Thief of Souls (9 page)

Above the coastal ranges, over the dry hot sands of the California desert, the birds traveled without rest. They were long beyond their endurance by the time they crossed into Arizona airspace, but something beyond mere muscle pushed them forward.

A faint awareness propelled them now. Faint, but growing, like a mind sliding out of sleep. As the flock followed the path of the Colorado River, the angle of their wedge narrowed from thirty degrees, to twenty, to ten, until they were a slim arrow of
movement across the sky. Moving directly toward a bird much larger than themselves.

The thing before them roared dangerous and loud, but still the flock willed itself forward . . . until it was devoured by the spinning mouth of a jet engine.

The plane, outbound from Phoenix, was filled with thrill-seekers, on their way to win and lose fortunes in the smoke-filled casinos of Las Vegas—but they had not bet on this particular thrill. Although the plane's engines often inhaled stray birds that got in their way, the plane wasn't designed to withstand an entire flock ramming down the throat of a single engine.

The right engine, fouled by the remains of the birds, blew out with such force that the wing caught fire. Inside the cabin, there were a few brief minutes of panic as the plane slipped out of the pilot's control and plummeted into the jagged depths of the Grand Canyon.

There were no survivors.

Not from the passenger list, that is.

However, of those passengers, several of them had packed their pets into the cargo hold—in fact, more than the usual number due to a dog show in Vegas—as if the confluence of coincidence had now evolved a structure beyond mere randomness. With the cabin burning above, and their travel kennels shattered by the impact, sixteen animals burst out through the shredded ruin of the cargo hold, each filled with a new life force gleaned from the Osterized birds. Rather than scattering, they traveled from the crash in a tight and orderly pack, their minds filled with a limited but powerful awareness that their journey was not yet complete. And so they pushed deeper into the canyon, where hungry predators searched for a night's meal.

I
N A RUSTED MOBILE HOME WITH NO WHEELS,
L
ARA AND
Jara watched smoke rise in the southern sky, and waited for their parents to return.

Hours after it had crashed, the downed jet still blazed in the canyon.

Not many exciting things occurred in Hualapai land, and it seemed sad to both Lara and Jara that it was only disasters that brought excitement. Most of the village had headed off into the canyon toward it. Surely the media would want to talk to witnesses. Only a few actually saw the plane soar past on its way down, as it was way past midnight, but plenty were willing to tell every last detail of the crash.

Jara and Lara would have none of that. They had no heart for wallowing in the misery of the dead—and they did
not
want to face the media. They were of one mind when it came to that. And so, while their parents had gone off with the others to view the spectacle and search for survivors, Lara and Jara stayed put in their trailer, as was their way, and they started a new game of chess. They were always starting new games—the problem was finishing them. It was that way with so many things in the twenty years they had lived, that their lives felt little more than a collection of unfinished business.

Still, they started a new game, always hoping for some miracle of completion.

Tonight their concentration was finally broken by the melodic chants of the Shaman next door. He was, by trade, an electrician,
but every once in a while, when some earth-shattering event stirred up the town, he would wrap himself in the old skins, and old traditions. Then he would spend hours filling his yard with sand paintings, and singing the chants that few remembered. When Radio Joe began his chants, and cast sulfur into the flames, Lara and Jara would almost believe that somewhere within the heart of the poverty that gripped the town, there truly was magic. The town scoffed at him in the light of day. But when someone was deathly ill, it was always Radio Joe they wanted spilling sands on their floor, and evoking the ancients in the secret dark of night.

At times like this, when the distant sky burned, and Radio Joe called on the spirits, Lara and Jara began to feel that eerie sense of magic, thick as the smoke on the wind.

“He's louder than usual,” said Jara.

Lara turned to look out of the window where they could see Radio Joe, sitting before the small fire on his lawn. He shook the ceremonial spices to the left and right; he wailed and invoked; he danced and stomped around the flames, and it
did
seem as if the flames grew higher as he tended them with his ritual.

“The crash must have really spooked him.”

The fact was, it was hard not to be spooked by it. The plane had come roaring right over their heads, before it disappeared over the canyon's edge. And although Jara and Lara rarely left the confines of their home, tonight the brother and sister strode out to speak to Radio Joe, leaving behind the strange, twisted footprints that can only be made by conjoined twins.

I
T WAS RARER THAN
rare. Impossible, if you believed the experts. Siamese twins born male and female. In every other way they were identical. The survival of conjoined twins
usually depended on their level of conjunction. Jara and Lara were severe thoracopagus. They had four legs, but the two central ones were withered and useless. The bones of their hips were fused, and they shared a liver, a pancreas, and a confused intestinal tract. Both their hearts were separate and strong, free from defects; but since their bloodstreams were connected, the two hearts often fought one another, like two drums beating out disparate rhythms.

Hospitals had offered to separate them for free years ago, but their parents both feared the dangers of the operation, and despised charity, so they refused those early offers. Then, as the twins grew, all those excited surgeons found other projects, and so Lara and Jara ultimately fell into the canyon of the forgotten. In times past, conjoined twins were killed at birth. Western medicine used to call them “monsters” before the advent of modern compassion. In spite of it Jara and Lara always tried to see beyond their hardship. Sometimes it was a blessing, to be able to be so close. To almost know the other's thoughts. To share more than most others on earth. But there were only three people who could look at them and not see freaks. Their mother, their father, and Radio Joe.

“T
HE SPIRITS SPOKE TO
me tonight,” Radio Joe told them, as they warmed themselves around his fire. Lara and Joe grinned at one another.

“Was it AM or FM?” asked Jara. The old man often told tall tales to local children, of spirits that spoke to him through the radios and TVs he repaired.

