She Walks in Shadows (32 page)

Bribe?
Ayahuasca didn’t understand. She had made her will and chosen an infant to contain her soul. The baby had been born two years past, in the month of the scorpion, a child of the water-dragon house. Ayahuasca’s testament should lead them to the ordained little girl, marked with a strawberry mole like a third eye upon her brow.

“If you refuse, Priest, I’ll expose you. Witnesses saw our transactions. Lady Natema —”

“Your concubine —”

Concubine? Ayahuasca’s soul trembled like flame. Yaje dared touch another woman while First Consort in her court?

“My tool, yes. Don’t tax me with her; you’ve had alley-lovers enough. Just do the ritual. Say that Empress Ayahuasca’s soul goes into Lady Natema’s unborn child.”

Ayahuasca’s fury glowed molten. But her body was cold and unmoving, and her incorporeal soul could touch nothing.

“Unbeliever!” The shaman rolled his eyes to heaven in fake piety. “Gold and spices and slaves may buy my actions but never my conscience.” Then his voice softened. “Yet, I must send the Empress’ soul somewhere — shall it be to your bastard child?”

Yaje’s voice was crafty. “You sly old fool, did I say the child is mine? What if it is? But on the off chance that the soul exchange is real, let’s not risk Ayahuasca’s strong character invading that baby. Send our bitch-queen’s soul elsewhere. The child shall be all mine. I’ll send Natema abroad — no, better, Lady Natema won’t survive the birth. Under my protection, the new Empress will teach her subjects respect — and they’ll double and triple their tributes.”

Ayahuasca’s fury exploded like green wood in fire. She had ruled fairly, demanding only modest tribute. Under her, the country had prospered, no child hungry and no foreign power threatening the people. She wanted to scream and tear her hair. Yaje was a parasite! He’d been false all along! Death had come to her too young, her last days filled with evil dreams and agony in her belly. And why had she never conceived, either by the now-dead Emperor, or by her consorts? Perhaps he’d even conspired to poison her.

Nai’uchi insisted. “I need some vessel for the Empress’s soul. I can’t perform the ritual without a target, even if I lie and say the soul lives in your bastard.”

Yaje’s voice went flat, as if he had already dismissed the issue. “Send it to the puppy or the cat, then.”

Nai’uchi burned sweet herbs; arousing Ayahuasca’s spirit. Chanted words set her spirit heart beating. The shaman spoke the high language only royalty and shamans understood. His words meant:
Go unto the cat, great Empress. Infuse the cat and return to living land.
The chant went on, entreating her to live, creep into the pet’s body.

Entreating. She had a choice: Return to the poisoned world of pretended love, pretended loyalty. And in the cat’s body, in this house of traitors, how long would she survive?

She had a choice. As incense floated around her, her soul flowed like blood from a chalice.

Her eyes opened. The colors of the trees filled her vision. She felt blood in her veins, the hair on her back rise. The smell of manure from the baboon cage flooded her senses. She flexed her great claws, and muscle and fur rippled on her flanks. Her screams brought the keeper.

The keeper looked at her with terror. She bore down on him, broke the gate latch and bounded down the boulevard, out of the zoological gardens. Toward the shaman house.

QUEEN OF A NEW AMERICA

Wendy N. Wagner

THE LITTLE GIRL
hunkered down to study the beetle, its shell a shimmering rainbow of colors like the ones she’d seen on the mud puddles beside the street. She was only six, but she had already learned that beauty could exist in places others would fail to look. She dropped a stick in front of the insect to force it to turn aside and make its colors play in the light.

A part of her mind went to sleep then. She did not remember when these moments occurred, although they happened more and more frequently as she grew taller and cleverer and more self-sufficient. Her brown eyes went blank for a second and then lit bright with some sharp intelligence that hadn’t been there before. They narrowed at the beetle. It was no royal scarab, no sacred icon, but only some ordinary creature. All the creatures of this continent were
ordinary
. It pained her to know her soul was bound to this tedious, ill-bred, and utterly mundane place.

