Divine Madness (2 page)

On the night of her eighteenth birthday a stranger was announced and, being much alone and tired of her sickbed, Ninon received him though he gave the servants no name. The man who appeared before her was very strange—old and yet ageless with eyes as black as midnight that matched his long black cloak. She had the strangest conviction that she had seen his face before, perhaps in a dream.

“My visit surprises, perhaps terrifies you,” he said. “But be not afraid. I have come on this night to offer you one of three things; either highest rank, or immeasurable wealth, or eternal beauty. But you must choose without delay. At the count of seven the opportunity will be gone forever.” He reached out a hand to push back his hood and she saw his skin was covered in a fine net of gold scars.

“Then I choose eternal beauty. But tell me—what must I do for such a great boon?” she asked flippantly, not truly believing this man was any more a great magician than the disappointing creature she had seen earlier in the day at the caves in Gentilly, the one she had sought because he might have a cure for stagnant lungs.

“You must sign your name in my tablet and never tell a soul of our secret compact.” A thick stack of parchment appeared in his hand.

“Do I sign in blood?” She coughed again.

The dark man smiled cruelly. “That will not be necessary. Ink will suffice for this part of our contract.” Then, when Ninon had done as he said he told her, “This is the greatest power that a person may have. In my six thousand years roaming the earth I have only ever bestowed it on four mortals; Semiramis, Helen, Cleopatra, and Diane de Poitiers. You are the fifth and last to receive this gift.

We go now into the night so I may finish my work. Look for me before fifty years have passed on the night of a great storm. When you see me again, tremble, for you shall have but three days to live unless you pay the toll I ask at that time.” He pulled his hood back over his head. “And remember that my name is Noctambule.”

—
Saint Evremond’s supposed account of the meeting between the Devil and Ninon de Lenclos

[Saint Germain] is supposed to have intercourse with ghosts and supernatural beings who appear at his call.

—
Landgraf von Hessen-Barchfeld

Mexico, 2006

The woman who was Ninon but who was now calling herself Seraphina Sandoval drove deep into the desert, doing her best to get completely lost before trying to find herself again. Her mind was like the scenery around her: red, empty of other life, monotonous. The only other living thing braving the brutal heat of midday was her cat, who had been Aleister but was also now someone else, though he was mostly unaware of it.

It was late spring in the desert and the earth followed its natural cycle. Hawks took to the thermals, prairie dogs scampered, the agave bloomed. Everything was getting on with the job of living. Even she was, though there was greater urgency to her movement because unlike these animals, the woman knew she was dying. Again. And someone was trying to speed her on her way.

“Poor kitty,” she murmured in French as she stroked him, finally rousing herself from her deliberately blankminded reverie. Then, hearing herself, she frowned. She
had to remember to speak Spanish now—even in her head. Even when she didn’t feel watched. “
Pobrecito
. But you still have eight lives left.”

The cat glared at her from his place in the passenger seat. His singed fur, dyed as black as his mistress’s hair and which now matched her obsidian eyes, was slowly growing back. But he was still far from his beautiful and dignified self, and the taste of the chemically altered hair infuriated him when he bathed. Ninon didn’t care for her hair color either, but the Devil—or at least the Devil’s son—was on their heels and there was nothing for it but to hide who and what they were.

The changed appearance and identity might work for a while, though there was no guarantee. After years of dividing her time between her island and New Orleans, burying herself in what she had thought was complete obscurity, she had awoken one dawn to find herself in a wet hole in the ground about the size of a grave with the world on fire around her. An explosion. Had she not been who and what she was, and had the fish pond not been filled with water, that would have been the end of her. And of her cat.

“Reeoow.”

“We must work on your accent. Anyone would know that you are a foreigner. You must learn to hide your disdain,” she said absently, trying for a note of gaiety but falling far short. Her smoke-damaged larynx hadn’t fully recovered. She was also coughing again. But that had nothing to do with the explosion.

The cat was not buying her false cheeriness.

