She glanced at Raven. "They're not shooting at me, right?"
He grinned. "Well, not yet."
It didn't surprise her when he guided them towards the sound of the guns. He walked a little ahead of her and she entertained herself by walking in his footsteps, her own smaller imprints lost within his. She had a sudden, vivid memory of a day on the beach when she was six or seven and she'd done the same thing walking in the sand behind her father.
As they drew nearer, she saw that the dark blots were houses, though they looked derelict. There was movement around them, she estimated at least fifty people, but she didn't think they'd been spotted. It was possible she was still cloaked within the spirit world. She was finding it harder and harder to tell.
When they were close enough to the town to see individual faces, Alex slowed to a stop. "If PD's here, is he a prisoner?"
Raven wobbled a hand in the air. "Yes and no." At her glare, he added, "Not in the way you mean."
As if they were as dissatisfied with his answer as Alex, she heard the animals howl again, high-pitched and desperate. A curt volley of barks followed, nearer this time. Her eyes swept the desert, but they passed over the creature twice before she picked out its shape from the loose rocks around it. It was mottled brown, dog-like but not a dog.
"Brother coyote," Raven said.
The creature slunk closer, belly low to the ground. The hairs on its ruff stood on end and she could see a subvocal growl shaking its jowls. A second later, another coyote appeared behind it, and then a third and fourth.
Distantly, Alex registered that the gunfire had stopped, but she couldn't tear her gaze away from the creatures. There were more of them now, a semi-circle of fur and bared teeth around her. She raised her hands in a gesture of surrender that she knew they wouldn't understand.
"Raven?" she said.
There was no reply. The thought of looking away from the threat of the coyotes made her breath catch in her throat but she braced herself and turned.
Raven was gone. And when she turned back to the animals, they were another pace nearer. She thought she could feel their breath on her skin, hotter than the desert wind. She could certainly smell it, rank with decayed meat. She took a step back and their eyes followed. She guessed the nearest was the pack leader. He was a little larger than the others and there was intelligence in his expression as he studied her.
"Are you really here?" she asked him, her voice husky with fear. "Or am I there?"
The coyote's head cocked as if he was listening. His eyes locked with hers as she remembered once reading that an animal's never would. Though they were the amber-yellow of a beast's, she felt a shock of recognition as she looked into them. She
knew
this creature.
The coyote's head suddenly turned, hearing keener than hers, responding to the footsteps she registered a moment later. The man running towards her had a gun drawn and she flinched before she realised it wasn't aimed at her.
She moved before she made the conscious decision to do it, flinging herself towards the man and in front of the coyotes. For a second she found herself staring down the muzzle of his weapon and he cursed and jerked his arm as his finger tightened on the trigger. A puff of dirt and sharp fragments of rock exploded to her left as her ears rang with the gunshot.
"Please don't shoot them," she said.
Other men joined the first. She could smell their sweat, ranker than the coyote's breath. She kept her eyes focused on the young black man who'd fired the shot as he frowned down at her. There was a softness about his face that suggested baby fat only recently shed. She thought he was probably younger than her.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he said. His accent was British, not at all what she'd expected.
"And who the heck are you?" the man at his left shoulder asked. He was opposite to the shooter in every way: massive, white, bearded, forty-something. He wore only combat trousers and a sleeveless khaki T-shirt and she could see swastikas tattooed on his arms. It was hard to imagine he and the younger man were friends, but they stood shoulder to shoulder and looked at her with the same hostile expressions. The big white man had a fox's spirit in him, but behind the younger black man's face she saw nothing at all. It made her uneasy and she realised that she was beginning to depend on the insights the other world gave her.
The coyotes had fallen back, away from the men and their guns, but their eyes were still on her. And their leader... The face that overlaid his long muzzle and sharp ears was human. It was impossible, but it was PD's.
The young man lowered his gun. "I'm sorry, I thought they were attacking you. I didn't realise they were your pets."
She choked out a laugh at that, which made him frown. "They're not pets. They're..." But what could she say that these people would believe?
