CHAPTER 16
I’d been looking toward the mountain, wondering if, perhaps, Sawyer was still up there, but at the kid’s words I looked right back. “Say what?”
“The spell required a weapon of fury coated in hellebore.”
“A weapon of fury could be anything.”
“In this case, that weapon was me. I rubbed hellebore all over my body.”
“Dammit, Luther!” I clenched my hands to keep from throttling the kid. “You could have been killed.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Don’t do that again.”
His expression became mulish—a quick switch from strong, able man to sulky little boy. “I’ll do whatever I have to. Seems to me it’s a lot safer to take a bath in hellebore than to coat some weapon and hope like hell you’ve got that weapon at hand if a barbas shows up. This way, I’m always ready.”
The kid thought like me, which made it hard to argue with him. Knowing that he was protected the next time a barbas tried to kill him took a small portion of the load off my heavily overloaded mind.
“It would be good to know why they keep coming after you,” I murmured.
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe. Seems their time would be better spent wreaking havoc wherever they can like the rest of the Nephilim. That they’re obsessed with you is . . . disturbing.” To say the least.
“They killed my parents”—Luther shrugged—“but they never found me. Maybe they just can’t let it go.”
“So they keep searching for the next fifteen years? Awful long attention span for a kitty cat.” I thought back to my short encounter with the lion man, and I tilted my head as I heard again his heavily accented voice. “He was African.”
Luther snorted. “Why? Because he was black?”
“He had an accent. He said, ‘Where is de boy?’ ”
The sudden shift in expression on Luther’s face made me pause and ask, “What?”
“Just like that?” he asked. “He sounded just like that?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Why?”
“My mother had an accent. She was from Kenya.” His lips curved into a small sad smile as his eyes gazed toward the mountain. “She would walk in the house, and she would call, ‘Where is de boy?’ and I would come running.”
My eyes got a little misty at that picture. I’d never had a mother—at least one I remembered. By the time Ruthie had taken me in, I’d been far too old to come running and she’d had far too many children in her care to call.
You’d think I’d have flashes of someone—a hazy, ghostly face in the night, a cool hand on my brow, the echo of a voice, a scent that brought back . . . anything—but I didn’t. Before the first foster home there was only a great black void, one I often wished had reached forward to encompass several of the places I’d lived thereafter.
“You’re saying the man who came searching had the same accent as your mother?” I clarified.
“Since I didn’t hear him say anything but—” He opened his mouth and roared so loudly if I were a cartoon I’d have been blown back three feet by the current, then shrugged. “Got me.”
As I’d thought before, it was too damn coincidental that a cadre of barbases had killed Luther’s parents and one had shown up here. Even if Luther had called the thing in, from its question to me in the shower, the barbas had been looking for the kid, and as the boy had pointed out, you aren’t paranoid if they’re really after you.
“Relatives?” I mused.
“Of my mother?” At first Luther appeared intrigued, until he realized that though he might have gained family, that family wanted him dead.
I remembered when I first realized that people—things, demons, whatever—I’d never met and hadn’t personally hurt wanted to kill me. It took a little getting used to. Luther got over it a lot quicker than I had.
His face hardened; he lifted his chin and murmured, “Gonna dust every last one of the bastards.”
“That’s my boy.”
“I’m not your boy.”
The kid still didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t blame him. Without this collar, I’d want to kill him too. Without this collar, I’d probably do worse than kill him for a long, long time.
And wouldn’t that be funnnnn? the demon whispered.
I shivered. I hated this thing inside of me. That I’d sent Jimmy to have his released only made me hate myself nearly as much.
I ignored Luther’s jab. What choice did I have? Pointing out that he was my boy, as in under my command in Armageddon’s Army, would only force another confrontation about having lost my connection to the army’s true general. Since I needed that connection now, pissing off the conduit wasn’t advisable.
Hey, I could be taught!
“Can you bring Ruthie?” I asked.
Luther frowned. “Now?”
“No, I thought maybe next Friday. After we’re all dead.”
“You don’t have to be bitchy about it,” he murmured.
“Obviously you don’t know me very well at all.”
His lips curved just a little. “I’ve never tried to bring her. She’s always just—”
“There,” I finished.
“Yeah.”
Boy, I wished she were just “there” for me right now.
“Close your eyes and—”
“Open,” Luther interrupted. “I know.”
Considering he’d been working with Sawyer for several weeks, I was certain he did. Sawyer was big on being open. Which was downright hysterical considering how “closed” the man was.
Luther shut his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out and waited. I stood helpless, able only to watch, to hope and pray that he’d succeed, but also kind of hoping he didn’t. I’d been able to reach Ruthie solely in my dreams. I couldn’t call her up on a whim no matter how much I might have wanted to.
Time passed. I sighed, shuffled, opened my mouth to tell the kid to forget it, he’d tried, but then his eyelids fluttered, opened, and the eyes that stared back at me were no longer hazel but a deep woodsy brown.
My lips tightened; I glanced away. “Overachiever,” I muttered.
“Lizbeth,” Ruthie’s voice came out of Luther’s mouth, sweet and gentle as a spring rain at dawn. “Jealousy don’t help anyone.”
I shrugged. “I’m supposed to be the most powerful seer in centuries, but I can’t see anymore, and I could never bring you like he can.”
“We all have our talents, child. Right now yours are in a different area.”
“Will I ever be a seer again?” I asked, my voice so wistful it surprised me.
In the past, all I’d wanted was to be normal, for God to take away the psychometric gift I’d been born with. Then Ruthie had given me her gift, and I’d wished that away too. Now that gift was gone, and I ached to have it back again.
