“But they could have. I can’t take that risk.”
“Then we’ll find another way for you to practice using your power, a way that doesn’t put anyone at risk. But for now, can we just go to bed?” His words were already slurring as sleep settled on him.
Mouse was tired, too. Her body hurt, and she wanted to crawl up beside Angelo and sleep for days. But she couldn’t shake a growing uneasiness. She slumped into the chair at the far wall, rolling the bone shard in her hands and looking out at the starry sky. How was a magic bone supposed to protect them? But then Mouse corrected herself—Ngara had never said it was meant to keep them safe. She’d said it was meant for revenge.
Mouse didn’t want revenge against anyone. She just wanted to be left alone. And for all his talk about defeating her father, Angelo wasn’t vengeful either. Then again, Ngara had said that the Dreaming not only showed visions of what was and is but also of “something that will be.” Were the Seven Sisters giving them a gift for the future?
Mouse put the bone on the crate beside the bed and gently eased down beside Angelo, curling toward him and putting her hand against his arm. The warmth of his skin reminded her that she was not alone. They would figure this out together. And tomorrow she would find Ngara and, hopefully, some answers, too.
“Where’ve you been?” Mouse asked as Angelo came in through the back door of the little shed. She was stirring oatmeal in a pot on the hot plate that served as their kitchen. “You left so early. I thought we might sleep in—let me tend to all your scrapes and bruises.” She lifted her eyebrows at him suggestively, but her playfulness vanished when she saw the bone shard in his hand. “What are you doing with that?”
“Trying it out. I wanted to see what it could do.”
“And?” She turned back to the oatmeal.
“Nothing.”
She turned off the hot plate and grabbed a spoon. “It didn’t do anything? You couldn’t feel any power coming from it?”
“Not that I could tell.” She could hear the twang of bitterness in his voice. He tossed the bone on the bed and threw himself down beside it. “Maybe it’s only meant for you.”
Mouse leaned against the wall, blowing on a spoonful of oatmeal. “Maybe. You want some breakfast?”
“It’s almost noon.”
“Did you eat already?”
“I’m not hungry.”
With her heightened senses and seven hundred years of experience, Mouse usually read people easily. She could pinpoint the subtle differences between guilt and shame, or between someone lying and someone simply hiding a truth. She could even anticipate what they would say or do. But Mouse had never been able to read Angelo that way. It was one of the things she loved about him—he was unpredictable. He made everything feel new, which was quite a challenge for someone as old as Mouse. But like any normal couple, Mouse and Angelo had learned each other’s norms—a preferred side of the bed, cream or sugar in their coffee, pleasure spots, trigger points. Mouse could tell that something was very off with him.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He shot upright like he’d been waiting for the question. “What’s going on is that your father’s coming and we’re not ready.”
Mouse finished chewing, refusing to take his bait and let her temper rise. “Okay. But that’s no different than yesterday or—”
“Or the day before that or the month before that or this whole damn year,” Angelo said. “Which is what I’ve been telling you. We have to stop pretending that everything’s fine, Mouse.”
“Where’s this coming from? We’ve talked about this. Where else—”
“You’ve talked but you haven’t listened.”
“I’m listening now. Why are you so angry?”
He held the bone up. “God or the Seven Sisters or the Rainbow Serpent—whatever the hell it was—sent us a weapon. We have to learn to use it.”
“Eventually.”
“Now.” He stood up.
“Why’s everything suddenly so urgent?” She couldn’t make sense of his panic or his anger.
“It’s not! I’ve been telling you for months that we need to learn how to use your power to fight your father, but you’ve refused. Always pushing it off until later. You want to go play doctor. You want us to play house. Now we have a—”
“I’m not playing. I am a healer, and I thought we were a family.” Mouse tossed the bowl of oatmeal on the table with a clang. She blew out a breath and counted Angelo’s heartbeats, then tried a different approach. “Why’d you go out so early?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Another nightmare? You haven’t had one of those in—”
“This isn’t about me.” But Mouse could hear the confirmation in his voice.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I’m not a child, Mouse! I can handle a bad dream without mollycoddling.”
Mouse let the silence hang for just a moment. “How many times have you held me while I trembled and wept after a bad dream? I didn’t realize I was being childish when I let you help me.”
“It’s different.” He sank back onto the bed.
“Why? Because you’re a man and I’m a—”
“No! Because I’m already useless.” He sighed and buried his head in his hands.
Mouse sat down beside him. “You’re not useless, Angelo. You give me—”
He shook his head, cutting her off. “I know you’ve kept us here because I couldn’t handle the pressure of being on the run. And I know there’s nothing . . .” He rubbed at his eyes. “When your father comes back—I can’t handle watching him do what he did to you at Megiddo.” His jaw clenched and his hands balled into fists. “But there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I thought maybe this—” He picked up the bone shard.
“You had another dream about Megiddo?”