At home, there would be magic. She settled down on the sidewalk, allowing her thoughts to stretch out and fill the small mind she occupied. She spent so much time hiding, keeping herself small to keep from breaking the child’s tiny brain. She had never been good at restraining herself. Once, she had killed a thousand guests at a state dinner, just to see if she could. Her lips twitched at the memory. Murder was a mere frivolity to a woman such as herself, Queen Nitocris, who had challenged the gods in the great necropolises of Egypt, and won out over life and death.

The smile vanished. Death, yes, she had vanquished. From the dead, she had made herself an army of creatures, hybridized beings whose disparate strengths were held together by her husband’s embalming art and her own will. She hardly needed his skills, not with powers like hers. From her own embalmed body, she had captured her soul and held it to roam of all of Egypt as she pleased.

Until the interloper came. Thinking about that magic-less chicaner made her momentarily lose her grip on the host. The little girl moved to stand up. For a second, Nitocris’s view of the iridescent beetle went gray as she began to dissolve into the depths of her borrowed mind.

She snapped back, wrenching the girl’s consciousness into a prison of waking sleep. Sweat dampened her armpits and pain throbbed behind her eye. Damn, but the girl was strong. Since the illusionist had carried Nitocris out of Egypt and into this dry, drab America, she had almost forgotten the thrill of wrestling with another magical talent. In a place of less science and more emotion, the child could have been a real threat.

Nitocris recrossed her legs beneath the hem of her ruffled blue skirt and noticed the beetle moving slowly away from her. She scooped it up and lifted it to eye level. Deep within her, the child whimpered as the bug ran up her brown arm with prickling feet. The undead queen squelched her host’s complaint. The little one would be in charge of their body all too soon. Nitocris would have her pleasures now.

Beautiful things had always been her love and she had missed them after her death. Her subjects had filled her tomb with all her most glorious treasures, but over the centuries, tomb robbers had carried them away. She had plenty of ways to punish them, of course. In the hidden parts of her tomb, her mummies were always at the ready, their jackal teeth and nimble ape fingers ready to rend and tear the flesh of her enemies. But they always returned to her shabby and dirty, her minions’ linens unraveling in the wear of battle and the track of time.

Her treasures, too, lost their luster. Golden urns returned dented. Jewels were chipped. Her carefully preserved and gilded cats were ground into dust and mixed with wines Nitocris wouldn’t have served to even her coarsest slaves. Even the once-great nation of Egypt had become a dirty, sad place. The energy ran out of it, drained like the nation’s fortune into its conquerors’ pockets.

Poverty and filth had weakened her. She understood that now. She scowled at the beetle, which stopped in its tracks. Its antennae trembled. Nitocris hated to recall herself in that weakness, but she had come to understand the source of her magical power and her own formidable will, and now that understanding had become its own kind of strength. Like removing the bandage from a festering wound in order to encourage healing, she could now allow herself to remember the moment she laid eyes on Harry Houdini.

He had come to her tomb on the kind of necropolitan tour so popular in those days. He wasn’t a handsome man, but there was something mesmerizing about his eyes, something that drew her to him, that practically compelled her to slip inside him. But his mind! She shuddered to remember it. Such a painfully logical mind. It nearly smothered her. It drained the energy out of her before she could even begin to mount an escape. She fought back with mad dreams and strange headaches, but without the power of the old ways for her to draw upon, his will had dwarfed hers.

And then he’d brought her here, to America, where his logic had grown stronger and her own magic had dwindled. Even after he died, she hadn’t found freedom, but had instead been drawn into the mind of the sleeping man in the hospital room next door. An engineer, as it would turn out. She poked at the beetle with a small finger, enjoying its nervous scrabble away. Here in America, everyone was so rational and scientific, their spirits pathetically small. She hadn’t gotten a whiff of magic until this child’s birth.

