Cairn dropped and flattened herself against the asphalt. A tremendous whoosh of air rippled over her as the lethal spines swept mere inches from her face and back.
The deadly pendulum continued past and reached the top of its arc, preparing to make an encore back through her air space, so she rolled out of the way.
Back on her feet, Cairn trembled at the close call and surveyed the road ahead. She could see now what she’d missed before: the network of trip wires masked by leaves and dirt, connected to a host of deadly devices concealed in the foliage overhead, a half dozen ways for any trespasser to suffer a grisly end.
As Cairn took inventory of Njörun’s deathtraps, she noticed something else. With the sun going down, she could discern a faint glow from the bell tower above Sanctuary’s church. Constructed mostly of stone, it had been spared the worst of the devastation the fire had doled out half a century ago.
Cairn treaded cautiously up to the church, stepping over another trip wire. Njörun had suspended a net full of heavy rocks high over the church’s entrance, poised to rain down and bludgeon any intruders.
Cairn slipped through the open door and into the dark sanctuary. Over time, the elements had punctured a constellation of holes in the roof, allowing pinpricks of daylight to illuminate random patches of the empty pews as if to spotlight worshippers long since dead. A nest of blankets lay at the base of the altar. Njörun must sleep in here, Cairn realized.
Ironic—a god taking refuge in a temple built for another.
Cairn located the door to the belfry behind the pipe organ. A rickety staircase spiraled around the interior of the tower like the threads of a screw. Gazing up through the aperture in the platform above, she could see the underbelly of a large brass bell. A single rope hung down from it, descending through the eye of the staircase until it coiled on the floor sixty feet below.
If Njörun was using the bell tower as a lookout post, then Cairn had already lost the element of surprise. Still, she determinedly ascended the stairs with one hand on the pommel of her combat knife.
When she emerged onto the platform above, she stepped into a sliver of hell.
Njörun’s body had been posed sitting with her back against the low belfry wall, and her limbs splayed limply around her. Her glassy eyes stared through Cairn, off into the afterlife. Bruises in mottled shades of blue and green encircled her neck, the outline of fingers that had strangled her to death.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. Her face and shoulders had been viciously clawed by a wild animal until the blood saturated her robe. And on the pillar behind her, illuminated by the flickering torchlight, someone had scrawled a message in blood:
I am the sum of your memories, but never happened
You can only see me until you open your eyes
Who am I?
Njörun had been murdered according to the myth of the sphinx, Cairn realized—a half-human, half-lion chimera that challenged her victims with riddles and strangled them to death when they failed to solve them.
As Cairn edged closer, she noticed that the question mark at the end of the riddle had yet to dry. Even more ominous, the broken tip of a feline claw was still embedded in one of Njörun’s wounds. And Cairn had a sinking feeling she knew which species it belonged to.
“I didn’t want to do it.”
Cairn spun around at the sound of the familiar voice. Alonso Cordova—Nagual—lingered back in the shadows, not unlike the first time she’d met him at the Coconut Grove club.
As he stepped into the light, she noticed that one of his middle fingers was bleeding, the fingernail missing. “I didn’t want to,” he repeated.
“But you did.” Cairn drew her knife. “Not another step closer, Alonso. I mean it.”
The jaguar king kept his distance but strafed around the platform, cutting off her path to the stairs. “You have to understand,” he rambled on. “I can’t sleep anymore. He’s always there in the background of my dreams, watching. Waiting. Manipulating.”
“Phobetor?” Cairn asked.
Nagual nodded sullenly. Dark bags like bruises had formed beneath his eyes. He must have lost ten pounds since she last saw him. “He unburies your secrets and lords them over you. But that’s not even the worst part. He fills my dreams—every sleeping moment—with the most disturbing nightmares, things so sick and twisted that you forget what joy feels like. And that droning, that damn droning in the background … I hear it even when I wake up, echoing in my eardrums like some chant from hell. But Phobetor offered me an out: kill Njörun and wait for you, and then I can sleep again.”
