My Soul to Take (34 page)

“When the two Bloodborn unite, their Blood shall cleanse the world,” the Witness said.

“And if we fail?” Michel said. “If there is no Cleansing?”

The Witness paced, pointing out the gold lettering on the wall above his head. “You know very well, Michel. Wars shall flourish. The air will be choked with smoke. The sun will scorch the earth like fire. The oceans will turn to poison. The very world itself will die.”

Michel mouthed the two-thousand-year-old words as the Witness spoke. Michel could already see it unfolding! He had wasted too much time. New tears stung Michel.

“And if she will not unite with me?” Michel said.

“She will,” the Witness said. “It is in the Prophecy. Her name means Light. Your union signals the advent of the New Days. You are the Bringers of the Blood.”

Michel did not want to utter his true question aloud:
Am I destined to become like him?
Instead, he whispered. “Will she choose to unite with me … or must I force her?”

Perhaps there was an interpretation of a passage he had overlooked or misremembered, hiding the truth from himself. Somewhere in this chapel, was his answer plain?

But the Witness was silent, offering only his empty, imaginary smile.

P
hoenix had stepped back in time: the private jet, solicitous handlers waiting at the gate in suits and ties, the caravan of shiny white vintage Rolls-Royces racing through anonymous, foreign streets. She could be back on tour, chasing magic she had never found.

Was she bringing magic this time? Or only witnessing it?

Their party split up between three cars donning small white flags with crests Phoenix had never seen before, with a crimson teardrop in the center. S
ANCTUS
C
RUOR
, the letters read. Before she climbed into the lead car with Fana and her parents, Phoenix saw the same crest on a large white flag flying above the red, white, and green Mexican flag on an official administration building. She could be riding in a presidential motorcade.

Nogales was a modern border city of busy storefronts; the Mexican kitsch of touristy bars and craft shops alongside professional pharmacies and dental offices. Pedestrians, minibuses, bicyclists, and cars competed for space on the freshly paved roads lined with rows of tall, decorative palm trees. The hillsides were crowded with a frenzy of new housing developments. And churches! There was a church on every corner, it seemed, although they were missing their crucifixes. Nogales’s churches flew the Sanctus Cruor flag where a cross might have stood.

Phoenix noticed children everywhere: a husky boy being led by his mother’s hand in front of a massive Coca-Cola mural, twins being pushed in a stroller, a thirteen-year-old girl riding a bicycle. They all stopped to return her stare.

Phoenix missed Marcus the same way she’d missed him when
she’d been locked in her cell. Her tongue curled, ready to ask the driver to take her back to the airport. She felt claustrophobic in her seat against the window, with Jessica beside her, in the middle, and Fana on the other end. Phoenix’s neck tingled.

A panic attack. She’d had them often in detention. Phoenix thought about asking Fana to hypnotize the despair out of her, but Fana had her own problems. As much as missing Marcus and Carlos hurt, her pain reminded Phoenix of why she was here. Her reason to stay.

Every streetlamp was adorned with a Sanctus Cruor banner in alternating colors: white, crimson, white. At a courtyard near the freeway, the car passed a giant bronze statue of a man spearing a winged beast that looked like a cross between an eagle and a giant bat. Beneath the massive statue, an impossibly old woman was holding up a hand-written placard: ¡L
A
S
ANGRE ES AQUÍ
! The Blood is here.

Phoenix gasped when a man in black tuxedo pants whose white dress shirt was soaked with—blood?—ran up to their car, just shy of her passenger-seat window. The man was trembling, but Phoenix saw rapture on his upturned lips. The stain on his shirt was only paint, she saw as they passed; too pink to be blood.

“The first who come are saved!”
he screamed after their car, in English.

The driver spoke up. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “The faithful sometimes lose decorum.”

Dawit muttered in the front seat, “One can hardly blame them, with so much pomp.”

“The faithful?” Phoenix said, embarrassed by her ignorance.

“The Most High,” the driver said. “He does so much for Nogales, the people cannot contain their gratitude. These new roads, the new schools, the hospital annex—all at the beneficence of the Most High. He has cleaned out the cartels, stopped the violence on the streets. The city has just elected a new mayor representing our movement. These are very exciting days. New days!”

