She started, slamming a foot on the brake. Ahead in the road, right in the center of her lane, stood a great horned owl. She locked eyes with the bird as she slid to a stop. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and a shiver wracked her.
“What do you want out here?” her voice cracked, barely more than a whisper.
As if he’d heard, the owl cocked his head. The large black pupils, swimming in yellow eyes, pierced her with their power. The universe might have narrowed to just the two of them. Time seemed to slow and stop … waiting.
As if slapped awake, she gasped and blinked. The road ahead of her was empty. Bare asphalt in the violet light of predawn. When had the bird taken wing? Why hadn’t she seen it fly away?
Or, had it been there at all?
She clawed her coffee cup from the dash holder. Swigging the hot coffee in the thermal cup brought a grudging warmth to her chilled soul.
“My God,” she whispered. “What did I see?”
She shook it off, and let off the brake, easing the truck forward. A wound had opened inside her, a sense of wrongness. She glanced at the truck phone and fought the desire to call her aunt. Sage Walking Hawk was the last of her beloved aunts—the women who had taken her under their wings and raised her after her mother’s death. The old Keres blood ran thick in Aunt Sage’s veins. She could see between the worlds. She would know what this owl wanted. The death bird wasn’t known for bringing good news.
Magpie eased the truck around the curve in the road. Her heart was pounding like a powwow pot drum. On such a beautiful morning, what could possibly be wrong with the world?
She saw the truck as she pulled into the Casa Rinconada parking lot. The big Dodge diesel looked forlorn, the only vehicle in the lot. A thick coating of frost covered the candy-red paint. Dust tarnished the chrome wheels and bumpers.
Magpie pulled up behind it, her sense of premonition tingling after her encounter with the disappearing owl. And now, here was a truck in the lot? She growled to
herself and checked her list of backcountry permits. Only one was outstanding, and that for a couple who had hiked into the Wijiji ruin yesterday. They would have parked in the lot miles to the east.
She looked at the truck, seeing the familiar lines, the amber clearance lights on the roof. She knew this vehicle. A glance at the New Mexico plates wasn’t conclusive; but she knew those bumper stickers: ARCHAEOLOGY—CAN YOU DIG IT? and ARCHAEOLOGIST FOR HIRE: HAVE TROWEL WILL TRAVEL.
“Dale?” Maggie asked the air. “What are you doing up here?”
Yes, she remembered this truck. She’d seen it the day he’d first driven it into Chaco Canyon. Over two years ago. They had been working at the 10K3 site in the western part of the canyon. Dale had traded in his ratty old International Scout for this opulent, chrome-plated four-wheel drive.
Maggie opened her door and stepped out, looking around. Nothing unusual could be seen. Her soul felt drawn to the Casa Rinconada trail, as if pulled by an invisible string. She ignored the impulse and walked over to the driver’s side window. Dale wasn’t inside, was he? From the frost the truck must have been here overnight.
With her ticket book, she scratched the frost away, and checked. To her immense relief no hunched body slumped there. The seat was empty but for a notebook, several cassettes from an audio book, and a thermos lying on its side.
She turned, staring around at the low sagebrush. “Dale? Are you here?”
The silence was broken by the faint roar of a jet somewhere in the stratosphere.
She trotted down the trail, past the Small House interpretive sign and up to the Casa Rinconada kiva. Cold burning her lungs, she stopped at the edge of the ruin and looked down into the gloomy interior. She’d had
a momentary image of Dale, facedown on the kiva floor. But there, in the shadows, the vaguely human outline just out from the firebox was only a dusting of darker sand.
Placing a hand to her chest, Magpie took a moment to catch her breath. A ghost of a breeze tugged at her collar-length hair and seemed to caress her round brown cheeks.
“Dale?” she asked plaintively, as if the touch might have been his.
She blinked and, for an instant, could have sworn that she saw him walking up the trail toward the Great North Road, his fedora tipped back on wiry gray hair. Then the image blurred and shifted, and an owl swooped up from the spot where she’d last seen Dale. Its yellow eyes burned like flames as it soared into the dawn sky.
