Apocalypse Happens (28 page)

The terrain surrounding him is both familiar and new—the Southwest from the shade of the dirt, the shape of the rock formations, the incredible blues and golds, reds and pinks and oranges of the sky at dusk, or is it dawn? Miles and miles and miles of desert, distant mountains, but not a road, a telephone pole or the hint of a house anywhere at all.

Sawyer lifts his face to the sun. He is naked. The colors of the sky cascade over him, tracing his skin like a rainbow. His tattoos writhe wherever the light hits.

He doesn’t have as many tattoos as he does now. The wolf stalks across his biceps; the tiger strolls along his thigh; the snake twists lazily between his legs. Then light sizzles so brightly nothing can be seen but white, and when it fades a tiger stands where Sawyer had been.

The wild cat continues to stare upward; a shadow cants across his face, and he watches the great bird sail overhead, then trots after, loping along with tiger grace, so beautiful, so deadly and strong.

Thunder rumbles, and the earth shakes. Dust rises on the horizon. Something is coming. Yet still the tiger follows the black V in the sky that is the bird.

A long, low, moving dark cloud appears; the thunder becomes the pounding of hooves. A hundred, no, a thousand, buffalo race toward the single tiger in their path.

They don’t appear afraid of the huge cat that does not belong. Perhaps they’ve never seen one and therefore don’t know enough to be afraid.

Before the herd tramples him, the tiger veers off, loping around them, hunkering down, tail twitching
as he waits. His gray-green eyes remain focused on the whirl of brown stampeding past like props in an old-time western. He springs, straight up and onto the back of a huge bull with massive hooked horns and a shaggy, matted ruff.

The buffalo stops, snorts, bucks. The others gallop around them, managing not to turn both the bull and the tiger on his back into dust.

Sawyer sinks his claws into the beast’s hide for leverage, then leans over and tears out his throat.

I wait for the buffalo to stumble, perhaps throw Sawyer to the ground where he’ll be trampled by the stragglers. Blood will spray everywhere, and if the animal is lucky, he might be able to gore the tiger once, even twice, before he dies. Obviously none of this will kill Sawyer—in reality he is still alive and right next to me—but it will be bloody and ugly and painful.

Instead, the buffalo bursts into ashes, disintegrating beneath Sawyer like an imploding Vegas casino. Sawyer lands on all fours, and as he races away gray particles swirl off his coat like mist.

The sun, which had been rising, not setting, now blazes with fury from a crystal-blue sky. When the bird circles back, diving toward the earth like a missile, it is easy to see what kind of bird it is.

Peacock-bright feathers mixed with red and gold, a huge wingspan. Definitely not a bird found in America. Technically not a bird found in nature.

The Phoenix dips close to the ground, shifting in a flare like a sunburst so that when my mother’s feet meet the earth they have toes.

She is naked. If I were actually
in
the desert I’d turn away. Who wants to see their mother like that? But this is merely a memory, and not even my own.

Lifting her face to the sun, she breathes in as if its rays are liquid gold, then runs her fingers along Sawyer’s ruff. “I told you he’d be here.”

The tiger shimmers beneath her hand and becomes a man, naked, gleaming, exquisite. “You did.” He looks down at her; she is much shorter than me, and his gaze is softer than I’ve ever seen it. “And as always you were right.”

She tilts her head as if someone has called her name, the move birdlike; then her gaze lifts to the sky, focusing fiercely on the sun. Her eyes flare, yellow, then orange, the black pupil forming the shape of a bison.

“There’s another,” she intones.

“Show me,” Sawyer says.

The Phoenix lifts her arms, and they become wings that carry her into the sky. A flash of light and Sawyer is again a tiger loping after the bird, and I tumble back into my body, still trapped beneath Sawyer’s on the bed in Cairo.

“She was a seer,” I whispered. “Like me.”

CHAPTER 29

“Yes,” Sawyer agreed.

His eyes were now closed; his forehead remained pressed to mine. I couldn’t hear any emotion behind that single word, couldn’t see any reaction in that granite face.

“And you were her DK.”

He stayed silent and still, our bodies aligned, our hands making a gesture of prayer against the bed.

The memory explained a lot. The connection between a seer and a DK is strong—a bond of secrecy and trust. Was that why Sawyer had come back to her when she’d risen? Had he been unable to stop himself?