It had been a stroke of luck, being in the same place as the girl, the first good fortune she had found in centuries. Ever since, she had been soaking up the child’s magic like a tender plant growing in the benevolent warmth of a hothouse. She had found just enough strength to escape the previous mind she’d been trapped in and make her way to the infant, allowing herself to be swallowed up by the tiny, developing brain. Slowly, so slowly, her mind and will unfurled from the years of psychic imprisonment. She could almost taste her freedom — and then she would have this lovely body to enjoy once she crushed the mind inside. If she could only find a bit more magic to draw to herself, the process would go faster.

The tinny thumping of drum and bass distracted her from her pleasant ruminations, and a car pulled to a stop in front of her. She eyed it warily. Green and yellow pennants waved on the dented front bumper and the young men inside nearly overflowed the shabby thing. This was a quiet street, but close enough to three fraternity houses to make the mother of the host child forbid the child from playing here in the front yard. One of the boys leaned out the back window, a brown glass bottle clenched in his hand.

“Hey, nigger!” He tipped back the last of the beer and then lobbed the bottle her way.

She threw up her arm, but the bottle struck her on the forehead hard enough to rock her backward. The bottle bounced off, clinking on the sidewalk. The car revved its engine and then screeched away. Someone inside whooped with delight and the sound sent her arm hairs up in prickles.

Nitocris stared after the car, taking in the red-white-and-blue bumper stickers and the back window full of unintelligible Greek letters. If her husband hadn’t turned to dust five centuries before, she would have begged him to wrap those boys in linen and rub them down in natron. Such hatred! Such feeling! It was nearly as powerful as the fear and hatred her people had once given their gods. These boys were the kind of Americans she’d missed while she was trapped in the skulls of magicians, writers, engineers. Now that she’d tasted it, she realized it surrounded her, energy-rich and delicious as blood. What she’d sucked at beneath the sands of Egypt was nothing compared to this fresh power source.

The screen door banged open. “Baby girl, what are you doing out here? You get away from that street.”

The host child’s mother. The tedious old bag would drag her back into the realm of the swing set and the toy ponies, and Nitocris would be pressed back into the unthinking part of the child’s mind. It was like being bludgeoned to sleep by stupidity. But today, she thought perhaps she wasn’t as bothered by the thought. Today, perhaps sleep would bring rest, recovery, strength. She stretched her awareness after the boys and felt the pulsing throb of distant energy.

“I’m coming, Mom,” she forced herself to answer. She eased the beetle back onto the ground.

The child’s mind fluttered at the edges of consciousness, called by the presence of the mother. The little girl had registered a little of the pain of the bottle striking her head and fear made her fight Nitocris’s control harder than usual. Nitocris had to whip a mental hand across the girl’s awareness. She staggered a little and a hot explosion of pain made Nitocris squeeze shut her eye.

“You’ll pay for that,” she whispered. She grabbed a tiny tendril of her newfound energy and gripped the girl’s will cruelly. An idea struck her. Nitocris forced the girl’s hand back out to the beetle and scooped it from the sidewalk. The girl’s wrist trembled as Nitocris wrestled the creature closer and closer to her face. Nitocris could not restrain a tiny giggle.

The beetle’s legs tickled her lips for a second and then she brought her teeth together in a warm burst of bitter goo. The girl choked and gagged. Panic let her burst out of Nitocris’s control.

“Mommy!” she screamed.

Nitocris slipped into the darkest corner of the girl’s mind. Let the girl rail and cry. Let her know fear. Nitocris was coming for her.

The Queen closed the eyes of her spirit and basked in the knowledge of a new America, ready for her to tap.

THE OPERA SINGER

Priya Sridhar

THE COLD HAD
blown in early on Sunday morning, too early for the fall. People shivered in their purple-and-black sweatshirts; so did Circe. She had taken to pushing her wheelchair, as a form of unofficial rehabilitation. She had managed to get it to the music school’s practice buildings this time.