constant.

  Kyra’s belly heaved.

  Hot water spurted over her tongue, a blistering gush of yarrow and clary sage and attar of black roses.

  “Shit,” Johnny said. He stood above her, wearing a shiny sharkskin suit that was electric Batman blue. “Are you okay, babe?”

  Kyra didn’t answer. She was on all fours in the middle of a puddle on the hotel room floor, wet as the fucking Creature from the Black Lagoon. She spit, then drew a ragged breath.

  Of course, the wound on her eyelid had already healed . . . but Kyra wasn’t aware of that. It was another pain that tortured her most.

  She caressed her neck with black-nailed fingers, and she might have sworn that she felt the imprint of a dead woman’s nasty little hands.

  Sorry, Pocahontas, she thought. You lose again.

  “Man,” Johnny said, because he couldn’t kee
p his mouth shut. “I thought it was San Francisco all over again. I thought you were dead.”

  Kyra opened her mouth.

  Her voice was a razored rasp.

  “Fuck death,” she said. “And fuck San Francisco, too.”

  Sonoran Desert, Arizona

  Dan stood in the desert for a long time.

  The Crow, perched once more on the roof rack of the Dodge Durango, didn’t make a sound. Respectful of Dan’s own silence, the bird seemed to be waiting for the man to make the first move.

  But Dan wasn’t ready yet. He stood there for an hour . . . and then two. He stood there, as still as death, knowing that in truth he was a dead man.

  He imagined that he could stand there forever, if he pleased. His corpse would not roast beneath the unforgiving desert sun, for his sunburned flesh would heal as soon as it was damaged. Though he did not live, his carcass would stubbornly refuse to deteriorate and join the desert soil. He would go on and on, lingering in a single moment, a single silence, until the world was no more.

  There were reasons to linger, certainly. There was much that Dan did not know, more that he did not understand.

  A thousand memories boiled inside him, each one stirring a thousand emotions. Leticia’s first kiss . . . and her last warning . . . and a wedding band ringing against hard black asphalt. Gunshots and murder and blood . . . and the cry of the Crow. Kyra Damon’s dark vision . . . and the black bird’s earnest truth . . . and Leticia’s voice: now a lost whisper in a gnarled, fog-choked forest. . .

  Dan stood in the desert and remembered all of it as the sun peaked in the sky and drifted west. He lived each memory again and again and again as morning became afternoon. But he could find no answer for any of it, no cause that made sense.

  Maybe there was no cause. No grand design, no eternal plan mapped out on high. Maybe there was no reason for any of the little tragedies that seemed to form his life, no explanation for the stolen pleasures that had come so few and far between, no secret seed of truth that could explain what had happened to him, or why.

  Or maybe the cause of all the horror that had entered Dan Cody’s life was so hideously simple that he hadn’t seen it at all.

  Maybe the answer was as simple as a length of rope.

  A hangman’s noose. Kyra Damon had fashioned one from instructions in a forbidden book. She had looped that rope around her neck, and it had delivered a vision to her tortured mind. That rope—twisted thirteen times as ceremony demanded—had led Kyra to Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin . . . and to Dan Cody, as well.

  That rope had wronged Dan and Leticia. And, in wronging them, it had provided an avenue for the Crow’s dark magic.

  But the Crow had been wronged by the witch’s rope, too. The noose had joined the black bird to Kyra’s vision, right along with Dan and Leticia. And now, because of the rope and the thing Kyra Damon had done with it, the Crow needed an avenger, someone to stand against the woman in ways the bird couldn’t.

  Dan thought about it. A simple length of rope. He concentrated on the image, coiled it in his mind. He fashioned the noose, tested its strength, heard the soft whisper of the rope as it pulled tight around Kyra Damon’s neck.

  That sound banished the questions from Dan’s mind. All the unanswerable whys, all the impenetrable wherefores. The hangman’s knot embraced the sliding rope, and the sound it made whispered like a strong, sure tide over the would haves and should haves and could haves that had haunted Dan since he returned to life in a sepulchre manufactured by Westinghouse.

  Dan stood in the desert, and he listened to that whisper until the wind died down.

  In the silence, the sound of the rope was suddenly gone.

  Just that fast, Dan didn’t want to hear the whisper of a hangman’s noose anymore.

  It was another whisper he longed for, another sound.

  The whisper of Leticia’s voice.

  Dan had heard that sound in the land of the Crow.

  If the bird was to be believed, he could hear it again.

  That was the only thing that mattered to Dan Cody, and he knew, at long last, that he really did have a second chance.

  He took it.

  The Merc pulled into the mall parking lot. As was his custom, Johnny ignored the carefully painted white lines and parked the ’49 in the middle of four empty spaces.

  “Our boy’s no mathematical genius,” Raymondo cracked, hanging from the rearview mirror. “He’s especially got problems with spatial relations.”

  As an ice-breaker, the joke went nowhere. Johnny was still too shaken by Kyra’s close call in the hotel bathtub to even notice that he’d been insulted.