She closed her eyes and fought to still her heart. Her aunts had all had the ability to see between the worlds. Right here, not so many years ago, she had heard singing in the night. Thinking it was tourists out after dark in violation of park regulations, she had come here, ticket book in hand to write a citation, and found an empty kiva bathed in white moonlight.
Chaco was a powerful place, and now, again, it spoke to her. If only she could understand. She hurried back toward her truck. Whatever had happened to Dale, it wasn’t good.
THE OLD-TIMEY JINGLE of Dusty’s rotary phone blasted Maureen straight out of dreams. In them, Phil Morgan, her sycophantish colleague at McMaster University, had invited himself to dinner at her house in Niagara-on-the-Lake back in Ontario.
The nightmare of it was that she couldn’t get him to leave. Phil just kept following her about the house, chattering incessantly about department trivia, the state of modern anthropology, and all the problems at the American Anthropological Association meetings. He was the Canadian liaison for the triple A.
Confused, but thankfully awake, she scrambled out from under the blankets and blinked at Dusty’s living room—or at least the couple of inches of it left on either side of the foldout bed. It took her a moment to realize the jingling phone was buried underneath.
In the process of climbing off the foot of the bed she whacked her knee on the metal frame, then upended the whole show to paw through Dusty’s dirty shirts for the phone.
“Hello?” she croaked, trying to clear the sleep from her throat.
“Maureen?” the curious voice asked on the other end.
It took her a second to place the caller, the young Chaco ranger: Magpie Walking Hawk Taylor. “Maggie?”
“Yes. Uh, have you heard from Dale?”
Maureen frowned at the concern in Maggie’s voice as she said, “No, should I have?”
A hesitation, and then: “Look, I’m out at Chaco. I just did the rounds, you know, dawn patrol? Someone rides around and checks the loop before the park opens. Well, Dale’s truck was in the Casa Rinconada parking lot. There’s frost on the windshield … like it’s been there all night.”
“It’s where?”
“Casa Rinconada. We have an interpretive trail that runs past a couple of small houses and the great kiva there. It’s on the south side of Chaco Wash. Almost due south of Pueblo Bonito. You remember that place?”
Did she ever. Stewart had found her in Pueblo Bonito the morning after he’d shot off his mouth and told her point-blank that she was such a bitch it was no wonder she lived alone. Stewart had tracked her down the next morning, three miles from their Chaco Canyon dig. She had been sitting at the lip of a large kiva in the giant pueblo.
Maureen shook her head. “What was Dale doing out there?”
Maggie hesitated again. “We don’t know. In fact, we didn’t even know he was in the canyon. That’s why I called. I thought maybe Dusty might know. Did Dale say anything about coming out here?”
Maureen frowned. “No. He wasn’t home last night. Sylvia called saying she couldn’t find him and she …” She glanced up.
Dusty stood where the narrow hallway opened into the cramped kitchen. He’d pulled on faded jeans, but his muscular chest was bare.
Maureen told him: “It’s Maggie. She found Dale’s truck in Chaco Canyon. Did Dale say he was going out there?”
Dusty crossed the floor and took the receiver from her hand. “What’s wrong, Maggie?”
Maureen glanced down, horrified to realize she only wore a T-shirt and her panties. With unnatural haste, she shot a hand out and snagged up her pants. As she yanked them on, the pant leg was twisted and wouldn’t pass her foot. Overbalanced, she toppled sideways into the wall.
“He’s where?” Dusty asked, amusement in his eyes as he turned to watch Maureen claw for balance. In her fluster, she thought she caught the subtle rise of his eyebrows as he admired her long leg. After a moment, he added, “No. Not a word. I thought he was going from Farmington back to his house in Albuquerque after he dropped Alevy off at the airport. I expected to run into him at the lab today when we took in the Pueblo Animas stuff.” Another long silence. “You tried him at home?” Dusty frowned as he listened to Maggie. “No, Maureen and I will drive down there and see if there’s any kind of message or anything. You know Dale. He probably met some archaeologist and went out to look at Rinconada, or the stairway, or one of the small houses, got involved in the project and left with the other guy. He’s probably planning to come back later and get his truck.”