The back of Phoenix’s throat went sour. The city belonged to Fana’s fiancé.

Phoenix stared back at the paint-spattered man to see him subdued by four police officers, two on either side. They had brought him to his knees, his hands behind his head. One officer pulled out his baton and raised it to swing at the man with both hands. Phoenix had to look away, her insides turning to stone as she imagined the blow.

“He hasn’t changed,” Fana’s mother murmured.

Ahead, a festively colored banner waved high across the road, strung between palm trees: B
IENVENIDO
, F
ANA—
L
A
R
EINA
.

In this city, Fana was a queen. Fana didn’t glance at the banner as it flapped above the car. Her face looked frozen.

The car slowed, turning. C
ALLE DE
S
ANCTUS
C
RUOR
, a decorative street sign on a post said.

Spectators lined the streets, and excitement stirred as the cars pressed on. Two thousand, maybe three thousand, people stood on either side, their faces hungry for a glimpse through the darkly tinted windows. Children, young women, and grown men ran through alleys and side streets to see the cars. The crowd was restricted from the road by velvet ropes strung to poles adorned with bunches of white gardenias. A mariachi band dressed entirely in white and gold, down to their gold-tasseled sombreros, played on a raised stage. The trumpets rang of love.

Phoenix experienced the crowd’s wonder—
She’s sitting so close to me
—melting into worship, until she remembered the crowd in Tokyo that had choked the street, and a young American serviceman who had danced on top of her car, shouting,
I can’t believe you’re here!
All Phoenix had brought was a sore throat and the same old songs, but they worshipped her.

Fana sat with her eyes closed, either steeling herself or taking herself away.

“You never get used to it,” Phoenix said. “I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

I HAVE A HARD TIME WITH CROWDS
, Fana told her.
BUT I’M GETTING BETTER
.

“It’s like my dad used to tell me—they all have to go home to whatever’s wrong with their lives,” Phoenix said. “You help them take away their pain. Open your window. Wave.”

Fana opened her eyes, realization relaxing her face.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Jessica said.

“No … I’d like to do that for them,” Fana said. “Will you sing, Phoenix?”

“Just for you,” Phoenix said.

The backseat windows whirred down, and the cool air blew through the car, with the smells of car exhaust and fresh paint. Fana leaned to her window, showing her face. The crowd erupted, waving handkerchiefs and newspapers and anything their hands could hold. The sound of joy. Women thrust their babies above their heads to see her, or for Fana to see them. “
Por favor, Fana
, look at us …” came their calls, asking for her eyes’ validation.

Softly, just loudly enough for those in the car, Phoenix sang the lyrics that had first come to her on her way to the concert, in a melody she pulled from the air:
“… Waking up is easy if you never go to sleep. Have you seen the soul you promised you would keep?”

When Fana waved, the crowd’s roar engulfed the car.

Nogales had changed in the past year. So many people!

Frenzied noise from their thoughts came in a blast, so much like the first time Michel had touched his thoughts with hers; when he first showed her what she’d shut away.

Riding on Phoenix’s song, Fana discovered so many others behind walls, cooking at their stoves, typing on computers at their desks at work, sick in their beds. More still were crowded in half-finished apartment buildings, tents, or alleyways after trekking from Juárez and Chihuahua and Oaxaca, or Tucson and Yuma and Corpus Christi, because they had heard stories of Sanctus Cruor and the Most High and the
Sangre de Vida
. Blood of Life.

The people around her prayed for the souls of those who would die in the plagues, but they welcomed the Cleansing because they and their families might be saved. They dutifully attended sermons at Michel’s churches, where they learned how they could serve the Most High. Their children sang folk songs about the Most High at their schools, with the lyrics written carefully, painstakingly, by their teachers’ hands on chalkboards. The most popular song, “Las
Flores,” called on the Most High to pull up the weeds so that flowers might grow.

The faithful tossed roses to the paved street in time for Fana’s tires to crush them.

REMEMBER HIS VANITY
, her father said.
IT IS A WEAKNESS
.

Fana did not answer. Their driver, Romero, was one of Michel’s most trusted guards, and although her probe had bounced against his pliant mask, she was certain Michel was lingering close to him. Romero probably could intercept thoughts with her father’s level of skill. She had sliced easily past Romero’s mental defenses, and much of what she had seen turned her stomach. The man was a psychopath, a killer in search of a calling.

