Eggert
and the Priestess bowed their heads a moment to acknowledge the words. It was a gesture too few in
Sandeus’s
own church observed.
“Archbishop
Kennen
should be praised. To have given over his beloved only proves how anxious he is to cross over. Do you know any of his plans for the unification? How he envisions the Church structure?”
“I don’t spread rumors,” said the Priestess, “especially not about the Archbishop of Morning.”
Sandeus’s
patience ran dry with these
outworlders
’ constant reverence of her Archbishop, as though he were not an equal. He took his wine, sipped and chuckled a bit. “So what are you willing to spread, Priestess?”
The bodyguard’s eyes flared.
The Priestess of Morning, not as affected, set down her glass and folded her slender hands on her lap.
Sandeus
found his eyes sliding over the deep crevasse between her breasts. The Priestess eyed his interest coolly. He could see the soft tip of her tongue just behind her teeth. “It’s hardly fair—the woman’s flesh in this world is devoured constantly with the eye and yet the male’s flesh is always obscured. Has your kind purposely tried to starve us?”
Sandeus
touched his makeup accidentally and cringed. “I’m afraid my fascination can’t be helped, Priestess. After all, you know midnight always seeks the morning.” The bodyguard
Eggert’s
gaze cut through him.
Sandeus
cleared his throat. “So you put the Nomads in your sight then, Priestess? You can see them in your mind. Well then, where are they now?”
“Driving their big, horseless wagon—
van
.”
“You can see everything happening to them. Clearly? How does your sight work? It has been a constant fascination of mine.”
The Priestess bit into a chocolate cherry. After a moment, she dabbed her lips with a bar napkin. “I share the same ability as the Interloper, although not as superior. It is said that I share bloodlines with the Messenger, the Interloper, or whatever you may call him, or her.”
“Interesting. So how many people are in your sight?”
“I see the Nomads now, but I can also see my own church, out there. I put them in my sight before I left last year. There.” She pointed to the passing waves of brown desert and Joshua tree. “The Church of Morning gathers on
Ekki
fields, singing for the gateway to open, sharpening their staves, offering the feast. Anything I put into my sight fills my mind, until I look away.”
“Sounds overwhelming, Priestess.”
“I like taking more than I can handle. It exposes my limits.”
Sandeus
finished his wine and set it on the wet bar. He crossed his legs almost as well as she had and he felt childishly proud about it. “I let your Church operate in its own fashion, but I must ask this. I still don’t understand why we couldn’t just kill the Nomads at the bar.”
“Cloth needs them to lead us to the Heart. There can be no delay.”
“Cloth and his children track down the Heart of the Harvest, every year.”
“Perhaps,” she remarked, “but Cloth wishes to go at this new Heart with speed and precision, not an extra breath of effort spent. The opening will be taxing on him once it comes.”
“Cloth speaks to you?”
“Through Archbishop
Kennen’s
offerings.”
Sandeus
suddenly felt empty; he’d hoped to put all the worrying aside this year, but to learn Chaplain Cloth wanted to go cautious made him fear the worst. These Nomads worked well together. It was a miracle how well. Most Nomads lasted one October, maybe two. Not Martin and Teresa. It had been two decades now. They won some, lost some and always came back for another go.
Sandeus
heard that the woman, Teresa, had been protecting Hearts for thirty years. That was longer than his tenure as Archbishop.
This conversation started to depress him, so
Sandeus
wheeled around the subject yet again. “Anyhow, I want to speak of a new Bishop, Paul Quintana. I believe you met briefly at the Celebration last year.”
A satisfied expression crossed the Priestess’s face. “He is the winner of the gauntlet? He wasn’t allowed in the celebration ballroom with the envoys and other Bishops. The blonde, who looks like a film actor?”
“Very good looking, yes.”
“I would like to meet him, formally of course, now that he has ascended. He might be of use to me.”
“Forgive me, but wasn’t there just a new Bishop recently?”
Eggert
the bodyguard asked, beard bouncing with worry. “Jason? Or somebody?”
“Justin Margrave. Yes, he’s no longer with the Church.”
“Something happened?”
Sandeus
shrugged. “
Some of us fight against the wind, and some of us are taken with the dust. We are too strong to embrace the departed
.”
They bowed their heads again. The Priestess finished her wine but held onto the empty glass as her eyes roamed the desert. Those eyes saw everything great and small, everything near and far. Those eyes saw their destination ahead, for better or worse. There was equal parts pain and pleasure languishing in their brilliance.
Sandeus
Pager gazed at her in breathless admiration, despite
Eggert’s
stare. The Priestess of Morning was too lovely to ignore. So unbelievably
superb
. If only
Sandeus
could steal such perfection and make it his own.
Teresa became startled in her seat as Martin punched the horn. A convertible Mustang rocketed around them and a chubby finger sprung into the air, the nail polish a stop-sign red.
Teresa smacked her sleep-gummy lips. “Welcome to Southern California.”
Martin still hadn’t recovered. He was strangling the steering wheel, muttering, and probably fantasizing about pushing each sleek silver car into a shallow ditch. When he finally got over it, he leaned back in the seat and shook his head. “They’re bad in Arizona but out here there are just so damn
many
.”
“Makes you wonder why we bother to save the world.” She snapped open her box of cloves.
Only three left. Better conserve
, she thought.
Driving weariness had branded into the contours of Martin’s face. A creature of the road. “If you could dress up for a party this year, what would you be?” he asked.
“Adults don’t dress up.”
“Sure they do, Teresa. They go to parties and dress up. You can buy one of those pirate outfits, a rock chick, a
tiger
woman, maybe a refrigerator or one of those fat lady suits—I dressed until I was twenty, up until when I met you.”
