Self said, Nice muffins.
There she stood, the love of my life.
Danielle.
Lost those years ago, returned to me now; cold sweat slithered over my body, goggling mouth hanging wide open, jaw dropped like an idiot's—my world come alive before me once more—the thoughts like torches shoved in my brain—we've got another chance, I've been redeemed, the slate erased, we can be together again at last—sapphire gaze burrowing into mine—nearly the same lilt to her nose—"My God," I whispered.
It was April: Danielle's little sister, the kid who always hung around and generally made a pain of herself, needing rides to dance class, tattling, making me take her along to the movies with us, whom I loved.
She didn't need words—her face so clearly defined her motives, the maleficia and madness roiling in the blaze of her stare. It made sense. The corners of her mouth turned upward in a mocking and sexed leer, so much like her sister's clowning come-hither look.
She said, calmly enough, "So we meet again."
"April . . ." was all I managed to croak. No explanations came. No joyous reunion or chance at playing catch-up—I groaned, mind whirling, couldn't believe the twisted rationale I saw scrawled in her visage, so beyond my ability to connect this version of Dani to the six-year-old girl I'd read to when thunder and lightning frightened her awake on dry summer nights.
"She's dead because of you," April said, "and I've become what I am now because of you." A simply spoken statement of fact. Her hate went so deep, hardly a ripple made it to the surface. She moved in close, standing outside the salt, so much like her sister that I couldn't keep a stupid grin off my face, still praying we could somehow be together again, Jesus, Jesus. She sat close to my knee, the way she had when forcing herself into the living room to watch television with us. I saw a searching hope in her eyes that brought a lump to my throat. "After all this time, you mind telling me . . .?" she asked. "Why? Why did she have to die?" A sob nearly broke in her. "Why did you do this to us?"
I'd asked myself the same questions a life's-blood worth of times. There was no answer: damnation prevailed, my curse carried too closely to those around me. I stammered but nothing came, tried once more and again only silence—no way to make her understand how Danielle's life had been forfeited along with mine—and while April waited, nodding me on to explain what couldn't be accounted for, that spilled tide of gold lapping at her shoulders, her sister's eyes on me, she smiled grimly and made a face of disgust.
I gestured to the ersatz "coven," the walking dead, and thought about the others murdered on the street, hanged for their teeth, cut open for viscera. "Those people . . . ."
"Shut up!" she barked, and Verd-Joli pranced around the altar, poking Self in the belly. "What do you care about anyone!"
"How did you manage it?"
"Without much difficulty," she admitted. "When you fled you left a lot behind. I read the same books the two of you did, learned our crafts, dwelled in the same darkness. Conferred with what I met there."
She'd followed in our footsteps down the same cursed path that had damned me and murdered her sister—the hate it had taken, the willpower to keep her on that course—all my fault. At . . . what . . . only seventeen? . . . what had she missed out on? The proms and winter carnivals and amusement parks. Had she known any kind of love on the beach, any kind of tenderness besides a demon's caresses? Did she still dance?
Kill her, Self urged.
"Yes," April said. "Finish the job. Complete the circle. End it for me."
Let me, he whined.
No.
Kill her!
No, she's . . . .
Do it! Do it! he repeated, now with a furious biting in his voice I'd never heard before, giving me orders. It's only a lousy ring of salt. Break it!
I stood and kicked the salt aside. "I may be guilty of a lot of things, April, but you have no idea what Dani and I went through at the end or just how much we loved each other. I deserve your rage, but all the rest of this—the murder of children, these deaths, the maleficia and desecration of your own sister's eternal rest—no, no, I've got enough on my back. You've set your own course."
Verd-Joli said, "I'm tired of this!" and sprang at me. I slapped him, my hands glowing with arcana. He sat back stunned and gave a couple of little boy sniffles before he bared his rows of needle teeth, face melting back to demon form. He came at me again like any child caught in a temper tantrum, and Self raged down upon him, the two of them hissing and ripping, scales and bone flying.
