Embers (32 page)

A display case showing a chunk of ruddy, striated stone confirmed Felicity’s research: that the site of the effigy showed geologic signs of volcanic or meteoric explosion. The exhibit further noted that the effigy was built at the intersection of three fault lines, suggesting unusual geologic activity in the meteor crater overgrown with vegetation.

The myth surrounding the mound was that it had been a burial site, a memorial to fallen Adena. The mound had been partially excavated in the late 1880s, but no human remains had yet been found. Still, the speculation continued about what could be found, if one just dug deeply enough.

“I want to see it,” said Katie. Her voice sounded stronger.

“You up to it?”

“Yup. I’ve exorcised the demon chili dog.” She raised a triumphant arm and pointed to the horizon. “Onward.”

A blacktop path led from the museum around the perimeter of the serpent. No more than three feet high, the Serpent Mound coiled across the top of the plateau for a quarter of a mile. It was the same as Anya had remembered: freshly mown grass clippings blowing over the rills in the earth. No other visitors walked the path; Anya, Katie, and Sparky were alone with the snake.

“Wow,” said Katie. She knelt and brushed her hands over the grass. “This place. . . it’s like it hums.”

Anya stepped off the path into the grass. She could feel it, too, as if some deep underwater current roiled beneath the surface. She climbed up the short hill of one of the serpent’s coils and sat down, surveying the land spread out below her. The land was foreign to her, but the taste of isolation was familiar.

Katie perched beside her, still combing the grass with her fingers. She arranged herself in a meditation posture, wrapped herself in silence. Sparky sniffed and snorted around the curls of the snake’s body, like a dog seeking out a buried bone.

Anya’s eyes slipped shut. She reached out with her mind, down the length of the serpent’s spine, reaching for some answer, for some fragment of knowledge that would help her understand the Horned Viper and its kind, some key that would help her find and keep Sirrush away from Drake Ferrer.

Her senses slipped below the ground, below the shorn grass, below the sediments built up over centuries. Her mind circled around something deep below the fault lines, far below the excavations of men. Deep in the bedrock, she saw the shape of a massive, serpentine creature, suspended in rock and silt, like Draco in the blackness of the sky. She sensed a heartbeat, slow as tides, thrumming in the hibernating creature. It had been here for thousands of years, content to listen to the seasons and the burning of stars overhead. As above, so below, indeed.

Why did it sleep? What kept it there, peacefully bound to earth? Her brow wrinkled as her thoughts smoothed over the mound, paused on a collection of delicate bones near the serpent’s head, fathoms and fathoms below the symbol of the sun above its horns.

Anya heard the ghost sigh, and she opened her eyes. The ghost paced the length of the serpent’s spine, from head to tail. Anya watched the spirit as she walked, barefoot, the grass prickling up between her toes. She was dressed in a white deerskin robe adorned with beads. Long, straight black hair was swept off her coppery face with braids pierced with hawk feathers. In one hand, she held a steady flame that didn’t burn the flesh of her palm. In her other hand, she held a staff, ribboned with snakeskin and beads, with the skull of a serpent perched atop it. She traced and retraced her steps in a circuit, watching the ground, her beads rattling as she moved.

“Do you see her?” she asked Katie.

Katie lifted her head, and nodded.

The ghost paused before Anya. She gestured for the women to follow her. Anya rose and followed her on her path, lit by the light from her hand.

“Anya.” Katie gripped her elbow. “I think she’s a Lantern. Her aura. . . it’s not amber like yours, but orange, like a sunset.”

Anya squinted at her. She could see a warm orange churning behind her chest. It wasn’t the black void Anya kept feeding with the shells of spirits, or the red burning chasm that pounded behind Drake’s chest. Her heart glowed with a warm orange light. . . and it was full. Not hungry. Anya sensed the stillness of glass, a transparent and peaceful love. The need to know prickled over her—how had the Indian woman found that balance, that perfect equilibrium? And, feeling that peace radiating from her, why was she still an earthbound spirit? Why had she not wandered to a bright hereafter?

“Why are you still here?” Anya asked her. She had no idea if the woman could understand her, if she could hear the question behind her foreign speech.

The woman turned, smiling radiantly. By now the three women had reached the head of the Horned Viper. She reached down to touch the head of the serpent effigy with a sense of reverence. Anya saw she wore a beaded necklace with a fetish of a winged serpent dangling on it, carved in bone.

