Nightrise (22 page)

There was a long silence. Then Joe spoke. "We took the bullet out," he said. "The shaman cleaned the wound with yarrow and other herbs. But there was nothing more she could do. He has crossed to the other side."

Daniel felt the tears well up in his eyes. He looked down at Jamie lying there, at peace. He couldn't believe that it had ended like this. He had met Scott, Jamie's twin brother. The two of them were so alike. But when Jamie had come into the cell the night before, it had been like the beginning of a new friendship, the first chapter in a story that still had pages to run.

And now…

"I thought…" Daniel began. His voice choked. He turned away and looked at the old woman who was muttering something, holding the little wand in her hand.

"What's she doing?" he asked.

''You mustn't ask questions," Joe replied. Then, more gently, he continued. "She is doing what she can.

She is using powerful magic. She is summoning up what we call we ga lay u.

Her spirit power."

"What is that? I don't understand."

Joe's eyes narrowed. "The shamans get their powers from helpers who give them guidance in their work.

They take many forms — but always animals or birds. This woman may not look it but she is very strong. She is not from-my tribe but she is famous. You saw her wand with the wooden carving. Her spirit power is the eagle."

"But if he's dead…"

"The eagle is the only spirit power that can cross over and bring him back. It is so powerful that none of my people will even keep one eagle feather in their house. It can do too much harm. But she has summoned it to help her. Look…"

Joe pointed.

Daniel didn't see it at first and when he did he wasn't sure if he was imagining it. A bird was swooping down, flying directly out of the sun as if it had just been born in the flames. As it descended, it cried out, a sound that echoed across the mountains. It didn't land but flew over them in a circle.

The shaman raised her arms. Her spirit power had heard her call and it had come.

The eagle circled twice more, then soared back into the sky.

FOURTEEN

Scar

This time it wasn't a dream. Jamie was sure of that much. There was no sea and no island, no seven-foot-tall man waiting to deliver a cryptic message. And anyway, the world he now found himself in was too real. He wasn't just seeing it; he could feel it and smell it too. And it was cold. He rubbed his hands together and found himself shivering. It wasn't possible to feel cold in dreams…was it?

He looked up. Wherever he was, it certainly wasn't Nevada. The desert sky had been an intense blue by day, the deepest black with a scattering of stars by night. The sky here was a strange mixture of colors, as if someone had spilled a dozen different pots of paint — but it was predominantly gray and red with dense, writhing clouds and no sign of any sun. Jamie took in the ancient trees — which could have been carved out of stone rather than wood — the wild, swaying grass, and the twisted rock formations. Not only was he was not in Nevada, he wasn't in America. Even the breeze was wrong: slow and sluggish and smelling of cinders, wet mud, and…something else.

Where was he?

He tried to remember what had happened. He had been standing in the back of a truck that had managed to break through the prison fence, but then he had been shot. He remembered the searing pain as the bullet entered his back, just next to his left shoulder. He had felt his legs failing him and he had collapsed onto the floor of the truck. That was all. He had thought he heard someone shouting but then the darkness had closed in.

Until now.

He looked around and saw that he was surrounded by corpses. There were dozens of them, lying broken and twisted as if some unstoppable force had scythed through them and killed them all in the same instant. With a growing sense of horror, he stumbled to his feet and limped over to the nearest of them.

They were all men, dressed in the same shades of brown and gray. Soldiers. He could see that now. But not modern ones, not like the soldiers he had seen on the TV news, waving and putting their thumbs up on their way to some faraway war.

These men were wearing strange clothes: long jackets that came down to their knees and loose-fitting trousers. Some were hooded, the dark material sweeping around their heads and over their shoulders.

They didn't seem to have any guns. Instead they'd been armed with swords and shields, but even these were like nothing he had ever seen before. The shields were small and round with a single spike sticking out so they could be used either for defense or to stab anyone who came close. The swords were different shapes, some straight, some curving, some with multiple blades. There were arrows all around but they were made of metal, not wood, and with some sort of black leaves taking the place of feathers.