April drove a lethal hex stroke into the center of my chest and I flew over backwards against the pulpit, biting back a scream, my shirt on fire. I put out the flames as the rest of the people slowly scattered, barely anything more than mannequins. Some tried for the door while others hovered near the back pews like insects, wavering, growing sicker, until one by one they began dropping over.
Her fingernails flared red with momentary flames and she threw another spell at me, and another, both of them like punches in the solar plexus that sent me reeling; having given so much of her life to the black craft she'd become powerful, but again the paradox: it stole as much as it gave. Hate wasn't enough, and the love for Danielle that had once been the impetus for revenge, had long ago fallen to the bottom of her soul. She mouthed Kabbalistic phrases yet didn't quite have the tongue for the exact pronunciation necessary. Fighting off her enchantments was like battling against a storm; painful but possible. Two ribs snapped, but I kept going. My knees popped, fingernails peeled back.
"Damn you," she growled, as if she could make my curses any worse.
Squealing, wheezing, shredding noises from our familiars as they tore at each other as badly as we'd been torn by ourselves. Verd-Joli possessed nothing of the lovely child any longer, true visage of the son of Abaddon sprouting rows of curved teeth seeking out Self's neck. Blood and ichor and unnamed liquids splashed the pews as they rolled and wrestled.
April grunted in pain. She'd given too much to killing me; begged the wrong beings, made bad deals, trapped herself. She'd been wrong about reading my books: I'd destroyed many of them and hidden others. I fell on my belly and crawled to her as more flaring hexes blasted against my back, realizing how they'd gloat in the halls of purgatory over the irony of this night. They'd take grisly satisfaction in knowing I'd ravaged my love twice. Her improper incantations imploded, feeding off her like an overload, and I could see the flames catching her hair, eyelashes igniting, flesh immolating from the inside like any consumption—she opened her mouth and it was filled with fire.
"Forgive me," I begged.
Her last words didn't sound quite human, her tongue boiling. "I'll see you . . . again . . . someday." And then she staggered forward and dropped against me burning, so much like the love of my life, ending the same way as Danielle—sobbing for only a moment, shriveling, gasping for air, and then died in my arms saying my name.
I rolled over and hugged her, unable to be forgiven by either of them now. The honeysuckle scent of Dani's hair had to be here somewhere, hidden beneath the maleficia. Her come-hither look would take me where? Anyplace was better, the ninth circle couldn't be worse. I held April's corpse to me and cried until exhausted, for hours and hours, the wracking sobs coming up from a decade of death and loss. It would never end, impossible, not for centuries, not until redemption, Armageddon, but of course it did.
Finally I dragged myself to my feet.
New York, New York, Self sang atop Verd-Joli's remains, tra-la, tra-la, licking his fingers. My stomach burned. I'd never seen him happier. It's a hell of a town.
PAINDANCE
Two Navajo teenagers in a Jeep came ripping out of the wash to the west about half a day after I hit the area they call Four Corners—the land where the states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah all reach a point.
The kids were riding after a stumbling Hopi woman carrying a bundle, not exactly chasing her, but the threat certainly loomed. She saw me, and with a terrified s
hout cut diagonally across an arroyo and patches of mesquite scrub brush, heading directly into the desert. The Jeep slowed and followed the woman for another few seconds before veering towards me. As they approached, the guy in the passenger seat casually placed his rifle across his knees.
They pulled to a stop ten feet away and did their best to appear bored. It was easy not to make eye contact since both of them were wearing hundred dollar Ray-Bans. The driver shifted in his seat, thumbed back his hat and drew a hand over his dusty chin in a world-weary gesture. He looked straight out of central casting. "Tourists aren't allowed this way of the Big Rez, mister. We'll guide you back into the nearest town. A heckuva dance tonight, you won't want to miss it. Great photographic opportunity. Lots of cheap wares to be bought, take 'em back to your friends, you'll be the pride of your block. Lots of genuine Navajo bows and arrows on sale. Best woven blankets in the world. Right, Billy?"
"As always, Stoneboy," the kid in the passenger seat said.