“Uktena,”
she said. She pressed her hand to her chest.
“Nina.”

Anya pressed her hand to her own chest. “Anya.” She crouched down beside the woman. Sparky waddled through the grass behind her, drawn by the irresistible scent of ghosts and magick. She touched the salamander’s head. “Sparky.”

The Native American woman smiled and extended her hand.
“Sparky.”

Sparky licked her hand and she stroked behind his gill-frond. Sparky made happy contorted faces of pleasure, scratching at his neck with his back paw.

Anya looked at the circular mound crowning the Horned Viper. Beyond it, she could sense Nina’s bones, arranged in meticulous order, in a hidden chamber beneath the earth. Her body was surrounded by urns, bits of pottery, the remains of a beaded belt. She had been placed here, with honor. Perhaps Nina had been a priestess to Uktena. . . or a sacrifice to him.

“Nina,” she said. “Are you guarding Uktena?”

Nina nodded, rubbing Sparky’s chin.

“Is it you who’s keeping Uktena here, underground?”

Nina pointed behind her, at her bones in the earth. She nodded. She pressed her right hand to her chest, the hand that flamed with unending fire.
“Nina.”
She placed the other on the ground.
“Uktena.”
She knit both of her hands together, then pressed her hands to the earth.

Nina placed her right hand on Anya’s chest. She didn’t feel the burn of fire where Nina touched her. Instead, she felt a swelling of peace that reached deep into her lungs, softening the hard edge of her fear and isolation.
“Anya.”
Nina reached her other hand to the north, grasping something too far for her to reach.
“Sirrush,”
she said. She knit both of her hands together, pressed them to the clay soil.

“I think I understand,” Anya said slowly.

The spirit brushed her cheek as tenderly as a mother might touch a child. In that gesture, Anya thought she detected that the spirit pitied her a bit, pitied her for her fears and struggles.

Nina climbed to her feet and walked away, continuing her patrol on the green grass. Her beads rattled softly and she hummed to herself in a melody that was quickly snatched up by the wind.

Her meaning was clear. Anya could see how Nina was rooted in place, bound to Uktena, patrolling the land while he slept. On a visceral level, she understood what would need to happen to keep Sirrush buried.

It would take the sacrifice of a Lantern.

The ride back stretched out long and gray as the road and rain before Anya, Katie, and Sparky. As soon as they’d climbed back into the Dart, rain began to strike the hood in earnest, drumming on the roof of the car and causing the windshield wipers to thunk in a slow, mesmerizing rhythm.

Anya curled up in the passenger seat, jacket wrapped around her shoulders and a salamander’s ass in her lap. Sparky still ignored her, but not as fiercely as before. She dozed somewhere between the pearliness of the sky and the charcoal of the road, in the gray rain-spangled space between the shift of gears and the hum of the engine.

And she dreamed.

She dreamed of the shimmering darkness of the underground ice cave, a darkness that seethed and glistened in the heat like a living thing. She was swallowed in the dark, swallowed like the bones of Nina’s grave, forever underground with Uktena.

But she knew, deep down, that this was also her destiny. . . that she would have to watch over Sirrush’s sleep, pacing the perimeter of his grave until the end of time. She’d watch as the world above fed him, in fire, but she would feed him no more.

But she wasn’t alone in this strange afterworld. She felt Mimi, boiling behind her.

“Leave me alone,” Anya told it. “Do you want to spend eternity in this darkness, with me?”

Mimi giggled.
“Don’t be so optimistic. You won’t succeed. You and I will be in Sirrush’s
service, the servants of chaos, at Sirrush’s left hand. And we won’t be alone.”

Anya squinted further into the darkness. She saw the pale yellow dress of the girl from the soda machine, floating like a butterfly in the haze. She saw her among hundreds of dead victims, walking through the cave to the growling blackness at the back. Food. She saw her mother, walking in her charred pink nightgown, and Neuman heavy in his firefighter’s gear. All dead from the hands of fire, nourishing Sirrush.

She shouted at them, tried to elbow through the crowd. But Mimi had ruined her voice, scraped it clean of her throat like an oyster from its shell. She reached out, caught an elbow, and turned a figure around to face her.

“Brian,” she whispered.

