Nightwing (21 page)

“Didn’t help, did it?”

Willie sighed. “Not a bit.”

“That’s why fm here. That’s why this place is here.” Father Bertram leaned back and spread his hands. “We’ll have you all fixed up in time for the Ritual tomorrow night.”

“You know about the Riddle of Rejoining?”

“Of course. I’ve got the Sacred Cedar, don’t I?”

“Is it a stake?”

“Yes, indeed. A very special one. You have to promise you’ll bring it back when you’re finished with it.”

“I promise. What’s so special about it?”

“We’ll talk about it in the morning. You need sleep, and some things are best not discussed at night. Especially when the moon is full and something as old and evil as a certain entity who shall remain nameless is still more or less in the neighborhood. If you get my drift.”

“Raven said that thought is a magnet.”

“And right he is. Now off to bed.”

Willie didn’t think she’d sleep, but she did, in a down sleeping bag Father Bertram unrolled near the fire. When she woke up a little after nine, she found the note he’d left.

“I’m in the garden. So’s the privy. P.S. Just kidding. It’s the door at the foot of the steps next to your suitcase.”

The car keys were on the table beside a pot of tea in a cozy. Willie took a cup with her, found the overnight bag she’d brought along, and a remarkably modern bathroom. She took a shower and washed her hair, wondering how Father Bertram had known where to find the Fiat. She asked him about it—and about how he could have a shower in a Bronze Age hill fort—once she’d put on clean jeans, a white sweatshirt and found him in the garden behind the tower.

“The nuraghe has its own well. I added the pump. It runs off the same generator that powers the lights.” He shrugged as he finished hoeing a row of potatoes. “As for your car, I followed the trail and my nose.”

He put his hoe away in a shed beside the tower, swept off the wide-brimmed straw hat that made him look like a Spanish padre and led her into the nuraghe. Outside one of the rooms with a floor and a door, he gave her his hat.

“You’ll need this,” he said. “It’s still the custom in this part of the world.”

He opened the door on the sanctuary, the most beautiful one Willie had ever seen. It was very small. The roof, a stained-glass skylight, depicted the ascension of Christ. It bathed the simply carved white marble altar, the chinked walls and rough-hewn pews in glorious splashes of light.

Willie put on the hat, dipped her fingers in the font, genuflected and followed Father Bertram to a shrine built into a sidewall. Rows of candles flickered around a statue of Christ on the Cross and gleamed on a plain wooden stake about eighteen inches long lying at the feet of the icon.

“Is that it?” Willie whispered, lowering herself onto the unpadded kneeler before the shrine.

“That’s it.” Father Bertram knelt beside her. “All that remains of the True Cross, hewn from one of the cedars of Lebanon. Hence its name in the Riddle of Rejoining.”

“Oh, my God,” Willie said and clapped a hand over her mouth. When Father Bertram chuckled, she took it away and said, “You trust me with this?”

“If God trusts you, who am I to object?” He took her hand and clasped it tightly in his. He murmured a prayer in Latin, crossed himself and rose, his knees cracking. “You’ll have to sign for it. Your name and the name of the friend you’re borrowing it for. Over here.”

A candle burned in a wrought-iron holder above a large book on a three-legged stand near the shrine. It was bound in leather and looked very old. Father Bertram turned to a fresh page and handed Willie a pen from his robe pocket.

She wrote her name and paused, remembering what he’d said about Humpty and Dumpty. She shook her head and, smiling, wrote Jonathan Raven and the date, July 19. A chill shot through her when she realized today was Johnny’s birthday. Raven’s, too. Happy 152nd, she thought, wherever you are.

The ribbed cuff of her sleeve caught the edge of the page as she turned to give Father Bertram his pen. It was just as well that he’d walked away from her to the altar, because the page preceding hers lifted and fell open when she raised her arm, carefully, so she wouldn’t tear it.

Her gaze caught on the few lines of hurried copperplate scrawl. The breath in her throat caught, too, as she read. “Borrowed by Samuel Raven of Stonebridge, Massachusetts, this eighteenth day of May in the year of Our Lord Jesus 1884, for my brother, Johnny. God have mercy on his soul.”

Chapter 21

How many Samuel Ravens from Stonebridge, Massachusetts, could there have been in the world in 1884? Especially in Sardinia? And how many with a brother named Johnny?