And suddenly Cairn understood. Phobetor might have been able to kill her mother, Tane, and Dr. Sibelius in their dreams, but Njörun was herself a dreamwalker, and thus far less vulnerable to his manipulations.
So Phobetor had driven this jaguar god to madness until he’d do anything to sleep again, then coerced him into murdering Njörun and staging it to look like one of his twisted myth recreations.
Now Nagual would kill her, too, and he’d be a goner himself as soon as he was no longer useful to the dream assassin.
“Don’t you see?” Nagual asked, tears in his eyes now. “I have no choice.”
Cairn lowered the knife and held up her empty hand in a gesture of compliance. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “I’m going to catch Phobetor and punish him for what he’s done—and you can help me.” She had no plans to actually team up with this monster, but negotiating seemed like her only chance to avoid sharing Njörun’s fate. And if the jaguar king had information on the assassin who killed her mother, this might be her only chance to learn what he knew. “Why is he killing the Pantheon? Does it have something to do with what happened on Sable Noir?”
“Don’t you speak of that place,” Nagual snarled, and Cairn immediately knew she’d said the wrong thing. “You can’t possibly understand what happened there.”
Cairn swallowed. “No island references, I understand. But you have to work with me, Alonso. I have a friend in the State Police. If you have information about who Phobetor is or why he killed my mother, then he can help you work out a deal.”
Nagual shook his head. “The police can’t protect me from them.”
“Them?” Cairn repeated.
“They see everything.” Nagual’s sleep-deprived eyes roamed the bell tower. “You can’t run from them, you can’t hide. There’s no dark corner of your dreams he can’t peer into, and no locked door she can’t penetrate. The only sanctuary is to carry out what they ask. That’s why I have to do this.”
“Please …” Cairn beseeched him. She glanced toward the exit, calculating her chances of getting to the steps before Nagual intercepted her. Not good.
There was a grim resignation in the jaguar god’s eyes as he slipped out of his linen shirt. “You don’t have to die a horrible death like Njörun—all these gory theatrics were Phobetor’s demands.” Cairn watched with horror as his hand morphed. His fingers thickened and populated with spotted orange fur, and the nails elongated into black, razor-sharp claws. “If you cooperate, I promise I’ll make it fast and painless. Just tilt your head back, and with one swipe across your jugular, this can all be over. It will be like going to sleep. After all that you’ve gone through the last few months, wouldn’t you like to be at peace? Don’t you want to see your mother again?”
Cairn gripped the hilt of her knife. She could see now that there would be no negotiating her way out of this one. And though she was terrified, a cold fury was taking over her. “I am Sedna’s daughter. And if you knew my mother at all, then you know that I’m not going to just lay down for a monster like you.”
“Very well,” Nagual replied. The whites of his eyes turned yellow and the rest of his body started to transform, bones audibly crackling as they shifted beneath his skin. “For what it’s worth, I promise I’ll make sure Delphine is taken care of when I get back to Boston.”
The rest of the transformation happened with alarming efficien
cy. Nagual reared back, and by the time he dropped to all fours, a large, muscular jaguar loomed in front of Cairn, feline eyes fixed on his prey.
Cairn realized she would never make it to the stairs. So as Nagual’s hind legs tensed, preparing to pounce, she did the only desperate thing she could think of in that moment:
She slid under the bell and through the opening in the platform.
Her stomach lurched as she began to fall six stories to the floor, but she wrapped her hands around the rope and came to a hard stop. The bell clanged above her.
Nagual clambered after her down the spiral staircase. When he saw her clinging to the rope, his fur bristled and she realized almost too late that he intended to jump.
Cairn slackened her grip and slid down the line, right as the jaguar sailed through the space she’d recently occupied. She bit back the pain as the rope burned into her palms, and when she hit the ground at the base of the tower, she took off running.
