River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (13 page)

Studying the records he had sent home, Ginny was surprised by how fascinating she found it all, and an adolescent obsession turned into a degree and a career. Always, though, she had kept her main goal in mind: getting to Smuggler’s Canyon, which was the last place she was certain her father had been, and figuring out what had happened to him when she was eight years old, a little girl who couldn’t understand why Daddy went on one of his trips and never came home again.

Her favorite childhood memory, one that had sustained her through hard times during the years of his absence, was from a family trip to the Grand Canyon when she was six. They had spent a few days on the South Rim, admiring the expansive views, which changed minute by minute and hour by hour as the sun slipped through cloudless blue skies. Then they had driven to Lees Ferry and taken a raft into the canyon, stopping at different points along the Colorado so her father could show his family traces of the prehistoric occupation of the area. His enthusiasm for the Anasazi people had been evident, and when they had climbed up to ancient storage bins in Nankoweap Canyon, it had been infectious. To this day, she remembered her childish amazement at the way stones had been fitted together so carefully that they remained in place thousands of years later. Hollis Tupper had taken a few sticks and twisted them into the shape of a deer, demonstrating how the Anasazi people had made toys for their own children centuries ago. She still had one of those twig animals in her room at her mother’s house. Holding it in her hands invariably summoned memories of her father’s warm hands and scratchy cheeks and the dry springtime air that had surrounded them that day.

This morning, for the first time, she had company at Smuggler’s Canyon. When she arrived, a blue van was parked in the little circle of dirt where she had been leaving her Kia Sportage. She parked some distance from the van and climbed out, looking at the other vehicle like it was an unwanted intruder, a burlesque dancer in church. What was someone else doing here, among
her
rocks? The license plate was from Nebraska (although her own SUV had California plates, so she couldn’t buck much about that) and the van screamed “tourist.” It even had one of those plastic shells on the luggage rack for carrying yet more luggage.

She scouted around for discarded water bottles or candy wrappers, certain that these interlopers couldn’t care as much for the canyon as she did. Seeing no immediate despoiling of the landscape, she opened her passenger door, pulled out a worn leather backpack containing some of her father’s notebooks, as well as her own, a camera, binoculars, water and a first-aid kit, and slung it over one shoulder.

The lack of visible trash encouraged her a little, but she still worried about tourists up in the rocks. Nothing protected the rock art except the site’s remoteness and some state laws posted on a sign near the parking area, which most people probably didn’t bother to read. She had seen names spray-painted over some of the ancient markings. Going back to the 1840s, people had added their own contributions to these walls, with chisels or paint or fire, each one obscuring the original artwork found here.

They wouldn’t do it while she was around to stop them.

She stalked into the rocks, her sunny mood fouled by the appearance of the van. If she came across some idiot smearing graffiti on this sacred place, she would—well, she didn’t know, but the object of her wrath would wish she hadn’t come along.

The most obvious trail led from the parking area into a natural gully between two huge jumbles of rock. About a quarter of a mile in, the rocks sloped away from the trail at a gentle enough angle that people could easily climb up and find the first batch of masks. Most tourists never went any farther into the rocks than that, judging by the sudden drop-off in the amount of litter Ginny had seen strewn about.

Ginny followed this trail first, guessing the tourists had come this way. Hiking boot prints marked the dirt path, scuffing over the tracks of lizards, snakes, and birds. Mesquite and creosote and amaranth grown tall from late summer rains scented the still morning air with a faint dry, peppery aroma. From somewhere up ahead, Ginny caught the sound of laughter on the breeze. She set her jaw and clenched her fists, anticipating a confrontation with a rowdy bunch of defilers. They had to be at the first section of masks, just around a sharp bend. Her view of them blocked by a pile of massive boulders stacked thirty feet high.

Before she reached the bend she heard what sounded like a cry of alarm, with lesser shouts following in its wake. She rounded the curve at a sprint. On the slope up toward the flat wall where the masks were painted, she saw them. Four people stood near the wall, looking down the rock slope with varying expressions of shock. A fifth person scrambled down at a half crouch, hurrying toward the last, who was about twenty yards away from the others, trying to sit up. The one on the ground was a woman, and she looked unsteady. Her nylon jacket was torn, her dark hair tugged from its ponytail. Blood smeared both her palms.

With a leap, Ginny made the slope and started up toward the sitting woman. Because of her long strides, she covered faster ground than the guy, probably in his fifties, who was trying to descend without falling himself. When Ginny was a dozen feet or so away, the woman heard her and turned.

“Are you okay?” Ginny asked. “Did you fall?”

The woman looked at her with wide eyes, as if Ginny were an apparition, and not a particularly welcome one.
Maybe she hit her head,
Ginny thought.
Suffering from shock.

“Can you call for an ambulance?” the man called. He had almost reached the woman, who was trying to regain her feet but looked as if the rock slope might be spinning beneath her. “She fell quite a ways.”

Ginny pulled her cell from her backpack and glanced at the screen, but as usual, she had no service. “Sorry,” she said. “I can drive into Palo Duro, but we’re too far out here to get a signal.”

“I’m all right,” the woman insisted. “Never mind an ambulance, I’ll be fine.” Other members of the group came down the slope and surrounded her, helping her to her feet. If she were in shock, that might be a bad idea, but after a couple of minutes they let go of her and she seemed able to keep her balance. Color had started to return to her cheeks. She was probably a couple years younger than Ginny, maybe twenty-five. She kept shooting Ginny uncertain sideways glances, as if uncomfortable with her around.

Relieved, Ginny put the phone away and caught the eye of the older man in the group, the one who had hurried down after the woman (the only other man was a short, pudgy guy who had been the last to reach her). “Thanks anyway,” the man said. “Damnedest thing.”