“Not really—this was different. Your father was there. He was doing something . . . terrible. I was trying to stop him, but I couldn’t get to him. My legs wouldn’t work for some reason.” He pressed his hand down like a vise on his thigh. “And there was another man there—someone I knew but I can’t think of who it was. He was covered in tattoos. I’m not even sure it was a man. His face was full of a terrible sadness. I couldn’t bear to look.”
“Where was I?” Usually when he had dreams about Megiddo, Mouse was in the dirt, dead or dying.
“You were . . .” He looked away. “You were with him.”
“The other man?”
“No. You were with your father.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You were beside him—with him. You were together. You were wearing a cloak like his.”
“What was I doing?” Mouse’s skin prickled with dread.
Angelo shook his head. “Nothing. Not that I remember. You were just there. You had the bone we found in the cave.” He looked over at her. “You were wearing a mask with feathers or hair—something wild.”
“Then how do you know it was me?” The anxiety that had been crawling all over Angelo seemed to be creeping into her now.
“I could see the eyes behind the mask. They were green, like yours.” Angelo looked back down at his hands.
“Your mind is just cramming what I told you about my vision into your old nightmare about Megiddo. It was just a dream, Angelo. I would never join my father.”
“I know.” An airy thread of doubt ran through his words.
Mouse swallowed. “I would die before—”
“You can’t die.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know it was just a dream—but I’m tired of being afraid all the time.”
Sadness spilled over Mouse like oil on water. “I know.”
“And I’m tired of being the weak one. I don’t have your power, and this thing’s obviously not going to work for me.” He handed her the bone shard. “So the only thing I can do is make you ready. I need to know that we’re doing something to get ready, Mouse. Because he’s coming
, sooner or later, and you know it.”
The squeals of the Martu children sifted into the silence. Mouse pushed up from the bed and went to the chair beside the window to watch them play. It took her a few minutes to find the courage she needed.
“There’s something I want to tell you.” Her voice was shaking. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t know . . . I still don’t know what it means.”
“Another secret?” It was more accusation than question.
“No. Just something I needed to figure out before I—it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” She took a deep breath, forcing herself to slow down. She needed to be calm so he would be. “I remembered something that night after the ceremony with Ngara.”
Mouse was afraid of the consequences of what she was about to confess, but she wanted Angelo to stop living in dread, certain that the worst was coming today or tomorrow. She knew what living in the shadows did to a person—dried up their joy, turned them bitter and hard. Maybe the truth would loosen the grip of fear just a little.
“My father’s not coming. Not now. Maybe not ever.”
“Why?”
“Because he has someone else to give him what he wants. I . . . I have a brother. That’s what I couldn’t remember that my father told me at Megiddo. The Dreaming ceremony must have helped my memory and—” If she kept talking, maybe Angelo would stop looking at her that way. But suddenly she had no more words. “I have a brother,” she mumbled again.
“How could you not tell me about this?”
“I was afraid of what you might do.” She whispered it so quietly he didn’t hear.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. I should have told you. I just wanted to figure out what it might mean first. For us, I mean.”
“It means I need to call the Bishop.”
Mouse stiffened. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“They have to know.”
“Why?”
“So they can get ready.”
“For?”
“Whatever your father’s planning to do now that he has a—”
“A child, Angelo. We’re talking about a child.”
“No. We’re talking about something like you.”
Mouse sat back hard like she’d been hit.
“I didn’t mean it like—” Angelo walked over to her. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. But Mouse, we need to—”
She shook her head, biting into her lip. “I can’t talk about this right now.” She stood and moved past him to the door. “I’m going to the clinic, and I need you to leave me alone.”
She grabbed her shoes and ran barefoot across the red, dusty earth toward the laughing children.
Sweat ran down Mouse’s neck after an hour of hunting shells and tossing spears with the children. It felt clean, ordinary, and human—everything she needed to wipe away the sting of Angelo’s words, which had brought back a torrent of nasty taunts from her own childhood. Odd, they’d called her. Witch. Demon. Outcast. The slurs still hurt even after seven hundred years. Playing with the Martu children had served as a joyful antidote until Mouse’s questions sent her in search of Ngara and answers.
Normally Mouse loved a good puzzle—figuring out how the pieces fit together and what picture they made. But when the pieces came in bits of dreams or visions shrouded in myth, how was she supposed to see the edges clearly? And how was she supposed to understand whether the picture they made was of something that had happened, would happen, or might happen? She hated the uncertainty, but it was the idea that she and Angelo were being played with that turned Mouse’s steps away from the clinic, where she’d meant to spend the afternoon, and sent her storming toward the community house, where she knew she would find Ngara.
A suffocating wave of claustrophobia stopped Mouse at the threshold. The old woman sat on the floor, crouched over a large square of linen canvas with shallow bowls of paint lined up at its edges. Mouse’s memory sucked her back seven hundred years to a tiny cell in the monastery at Podlažice where she, too, had hunched over parchment, lined by jars of ink and scattered quills, as she had painted the elaborate illuminations in the Devil’s Bible.
