Perdition (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

L
ABORATORY
A
NIMALS

Men talking . . .

Movement . . .

A car moving . . .

A moan escaped me, and someone to my left spoke.

“She’s coming to.”

“Couldn’t be. There’s enough tranq in her to bring down a three-hundred-pound man,” Mr. Smith said from behind us.

“For how long?”

“Minimum twelve hours, which gives us another four.”

“How far out are we?”

“Another hour to Happy Jack.”

Happy jack? What the heck was a happy jack? A ghostly gray jackrabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch floated in the fuzzy landscape of my mind. The mangy creature checked his watch, shook his finger at me, and then executed an Olympic-worthy jackknife dive down a hole. Sound and sensation faded, and blackness took me again.

I woke to the Escalade pitching and the crunch of gravel like we were on a dirt road. I kept my eyes closed and my head in its current lolled forward position, which made my neck muscles scream. The spot on my chest, where Zamora’s marker had been, itched and I longed to scratch it. Something skittered across my hands which were lying on my lap. I slivered my right eye open. The moth sat on my hand, wings down with their pseudo eyes staring up at me. How could the men next to me not see it? The wingspan stretched four inches across, and the bug practically glowed neon green.

I couldn’t blame it on the drugs. I’d seen this bug without a drop of hallucinogens in my system. The telekinesis must have been frying my circuitry while it was wreaking havoc on my life. Who said it couldn’t multi-task?

After several more bumpy minutes and jolting turns, the car stopped. The driver’s window rolled down, and he punched something into a keypad. Heavy metal doors scraped open, we drove forward, and the doors closed behind us. The car traveled on, the road slanting down for another few minutes. Then it stopped. All four doors opened at once, and the two men beside me got out. Musty dry air flooded the car, and I fought a sneeze. Footsteps and something on squeaking wheels approached, echoing like we were in a cavern or warehouse.

 I kept pretending to be unconscious to gather more information and keep them from knowing about my partial immunity to drugs. Plus, fighting at this point would do me no good. I mean really, the guys were gorillas in human clothes.

“Load her onto the gurney and strap her down,” a new, but familiar, voice said. “We don’t want to lose our precious cargo. It’s taken too long to acquire it.”

The newcomer’s energy slid like grease across my exposed skin, the viscosity of it unlike anything I’d ever felt. It invaded the air, forcing its way into my nose and sticking to the back of my throat. I racked my memory for where I’d heard his voice before as strong hands grabbed me and hoisted me out of the car. One of the men lifted me as if I weighed nothing and placed me on the gurney. Straps locked me down, and they wheeled me away.

“Excellent,” the newcomer said.

Sarkis
.

The voice belonged to Sarkis. Sweat rose on my prickling flesh, some of it rushing in small rivulets down my face and under my breasts. The moth’s feather-light presence stayed on my hand through the whole ordeal, giving an odd comfort. At least I’d have company wherever I was going—even if it was just imaginary.

They pushed the gurney across the echoing space and bumped through a door where the echoes got closer—a narrow hall, maybe. After two left turns, we entered an elevator and traveled down for several seconds. It was either a slow elevator or we were several stories underground by the time we stopped. Cool antiseptic air raised goose bumps on my skin as the gurney exited. The buzz of fluorescent fixtures joined the cadence of booted footsteps and the
squik-squik
of the gurney wheels. More hallways and three turns later, someone entered a code into a keypad and they wheeled me into a room and stopped.

I was unstrapped and hoisted onto a bed. Something crashed across the room and all went quiet for a few heartbeats.

“Did she awaken during the trip?” Sarkis asked.

“No,” Mr. Smith said.

“She moaned a few times,” another man said.

“Did you administer enough tranquilizer?” Sarkis said.

His greasy aura crept over me again. He lifted my hand over my head then let it go. I let it drop and hit my face without a grimace or flinch. He opened one of my eyes and peered at me. I refused to focus or move my eyes. The fuzzy image of a gray-haired man with glasses loomed over me. He released my eyelid, and after a few hushed seconds, brushed his finger lightly over my eyelashes. My eye twitched, and he stepped away. An instant later, the all-too-familiar click and burn hit my arm, and I was out.

The moth fluttered midair surrounded by blackness, its wings a lime-green blur around a pale, orange body. The pseudo eyes hovered stationary among the green, blinking at me like photo cards flipped revealing a moving picture.

“Where am I?” My voice echoed in the inky ether.

The spirit plane.
The voice came from the moth and found its way to my brain, bypassing my ears altogether.

“How did I get here?”

The drugs create an alternate consciousness just as peyote did for your ancestors.

“What ancestors?”

The shaman. Your grandmother. Your aunts. Your great-grandfather. His father before him. Back as many generations as time remembers.

 “No. My mother’s people were telekinetic. My grandmother wasn’t a shaman.”

There exists another lineage.

What was he talking about? Lineage? The truth seeped into my brain, dawning a slow sunrise of knowledge.

“My father’s mother?”

Yes.