“What happened?”

The man had the look of a Midwestern merchant, a grocer or a hardware store owner, with an open, friendly face, short hair the color of dry straw, and a smile that flashed even when it wasn’t appropriate. Caucasian, like his companions. He grinned as he began to answer, then seemed to think better of it and showed a more solemn face halfway through. “We were all up looking at those faces,” he said. “We read about ’em on the Internet when we were plannin’ our trip. We’re headed to the Alamo, down there in San Antonio. Anyway, Juliet there was lookin’ at that one on the end, kind of angry-lookin’ fella with a mask over his eyes. She was by herself at the end and all of a sudden she screamed. When I looked up, she was airborne, like she’d been hit with an electric shock. She hit the ground and rolled down to where you saw her when you showed up.”

“Electric shock? From a rock?”

“I guess she was touchin’ it. I don’t know if there’s some kind of security deal or whatnot, but—”

Ginny couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She worked to keep her incredulity from her voice. “There’s no security system here, and the rocks aren’t electrified.”

“Well, I don’t know what did it, then. Juliet says that face glowed when she touched it, like it was white-hot. Then she got that shock and it just blew her right down the slope.”

Ginny didn’t know how to respond. None of these people looked like they’d been drinking or using hallucinogens.

“Mandy went over and touched it after,” he said, nodding toward a white-haired woman who could have been Juliet’s mother. “She said it was still warm then.”

“I’ve been around these for days, and hundreds of others at different sites,” Ginny said. “And I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Well, we by God hadn’t of or we wouldn’t even have come.”

“I’m sure. I’ll just take a look, if that’s okay.”

“Just be careful, miss.”

“I will.” Ginny climbed the rest of the way up the slope, to the wall where the masks had been painted. There were nine of them here, grouped in threes. The “angry” one was on the far left. An overhanging boulder that had fallen from above slanted near it, and if you ducked beneath that overhang, you entered a little sheltered area where there were more drawings, including some that seemed to represent a river, clouds, some warriors, and a huge, vaguely malevolent being. Most visitors never made it that far.

Ginny touched the image that had supposedly shocked Juliet, pressing her palm against rock smoothed by centuries of wind and rain and other people doing this exact same thing. There might have been some trace warmth coming off it. She touched bare rock nearby, to see if it was just radiating sunlight, but that surface was cool against her hand.

On the off chance, she crouched and crab-walked under the overhanging slab. The images there were just three feet off the ground, but the ceiling was low, too. On her knees, Ginny pressed her hands to the river and the warriors.

Also warm. Direct sunlight hadn’t fallen on these paintings for hundreds of years, if not thousands, depending on when that slab had fallen and blocked in this little depression. She moved her hands over the unpainted rock, over the clouds and the unknown creature looming over the scene. Cold rock, maybe a degree or two warmer where the paint had stained the wall.

Could it be a chemical difference, the virgin rock and the painted rock radiating at different temperatures? She would have to do some research. It had to be something like that, some obscure bit of geological trivia she had never encountered, because any other explanation was too bizarre to consider.

Suddenly, Smuggler’s Canyon had added a new mystery to the one that overarched her life. In the cool shade of the overhanging slab, Ginny shivered.

TWELVE

It had taken Simon Winslade decades to acquire his property in Bath, close to the hot springs dedicated by the Celts to the goddess Sulis. Once he bought several old houses and tore out the walls between them, renovating the interior into big living and ritual spaces, he decided the wait had been worth it. Years of pagan worship had permeated the place with occult power, and he made the most of it. Within a year, he discovered that his powers and abilities had expanded geometrically as a result of his proximity to such a special place.

He lived in the house alone, although at any given time one of a number of girl- or boyfriends might be spending the night. None had stayed over the night before, and none were expected today. Simon’s libido was the source of considerable gossip and speculation throughout the city, but at the moment he had other things on his mind.

Today he wasn’t actively trying to summon a demon or perform a particular spell. Instead, he was casting about for information. He wanted to know what had caused the disturbance in the ley lines the night that Lawrence Ingersoll had died in the U.S. He had been in touch with Millicent Wong and knew that Robb Ivey had met with an American intelligence agent at Ingersoll’s place, but he had been unable to reach any solid conclusions.

Instead of relying on his specialty, which was ritual magic, he had spent the day in quiet meditation, secluded in an inner chamber with a few candles lit. This was, from all reports, similar to what Ingersoll had been doing when he’d died. This fact caused him a certain trepidation, but he went ahead with it just the same. Any information he could glean would help the entire community, and it was worth whatever risk might be involved.

He cleared his mind of extraneous clutter and tried to open it to the forces that swirled around the universe, out of sight and awareness for most people. After some time had passed, he began to hear the soft tinkling of distant bells. A spicy aroma, like mulled cider, wafted to his nose. He couldn’t see anything but color—now a wash of peach, which changed to eggshell and suddenly flooded with scarlet.

As the red darkened toward purple and then black, the ringing sound raced faster and faster, like chimes in a strong wind. Simon felt cold, too, a bitter chill that seeped into his bones, as if he were outside the house naked and not snugly ensconced within its reinforced, insulated walls.

The cold, the dark, the raucous din of the once-soothing bells…it all made Simon too uncomfortable to continue. He opened his eyes and snapped his consciousness back to the present, to the house in Bath with its views over the tops of the houses and old Roman ruins out toward the Cotswolds. His heart hammered like it wanted to break free of its fleshy cage. Blood trickled from his right ear and nostril.

There at the last, just before his panic got the better of him, he had…no, not
seen
, but
sensed
, something awful, terrifying even to a man who had faced Asmodeus and foul-breathed Ashtaroth, crouching Nergal, Balam with his three heads, riding the back of a bear, and more.