“Time will tell,” Ruthie murmured.
If I closed my eyes I could delude myself; I could forget—momentarily—about the boy channeling the woman and once again see Ruthie Kane.
Nearly everything about her was sharp—her mind, her elbows, not to mention her spiky hips and knobby knees. I never could figure out how a woman who resembled a bag of bones could give the softest, sweetest hugs on the planet. The kind of hugs people lived—and died—for.
She’d fold me into her arms, and the fluff of her steadily graying Afro would brush my face as I listened to the sturdy thud of her great big heart. I missed those hugs so damn much.
I opened my eyes. The kid looked nothing like her, and if I tried to hug him, I’d probably wind up with a black eye. Not that I needed a hug or anything.
Yeah, I didn’t believe it either.
“What’s that mean?” I asked. “Time will tell?”
“The future is . . . murky.”
My eyebrows lifted. “I thought the future was written.”
“It is. Unfortunately, the way it’s written . . .” Luther’s huge hands spread wide. “Could mean anything.”
I rubbed my forehead. Why did I even try to make sense of my life?
“Listen.” I dropped my hand. “I had a . . .” I paused, frowned. “Well, I thought I was dream walking, but—” Quickly I explained what I’d seen and how I’d seen it.
Luther’s mouth turned down, just the way Ruthie’s always had whenever life threw her an unpleasant curve. “Not dream walking,” she muttered.
“You’re sure?”
Those familiar eyes in that unfamiliar face met mine. “Coffin, dirt, graveyard. The dead don’t dream, Lizbeth.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. This was a message.”
“From whom?”
“The usual messenger,” Ruthie said, obviously still thinking. “This woman was dead, and then she wasn’t.”
“And how does that happen exactly?”
“Someone, or something, raised her.”
“Zombie?” I’d never met one, but that didn’t mean they weren’t around.
Luther’s curls flew as his head moved left, right and left again. “Zombies don’t run; they shuffle. They aren’t very pretty either. The decay don’t go away just ’cause they’re above ground instead of below. But what zombies really don’t do is turn into birds and fly.”
“What does?”
Ruthie held up one long, brown finger. “First, tell me about the bag she carried. Size. Shape. Weight.”
I placed my hands four inches apart. “About like this.” Then I did the same lengthwise and added a few inches to the space. “And this. Weighed a pound or so.”
Ruthie’s gaze remained on mine. “If you had to guess, what would you say was inside?”
I closed my eyes, imagined again what it felt like to be the woman in the grave. I shivered at the memory—the dirt in my nose and mouth, the darkness all around me, the press of the earth, the smell and the madness that hovered very close to the surface.
“Focus, Lizbeth. What was in the bag?”
I stood in the exquisite rays of the rising sun, felt the cool, damp morning dew on my feet and my face; then I lifted my hand—scratched and bleeding, but already healing—to the satchel looped around my neck.
As soon as I touched it, I got a flash so strong it made me stagger and open my eyes. “Whoa, what the hell?”
I’d never been able to touch something in my memory and see it. Of course I’d never been able to enter anyone’s mind without first physically touching them; I’d never “become” someone the way that I’d become the woman in the grave.
“What did you see?” Ruthie’s gaze was intense; Luther held his breath.
“A book. Very old. Had a crest on the front.” I scowled, staring into the distance, thinking so hard I risked a brain embolism. “A star.”
I closed my eyes and laboriously counted as I held on to the image in my head with all the power that I had. A bead of sweat slid from my brow, tickling first my cheek and then my neck. “Six.”
“Hexagram.” Relief colored Ruthie’s voice.
I opened one eye. “That’s good?”
“Yes and no. Pentagram—five points—can be white or black magic. Just depends.”
“But a hexagram?”
“Jewish magical symbol. Legends state it came into use after being discovered on a signet ring transcribed with the secret four-letter name of God.”
“Which is?”
Luther’s eyes rolled. “A secret, Lizbeth.”
I lifted my hands, surprised to discover they were shaking. I put them behind my back, clasping my fingers together in an attempt to still the trembling. “Forget I asked.”
“What else?” Ruthie pressed.
I reached again into the dark recesses of another mind. “Lions?”
Luther’s head bobbed. “The seal was used to mark magical icons of legend and the sacred name was replaced with lions, which were a symbol of Solomon.”
I started, but Ruthie continued to speak. “The hexagram with the lion accents is known as the Seal of Solomon.”
Solomon. Swell.
“The key is with the Phoenix,” I murmured.
Which explained how the dead woman had come back to life, then turned into a brightly colored bird and flown into the sun. I don’t know why I hadn’t caught on before. My only excuse, one I’d used many times before, was that I’d been a little busy to connect the dots since I’d been dealing, again, with half demons that were trying to kill me.
“Now what?” I asked.
“You’ll have to infiltrate the Nephilim.”
“Excuse me?” My voice was so loud I startled a bird from a nearby bush.
“How you think you’re gonna get the key back?”
“Kill them all and take it?”
“Could.” Luther’s bony shoulders lifted, then lowered. “But there’s a lot more of them than there were, and they’re gettin’ stronger every day. Infiltrating is a better bet.”
“They know me. I’m not going to be able to sneak up and pretend to be one of them.”
“Don’t sneak, child; walk right in the front door and volunteer.”
“And they’ll believe my sudden change of heart because they’ve all had recent lobotomies?”
“No, Lizbeth.” Luther took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, looked toward the mountain, up at the sky, back to the house, the hogan and finally me. “They’ll believe it because the Phoenix is your mother.”