Only one, Willie decided, trying to recall what Lucy had said about wolves and the winter of ‘79, about Samuel running away. Where had he gone for five years, before he came here to fetch the Sacred Cedar?

“Something wrong, Willie?”

Her gaze shot from the book to Father Bertram, frowning at her from the altar. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. The stake
had
been returned. But if Samuel had borrowed it 111 years ago, why was she borrowing it now?

Father Bertram had been expecting Johnny, though he hadn’t said how he’d known he was coming. He hadn’t said much of anything, really. How much did she dare tell him? What if there was a one-to-a-customer rule? Johnny and Raven were sunk. And so was she.

“I was just wondering,” she said, smoothing the page back into place, “if the Ritual has ever failed.”

“You don’t really want me to tell you, do you?”

“No.” Willie sat down on the closest pew. “I want you to tell me it will work, that everything will be all right.”

“I’d dearly love to, but I’m not a very good liar.” He smiled and came to sit beside her. “It will be better if you go. At least you won’t spend your life wondering what would have happened if you hadn’t.”

“How far is Tharros, anyway?”

“A couple hours’ drive. Well have to take your car, by the way. I don’t own one.”

“Do you think Johnny will be there?”

“I’m sure he will. Your friend is right. Nekhat can’t kill him twice.”

“Johnny isn’t dead, Father Bertram. Raven is.”

“There you go again, trying to make two out of one.” He slapped his hands against his knees and rose. “Come along when you’re ready. And don’t forget the Sacred Cedar.”

Willie’s courage shrank along with the flames of the candles in the draft of the door dosing behind father Bertram. Was it too late to promise God she’d never skip Mass again if only He’d put Raven and Johnny back together? Probably.

No lightning flashed, no trumpets blared when Willie picked up the Sacred Cedar. It looked and felt like what it was: a wooden stake, wedge shaped, maybe from an ax blow, its edges worn smooth by time.

“I promise I’ll bring it back,” she told the icon. And hopefully, she prayed with all her heart, Johnny with it.

Father Bertram fed her another omelet, put on his padre hat, picked up her overnight bag and the smaller burlap bag he called his tote sack and led her out of the nuraghe. Willie followed with the backpack and the sleeping bag. Father Bertram thought she might need it.

Dark flashes of her terrified run with Johnny jerked through her head. She looked for the dead swath she’d seen Nekhat’s shadow slash across the heath but couldn’t find it, not even when she looked back from Monte Corrasi, from the spot where Raven had leapt off the trail. She knew she hadn’t imagined the gorse shriveling and dying. Then again, Father Bertram had already passed this way once to retrieve her bag.

She followed him, wondering, until the backpack began to clunk against her shoulders. The stake was inside, along with a thermos of Father Bertram’s tea.

“Wait a sec,” she said, slinging the pack off. “The Sacred Cedar is getting knocked around.”

“Don’t fret.” He put down her bag and turned around. “It takes care of itself, and the person who’s carrying it.”

“Is it any good against really nasty vampires?”

“You mean Nekhat.” He picked up her bag and started off again. “I don’t know. He’s not your run-of-the-mill vampire. He was born that way, not made, like your friend.”

Willie blinked, stunned, at Father Bertram’s retreating back. He wasn’t wearing his robe—too hot, he’d said—just a dark shirt and trousers. The sun shimmered on his broad shoulders. Willie felt her head start to spin, shook it off and ran to catch up with him. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. The ancient Egyptians were very gifted in certain sciences. Genetics, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them. Their religion got in the way. All that nonsense about the divinity of the pharaoh caused some serious inbreeding. Princes died very young, like Tutankhamen. A few visionaries took a shot at genetic engineering, in the hope of strengthening the royal line. It didn’t work.”

Willie wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer, but she asked, anyway. “What d’you mean, it didn’t work?”

“Nekhat is one of their experiments that failed.”

Willie stopped cold. Father Bertram walked a few feet ahead before he realized it and glanced back at her.

“How do you know all this?”

“A little bird told me.”
He winked and kept walking.

A little bird, Willie puzzled, then it hit her: Raven. She ran again to catch up with him. “Is that how you knew Johnny was coming?”