“What happened?” I asked. “When did things go wrong? Why? How?”

Sawyer’s fingers threaded between my own, clenching so that our palms rode ever closer. The room receded as I returned to the past.

The scenes flash quickly, images like photographs tumbling from an album and cascading across the ground.

The flare of her eyes, yellow to orange, the shifting of her pupil to reflect what she saw, creatures that populated legends all dying by his hand. Time passes;
together they fight, always together. He is as gifted at killing as she is at seeing what needs to be killed. Nothing can stop them.

Until it does.

“Where have you been?” Sawyer asks.

The shadow of Mount Taylor casts over them, purple against a dusky pink sky. Sawyer’s place looks almost the same as the last time I saw it. Perhaps the hogan is less weathered, the outside of the house less faded.

Time in the West is hard to determine. If the house hadn’t been there, the year could be
B.C.
for all I knew. The Navajo arrived on this continent back when Moses was still bobbing in the bulrushes, although they didn’t migrate south until much later.

I had no idea when the Phoenix had decided to come from Egypt or why. Maybe she’d had a falling-out with Cleopatra. I guess it didn’t really matter.

“I’ve been busy,” she says.

“People are dying, Maria. We’re supposed to stop that.”

She lifts her chin. “We can’t save everyone.”

“We’re supposed to try.”

“You’re the local killer.” She waves her hand. “Kill.”

The difference between the woman she’d once been and this one is marked. They’d been a team and now . . . they aren’t.

“I need you to tell me where and what they are,” Sawyer says. “I can’t see them the way that you do.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to wait until I see something.”

She turns, and he snatches her arm. “I’ve watched you, Maria. Talking to someone who isn’t there.”

“You’re wrong.” She pulls out of his grasp, shifts shape and flies away.

He lets her go, watching as she becomes smaller and smaller, fading quickly into the burgeoning night.

The scene changes. Sawyer still stands in the yard, but now a tan station wagon bumps up the drive. I recognize the vehicle, though it’s a lot less rickety than the day I rode in it.

The woman inside is Lucinda. She’s Navajo, a seer. She’s also dead, which gives me a strange, dizzy sense of being in two worlds, which I am.

Her face is as sun-bronzed as when I met her, but less lined, her hair black and long, without any silver threads. The hands that I’d once likened to monkey’s paws—shriveled, bony and dark—are just dark.

Her ebony eyes refuse to meet Sawyer’s. She’s as scared of him now as when she dropped me off at his mailbox, then hauled ass before he ever came out the door.

Sawyer is a skinwalker, to the Navajo,
adishgash
. A witch. They believe he hurts others for his own selfish reasons, and I suddenly understand why. He’s been out killing what they believe are people, or in some cases harmless, helpless animals. That those he killed are actually half demons bent on the destruction of the human race is not something those half demons go around sharing.

And Sawyer, being Sawyer, has probably gone along doing his job however he can do it, never worrying about how things look, never caring. In truth, he’s probably fed his legend by allowing people to see him kill, allowing them to see the bodies burst into ashes and disappear. The more others fear him, the less likely they are to come around and try to kill him.

Lucinda keeps her gaze fixed on her feet. “There has been an attempt on the life of the leader of the light.”

In Cairo I jerked, and Sawyer’s muscles bulged as he pressed my hands, my head, my body, back down. “Shhh,” he murmured. “It’s in the past.”

I hadn’t been worried about me. Hell, attempts on my life came along as often as breakfast. But Ruthie—

If the leader then had even been Ruthie.

“You’ve been summoned,” Lucinda continues.

“Why me?”

She glances up, then quickly back down. “You’re the best we have. You won’t stop until the traitor is dead.”

Sawyer lifts one shoulder, tilts his head, then twists his mouth in an expression that very clearly says,
Got that right
, before he begins to strip. Since, as usual, he isn’t wearing a shirt, shoes or even underwear, it doesn’t take much. He hooks his thumbs in his loose tan trousers and drops them to the ground.

Lucinda chokes, then runs for the station wagon. What is wrong with the woman? Scary badass or not, why refuse a free peek? Sawyer obviously doesn’t care. I doubt she’ll view a finer male specimen this side of paradise.