My body floated weightless in the void. The diaphanous white dress I wore flowed in slow waves around me. Seven distant glowing shapes materialized behind the moth, waiting on the outskirts of my field of vision. As hallucinations went, this wasn’t all together unpleasant. Not that I had any experiences to compare it to except my recent encounters with the moth.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say this is real. Why didn’t my father ever tell me about these people? Why didn’t I ever meet them?”

I am blind to your father’s life. The power does not exist within him. You have not met your ancestors because they do not exist on the same plane with you.

“So they’re dead.”

As yo
u understand the word, yes.

The figures in the distance loomed slightly larger than they had been a moment ago. I nodded toward them.

“What are those?”

Your power animals.

Frustrating. The little bug only answered what I asked. He didn’t expound on anything. Or maybe I just wasn’t asking the right questions.

“So who are you?”

I am your spirit guide. The others access you through me. Likewise, your path to them lies through me.

The shapes were almost distinguishable now in the feathery blackness. They ranged in size from massive to small. One looked like a bull. Bright light from a fiery ball sitting on its back outlined its wide head and horns in stark relief. Striking the air with a front hoof, it snorted fire out its nose.

Two of the small shapes on the ground took flight, one rasping out a loud caw, the other screaming a shrill cry. The crow and an eagle-like bird hovered above the other animals well away from the flaming bull.

No more than twenty feet away now, the menagerie stopped, waiting. The black horse to the far left of the group reared on its hind legs then settled onto all fours, throwing its head up and down in restless impatience. Or maybe it was just nervous from the giant grizzly bear sitting serenely next to it. A puma stood next to the bear, its eyes fixed on me, ignoring the other animals. On the other side of the bull, a white swan the size of a grade-school child preened its feathers below one wing.

The moth spoke again, and I jerked back and yelped. I calmed by convincing myself that hallucinations couldn’t hurt me. The moth quieted until I got myself together, then continued
.

Each power animal will reveal itself to you when your life path calls it,
Moth said.

The horse stepped forward, head down. I held my floating body as still as I could, refusing to flinch at an imaginary animal. Reaching me, it pushed its nose under my hand, and I stroked its velvety face. He lifted his head to nuzzle my hair.

Horse already walks the path with you,
Moth said.

I smiled and pulled away from the animal’s sweet, hay-scented breath, which tickled my neck.

“I think I would have noticed a horse walking with me,” I said.

You did,
Moth said.
Kava’i joined you yesterday.

Disagreement died on my lips.

“Astral projection,” I said, remembering the horse-shaped blob in Rune’s apartment and being at my Grandma’s house and in Rune’s apartment at the same time.

As you understand it,
Moth said.
It’s known as
Spirit walking to The People.

“The People?”

Yaqui. Your people.

I peered around Horse to the other animals.

“What powers do the rest of them have?” I asked.

You will know when your life path merges with them.

Shoot. I hated surprises.

“Why can’t I just have them all now?”

Small steps are best when walking on a precipice.

“Precipice?” I said.

The scene before me blurred then refocused, the images less clear than they had been before.

“What was that?” I asked.

You are waking
, Moth said.

“They’ll just put me under again, and I’ll be right back here.”

You must control the machine that tells them you are awake.

“The vitals machine?” I said. “Which animal does that?”

No animal. Use the power of your mother’s kin.

“The telekinesis? But . . .”

Use the power to control the machine. Use Kava’i to see.

Another bout of blurring, this time longer and my focus was even worse when I returned.

“Wait,” I said to the small, green blur I assumed was Moth. “How do I find you again?”

I am always with you. Your life-force creates a bridge as strong as the drums and peyote of your shaman ancestors. Open your inner eye to us, and you will see what has been there all along. Your mother’s gift is the portal between our planes of being.

During the next blurring, I felt my physical body on the gurney—the IV needle in my arm, the monitor pads on my chest and head, the increasing beep-beep of my vitals echoing through the monitor. Then I returned to Moth’s faint glow and the outlines of the other animals—all but Horse, who still stood by me in sharper focus.

“I don’t know what to do,” I called to the shapes.

Trust yourself. You are your own best counsel. But turn your face from the dark one. Now that the bridge is complete, she will come.

“Dark one?”

Horse nudged me with his nose, and I popped back into my body. An alarm squealed on the vitals machine. I opened my eyes and saw the heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure numbers climb. Another machine’s wired pen scratched deep waves onto a scrolling length of paper. I’d seen that type of machine on
Real Stories of the ER
. It measured brain waves, and it was telling Sarkis and his men I was awake. A small camera nestled in the corner of the ceiling moved toward my face, and I closed my eyes.

Control the machines. But how? Sweet hay-scented breath warmed my ear. I visualized the room but only created a two-dimensional picture in my mind. I needed to feel my surroundings as I had my grandmother’s bedroom. Again, warm breath brushed my ear. I called to Horse in my mind, and the room’s image came alive, Horse standing beside me, shaking his massive head up and down then raising his nose to the air and shaking his long black mane.

I concentrated on the machines, connecting with their power, their raw electricity tingling across my brain. Homing in on the numbers, I willed them down, guessing at levels that would show me still under the influence of the drugs. The brainwave tape had just settled back to a small squiggly line with the door opened.