His head was shaved and stubbly, a tube dangling from his temple to his shoulder, dripping a leak on the shoulder of his hospital gown when she shook him. A tangle of wires and tubes followed him like the severed strings of a marionette.

“Brian. . . Brian, you shouldn’t be here,” she insisted. “You’re alive.”

He stared at her with glassy, blank eyes, his attention turning back toward the gaping maw of darkness.

“Do you hear me?” Tears streamed down her cheek, and she gripped him fiercely.

“You’re alive. You shouldn’t be here.”

He looked beyond her, past her, at the growing darkness.

Anya awoke in darkness, with a jerk that slammed her burnt chest against the seat belt. Sparky tumbled from her lap to the floorboard.

Katie slammed on the brakes. “What? What’s wrong?”

Anya clutched the seat belt that cut into her chest, pain lancing across her skin. Deep in her gut, she could feel Mimi giggling.

“It’s Brian,” she gasped. “I dreamed that Brian was dead.”

Katie set her mouth in a grim line, and wordlessly stepped on the gas. The Dart growled down the highway, toward the light of Detroit on the far horizon.

Anya pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. If she lost Brian. . . She’d promised him that everything would be different. That she would learn to open her heart to him.

“
You lied,”
Mimi hissed at her.
“You lied to him. If you loved him, you wouldn’t have
screwed Drake Ferrer.”

Anya pressed her fists to her ears. “Shut the fuck up, Mimi.”

“
You’ve got a funny way of showing love, Anya. Leave the one you love all alone in a
hospital bed. He probably died all alone. . . just about as alone as you’ll end up.”

Katie looked sidelong at her. “Do I need to use that power of attorney?”

Anya slid her hands down the side of her face. She took a deep breath. “No. I’ve got it under control.”

Mimi snickered.
“If she only knew that you were long out of control. . . she’d have you
locked up in a rubber room.”

Anya dug her fingernails into her palms. She stared out the window, trying to tune Mimi out. She wondered what collection of stars up there were Draco, if any of them could be seen under the city’s relentless halo, that miasma of man-made light.

Katie sped to Detroit without stopping, drove until they pulled into the hospital parking garage with the gas gauge an eyelash above the big
E
. Anya had raced out of the car to the walkway into the hospital before Katie had locked up. Sparky scrambled to catch up, his short legs churning across the litter-strewn concrete like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

Anya sprinted through the corridors, her dream fresh as upturned earth in her head, tasting like ash in her mouth. She ignored a warning from a nurse to slow down, dodged around a meal cart, and sidestepped the ghost of a woman pacing down the hallway with a stuffed animal in her arms. The ghost ignored her, slowly drawing a thread out of the teddy bear’s foot and pulling the stuffing out of it.

Anya reached the ICU, skidding to a stop when she saw Jules and Max in the common area. Panic washed over her.

Jules raised his hand. “Anya. Don’t go back there. You don’t want to see that. . .”

She made a strangled noise and lunged past him. Heart in her mouth, she ripped aside the curtain. . .

. . . to see a full-moon flash of Brian’s ass and a nurse’s assistant removing a bedpan. Brian twisted his gown around and glared over his shoulder.

“Jesus Christ, Anya. I haven’t taken a piss in days. Some privacy, please!”

She burst into tears, jostled the nurse’s assistant aside, and flung her arms around him. His stubbly cheek felt warm against hers, and he felt joyously, perfectly alive.

Bewildered, Brian stroked her hair. “I’m glad to see you, too.”

She sat down on the edge of his bed, wiping tears from her eyes. “I thought you were a goner.”

Sparky launched himself into Brian’s bed. Brian’s heart monitor skipped a few beats as Sparky scrambled up to lick his face, tail wagging.

“Pfffbbbt. I had a nice nap with some trippy dreams. Jules tells me that I whacked my head on the sink. Not a glorious wound for a ghost-hunter.” Brian reached out to turn her chin to the light. “You, you look like hell.”

She smiled through the gloss of tears, as she patted his hand. “Don’t worry about me. Tell me about your trippy dreams.”

Brian blinked up at the ceiling. “I dreamed you and I went out for ice cream.”

“That sounds like a nice, non-trippy dream.”

“Yeah. It was. Until the Great Pumpkin drove up on a Harley and offered us pumpkin seeds he scooped out of my head.” He rubbed his stubbly head. “Damn. I’m bald. That’s gonna take some getting used to.”