The sun glints off Sawyer’s skin, smooth and bronze, the ink of his tattoos seeming to sparkle and shimmer and shift. He traces a finger along his neck and lightning flashes from a clear sky as he becomes an eagle.

The beat of his wings is drowned out by the roar of Lucinda’s engine, then the spraying of gravel beneath her tires as she reverses direction and leaves Sawyer’s now-deserted homestead behind.

Night falls as the eagle catches the scent of Lake Michigan. The Bradley Clock looms out of the jumble of low-slung industrial buildings. He veers off before he reaches it, clinging to the tree line as he coasts over block after block of fifties-style ranch houses, zeroing in on the only two-story in the area.

It’s late. He purposely took his time, planning to arrive after midnight. There are eagles in Wisconsin, but not many and most live much farther north. None would soar into a suburb and land in a backyard.

He stands on the grass and tilts his snowy white head, black gaze on the windows. Every single one is dark.

Human intelligence, bird body, sometimes it’s a hassle. No thumbs to open the door even if it wasn’t locked. He could burst through a window, but which one?

He lifts his beak to the just-rising moon; his call is shrill and loud. No one who hears it will ever confuse that shriek with the chirp of a twirpy city bird.

“No need for all that racket.” A voice drifts free of the smoky tendrils that surround the house. “I’m right here.”

A much younger Ruthie steps into the frail moonlight—forties maybe—her dark skin unlined, her Afro still tight and short, but pitch-black, without a single strand of gray. Her breasts don’t sag; her legs aren’t veined, her hands not yet gnarled with arthritis.

I’ve never seen her like this, not in a photo or any dream or vision. To me she’s always been Ruthie—my only mother. Soft heart, bony hips, firm but gentle hand. But seeing her young has me wondering for the first time why she never married, although maybe she did. Maybe he died; maybe he left her. Being a seer isn’t for sissies. Being the leader of the light leaves precious little to spare for anyone else but those in the federation and those just begging to die by it.

Her thin arm is framed by a charcoal-gray house-dress, which only makes her appear even thinner, as its voluminous folds fall around her skinny body like a tent. That arm is wrapped in a stark white bandage; a tiny dot of blood has leaked through.

“Careful, or some nosy neighbor might call the DNR with a wild tale of an eagle in my yard. Been enough stories ’bout strange goin’s-on. Don’t need any more.”

That voice. I want to crawl out of Sawyer’s memory and right into her lap. When she’d died I’d been devastated, but having her pop into my dreams, flit through my head, speak to me even if it was to announce impending death by Nephilim had made her seem less gone.

Exchanging Ruthie for a whispering, whining demon had been like losing her all over again. Every time I saw her in my memories or the memories of others, or heard her voice coming out of Luther’s mouth, I wanted to weep, and I was not the weeping kind.

“There’s somethin’ I need done.” Ruthie lays her dark hand on Sawyer’s head, and he fluffs his feathers, preening. “I’d do it myself, but I got kids here can’t be left. Besides.” Her bony shoulder shifts beneath her sagging dress. “I’m the leader now. No more fieldwork for me.”

Those were the days.
Since the battle is
now
it’s fieldwork for everybody. Although . . .

Ruthie was a seer. What in hell was she ever doing in the field? Funny how some answers only bring more questions.

“Someone came to kill me.” Ruthie glances at the dark house, and silvery moonlight spills across her face. Is that a shadow or the hint of a bruise along her jaw? “Tried to bring about Doomsday.” Her dark eyes narrow. “We ain’t ready for that yet. Someone knows where I live, what I am, and that can’t be. Only way to make it
not
be is for them to no longer be.” She lowers her gaze to the eagle’s. “Understand?”

Sawyer dips his head, waddles back and forth, back and forth on taloned feet.

“This ain’t gonna be easy.” Ruthie sighs, long and sad and deep. “It never is.”

She reaches into her house dress and pulls out a feather. Even in the moonlight, which seeps color from everything, making the backyard appear like a scene from 1940s film noir, the plumage is radiant.

Sawyer makes a different sound—caw, screech—an unearthly howl of shock and pain.

“Hush now,” Ruthie whispers, and lets the feather go. “Just hush.”

The feather coasts downward, a bright red slash canting to and fro, coming to rest half on Sawyer’s bird feet and half against the thick carpet of ebony grass.