Back in the church, Cairn got behind the dusty old altar. She groaned with exertion as she pushed it across the transept and rammed it into the belfry door. It wasn’t a moment too soon, either—the altar shuddered as the jaguar’s body collided with the door, a heavy thump, followed by a frustrated yowl and the scratch of claws viciously raking at the wood.
The door wouldn’t last for long, so Cairn rushed out of the church and onto Main Street. When she dared a glance back, she caught the silhouette of the giant jaguar bounding from the belfry out onto the steepled roof, then onto the street below, clearing sixty feet as effortlessly as if he were playing hopscotch.
Knowing she couldn’t outrun the jungle cat, Cairn ducked into the burnt husk of what used to be the town library. The roof had caved in and moss blanketed the spines of the books.
Cairn sought refuge between two rows of shelves, out of sight of the library’s front door. As she pressed her back up against the rotting tomes, she quieted her breathing and listened for the telltale sound of paws on dried leaves outside. Aside from the thrum of her pulse in her ears, she could only hear the wind blowing through the trees and the distant call of a goshawk.
A small clump of debris rained down on her at the same time that a giant shadow eclipsed the setting sun. She jerked her head up to find Nagual perched on the tattered walls. She tried to draw her knife, but he pounced on her and the blade flew from her hand. His bulky body pinned her to the floor.
Cairn cried out as his claws dug into her shoulders. “You smell just like your mother …” he hissed in a half-human voice. He bared his saliva-slick teeth and lowered them to her throat.
Cairn’s fingers, which had been unsuccessfully groping around for the dagger, closed on the only thing she could find—a pile of ash. Before Nagual could sink his teeth into her jugular, she jerked her arm free of his claws, brought her fist in front of her mouth, and blew.
The ashes hit Nagual right in the eyes and he yowled in pain. His claws momentarily transformed back into fingers as he frantically wiped the particles from his vision.
Cairn seized the moment to scuttle out from beneath him. She grabbed the heaviest book she could find from the shelf next to her and brought it crashing down on the top of the jaguar’s head, hoping to stun him into submission. She struck again, but on the third swing, he gnashed blindly with his teeth and ripped the book from her clutches.
One crazy plan had started to formulate in Cairn’s mind, so she raced out of the library and back into the street. She’d barely made it half a block through Sanctuary when she heard Nagual thundering after her in hot pursuit. Just a few more strides … she told herself.
Cairn dove headlong onto one of the trip wires she’d avoided earlier, and rolled around to face Nagual. He loped toward her with fury in his eyes. Sensing victory was imminent, he made one final leap, teeth poised to rip out her throat.
A spiked log swung out of the canopy overhead and broadsided Nagual in midair. The impact sent the jaguar flying into one of the nearest houses, and he collided hard with the charred walls before dropping limply to the ground.
Cairn stayed flat until the murder log had passed safely over her, then scrambled out of its path. She edged cautiously into the cloud of dust that had erupted when Nagual struck the old house.
The jaguar lay on his side, a cluster of puncture wounds dotting his right flank. His chest puffed in and out with labored, shallow breaths. His body transformed, contracting until he had returned to human form.
With trembling hands, the jaguar god touched the wound closest to his heart. It pulsed with hot blood. He stared at his red fingertips almost in awe. Cairn half-expected him to take another lunge at her, but all the fight had drained from him. He simply lay there, clutching his wounds as if he could hold the life force inside of him.
“When we left that island, I think we always knew it would end this way,” he wheezed. A tear escaped the corner of his eye. “We used to be a family. Now look at us.”
Cairn crouched in front of the dying god. “Don’t leave this world in vain,” she urged him. “There’s still time to do some good: Tell me something I can use to get these bastards.”
Nagual didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, he whispered cryptically, “We should have killed the other one instead …”
Then his head slumped to the ground. With his cheek pressed into the ashes, his dead gaze stared through Cairn and off into the next life.
Cairn wanted to feel relieved at his passing. But with both him and Njörun dead, she’d lost the two people who might be able to tell her something that could lead her to Phobetor and the mysterious client who’d hired him.
