“I don’t know. But you must be ready.”
“They will want our stories . . . of you.”
“Yes. And you should tell them whatever they need to hear. It’s the only thing that will keep you safe.”
“We will not give away our stories. They are our treasure.”
“They won’t ask, Ngara. They will take them from you.”
“We will hide our stories and ourselves out on the land. We have tricked the whitefella before.” She turned and said something to one of the women. The woman stepped out of the circle guarding Jack and went back into the community house. Mouse could hear her giving instructions to the children still inside, and then the roar of the engine drowned her out.
Angelo was climbing out of the jeep before it even stopped. “What happened?” As the women parted, exposing Jack at their center, Angelo asked, “Who’s this?”
“Jack Gray,” Mouse answered. She’d already told Angelo all about Jack.
“You okay?” he asked.
Mouse nodded. “But we need to—”
“I’ll get the bags.” He started off toward their shed.
“Angelo, don’t forget the thing on the table beside the bed.”
Mouse hadn’t been able to make herself pack the bone the Seven Sisters had given her. If she took it, she felt that she was accepting the future the Sisters had laid out for her in the Dreaming. The bone shard made it all feel true in a way that terrified Mouse.
Angelo turned to look at her, knowing. “You sure?”
“We might need it.”
Her stomach twisted when she saw the fear in his eyes as he nodded and took off again toward the shed, but she clenched her jaw at the hot bile climbing up her throat. She turned back to Jack. “You were stalling earlier, so I know someone’s on the way. How’d you contact them? How close are they?”
Jack just looked at her, blankly.
She slammed her knee into his face. Blood spewed from his nose and splattered his white hair.
He spat. “Give me my stone, and I’ll tell you.”
But Angelo was already back with the bags, pulling open the hatch on Jack’s four-wheel drive. “Mouse.”
She looked over at him and didn’t like what she read on his face. She peered into the back of the vehicle where Angelo pointed. “Is that a—” he started to ask.
“Sat-com device or signal booster of some kind—yeah. Like the military uses.” Mouse turned back to Jack. “Who the hell is coming?”
He turned his face up to her and smiled, blood pooling between his teeth and stretching like string between his lips. “The Reverend.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A storm of dirt and stone swirled around the SUV as Mouse and Angelo raced across the outback. Jack bounced against the back seat of the car, his hands tied with the jumper cables and his hair clinging to the drying blood on his face. They were headed south—away from the outstation. The Martu had crammed as many people as they could into their two jeeps and headed north to hide in the hills along the Rudall River. Those who couldn’t fit in the jeeps gathered supplies and walked out into the desert. They were the old ones led by Ngara.
Mouse looked out her window into the sky where she knew the Pleiades would be if only she could see past the late afternoon sun. Silently, she asked the Seven Sisters to hide Ngara and the others as they had once hidden their sister.
When Mouse had seen the communications device, her mind had worked out the rest of the strategy. They’d thrown Jack into the car and said a hasty good-bye. Even with a device like that, communication would be limited by distance, and whomever the Reverend had at the ready would need to be close enough to act on any information Jack sent them. They had to be close, but close in the wide expanse of the outback was a relative term. Best bet for their base of operation was Port Hedland.
That was three hundred miles across impossible terrain. Ngara had told her that Jack had been waiting for about three hours. That still gave Mouse and Angelo plenty of time to draw the Novus Rishi away from the Martu and then make a run for it themselves. They kept Jack’s phone and the com device active, hoping that whoever was coming after them would follow the signal and bypass the outstation. Mouse meant to dump the electronics at Lake Disappointment and then turn west. They’d leave Jack at Newman and move on toward the coast, staying clear of the Great Northern Highway, where they would be easy to spot.
But Mouse knew she’d built the plan on too many ifs.
She turned and looked back as a jolt sent Jack slamming into the door. “Who is this Reverend?” she asked.
“Give me my stone,” he said.
“What stone?” Angelo asked, his arms jerking as he wrestled the tug of the steering wheel.
“He has a piece of one of the murals from Podlažice.”
Angelo glanced at her sharply and then back out the window as he navigated the rugged terrain.
She understood his concern. “It only has a ghost of power left in it—barely enough to make the locator spell work and mess with Jack’s head. It’s not a danger to me.”
Her father’s power, concentrated and potent in the undiscovered ruins of the monastery, had twisted Mouse’s mind when she and Angelo had gone looking for the missing pages of the Devil’s Bible. That tainted power had nearly driven her insane.
“It’s not affecting me,” she reassured Angelo. “I’m in control, okay?”
“Since you’re in control,” Jack said snidely, “would you mind turning up the AC? It’s stuffy back here.”
Angelo flashed his eyes up to the rearview mirror. “Will it draw your father?” he asked, ignoring Jack.
Mouse laughed. “I’ve been trying to tell you—the way I am now, it’s not like it was before. The power’s just a part of me. I can’t turn it off even if I’m not using it. It’s like I’m a perpetually running lighthouse. My father could’ve found me any time he wanted over the past two years. And this?” She dug the piece of painting out of her pocket. “There’s so little power left that I didn’t even know it was there until I went looking for it.”