"Lady, you still haven't told us what you're doing here," the bigger man said. "Where's your car? Ain't no way you walked."
She laughed again. "I took the train."
He stepped closer, enveloping her in his stale body odour. There was a hesitancy about his movements, the sense of something held back. She suspected that if she'd been a man, she'd already be on the ground.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to jerk you around. I really did ride the train - the freight train. It went by about half an hour back."
"I saw it," the other man said. He held out his hand and after a second she reached out and shook it. "I'm Morgan."
She nodded. "Alex."
The older man stared at her for a long, unfriendly moment before saying, "Jimmy."
She tugged her hand to release it from Morgan's, but his grip didn't loosen and he shifted his fingers until they circled her wrist. "No one jumps a train in the middle of the desert for no reason. Tell us what you're doing here. Last chance." He hadn't holstered his gun, though he wasn't yet pointing it at her.
She didn't know who these people were, but they were too well armed and too twitchy to be up to any good. And though they didn't seem to be Croatoans, she had no guarantee they weren't allied to the cult. She could leave, slip into the spirit world and disappear like mist. But Raven had brought her here for a reason. Whatever had happened to PD, she suspected these people were somehow connected. Leaving now would be taking the coward's way out, and she'd done that once already.
She looked at Morgan, into his eyes, searching for the spirit truth behind his mundane face.
There was nothing, only a guarded expression and a light sheen of sweat on his smooth skin. "How about you tell me who
you
are first?" she said.
He quirked a smile, eyes cutting down to the gun in his hand.
"Yeah, but you're not going to shoot me in cold blood, are you?"
He flinched, as if she'd hit some kind of nerve. "I wouldn't bet my life on it."
She took a breath and took a gamble. "Look, I don't know what you guys are up to and I really don't care. I'm here for the coyotes, that's all."
"OK," Morgan said. "Why?"
She wished she could ask Raven for the advice she usually scorned. But he wasn't there and all she could do was what he might have done - answer with a truth that could be understood as a lie. "Because they're friends of mine."
Morgan nodded. "You're part of this, aren't you? I don't know how, or which side you're on, but you're a soldier in the war."
She meant to tell him she had no idea what he was talking about, until she remembered something Raven had told her. "Actually, I think I'm a conscientious objector."
"Impossible," a new voice said. The man was olive-skinned and dark-eyed with a hawkish nose and an unfriendly expression. Then she saw what lay behind the human mask: fire and wings.
She stumbled away from him and to her knees, holding a hand in front of her face to shield her from the light. It shone through her fingers, a red glow around the black shadow of her bones.
Abruptly, the light blinked out and when she lowered her hand she was looking at an ordinary Middle Eastern man.
Morgan reached down to help her to her feet as he looked at the newcomer. "Lahav, she saw you, didn't she? The real you, I mean. What's going on?"
"She's a CIA agent," Lahav said. "And she's a spirit traveller."
The men behind and around him tensed and suddenly a lot more guns were pointing in her direction. Lahav scowled at the men, and the weapons dropped - all except Morgan's. "Is she on our side?" he asked.
"Maybe if I knew what your side was, I could tell you," Alex said.
They brought her to the least derelict of the buildings in the ruined town. It had been turned into a church, a crude wooden cross nailed to the back wall.
Angels and demons
, Raven said, and she'd thought he was speaking metaphorically. But if these people were to be believed - this soldier of the Hermetic Division and the Mossad agent with the winged spirit living inside him - it was literal truth too. There
was
a war being fought, and she'd stumbled into the middle of it.
"I'm not on any side," she told them. "My... bosses at the CIA didn't talk about any of this. I'm not even sure they know."
Morgan eased back on the creaky pew beside her. "They employ Belle. They've got to have an idea."
Lahav shook his head. "They choose ignorance, as they once chose not to ask very much about Saddam Hussein's prisons or his palaces or the unmarked Kurdish graves while he kept the Ayatollah in check. They use what's useful to them and they never ask what it means or what is the true price."