Maureen, having managed to pull her pants up, took a deep breath to settle her blush and read the mild concern on Stewart’s face. Dale did do that sort of thing. He might have been one of the greatest archaeologists the world had ever known, but sometimes real-world concerns, things like National Park Service regulations, didn’t compute.
“I’ll be in touch as soon as I know,” Dusty promised. “Thanks for calling.” He bent down, hung up the phone, and turned puzzled eyes on Maureen. “When Dale left Pueblo Animas, he didn’t say anything to you about going to Chaco Canyon, did he?”
Maureen shook her head and pulled back a fistful of unruly black hair that kept trying to tumble over her
face. “No, but you know Dale. He rarely, if ever, gives you advance warning.”
“Yeah, I know. He got carried away with petroglyphs in Tsegi Canyon one time and left a ten-person field crew abandoned on a mesa thirty miles south of Kayenta.” Dusty slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.
She saw concern line his forehead and asked, “Should we start to worry?”
He considered; then his expression cleared. “No. I’ve been doing this for years. It’s just Dale. I go through this about once every six months. He doesn’t show for a meeting, or vanishes without a trace, and he can’t figure, for the life of him, why you were concerned.”
Relieved, Maureen caught herself studying him: The morning light pouring through the windows gave his muscular body a golden glow. She was happy that she could ignore the way his flat belly tapered into a thin waist. A lesser woman would have caught herself outright admiring his broad shoulders and the swell of chest.
“So, what’s the plan?” She used her casual voice just to demonstrate her nonchalance.
“I say we get showered, dressed, find some
huevos
, and drive down to the office in Albuquerque. We’ll check and see if Dale left any messages, unload the artifacts, and if we still haven’t found him, we’ll drive by his house.”
“What’s the ‘we’ business?” she asked, crossing her arms.
“You don’t want to come?”
“You said, and I quote, ‘we get showered and dressed.’”
It took a half second before he grinned. “Well, you know, we do live in a desert environment; water, as the Anasazi knew, is something that you treat as a precious resource. It’s not to be squandered lightly. Showering together is environmentally—”
“Not even in your most deluded dreams, Stewart.” She picked up her suitcase, walked past him, and made her way through the kitchen and down the narrow hallway toward the cramped bathroom. Over her shoulder she called, “You do have clean towels, don’t you?”
“That little cupboard to the right of the sink,” he replied. She shot him one last glance, seeing him still in the cramped living room, his attention fixed on the phone where it lay in a nest of his rumpled shirts. She thought about his expression as she locked the door behind her.
Despite his cavalier words about Dale, he looked worried.
THE SCENT OF death fills this old kiva. My wounds have festered. Every time I take a breath, white-hot pain lances my body and I gag from the smell.
They have carried me here. To the wolf’s lair. My fevered eyes drift around the circular chamber, noting the square wall crypts, the beautiful paintings on the plaster, the fire crackling in the middle of the floor. In the northern wall crypt, inside the painted rawhide box, I can feel the power of the mask. Despite the thin leather separating us, I can feel the mask’s stare. I avert my eyes, looking up through the smokehole in the roof; I see the pink gleam of sunrise. One of the Cloud People hovers high above, as though watching me. I …
A sound. Fabric rustles.
It takes great effort to turn my head. She crouches to my left, across the fire, absolutely still. Her magnificent eyes glitter in the firelight. She is hunger itself, a black pit that must be filled.
“Shadow,” I say. That is all I have breath for.
She smiles, and I feel it across the chamber. Her need is overpowering. She is trembling, longing for the kill.
She rises like a dark ghost and floats toward me. Her icy hand smoothes gray hair from my brow and leisurely caresses its way down my face to my throat. The coolness feels so good I close my eyes and try to live in the movements of her hand. Her fingers lightly rub my chest, outlining each of my broken ribs; then they slide back up to my throat, and she delicately traces the shape of my windpipe.