I could see they'd talked to too many couples named Sal and Myrtle from Lima, Ohio to sound anything but completely disgusted when speaking to someone with a white face. In their position, maybe I'd have had that same disrespect prevalent in my voice too, but this tough sitting-bullshit act rubbed me wrong. Navajos—who called themselves "Dineh," the People—had sixteen million acres for their reservation; they'd done what no other tribe had managed to do—hold on to their land. They'd assimilated and profited and had actually managed to expand their holdings.
"Thanks anyway." My disarming smile wilted, too weak to disarm two teenagers with chips on their shoulders and rifles across their knees. "What happened between you and the woman?"
Happened?" Billy said. "Nothing happened. Just trying to keep her out of trouble. She's a loco Hopi, probably been smoking too much of that damn jimson weed. She's acting like her baby's dead. We've got to notify the reservation deputies."
"Okay, then go do it," I said, and started walking after her.
The driver rolled the Jeep slowly into my path. "What do you want with them cliffshitters?"
"None of your business."
They both laughed and calmly got out of the Jeep; Stoneboy had a beautiful Colt .44 in his hand. They held their weapons loosely, barrels pointed straight up, unlike the southern redneck teenagers who always let the barrels drag in the mud. Navajos aren't called headpounders for nothing—centuries ago they killed their prisoners by smashing their skulls with rocks.
Stoneboy reached out to touch me and my second self familiar rose halfway over my shoulder, his spit hot on my cheek, hunger suddenly wild as he prepared to bite off the kid's fingers. I slapped Stoneboy's hand away and saved him from becoming a cripple, stepped inside his reach and grabbed the Colt in the same motion. Before Billy got a chance to aim at me, I whacked the barrel of the Colt down hard on his knuckles. He let out a short howl and dropped his rifle.
"Back up a couple feet, kids," I said.
"Now look, mister . . . ."
I motioned with the gun. "Go on. I'm sunburned and parched and I really don't need trouble today. Enough is coming for all of us. And do me a favor and take off the sunglasses, okay?"
They complied and moved away a few paces; without the shades that edge of anonymous superiority vanished and they just stared at me. "Hey, mister, we didn't . . . ."
"Relax. Do either of you know where Isaac Spear-in-the-Heart is at the moment?"
It did the trick. The boys reacted the way I expected them to; mentioning Isaac's name in this area always got the same result, though I could never figure out exactly what that was: a mixture of respect, fear, hatred, and astonishment. They looked at each other, then back at me, and nodded in unison. Billy said, in a much smaller voice, "He's back on Third Mesa."
Less than twenty thousand Hopis lived year round in the nine villages scattered over the tops of the three bony fingers that comprised the Black Mesa tabletop plateau, surrounded on all sides by nearly two hundred thousand Navajo. The Hopi reservation was an island amidst the Navajo nation. Land disputes were still going on strong, and I could see where the battered barbed wire fences separated Hopi from Navajo partitioned lands.
"What do you want with him?" Stoneboy asked.
I moved forward, handed them their weapons, said, "Treat women with more respect," and started after her.
Self snickered and blinked at me, shaking his head. You sound like such a dork when you say things like that.
She laid the bundled baby on a juniper bush and began digging in the dirt like a dog, bent over and flinging gouts of sand up into the air through her legs. She was in her mid-twenties, pretty with a throwback set of sharp Aztec features, hair disheveled and eyes drilled with exhaustion as she dug maniacally, hardly sweating though a thick ring of salt clotted along her forehead; that could mean the verge of heat stroke. Worst of all was the borderline rictus grin locked in place, unwavering as she grunted and scratched at the earth.
After she had a hole perhaps two feet deep, she began chanting softly to herself and drew a symmetrical maze-like sand painting above it, using cornmeal she took from a pouch. It was one of the few symbols I recognized: Tapu'at, representing the mother and child, a center line drawn directly through it like an umbilical cord.
I kneeled beside her and she gave no notice. Self dropped to the child and ran his fingers over the infant girl's thick hair. The teenagers were right. The baby's not dead, she's just sleeping.