“More or less. I’ve met your friend. Not here, of course, not at the nuraghe. But other places.”

“And other times, Father?”

“Perhaps.” He gave her a sideways smile, the sun sliding under the brim of his hat. She’d thought his eyes were brown; now she saw they were much darker, with no discernible pupil or iris. “You don’t want to know any more about vampires than is absolutely necessary. They’re a very scary lot.”

So was Father Bertram. Another whoa-wait-a-minute rush swept over Willie as she watched him stride ahead. She followed slowly, wondering who—or what—he really was.

The world’s worst driver, she discovered when they reached the Fiat and he took the wheel. When they stopped for gas she fished the guidebook out of her bag and buried her nose in it—until she saw on the map that they’d pass through Oristano, where Nekhat had come ashore... and that Tunisia lay just across the Mediterranean from Tharros... and that only Libya separated Tunisia from Egypt, where this whole horrible mess had started 117 years ago.

Was this why Nekhat had landed in Oristano? Did he know about Tharros? Was he there, waiting for them? Willie raised a hand to her throat, touched the azurite father Bertram had given her, set in copper like the chrysocolla, felt the tingle in her fingers when the two stones tangled with her little gold cross.

“He’s somewhere about, I’m sure,” Father Bertram said, as if he’d been reading her mind. And Willie, clutching the armrest as he screeched the Plat around a curve, the last one out of the mountains, was sure of it.

The western coast shimmered on the far horizon, a blue-white smudge beyond rolling green stretches. The sky was calm and perfectly clear. Willie felt the same way, so long as she kept one hand near the stones.

She forced herself to eat lunch in Oristano, but regretted it when Father Bertram stopped at the Church of San Franceso. The wasted, tortured body of Christ draped on an austere crucifix on the left altar turned her stomach and started the Sacred Cedar throbbing, almost as if it were crying, inside the backpack.

It quieted and so did her stomach when they reached Tharros, the ancient Phoenician port on the very tip of the Sinis Peninsula. Most of the city was underwater; crumbled walls glimmering beneath the very blue Mediterranean. Father Bertram joined the last tour of the day to explore the above-ground Roman temple and Punic shrine.

Willie stayed on the beach, close enough that she could still see the tour party winding through the excavated fortifications, but far enough away that she couldn’t hear the guide’s voice. With her anus looped around her drawn-up knees and her eyes closed, she could almost be at Beaches.

In Stonebridge the sun would be well up rather than setting, and there would be a dune at her back rather than an almond grove. The sand would be cool and gray, not hot and white.

Willie took off the pack, looped it over her right arm and stretched out on her back, fingers laced over her stomach. The first streaks of bronze were just beginning to swirl and funnel together above the Mediterranean. It would be a while yet before she needed to keep watch for Johnny and Raven. She sighed and closed her eyes.

She didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did, lulled by the surf and the rustle of the almond trees. She didn’t wake up until her right wrist thudded heavily onto the sand. Then she jolted upright, her eyes dazzled by the glare of the sun. She remained fuzzy headed until she felt the backpack slide down her arm, heard the straps being dragged through the sand.

Her heart slammed into her throat. She shot up and clutched the bag to her chest. Over the dull ring in her ears she heard someone chuckle. A man. His voice was very deep and very close.

Willie scrambled around and saw him behind her, squatting on his bare heels in the sand, elbows resting on his knees. His shirt and trousers were so white it hurt her eyes. His eyes were very dark, with no discernible pupil or iris.

 In the shadow of his wide-brimmed panama hat, his face was the color of creamed coffee. His features were so perfect and so beautiful she caught her breath. His hair was glossy black, done up in a long queue that fluttered over one shoulder.

It was Nekhat. She knew it before he smiled, showing her the tips of his very long and pointed incisors, before she tore her terrified gaze away from his face to the heavy gold amulet with the gaping hole in the center at his throat.

“I love your name, Willow. It reminds me of my father’s palace. We had willows there along the banks of the Nile. I would lie under them while I fished when I was a boy.”

Scream and run, Willie told herself, but she couldn’t. She could only stare at him, paralyzed with terror.

“I’m not a monster. I’m a prince. I’ll be king someday. I can make you a queen. I can make you any thing you want, if you give me that bag you have clutched to your heart.”