Jack lurched forward, trying to get at the shard in Mouse’s palm. She had anticipated the move and jammed her other hand against his throat and shoved him into the back floorboard.
She held the painted eye close to his face. “You want it? Fine. I need to know what’s coming. Tell me who the Reverend is.”
“Just make him tell you, Mouse!” Angelo shouted as he fought to control the car.
She jerked back, her face inches from Angelo’s, and saw the sweat running under the edge of his hair, his jaw twitching as he clenched it. He was terrified.
“I won’t force my will on someone.”
“It would be so much easier.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” She turned to look out the window to hide her despair. In the struggle to work out the right and wrong of what she could do and what she shouldn’t, Mouse had held to two rules—no killing and no compelling another person. She had done both in her long life, some by accident, some with intent. All of it hung on her conscience. In her mind, those two rules defined her goodness and proved that she had a soul, even if she couldn’t see it.
“Look.” She pointed out the window to where a line of white grew against the horizon. “It’s Lake Disappointment. We’re almost there.”
“Wait,” Jack said from the back. “Your name is Mouse?”
“Nice to meet you.” She sneered. “You said the Rabbi wanted me dead. Does he know that I’m . . .”
“Old?” Jack offered.
“Immortal.”
“Bishop Sebastian said you were, but the Rabbi thinks he knows a way to do it.” Jack pushed himself back up onto the seat.
“I thought the Novus Rishi wanted her to work for them. Why would this Rabbi want her dead?” Angelo asked.
Jack lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows at the same time. “It’s all politics to me.”
“Is this Rabbi here, too? Is he coming?” Angelo asked.
> “Just the Reverend,” said Jack, all the levity gone from his voice.
Mouse twisted around to look him in the eye. She’d heard his fear, could feel it rolling off him even through the mental fog caused by the portrait shard.
“You mean the Bishop’s not here either?” Angelo asked, a new tremor of worry in his voice.
“Just the Reverend,” Jack said again, holding Mouse’s gaze, unblinking, almost as if he were pleading with her.
She reached her hand back and laid it gently on his knee. She was scared, too. “What does the Reverend want?”
There was a flicker of the old Jack behind the terror in his eyes—the student giving his former mentor a warning. “Only you.”
Mouse felt it settle in her chest like the Delphic oracle’s omen to Oedipus: Who seeks shall find.
Angelo stopped the car. Mouse was still staring at Jack.
“We’re here,” Angelo said. “Let’s toss the stuff and get going.”
Mouse climbed out as if sleepwalking. Angelo opened the back hatch and hauled out the com device, then carried it over to the edge of the salt lake. There was no water anywhere to be seen, only a wide expanse of white that butted up against the red dirt and stretched out until it touched the indigo blue of the horizon.
“Is the wind blowing?” Mouse asked, her voice hollow.
“What?” Angelo turned to look at her.
“It’s safe if the wind is blowing, Ngara said. It means the Nyayurnangalku aren’t here.”
“The what?”
“Monsters. Demons. They live under the salt surface.” She was looking out over the lake.
“Toss me the phone and we can go.”
“No.” It poured from her mouth, more a moan than a word.
“Mouse?”
“We have to hide.” She spun around, looking for an outcropping or a ravine—anything that would provide some kind of shelter or camouflage. The flat land knotted with clumps of spinifex grass mocked her.
“What is it?”
“From that direction.” She pointed back the way they’d come. “Helicopters. I can’t see them yet, but I can hear them.”
Angelo ran to the back of the car. “Bags?”
Mouse nodded, still squinting as she scanned the sky. “If we get away, we’ll need the water.”
Angelo slung one of the bags over his shoulder and handed the other to Mouse. “And Jack?”
“Leave him. He’s safer here and we’re quicker without him.”
“Which way?”
“There’s nowhere, Angelo.” She knew it. There was nowhere to hide and no way for them to escape what was coming.
He put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently. She could see that he knew, too. “Which way?”
“Across the lake. Maybe . . .”
He grabbed her hand and started jogging into the white salt and sand.
“Good-bye, Jack,” Mouse called over her shoulder.
They ran for about fifteen minutes before coming to the first lift of land, a small hill of dirt in the wash of salt. It would’ve been a tiny island had there been water. It wasn’t enough, but it was all they had.
Mouse and Angelo threw themselves behind the back edge of the rise, the twang of salt filling the air. The car was a small speck of reflected sun in the distance. Two helicopters crawled across the far sky until they reached the car. They circled like vultures.
Mouse counted one breath, then two.
The helicopters turned and headed out over the lakebed toward them.
Angelo turned to look at her, his mouth open as if to speak, but a wave of blown salt and sand crashed into them, stinging their skin. They both threw their hands up instinctively to shield their eyes. Jack’s sliver of painted stone fell to the ground. Mouse watched it disappear and reappear in the swirling salt.
She pushed herself up to her knees and spread her arms. “Blow wind!” she commanded, and a tempest began to twist around them, pushing outward and driving the debris away from them and toward the helicopters. But Mouse had gotten salt in her eyes, sharp grains scratching against her eyelids, tears pouring down her face. She couldn’t see, but she heard the helicopter pilots yelling and the chopping rap of the blades moving away.