They had all been mutilated. Some were almost unrecognizable as human beings. As the smell of the freshly spilled blood rose in his nostrils, Jamie turned around and threw up, then staggered away, desperate to hide himself, to try to make sense of what he was seeing.

He had woken up in front of a ruined building, perched on a hill. It loomed high above him, built out of red bricks and shaped like a giant thumb with a curving terrace where the nail should have been. There was a wooden door hanging off its hinges and, inside, a spiral staircase leading up from what had once been a circular entrance hall. The fortress — for that was surely what it was — had recently been set on fire. Parts of it were still smoldering and it was obvious that all the men in front of him had died trying to defend it.

Still nauseous and disoriented, Jamie stumbled over some of the rubble until he reached the entrance, resting his hand against the door frame. He winced. The wood was too hot to touch. Rubbing his palm, he continued around the back of the building, away from the dead bodies. He found a patch of grass and sat down, forcing himself to keep control. His heart was beating twice as fast as it should have been.

There was a foul taste in his mouth and his head was spinning. He wanted to be sick again but there was nothing left in his stomach.

It was now that he realized he was no longer wearing his own clothes. Someone had redressed him in baggy pants and a coarsely woven, gray shirt that was buttoned up to the neck without a collar. There was a leather belt outside the shirt, above his waist. His feet were bare. He looked very much like all the dead men around him.

Except he was alive.

Or was he? It suddenly occurred to him that he might have been killed trying to escape from Silent Creek and this might be the result. Jamie had read bits of the Bible. He'd been to church a few times.

Marcie had forced it all on him and Scott as part of their homeschooling. He knew about Heaven and Hell although he'd never believed in either of them. Now he wondered if maybe he'd been wrong.

Maybe this was Hell. There were no flames and no devils with horns but hellish was exactly the word to describe where he was right now. This could be the place where bad people went after Judgment Day.

But he knew it wasn't true.

He reached behind him and tried to find the place where the bullet had entered his back. But there was no sign of any wound, and even as he moved he knew he wouldn't find one. He wasn't in pain. It was as if the gunshot had never happened.

"I'm alive!" He whispered the words to himself as if hearing them could somehow prove them to be true.

He turned his hands toward his face and flexed his fingers. They obeyed him. His stomach felt hollow and his throat was raw but otherwise he was fine.

So if this wasn't a dream and he wasn't dead, could he be suffering some sort of hallucination? He'd seen that sort of thing on TV, in science fiction programs. A woman in a car accident hits her head and wakes up somewhere weird. She thinks it's real but in fact she's just imagining it and she's really in a coma in a hospital bed. That was more likely. Jamie lowered his hands and gazed around him again. The great tower did not look like a hallucination.

But there was one way to make sure. He gritted his teeth, counted to three, and slammed his fist into the brickwork. He yelled out loud. It hurt! He looked down and saw blood on his knuckles. Well, surely that had to prove something. He swore quietly to himself and licked the wound.

Was it possible that he had been knocked unconscious on the way out of the prison? Could it be that Colton Banes or Max Koring had captured him again and brought him here as a punishment? No. That didn't work either. Because "here" was too different. The bullet wound had gone. And what about all these dead bodies, lying there in their strange clothes? Some sort of war had been taking place. And he had just woken up on the losing side.

There was no simple explanation. Jamie realized that he had to accept the situation as it was and try to make the best of it. After all, his entire life had been completely insane, from the day he'd been abandoned in a cardboard box and left on the edge of Lake Tahoe to the time he'd found himself being chased across state lines for two crimes he hadn't committed. He was a freak. A mind reader. He'd learned to live with all of that — so why not this? Somehow, in some impossible way, he had been transported to another place…maybe even another planet. And it seemed that he was on his own, the only living person for perhaps miles around. He could stay here, cowering in the corner, or he could move on.

There was no choice, really. It was time to go.