Things had come apart on New Year’s Day at about one in the morning on what should have been the start of a new and better year, had her old enemy not caught up with her in the form of a fire bomb delivered by some unknown means. It had had no note with it, at least none that survived, but she knew who the sender was anyway. He’d been after her for a long time—two centuries at least.

At first his attacks had been subtle, oblique, things that inspired anxiety more than presenting actual danger. But after his father the Dark Man’s descent into insanity and then death at the hands of Lord Byron, Saint Germain had turned to a more overt form of war. He must be getting desperate, fearing he would go the way of his sire and looking for a cure for the insanity that came when too many brain cells died in the needed electrocutions. Just as she sought help from outsiders, so too would Saint Germain. It was a race to see who would find help first.

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. She didn’t usually dwell on her many brushes with death, but this had come so close. If she hadn’t been outside, rescuing Aleister’s midnight fishy snack, she and the cat would have both died. Vaporization and fire were two sure ways to kill her. As it was, her poor koi had been boiled.

Ninon pulled her mind back to the present and worked on keeping it calm and blank. Strong emotion was bad. It seemed to work like a sort of beacon, calling her enemy to her if he were anywhere nearby. Once she could have controlled her feelings, but her mind was every day less and less her own. She couldn’t risk leaving any sort of a mental pathway that he could use to track her now that she knew—more or less—where she was going. She had been careful not to leave any electronic or paper trails for Saint Germain or others to follow, used no credit cards, debit cards, or cell phones. But that wasn’t the only way they tracked her.

“I’m sorry. That is banal. So, I shall choose a new name for you, yes? How about Corazon?” she asked, and then realized that in her mind she had already named him this. “It’s pretty, and it would be an excellent disguise for you. You must not be a gender bigot.”

The cat closed his eyes. He was not a sweetheart, and it was a matter of indifference to him what his mistress called him so long as she produced proper sustenance at regular intervals and scratched him under the chin.

Ninon understood this and didn’t judge him harshly. Though her closest friend, he was an animal and had an animal’s experience of the world. He needed food and shelter and an occasional physical display of affection. She was not so simple. Not any more. For a long while—since a form of immortality had been visited upon her—she had been plagued by a complex question: Was she just a thinking animal who occasionally had glimpses of a spiritual realm; or was she in fact a creature of spirit, trapped on earth so that she could learn from earthly experience before moving on to another life? If it was the latter, then she had certainly miscalculated when she allowed her enemy’s father to extend her life with his Promethean fire. How could one move on to the next world if one could not die at the appointed hour?

It was not like her to dwell on unhappy things, to second-guess herself. She agreed with Charlotte Brontë that regret was the poison of life, and did her best to never sip from that cup. But having someone’s hate endure unto the second generation and then a good deal longer—hate grand enough to prompt a man to multiple murders and to hurt a cat—that was just cause for momentary reflection, and perhaps even to review one’s life choices.

But not right now.

Ninon sighed and shifted in the Jeep’s less-than-luxurious seat. How she missed her Cobra! But that much-loved car and her other house were both in New Orleans where she could not go without risking Saint Germain’s spies finding her. Had he not sent his minions to open the already weakened levees after the terrible hurricane? He had drowned her beloved New Orleans in another attempt to kill her, and also to hide the evidence of his own systematic looting of the old graveyards.

Her nose wrinkled. The smell of exhaust was strong. It was expected. The tailpipes had smoke like that from a fire-breathing dragon. Her current vehicle was a probably reject from a demolition derby, but that was proving to be
handy in a place where nice cars were like friendly dogs, tending to wander off with any passing stranger who knew how to hot-wire an engine. It was also faster, more stubborn on hills, and more loyal than any other desert vehicle she might have asked to face this Hell at high noon.