“They’re leaving!” Angelo yelled over the torrent of engines and wind.
But Mouse was shaking her head. She’d heard the crunch of the landing skids raking across the salt surface. “They’re landing,” she said, but she wasn’t sure if Angelo had heard her. She reached her hand out for him. He wasn’t there.
She heard his footsteps moving away from her. She jumped up, lurching in the direction of his sound, and slammed into the backpack he was still wearing. He had his hands up and to the side.
“We surrender!” he shouted. “We surrender!”
Mouse’s vision was clearing. She could make out a dozen or so men dressed in sand-colored armor, carrying guns. Some stood a few yards away. Others crouched under the rotating blades of the landed helicopters. A couple were half in and half out of the fuselage. Mouse’s tempest still whipped away the airborne sand and pushed against the armed men. Each gust lifted her hair, the strands undulating as if she were a snakeless Medusa. Her eyes met those of a man in one of the cockpits, seated beside the pilot. He was the only man not wearing armor. He wore a business suit, gray with a thin silver stripe. There was a pin on his lapel—a cross made of swords. The Reverend. He was smiling.
Mouse watched his lips move as he spoke into the mic of the headset that bulged out behind his fat cheeks. She read his lips, but too late. Take the girl down. The priest doesn’t matter. Kill him.
She jerked when the first shot rang out. Jerked when Angelo did. Jerked when it tore through his stomach and out of the backpack, spraying her with shrapnel and his blood. Jerked when more rounds slammed into him and when they hit her in the legs and arms. Jerked when she tried to catch him as he fell back.
She knew then why she’d had them run out across the lake. Her subconscious mind had been giving her a choice—one she had shut away until now because it crossed a line. Mouse didn’t care about lines anymore.
Her face was buried in the salt beside Angelo’s—hers down, his up. The blood had splattered everywhere against the white salt. It looked like one of Ngara’s paintings.
Mouse mouthed the word “Come,” her lips digging into the bloody salt, and though no sound came out, she knew she’d been heard when the air went instantly and completely still.
The men stopped shooting.
And the Nyayurnangalku came.
They broke through the crusty salt like roots erupting from the earth, driving upward, long clawed hands ripping at the white soil until they birthed themselves in the empty air. Tall and wiry, so thin their joints jutted out from taut skin, they reached out and wrapped their long, spindly fingers and claws around the nearest man. They reeled the men into mouths crammed with jagged fangs, teeth sinking into necks and abdomens, yanking off flesh in chunks and crunching bones. The creatures devoured their prey as if they’d been hungry for millennia.
The helicopters lifted off again, men hanging from the skids with one hand and firing their guns with the other. Bullets fell like hail in random bursts. Mouse coiled herself around Angelo’s head, trying to protect him. She closed her eyes and searched desperately for proof that he was still alive. She saw the brightness of his glow and opened her eyes again, scanning the scene, looking for a way out.
The demons had pulled down one of the helicopters. The other had pulled back behind the cloud of debris. Most of the men who’d been on the ground had been eaten. Some of the creatures were still feeding on what was left. Someone in the helicopter was still firing.
Mouse opened her mouth, ready to do whatever she must to get Angelo out, to save him. Her power coursed through her. She heard the whirr of a bullet. It sounded so much like the whistle of an arrow that for a moment Mouse forgot where and when she was.
The bullet ricocheted off the ground in f
ront of her and shred her throat. Blood and cartilage shot out from her neck and her head dropped. She could feel the darkness closing on her like the coming night. She closed her eyes, searching for Angelo again.
Her heart broke. The glow of him, his soul, was slowly slipping past his body, down and up, like she’d seen so many times over her long life with other bodies on other battlefields and in hospitals and bedrooms through the ages.
Not this one, she begged. Not this one. She tried to make her hand move to cover his mouth, to hold his life in his body.
She had no air to make the words. To make him live. To tell him she loved him. To tell him good-bye.
She had one last choice as the darkness fell.
Not a word, but a calling out in her mind: “Father.”
PART TWO
For the first time in her life she thought, might the same wonders never come again?
—Eudora Welty, “The Winds”
CHAPTER NINE
Who is she?”
The high, bright voice of a child filled the chamber.
“Your sister.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mouse.”
Giggling trickled around the white stone walls and floor. “That’s not a real name.”
“It’s the only name she has.”
“She looks dead.”
“She is.”
“Will she stay that way?”
“That depends on you, Luc.”
“Why me, Father?”
“You get to choose. We can make it so she stays dead, or we can let her be and she will heal and wake up again.”
“Wouldn’t she be sad to stay dead?”
His father was quiet for a moment. “I think she will be very sad when she wakes and remembers what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Someone she loves is gone.”
“Oh.” Luc stepped close to the table. Mouse’s shorts and shirt were soaked with blood. Small and large holes dotted both her legs and arms—entrance and exit wounds. Her throat was splayed open, exposing raw, red tissue and white specks of cartilage and bone.
Book of the Just Page 10