He wiped his mouth on his arm, then stood up and began to make his way down the hill. The farther he went, the more bodies littered his path until he found himself stepping over them, doing his best to avoid treading on them while at the same time trying not to examine them too closely. The wounds were too horrible.

The battlefield stretched on, all the way down to the bottom of the hill and beyond. Jamie saw more broken swords and shields. He came upon a young, fair-haired man pinned to a tree by a spear that had gone straight through him. The man was holding some sort of flag — a blue five-pointed star in a circle, set against a white background. Jamie began to understand. This was like one of those battles that he had seen at the movies. All these dead men could have been warriors. But who had they been fighting? Their enemies, whoever they were, had been utterly ruthless. It was possible that they had taken prisoners but they had left nobody alive on the field.

Jamie looked farther down the hill. The field stretched on toward the horizon, which formed an almost invisible line between the darkening sky and the grass. Even though he had moved away from the fortress, the smell of burning was getting stronger and he realized that the clouds were actually smoke, that something huge — a town or a city — had burned a short while ago and that although the fire might now be out, it had left a pall that had smothered the sky. If so, this battle was probably one of many. And the carnage might stretch on for miles.

He came to a muddy lane that gave him a choice of two directions, although neither of them had much to offer. The, countryside was flat but with hills rising up straight ahead. Jamie was tempted to ignore the lane and continue across open country. He might be safer away from the beaten track. After all, there was a victorious army somewhere in the area and he didn't want to go blundering into it until he knew which side he was meant to be on.

There was a movement. Jamie started, about to run away, then relaxed. A single figure was walking down the lane toward him, an old man supporting himself on a stick. He looked like a monk, dressed in a brown robe with a hood folded back over his shoulders. He was still a long way away, but as he drew closer, Jamie saw that he was at least sixty years old, almost bald, with sagging skin and weeping, bloodshot eyes. The old man could barely walk. All his weight was concentrated on the stick that he placed carefully in front of him before he took each step.

Jamie felt a huge sense of relief. He was no longer alone! The man raised a hand and waved at him. It seemed that he was friendly. Now perhaps Jamie might learn where he was and what had happened here…assuming that the man spoke his language. Jamie waited as he made his way along the lane. It took him a very long time before he finally arrived.

The man stopped and spoke.

"Rag dagger a marrad hag!"

That was what the words sounded like. Jamie heard them quite distinctly and they should have made no sense at all. The man was talking gibberish. But Jamie understood exactly what he meant. Somehow, his brain had tuned itself into a foreign language that he had learned instantly. Impossible, of course. But that was how it was.

"Good day to you, my friend!" the man had said. He had called out the greeting in a trembling, high-pitched voice. He stopped to catch his breath, then went on, the words instantly translating themselves.

"A living child among so many dead! That's very strange. Who are you, my boy? What are you doing here?"

Jamie hesitated, wondering if he could respond. "My name is Jamie," he replied, but although they were the words he thought, they weren't the ones that came out of his lips. Without even trying, he was speaking the man's language. He paused, then went on. "I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't even know where I am. Can you help me?"

"Of course I can help you." The man laughed briefly. It was a dry, unpleasant sound. "But as to where you are, there is nothing left here, so why should it even have a name? And if it did have a name, it would soon be forgotten, like everywhere else. There are no countries now. No cities, no towns. All is but ashes." He ran an eye over Jamie and frowned. "Where have you come from?" he asked.

"I'm American," Jamie said. "From Nevada."

"America? Nevada? I don't know these places." Now the man was suspicious. "How did you arrive here?"

"I don't know." Jamie shook his head. "I didn't mean to come here. It just happened."

"As if by magic?"

"Well…yes." Jamie wasn't sure that the old man was joking.

"Perhaps it was magic!" The old man's hand tightened on the walking stick. "Perhaps you were brought here by the Old Ones. They might have wanted you, although I can't think why." He cocked his head to one side. "Do you serve the Old Ones?" he asked.