  For her part, Kyra didn’t feel like smiling, let alone laughing. At anything. She stared across the parking lot, watching heat waves radiate off asphalt, her gaze drifting over row after row of suburban steel.

  Kyra sighed. They weren’t even close to the stores. Getting there would be a major walk.

  “You could have parked a little closer, Johnny.”

  “I know, Ky. But, shit, I don’t want any steroid-pumped SUV scratchin’ my ride.”

  Johnny got out of the car quickly, before Kyra could protest. “C’mon,” he said. “I noticed this bridal boo-teek when I was shopping for my wedding duds. The place looks really hip. I’ll bet my left nut that you’re gonna love it.”

  Kyra didn’t move for a long moment. The hot air boiled off the blacktop and the dry wind slapped it hard, stuffing it into the Merc’s interior like a rag down a choking man’s throat. Kyra sat there, staring at the dashboard, at the scorpion encased in plastic resin that Johnny had taken from the Spirit Song Trading Post, and she felt like that scorpion had felt in the moment before death took it, like hot waves of plastic resin were pouring down on her, hardening, and in another minute she wouldn’t be able to move or breathe or—

  Suddenly Kyra didn’t want to sit in the car anymore. A minute longer and she’d really get mad, because the heat would drive her crazy enough to think.

  About the Crow . . . and the people she and Johnny had killed at the trading post.

  The people who were supposed to be dead.

  The people who had now entered her vision.

  Or her dream. It might have been nothing more than that, Kyra told herself. Only a bad dream. After all, I was tired when I got into the bathtub . . . and a little drunk . . . and the water was really, really hot. Too hot. No wonder I passed out. No wonder I had a bad dream. And sure, I nearly drowned . . . and sure, I came out of the tub looking like a shriveled-up prune . . . but the important thing is that I'll never look that way after I finish with the Crow. Dream or no dream, my skin will never wrinkle. I'll be immortal, eternally young and beautiful, and my skin will always be as smooth as a marble headstone, as white as—

  Johnny slammed the driver’s side door, and Kyra nearly jumped out of her skin.

  And why? Because deep down, beneath all her carefully considered explanations and rationalizations, Kyra Damon was scared.

  And why was she scared? Because she’d started thinking, that’s why.

  Well, fuck that, Kyra decided. If that was the problem, she just wouldn’t think. Not now. She’d keep moving. Stick with the plan. Get through this day and the coming night.

  When she did that, she’d be stronger.

  Maybe even as strong as the Crow.

  That was all that mattered. Not bad dreams, not accidents in a bathtub. Not even spiritual visitations, if that was indeed the correct interpretation of her nasty little aquatic tango.

  Whatever the cause of that particular nightmare . . . well, it really didn’t matter, because Kyra Damon wasn’t going to fucking think about it.

  Kyra opened the passenger door and stepped into the afternoon’s scalding embrace.

  “How about me?” Raymondo protested. “You’re not going to leave me hanging from this damned mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice, are you? It’s broiling, and I’ll absolutely cook in here without the air conditioner.”

/>   Kyra sighed. It was just more bitching and moaning—this time from an external source—and she was way past tired of it. “You should have expected such problems when you booked passage to the land of piranhas and witch doctors, Raymondo,” she said. “You made your bed, now lie in it.”

  “Wait! At least you can roll down the window a little bit! You’d do that for a dog, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Kyra said. “I’d do it for a dog . . . but not you.”

  She slammed the door, glancing at her reflection in the smoky glass. Well, she thought, shit travels down. That’s what my daddy used to say in the black heartbeat before his fist lashed out, and he was right.

  Kyra Damon didn’t waste a second thinking about the complaints of a freon-deprived shrunken head. Neither did she think about bathtubs, or vengeful revenants, or dead assholes who maybe didn’t want to stay dead. She just stood there in the afternoon heat, hating every hellish degree. And she didn’t even smile.

  “You’re cold, Ky.” Johnny laughed. “Real, real cold.”

  The afternoon sun was dropping in the western sky when Dan Cody slipped behind the wheel of Emily Carlisle’s Dodge Durango.

  Startled, the Crow cawed from its perch on top of the vehicle: Where are you going?

  Cody didn’t answer. Instead, he twisted the ignition key, and he stomped the gas pedal, and he listened to the satisfying rumble of the big Detroit engine.

  The Crow could barely be heard above the mechanical roar. No, Dan! It's not even dark yet! We have to wait for the stars to rise! The Corvus constellation will guide us to Kyra Damon and her familiars. Without the stars, we’ll never find them—

  Releasing the emergency brake, Dan shifted into gear and punched the gas pedal hard. He smiled as the wheels churned dead- white sand, gained purchase . . . and then the truck rocketed forward, speedometer notching zero-to-reckless in less time than it had taken Johnny Church to aim a hogleg pistol and shoot Dan Cody in the back.