“Sorry.”
“So answer the question,” he prodded.
“I’d be one of those ghosts with the holes cut in a sheet.”
Martin shook his head. “That’s the lamest costume ever.”
“So what would you be?”
He shrugged. “I’d show up as anything if it meant going to a party on that night rather than... you know.”
“Yeah, that’s something we gave up. Halloween parties.”
“Hey, you want to play?” he asked.
Their eyes met for a moment and she tilted her head. “Haven’t done that in a while. A few years?”
“I’ve got more things to add to the list. It’ll be hard to top me this time around.”
She folded her arms. “You go ahead and start. Tell me your first thing.
Martin, what has the Messenger taken from you?
”
Martin sat up, excited to play. “Aquariums.”
“Say what?”
“I’ve always wanted an aquarium, but I think it’d be difficult to maintain one on the road. Not with how you make those jackrabbit starts and sharp lefts.”
“Oh, you’re going to have to do better than that,” said Teresa. “
Cruises
.”
“Oh but we’ve been on ships before.”
“They weren’t vacation ships. Can you imagine us going to Jamaica? Being trapped on a boat for weeks? Then on the island, walled in by the Jamaican chapels? The church would be all over us.”
“Point taken.
Mowing the lawn
.”
“Oh now you’re just being silly.”
“Give me a dark Heineken, some sunglasses and the early morning allergies—ah! We’d need a house though first. I’m not
mowin
’ other people’s damned lawns.”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “
Weddings
.”
“Are you proposing?”
“A friend’s wedding or, God forbid, a family wedding. The ceremony, the reception, the dancing, the bouquet—”
“The garter belt. What about pets?”
“Now hold on, we’ve not been deprived there. We picked up at least half a dozen strays this year alone.”
“And then gave them to a shelter. It’s not the same.”
Teresa looked out the window, disconnecting from the conversation. “Pets just die too early anyway. Guess we’re better off.”
Martin kept driving. Dealing with the tailgaters and excessive lane-changers almost became a therapeutic diversion, even as they hit rush hour.
~ * ~
The Messenger never led them to five star hotels. They were lucky if they even got a hotel instead of a motel. The Happy Moon Lodge was the prototype for this manner of dwelling. A two-story building with a barren, sun-scratched roof and lazy air vents spinning. The place slumped in the bottom of a depression just off
Mount Vernon Avenue
. The second floor overlooked a swimming pool filled with some kind of limeade and dappled with mosquito larvae.
“A hospitable resort,” Teresa read from a travel book.
“Oh so they got massages here?”
“Yeah but have to go up the street and meet the leper with the shopping cart.”
“Is it far?”
Teresa smirked before slipping outside. Martin checked that his door was locked. “I wonder. What about the God thing? Like this is our test? Just think about it this time. It makes more sense than anything else.”
“I thought this conversation died about a thousand times ago.”
“No conclusion was ever drawn,” he replied.
“If the Messenger was God that would make us guardian angels and you’re no angel. I’ve known you too long.”
He grinned and leaned in to put her in a guillotine chokehold. A nervous laugh died in his throat as he stopped and withdrew.
What the hell am I thinking?
Teresa cocked an eyebrow. “I better not be that brittle yet.”
“I know but—”
He missed a beat and she fell sideways, swung around and grappled him. Though he knew how to break a blood choke, he couldn’t believe her speed, this woman who’d been barfing a lung for the last hundred miles. Teresa applied gentle pressure to a carotid artery, just to show him she’d found it. Martin didn’t need reassurance. She could have given him a case of cerebral ischemia right then, and he didn’t have to speculate long about that. He raised an arm buzzing from blood restriction, aimed a pulsing finger to the motel office. “After you, wonderful, brilliant, beautiful lady.”
She gave him a cool kiss on the neck and released the hold. “There’s a good boy.”
There was no front door, just a wobbly screen. The office had two cubicle-sized rooms. A man sat on a stool, his plump tropical shorts running down the sides. An Asian soap opera played on a nine-inch television sitting on top of several torn maintenance manuals. The air in the room hung with the odor of cheap cigarettes and Martin could tell that in the summer this place would be the worst kind of hell imaginable—he could almost foresee the sweat waiting behind the man’s broad forehead.
“We’d like a room through the first of November.”
The manager tweaked his chin. Martin and Teresa waited a moment, while the man completely ignored them. After politely reading the subtitles for a spell, Martin opened his mouth to repeat their request, this time with a spicier conclusion, but the man cut him off. “Cash and Card?”
“Cash,” they chorused.
He turned one eye to them. “Five hundred, seventy-five. Credit card for deposit please?”
“We don’t have a credit card.” Martin glared at Teresa.
“Two hundred cash for deposit.”
Martin knuckled his way into his pocket. There was plenty of money but he wished it spent elsewhere, not given for this rundown
pusbucket
of a motel. They had broken a few thousand at a credit union in San Bernardino and deposited the rest in the Messenger’s secure checking account. After the credit union they went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant called El Sombrero. Martin could still feel the onset of a carbohydrate crash; the beans, rice and tortillas anchored around his waist. It was not doing anything to improve his mood. Besides which, this motel manager looked like he could have been Tony Nguyen’s father. It made last year sharply return. Did they
have to
stay here?
They did. Teresa taught Martin to never question the Messenger’s instruction, no matter how unreasonable. It was a code to live by, he guessed.
After the manager put the cash in his safe, he handed over a torn copy of the receipt. He took down a pair of keys. “Second floor. Room 218. You come here for a pool key. No loud TV. And this is for you.” He brought up a black envelope from under the counter.