“No. This time for real.” He closed his eyes and offered an open-palmed chant to the flames.

“What did they sound like?”

“They came in the voice of the mountain lion,” he told
them. And even as he said it, they heard the guttural roar of the great cat somewhere close by.

The twins pulled themselves up quickly, but Radio Joe didn't stir. He opened his eyes, and turned slowly to look up at them. The fire painted a stroke of madness in his ancient eyes. “They called for you,” he said. “You did not quest after your spirit. So your spirit has quested after you.”

In truth few of the teenagers in town went on vision quests anymore. Radio Joe never missed an opportunity to rebuke them for it.

The roar came again. It sounded strange—different from roars they heard before. It sounded more powerful than other lions. There was a lion that had attacked a woman a few weeks before; surely this was the same one. With most of the neighborhood gone, the twins knew they would have to take care of it. How surprised the others would be when they discovered that the freakish pair had dispatched the troublesome cougar.

“Are you going to shoot it?” asked Radio Joe.

“Once it's had a taste of human blood it won't stop,” said Jara. “It has to be destroyed. I know it's not what you believe but—”

“Use my rifle,” Radio Joe said. “It's in the shed.”

T
ONIGHT THE WORLD SEEMED
to end at the rim of the canyon. As the twins stood there, gazing out across the great expanse, they could still see an orange glow far below, on the canyon floor. Smoke from the smoldering wreckage had blown to the canyon wall, filling the space beneath the cliff with a haze lit pale blue by the gibbous moon.

They had followed the strange roars of the mountain lion to this spot—and although they could catch hints of its gamy scent, the smell of smoke masked it as they neared the rim.

They looked down into the pit of the canyon.

“Do you think it went back down?” asked Lara. And the answer came as a single earth-shaking roar behind them.

It awakened in them a searing terror, and they realized at this awful, vulnerable moment that they feared death far more than they had imagined.

They turned in a ballet-smooth motion to see not one, but four mountain lions stalking toward them, out of the shadows of the Arizona night. Their mouths were covered with the fur and blood of their latest kills.

Jara raised his rifle but did not know which creature he should aim at. “Don't move,” Jara said.

There was something about these beasts that was not right. It was the way they walked—their paws stepping in perfect unison as if they were all reflections of the same beast. And it was common knowledge that mountain lions did not hunt in packs.

The quartet of beasts opened their mouths to roar, and only now did the twins understand why the sound had been so strange. It had been the sound of
all four of them roaring at once
.

Backed against the half-mile drop to the canyon floor, Lara and Jara knew their lives were about to end one way or another. But the lions stopped ten feet away and held their position. Dark eyes fixed on the twins. Perhaps they were confused by the sight of Siamese twins, or perhaps it was something else. Out of nowhere, a voice spoke to them.

“I understand now.”

The twins heard the voice, but it was as if the voice had originated deep within their own minds.

“I understand.”
This time the thought had come from the direction of the great cats. Although Lara didn't pretend to
understand all the mysticism of the old ways, she felt sure this was a vision—the kind Radio Joe often spoke of. The kind of vision that opened the door to one's destiny.

Jara, on the other hand, wasn't so convinced. He held the rifle on one of the creatures, unwilling to let his guard down.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Completion,”
said the four voices. “
Mine
and
yours
.”

“We don't believe in animal spirits,” said Jara.

“I don't think that's what they are.” Lara raised her hand and pushed down the barrel of Jara's gun.

“What are you?” demanded Jara.

“I am nothing,”
said the voices.
“I am nothing without you. Because you are the point of focus. You are the one.”

Although the twins did not yet understand the full implication, the truth of it rang deep within them. The suggestion of them being at the focus of anything was a powerfully charged notion. They had lived so much of their lives in hidden anonymity, that it was more than just their curiosity that was piqued. It was a call to their souls.

“What do you mean?” the two asked in unison.

But they didn't need to ask, because they implicitly knew. Jara and Lara were the point of focus. That meant that these creatures had not arrived here by random means. They were directed here by an ordered series of events. Then an image flooded the twins' minds, and they instantly saw how these creatures came to be.

The bacteria aligned.

A powerful force injected perfect order into the river's current, and the bacteria aligned!

The same order flowed its way up the food chain until the alignment of those billion bacteria had distilled down into the alignment of these four dangerous predators.

“And you . . .”
said the four voices again.
“You are the point of focus.”

If it were true, thought the twins, then it was something more than fate, and more than destiny. It meant that the unknowable forces of nature had not spat the twins out as freaks, but as vessels for something greater than themselves.

“I can give you what you need. What you long for,”
said the voice.
“I can give you completion.”

As they heard those words, they finally knew what it would mean to be the point of focus. They had lived lives of incompletion—from their own bodies, to the games of chess they never finished. They were like a tune, straining on the penultimate note, waiting for resolution. They
were
incompletion, and nothing was more desirable than to finally be complete.

“What do we have to do?” the twins said simultaneously.

“You already know,”
came the answer.

Yes, they did know.

Jara raised his gun at the beasts . . . and released four deadly blasts.

The cats did not flinch, or shy away. Instead they each received the bullet through the brain, and collapsed to the dust, one after another. The twins realized what was about to happen next even before it began, and the knowledge made it even more joyous. The moment the creatures were dead, and their spirits were released, Lara and Jara could feel the four dissolve together, funneling into them. Now the twins could truly hear each other's thoughts, feel each other's beings. The four incomplete spirits that had inhabited the cougars, meshed together, weaving into a single great spirit that wound itself around the twins like a cocoon.