"What are you doing, mother?" I asked.
She tilted her head as if hearing a sound in the distance, thunder over the hills, an echo miles off. She spoke loudly, like answering someone washed backwards out of reach. "Saving my child!"
"From what?"
Peering into the hole, she whispered, "From she who has no name."
"But in the sun and sand your child will die."
She snapped her eyes shut on the thought and kept swirling the cornmeal of the sand painting, crossing out signs and adding more. "Hsssst! Muing-wa lives in the earth, the . . . the guardian of life and . . . ." Her sentence trailed off. She'd lost her momentum, the fuel of fear draining from her; trembling in the heat now, she realized what she was about to bury. The pause lengthened; I wondered if I should just tag her with a sleep spell and haul her back to her village, but I wouldn't learn anything that way. When she spoke again the words were barely audible. "He and Sand Altar Woman will protect my little Betty?"
The child awoke and started to cough and cry short, dusty sobs; the woman worked more quickly, drawing pictures over pictures until the representations made no sense. Self stuck his pinkie in the baby's mouth and tickled her under the chin. La-la. Kitchy-coo. La-la. Each of his claws could have speared an infant, and there were levels in Hell where it was standard practice. He made kissy faces. Mwa mwa mwa. After a few more sobs the baby began to giggle, and Self chuckled with her—the sound startled me. Infant's blood is the most powerful ingredient of any witchery. I kept an eye on him, but he seemed genuinely pleased to be playing baby-sitter. La-la. Kitchy-kitchy. Mwa mwa. The child's laughter worked on her mother, drawing her back from that cornered heat madness.
"Where do you live, mother?"
Ponderosa pines waved in the heat-shimmer of the water table near the cliffs. She looked up as if seeing me for the first time. "Shongopovi. But I will not return."
Shongopovi pueblo was on Second Mesa. I asked Self, Where's Isaac?
The kids were right. Third Mesa.
"Okay, we won't go to Second Mesa, mother."
I knelt and drew a pentagram beside her myriads of tangled sand paintings, and above them a swastika, the sacred, universal symbol of the solar wheel before being poisoned by becoming known as the emblem of the Nazi party.
"I can help you."
"No one can help us," she said, "not even Spear-in-the-Heart."
The pause lengthened, and my sunburn itched. A hex ignited in my palm and I slapped it down hard against the pentacle. A shrike dove from out of the glare, its shrill bu
tcherbird cry exploding overhead. This was Massau's attendant—the Bone Man, Hopi god of death—whose arrival signaled murder.
Self took a running start, planted one foot on my shoulder and leaped, arching like a diver through the air, arms extended, and caught the bird perfectly in his fangs, chewing frantically. His kissy face was crimson this time. The butcherbird fell in pieces to either side of us, feathers wafting into her hair. Infant Betty giggled at that, too, drops of blood spattering the ground around her.
The woman gasped and retrieved her baby from the juniper shrub.
"I'll protect you and your little Betty, mother."
With a resigned shrug she said, "I don't believe you," but followed me back towards the pueblos anyway.
The Hopi village was a strange mix of old and new: modern cement-block houses stood beside crumbling, stone dwellings and earthen hogans. Out-houses clung to the cliff edges, explaining how the Navajos came by their nickname for the Hopis. We passed trucks up on blocks, trailers with corrugated metal porches, and a general store trading post—which was little more than an extra room in somebody's house—where you could rent videos and buy kachina dolls. Corrals and pens of cattle, horses, and sheep sprouted like yucca stems. Hornos—stone ovens—dappled the area and I smelled bread. My stomach rumbled.
They weren't the Hopi—Peaceful People—for nothing; their ancestry was one of concord and quiescence when they weren't forced into war or slavery. The nine villages atop the three mesas were filled with mechanics, plumbers, and electricians, as many as any middle-American town.
As we entered the village, two old women approached, shuttled the mother and child into a home and slammed the door in my face.
What'd we do? Self asked, frowning and offended. I never liked this place. Too many clay and doll gods.
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