But Michel had given him specific instructions: No one was to touch her or harm her party. That was a good start, so she would keep faith on her end, too. She remembered how Johnny had shot Romero and stopped his heart a year ago, but the thought was gone in a blink.

A full-stemmed white rose flew in through Phoenix’s window and hit her face, an accident of the breeze. “Ouch!” Phoenix said, touching her cheek. One of the thorns had scratched her. Phoenix stopped singing, and the day grew slightly grayer. Less light. Fana wished she had felt the rose coming, but she wasn’t all-knowing, like Teka said.

“Put the windows up now,” Dad said, and Romero obliged obediently, despite the enraged obscenities in his head because Dawit had bested Michel’s father, Stefan, twice.

Jessica fussed over Phoenix’s face, dabbing it with a tissue from her large woven purse. Phoenix told her she was fine, but Mom needed to have someone to fuss over. Jessica sighed heavily at Fana.

That was an accident, Mom. I wouldn’t have brought her if I couldn’t keep her safe
.

Fana had considered the Blood Ceremony for Phoenix when she first found her, but she hadn’t had time to prepare her. Besides, since Michel had forbidden concerts, how would it look if she gave her Blood to Phoenix, too? She would trust Michel not to hurt Phoenix. Offering trust might help him trust her. Michel liked to live up to his word. His life had been shaped by words since infancy.

Their side of the freeway had been cleared, so the cars sped on the empty road. They drove away from the city, toward the mountains.

On the opposite side of the freeway, the crowded lanes toward central Nogales were clogged to a standstill, cars twinking like diamonds in the bright sun. Only bicycles were moving. Roaming drivers milled in conversation beside their vehicles. Vendors strolled between the paralyzed lanes, selling bulls’ horns and bags of fruit.

So many people! Fana had to shut out their noise.

The smell of the Shadows came unexpectedly, so acute that Fana’s knees trembled. For the first time since she was three, she longed to swim in the Shadows, if only because of the smell. She had forgotten that any smell could be so strong, flowing through her veins like blood.

She didn’t ask Phoenix to sing for her again, because she wouldn’t always have Phoenix with her. Instead, Fana directed a thin veil toward the Shadows. The smell softened, but not by much. She wouldn’t be able to filter out the smell without losing other perceptions. And she didn’t want to arrive at Michel’s wearing an ironclad mask, no matter what Teka said.

“Dear Lord,” Jessica said, her voice soft. She’d closed her eyes. “We know the journey ahead is a difficult one. Only our faith in you gives our legs strength to walk this path. Please bless us as we work to carry out healing in your name. Please bless the Blood, Lord.”

Exactly what Gramma Bea would have said. Or Johnny.

“Benedetto sia il Sangue,”
Romero echoed her blessing, voice trembling with sincerity.

“Amen,” Jessica whispered.

The road climbed into the mountains, winding steeply. Concrete gave way to green thickets, and a new road sprinkled with dust. No other cars passed them, or followed from behind. Military vehicles appeared on the wooded borders, trucks full of disciplined soldiers with shiny boots and perfect haircuts. The troops fell into line and stood at attention as her caravan approached.

Fana remembered a time long ago, almost in the time before remembering, when she’d wanted to be a princess in a fairy tale. And
then Teferi and Teka had come and begun bowing to her—only a little girl! She thought she’d wished it true, and maybe she had. But in her fantasies, she’d imagined a different kind of prince waiting for her.

They were a mile away, and she had underestimated Michel already.

His presence loomed taller than the mountain. He shook the leaves in the treetops.

How would she stand in a room with him?

YOU’LL DO FINE, DUCHESS
. Her father’s constant assurance.

No one spoke the rest of the drive.

Peace. No strangers’ thoughts. None.

As she climbed out of the car, Fana heard only frogs, the ebb and flow of the cicadas’ calls, and the gurgling of a massive fountain with life-size marble sculptures of a man and woman astride horses side by side. Water sprayed a shower above their heads, rainbow halos in the last daylight. The woman on the horse was she, Fana noticed when she saw her mane of dreadlocks. Michel’s likeness carried a medieval-style Sanctus Cruor banner on a tall pole.