Her fingers tighten, her nails digging in, as though to tear it from my flesh. She leans over and whispers in my ear, “I could, you know.”
Her scent is musky, intoxicating. In my absence, it seems, she has been coupling with my warriors.
Laughter shakes me, and I cough from the pain.
Shadow’s grip relaxes in confusion. “Why are you laughing?”
“Shadow,” I say. “Where … is … Piper?”
A small dark form moves across the room. She has eyes like a wild dog’s, large and unblinking, fixed on me, as though I am a mouse in the grass.
“Come here … child.”
She remains as still as a newborn fawn when eagle’s shadow passes over.
“Piper … I swear … if you do not … come, I will witch your breath-heart soul … and put it in a rock … so that it … never … finds its way to the Land of the Dead.”
She trots across the chamber and stumbles in the bones beside the fire pit. She stops, her eyes huge. Her mouth quivers.
I laugh. “Someday … I will rename you … Bone Walker.”
Piper runs forward and hides behind her mother. Shadow grabs her arm, drags her out, and shoves her toward me. “Your grandfather called you!”
Piper walks a step at a time, rubbing her arm where her mother’s fingers dug in. Her knees tremble. She is a very beautiful child.
“Sit down,” I order.
She kneels at my side and her long tangled hair falls over my broken chest like a black cloud. Piper’s eyes go vacant, and she starts sucking on her lower lip, like a newborn would a nipple.
“Here,” I say. “Let me brush your hair.”
I run my fingers through her hair, then let my hand fall and slip it beneath her shirt. Her breasts are not even tiny nubs.
A soothing wave tingles through me.
“Lie down.”
BROWSER LED HIS small vanguard of warriors southward along the beaten trail that led to Flowing Waters Town. They had left Dry Creek village when the faint light of dawn first grayed the horizon. As the sun slanted toward the west they topped the last rise, passing the guard tower where sober-eyed warriors—seeing Cricket Dancer—waved as they passed.
Browser’s gut squirmed. They only had Cricket Dancer’s word that Blue Corn would honor a truce. It had been less than a moon since Browser and Catkin had found an entire village of Katsinas’ People murdered, beheaded, and butchered, their corpses lying in an abandoned kiva. Things had changed since the last time they had been here. Then Blue Corn had simply been disbelieving, now, he had heard, she was downright hostile to the Katsinas’ People. Villages had been attacked and burned by warriors faithful to the Flute Player. How many of those raids had Blue Corn sanctioned?
Coming here might be akin to making camp in a rattlesnake den.
Under the empty blue sky, the gray hills looked dreary. They rose in lumpy layers above the pale cobble terraces that lined the river. Here and there, he could see garden squares where people had planted corn, beans, and squash last summer. The stalks and vines had been collected for fuel as soon as they’d dried enough to burn. Now the canals that watered them drew forlorn lines across the dry soil.
The large three- and four-story buildings that made up the core of Flowing Waters Town perched on the terraces overlooking the river to the southeast. A thin line of cottonwoods—so familiar to Browser from the Katsinas’ People’s stay here almost two sun cycles ago-—stirred an ache in his heart. When they had lived here, Hophorn, Ash Girl, Flame Carrier, Whiproot, and Browser’s young son, Grass Moon, had been alive. It had been here in Flowing Waters Town that the boy had first taken sick with the coughing disease and his body had begun to waste away.
The lines around Browser’s mouth deepened as he looked down at the cluster of towns that dominated the terrace. North House, situated at the terminus of the Great North Road, hunched like one of the monsters of the Beginning Time, its adobe brick walls gleaming golden in the late fall sunlight. As Browser’s party passed, men, women, and children watched them from the rooftops, and some even waved.
Rounding North House, they trotted down the raised earthen causeway toward the lower terrace, where the center of Flowing Waters Town hulked above the River of Souls.