The good news was that process of elimination had left Cairn with only one suspect. Of all the members of the Pantheon who had visited Sable Noir, only Ra remained alive. There was just one problem with that theory:
Why had Nagual called the one who’d ordered these assassinations “she?”
Blackout
Needless to say, Delphine was not impressed when Cairn showed up at her apartment twenty-four hours later, hopelessly dirty, with inflamed claw marks peeking out from the shoulder straps of her tank top. Delphine’s eyes narrowed and her mouth opened as she prepared to launch into a polemic on how Cairn had gone AWOL for two days—again—and how she’d promised not to put herself in harm’s way.
But then she saw Cairn’s hollow expression, the ragged look of a girl who’d gone through war. She pulled Cairn into a hard embrace, arms tightening in a vise grip around her. “Let’s get you into a warm bath,” she said. “Then you can tell me everything.”
Over the next few days, Cairn made a bulletin board with all the information she’d collected so far—copies of the journal pages, profiles on the Pantheon’s members, a timeline of the murders.
At the very top of the board, connected by red yarn and thumbtacks, she put Ra’s photo, a faceless silhouette for Phobetor, and an empty space labeled “mystery client.” She had tried to learn more about Phobetor, but the Arboretum had little information on the nightmare god. No pictures, no rebirth date, no leads on his mortal identity.
The truth was that if a god chose to hide among mortals, it wasn’t hard, as long as he kept a lid on his abilities. An assassin like Phobetor would no doubt go to great lengths to conceal his true nature.
As for the unidentified woman Nagual had mentioned, Cairn had even fewer leads.
A thunderstorm rolled in off the harbor that weekend, knocking out power to half the city. They bunkered down in Delphine’s apartment, surrounded by candles and playing Scrabble on the floor while the gales raged outside. Cairn had brought Squall along for the ride—for a cat named after a storm, he was easily frightened by the sound of wind and she couldn’t bear to leave him home alone back at the empty Delacroix house.
Unfortunately, the mischievous lynx thought all the Scrabble tiles were toys intended for him and scattered them any time Cairn played a decent word. “How about we play a game that doesn’t have tiny pieces,” Delphine eventually suggested
. She sauntered across the apartment with a mischievous smile. “It’s called ‘Take off all your clothes.’” She disappeared into her bedroom. A moment later her jeans flew out the door and landed at Cairn’s feet.
By the time Cairn followed her into the bedroom, Delphine was under the azalea duvet, visible only from her bare shoulders up. Her clothes formed a rumpled trail across the floor, and her hair cascaded down the pillows behind her.
“You already lost,” Delphine teased her.
Cairn pulled her own t-shirt over her head and flung it onto the dresser. “Then why do I feel like I just won the lottery?”
Unsettling dreams found Cairn in the middle of the night, visions of that same puffin with the bleeding eyes watching her every move. She exhaled a sigh of relief when she stirred from sleep and found herself safely back in Delphine’s bed. The past few nights, she’d half-expected to wake up plunging to her death after sleepwalking off the roof.
Delphine lay next to her, facing away with her beautiful back exposed. Cairn felt so lucky that Delphine hadn’t given up on her, that they were back on track toward something greater.
Cairn felt like her bladder was about to burst, so she slipped on a robe and grabbed the jar candle they’d forgotten to extinguish. As she navigated the dark apartment to the bathroom, the orb of light illuminated Squall, fast asleep and sprawled out on Delphine’s couch.
Distracted by the adorable sight of the snoring lynx, Cairn tripped over a leg of the coffee table and the candle slipped from her hands. Miraculously, the jar didn’t break, but it dumped a trail of hot wax along the hardwood floor. It spun in a lazy circle before stopping at Cairn’s feet.
Cairn swore. As she was about to retrieve a towel from the kitchen to clean up, she stopped dead. She watched the candlelight flicker over the archipelago of melted wax before the flame finally extinguished. A door in the back of her mind rattled, some important nugget of information longing to break free.
This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Page 18