Ngara’s work was elaborate, too, though in a different way, more abstract but with fine detail. She had started at the corner with a small brush, pressing dots of color in intricate patterns that erupted as she moved across the canvas. With shifts of pressure, she controlled the shape and shade of each dot so that the image seemed to emerge completely alive in its making, not like conventional painting that started with sketches and layers that were flat and dead until the artist refined the work, finally bringing the picture to life.
Ngara’s work was already alive, as if she was simply revealing it to the world.
Mouse took a step into the room and dropped cross-legged onto the floor near the open door. She took full, slow breaths to drive away the feeling of being trapped. Ngara silently worked on.
“It’s powerful,” Mouse finally said. Watching the old woman paint seemed to siphon off Mouse’s anxiety. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes. And terrible.”
“Why terrible?”
“It is Kumpupirntily,” Ngara answered as she looked over her shoulder at Mouse. “The Lake of Disappointment.”
“That’s the salt lake near here, right?”
Ngara nodded.
“The children say no one goes there.”
“Because the Nyayurnangalku live there.”
With her unnatural abilities, Mouse had been able to pick up several of the Martu dialects quickly, but the proper nouns, many ancient in their origin, did not translate easily.
Ngara saw the question in Mouse’s face. “It’s the name of the beings that live under the lake.”
“Beings?”
“Like people, but not. Devils. Long, sharp claws to grab you with. Long, sharp teeth to eat you with.”
Mouse half expected the old woman to smile, like a grandmother telling a fairytale, but Ngara did not smile. Her face stayed stony in its warning. “The children know the truth. No one goes to the lake except when the wind blows. When there is wind, the Nyayurnangalku are away, asleep. When there is no wind, they come hunting.”
Mouse shivered. She knew enough of the darkness in the world to believe there was probably some truth to the story. She watched Ngara’s brush trail a long line of black like a maze around the haunting white of Lake Disappointment.
“We found something in the cave,” Mouse finally said. The brush stopped.
“A bone?” the old woman asked.
“How did you know?”
“It’s for the pointing. For the kurdaitcha.”
“The vengeance seeker?”
“Yes.”
“It was deep in the cave beside a river. Angelo nearly—”
“A special bone, then,” Ngara interrupted. “To be so deep inside the land.”
“It was glowing.”
“Ah.” She pushed back to rest on her heels, her hands pressed against her thighs, the black paint dripping from her brush to the floor.
“What does it mean?” Mouse asked.
“A very special bone. From the old ones. For you.” She turned to look at Mouse again, her eyes alit with awe.
“I don’t want it.”
“What you want does not matter. What is coming will come.”
“I don’t care what’s coming. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.” Mouse felt her anger rising, and the general uneasiness that had been haunting her since the Dreaming hardened into an ominous foreboding that sank deep into her bones. Instinctively, she looked out at the sky, searching for the oncoming storm. With a twinge of regret, she realized that this was what Angelo had been trying to tell her. He’d felt it already. And he was right—Mouse had been hiding from it in a land of make-believe.
The old woman shrugged. “The old ones do what the old ones do. I cannot change it.” Ngara pressed her lips togethe
r, then added, “You cannot change it.”
“I will,” Mouse answered defiantly as she stood. “I’ll take the bone back, bury it deep in that damn cave, and then Angelo and I will leave.”
She hadn’t made the decision until she said it, but now that the words had been let loose, they also unleashed an urgency in Mouse, the feeling that she and Angelo were racing against something—and that they were already behind.
Ngara turned back to her painting, pressing red dots into the rivers of black. “What is coming will come. You will not change it.”
“Watch me.”
Mouse fought a panicked impulse to run as she went to find Angelo. He wasn’t at their shed or anywhere around the outstation. Finally, one of the children told her that he’d gone with some others to Parngurr to pick up supplies. Frustrated, Mouse headed to the clinic.
The trapped, hot air in the small room pushed against her like stale breath. She opened a window and turned on the fan that rested on her desk in the corner. She stood in front of it, letting the oscillating air cool her off and quell the seething rebellion inside her. It didn’t matter what Ngara said. It didn’t matter what the Seven Sisters meant with their bone gift. No one had the power to say what was meant to be for Angelo and Mouse except the two of them. And only the two of them. To hell with everyone else.
Mouse shoved the hair out of her face and headed into the tiny, windowless room at the back of the clinic to inventory supplies, thinking about what she needed to restock before she and Angelo left. She knelt before a small refrigerator that took up half the room. It was the only appliance at the outstation with its own designated generator. It stored insulin and other medicines that would spoil in the scorching heat of the desert. As she opened the door, light and cold air rushed out, washing over her. It was as if someone had pulled a curtain back, exposing what was on the other side, and Mouse suddenly realized why Angelo had gone to Parngurr with the others.
She closed the refrigerator door and sat on the floor in the darkness.
Mouse and Angelo had ditched their phones when they’d gone off the grid in the Ukraine. No phone and no credit cards meant they were virtually untraceable. As long as they were together, they didn’t need a phone anyway. Mouse literally had no friends and no family—besides her father—and Angelo had turned his back on all of that when he’d decided to go on the run with her.
Book of the Just Page 6