"So why
are
you here?" Morgan asked her. "What's the CIA's interest in this?"
Alex looked up, through the gaps in the roof to the pure blue sky above. These people weren't her enemies and they could be allies. "I'm not with the CIA, not any more. The Croatoans kidnapped my partner and I need to get him back."
"Then our interests align," Lahav said. "They have something of ours, too."
Morgan darted a surprised look at the other man but Lahav's inexpressive face gave nothing away.
"I showed you mine..." Alex said.
Morgan hesitated a moment, then sighed. "It's called a shofar," he said.
When he'd finished, Alex felt a nauseous churning in her stomach. The coyotes howled a question in the desert and she finally had all the information she needed to answer it, but she didn't know if the answer would do them any good. She stood, rattling the wooden pew.
"I think we're both after the same thing," she said. "It divides spirits from bodies, right? Jesus. Jesus, they're clever."
"The Croatoans?" Lahav asked.
She nodded. "The bastards. They tell all their young, pretty members they can teach them to spirit travel - and I guess it's even true. But they tell the old, rich members something else entirely. No wonder the cult got so much money and power so quickly. Who wouldn't pay everything they had to live forever?" She thought about Maria, who from one day to the next seemed to become a different person. And then she thought about James Marriott, who'd loved his dying wife so much, the wife whose suffering had infused the bones of their house. Suffering, but not death. Because she hadn't died. Of course she hadn't. She'd just... moved.
Lahav frowned. "The shofar can clear the path to Eden, but it hasn't happened. I would know."
Alex laughed, giddy with a sort of horrified excitement. "That's because you're thinking of bodily immortality, aren't you? But the body isn't really what matters - it's the spirit. The spirit can live forever if it can find new young bodies to house it. The only thing you need to do is make sure they're vacant."
"Christ, I get it," Morgan said. "They use the shofar to drive out the spirits of their young recruits and then the new spirits get to move in."
"And the old cultists leave their money to the young, because they've leaving it to themselves. It's perfect. Murder with no bodies, a crime that'll never be investigated."
Morgan chewed his lip, eyes downcast as he thought. "But why use the shofar to get that sort of immortality, when you can use it to get the actual apples from Eden, the real thing?"
Lahav nodded. "A good question, but if we get the shofar it won't matter. I can hide it, and there will be no more immortality of any sort."
"
After
we've used it," Alex said.
Lahav glared at her, and for a moment she saw the fire in his eyes, bright and uncompromising. But she stared him out. "The souls they drive out aren't destroyed," she said. "I guess... I don't know. They're drawn to the nearest thing they can inhabit."
"The coyotes," Morgan said. "Your partner as well, right?"
She nodded as Lahav shook his head. "No," he said. "These people are lost. Sad, but not important. The shofar is far too dangerous to leave in the world a moment longer than we must. The murderer, Coby, is still out there, hunting it. He must not get it."
Her neck prickled with the knowledge of all the guns around her, and the hostility of the men holding them. "A few moments won't hurt. There's a reason we were brought together - like you said, Morgan, it can't be coincidence. Help me and I'll help you."
Lahav looked round at the men with their ragged beards and khaki T-shirts and the hair-trigger violence in their eyes. "I don't think we need your help."
Alex smiled. "Did I mention that I can walk through walls?"
"I don't like it," Jimmy said. His hands moved fluidly over his weapon as he spoke, disassembling, checking, reassembling; the practised, instinctive motions of a soldier before battle. His men were doing the same, strapping ammo belts around their chests, sheathing knives at their waists and ankles.
Morgan patted the SIG Sauer in its holster on his hip, but didn't take it out. He didn't think steel would win the battle they were heading for.
"She's government," Jimmy said. "And she's..." He shook his head, denying what he wanted to say.
"Irritating as fuck?" Morgan suggested.
Jimmy shot him a quelling look. "She ain't on our side. Said so herself - there ain't no damn conscientious objectors in this war."