And it seemed to always be high noon—all day, every day—in this land suspended somewhere between what had been once and what was yet to be. Man was an unwanted intruder here. Sometimes gray clouds appeared on the horizon and hinted at cooling rain, but Mother Nature never followed through with her promise. Ninon had come to suspect that She was on the enemy’s payroll, trying to degrade his victim’s will by frying Ninon in the sun while denying her the renewing fire of the storm. That would be one way for Saint Germain to kill her. Not as quick as decapitation, but just as sure.

Of course, the nine-millimeter pistol Ninon had tucked under her leg didn’t help her comfort either.

Corazon chuffed. He didn’t care for the smell of gun oil or exhaust.

“We must endure,” Ninon muttered.

The Americas were a strange place. She had been in the New World off and on for nigh on three hundred years, but her eyes had still not adapted to all the varied landscapes. The scenery was simply too bright, too bold, too big. And this land was too dry.
Por Dios!
Would it never rain?

The people were different too—brash, uncivilized, disinclined to play by any rules. Even rules they themselves made.

Like you’ve ever played by anyone’s rules?
a voice that might have been her conscience asked.

I had rules. They were just my own.

The cat lifted an eyelid and glared. He seemed to know whenever she started talking to herself, though the dialogue was strictly internal. The voice had always been there, but it was only in recent weeks that it had taken to
visiting daily, forcing her into a slightly insane Socratic dialogue. Maybe it would go away when her concussion healed—when all of her healed in the heavenly fire.

Hoping to stop the voice in her head, Ninon pushed a tape into the player and the sounds of Sourdough Slim filled the Jeep. The cat glared some more. He did not care for yodeling.

Ninon glanced down at the gas gauge. She was still fine for fuel and she was in sight of a major highway—the 111, if the map was correct—and there was a town located at the outskirts of a nature preserve that would be at the junction of this highway and the 30. There was at least a quarter of a tank and she had begun seeing signs for a place called
Cuatro Cienegas
. Four Lakes—that was good. Of course, after the
Sierra del Muertos
—Dead Man’s Mountains—anything sounded good.

Oui,
but you still do not know why you are running or even where
.

Nonsense. She was running to…She looked down and read the words she had scribbled on the map: Hotel Ybarra.

That’s not what I mean,
cherie.

I know. But you also know that we have to…to do something. There is no one left in Europe who can help—Saint Germain has killed them all. The lead in Greece was faulty, and the only other place we have heard any reference to people being resurrected by fire is here in Mexico.

They were being resurrected by other things as well, if legend were to be believed. Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, God of the Night, was apparently big on vampiric priestesses culled from women who died in childbirth. These creatures were scary, not like the usual necksucking Euro-trash so popular in movies. They liked brains as much as blood. This was a bit of a drawback, but Ninon needed help badly enough to brave brain-sucking fiends. She just wished the ancient stone tablet
she’d sought hadn’t been stolen from the museum before she could see it. She would have had a clearer understanding of what she was up against.

So now you seek out the blasphemous Aztec gods to aid you?

Look, I’d seek out the Dev
—she started to say and then paused.

Not
the Devil?
the voice asked.
But why, if he can help?

You know why. I think it may have been the Devil who got me here. Or at least one of his henchmen
.

Perhaps. Regardless, we are now touring the hellholes of the New World looking for a way out of troubles. Is that wise? Have we exhausted all other options?

Yes, they are exhausted, most dead and buried. I wish the answers were in heaven—do you really think I wouldn’t rather be in Cancun sunning myself on a beach? But I tried paradise for a savior, and all I found was a serpent. And no rain—no storms even where there should be. It has to be Saint Germain’s doing
.

The voice didn’t answer. Perhaps because the cat had stuck his claws in her leg. Corazon looked worried. He seemed to know that his mistress’s mind was going somewhere bad.

Actually, when she thought about it, Ninon’s paradise had been free of serpents for a long while, and there had been plenty of rain if no lightning. But as always happened, the modern world had started intruding on her Eden, and paradise had been slowly losing its allure. Before, where there were lush crops of tropical flowers, the land had sprouted expensive homes—which would have been lovely architectural sculptures if people hadn’t come to live in them.