She didn't realise Morgan had stopped until her shoulder jogged his and she felt his hand against her mouth, her breath humid beneath his palm. His breath tickled her ear as he whispered, "They'll be waiting." He nodded at the corner of the building, now only a pace away. "They know we're here. I'm gonna have to go for it, but I need you to keep them occupied."
She felt a rush of fear so intense it made her light-headed. The corpses of the two men he'd killed were only feet away and she could smell the blood and something fouler. One of them must have soiled himself as he died, no dignity in it.
Morgan studied her face. "Fire blind," he said. "Put your hand round the corner and pull the trigger. I don't need you to kill them, just distract them."
"OK. I can do that."
"Ready?"
She nodded and he held up three fingers. He clenched one back into a fist, then a second - and then he launched himself forward into a long low roll.
The first volley of gunfire shocked her into motion. Her hand shook so hard as she pushed it round the side of the building that she could barely squeeze the trigger. But she did and the gun recoiled brutally, almost snapping her wrist until she remembered to bring up her other hand to support it.
There were screams mixed in with the gunfire and shouts of rage. The building was immovable against her side, but the spirit world was still there, one with the timeless desert. She could slip into it and away and she wouldn't have to kill or be killed.
"Now!" Morgan shouted.
She froze, looking towards the horizon. PD's body might be here, it might not. The shofar might be found, or it might be far away. She was risking so much for a very small chance of success.
"Alex, move it!" Morgan roared.
She kept squeezing the trigger as she threw herself round the corner, barely registering that it was clicking on empty. Her legs kicked something soft and she leapt over it instinctively before she realised it was a body. Not even a corpse. The man's pleading eyes met hers as his hands clasped over a stomach that had been ripped open, his guts coiling into the sand around him.
"Got too close. I had to knife him," Morgan said.
She lost it, doubling over to heave her lunch onto the sand.
She felt Morgan's hand rubbing soothing circles against her back. She couldn't look at him. She looked around instead, at the bodies littering the ground. There were six of them, no seven. She wondered if any of the bullet holes she could see in chests and heads and legs had been put there by her.
"OK," Morgan said. "We gotta move."
She nodded, swallowing the burn of bile in her throat. The door a was third of the way along the wall. It hung half open, a body wedged into the gap between wood and frame. Morgan grabbed one of the limp arms then gestured at her to take the other. The flesh was still warm beneath her fingers and she had to look away as the head flopped on the loose neck and she had a brief glimpse of a dark-skinned, round-cheeked face.
As soon as they were inside, Morgan ran, zig-zagging through a seemingly endless network of corridors. She was glad to let him, happy to have him take charge, take responsibility.
Without warning, he wrenched open a door and pulled her inside, leaving it open a crack so he could peer at the corridor behind. She could hear nothing but the harsh rasp of her breathing and the more controlled
hush
of his. "Where are we?" she asked.
He shrugged and she felt the tension and fear of the last half hour transmute into a sudden, disproportionate rage. "Then why the fuck did we fight so hard to get here?"
"Had to get away from the entrance. Scene of the crime, know what I mean?"
The
crime
. Yeah, that's what it felt like. She swallowed and looked away, though she felt his eyes on her for a long moment. She turned her face away when he touched her cheek with a tentative finger.
"You did all right," he said. "But if it's any consolation, you're the worst fucking shot I've ever seen. I killed those men, not you."
"But you killed them
for
me."
He shrugged again and this time she let it pass. She didn't know what she expected him to say, anyway. This was his job.
"So what now?" she asked.
"You came because you can walk through walls, right? But you can't do that here and you sure as hell can't shoot a gun. You're not gonna be much help to me. Why not stay here and let me go after the shofar?"
"And let you destroy it without giving me a chance to use it?"
"Fine," he snapped. "Just keep your head down."
She sighed. "No. I'm sorry, you go ahead. Will you come back and find me when you're done?"
He nodded, turned to the door, then turned back again. "I think you're right - Lahav doesn't want you to use the shofar. But it's me who's getting it and I will."
She smiled at him and he smiled back. Then he slipped through the door and was gone.
There was a small single bed in the corner of the room. She sank down on it, the hard mattress giving only a little beneath her but the white cotton sheets releasing the comforting smell of fresh laundry. She wondered whose room it was. Had Maria spent her last night as herself in a room like this?
"As a matter of fact, yes," Raven said.
He leant against the door, legs crossed at the ankle.
"You knew," she said. "Why the hell didn't you just tell me?"
"I could have, I suppose. Then I imagine you would have felt obliged to come here yourself, all guns blazing. Except for the fact that you didn't have a gun. Or any back-up. And then they would have captured you - or just shot you. No, I think they would have taken you prisoner. And then they might have tortured-"
"Jesus - stop!"
He grinned at her, unrepentant.
Despite herself, she felt better for his presence. She could still hear the muffled sound of gunfire and she couldn't tell if it was approaching or receding. She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. "Morgan's got no spirit self," she told Raven. "What does that mean?"
"That's a good question."
"Are you going to answer it?"
"Nope."
"Right." She lowered her head until it was resting between her palms. "Are you
my
spirit self?"
"Ha! Now that's a
very
good question. But you know the answer - you know who I am."
"Then who am I? You said you didn't choose me, but that could just mean I was already chosen."
He cocked his head. "Do you worry about where you'll go to when you die?"
Alex blinked, unprepared for the question and not sure how to answer it. The only church service she'd ever attended was midnight mass. She'd never worried about heaven and hell because she'd never believed in them. And now... she hadn't taken the time to think through what the things Morgan told her really meant.
Where was she going when she died? She hadn't been a terrible person but then she hadn't been a terribly good one either. She thought about Lahav, the man who contained a being inside him straight out of the Bible.
I have to trust him
, Morgan had said, and she thought she understood why: because his very existence proved the promise of heaven and the threat of hell real. But Raven existed too, and he wasn't a part of Lahav's book.
"When I die, I want to go where you are," she told him. "I think I belong there - in the spirit realm."
"You do," he said. "And
that's
why I came to you."
"OK. I guess I can live with that."
"That's the plan."
She studied him, the face which was so expressive and yet gave so little away. He was still here, and she knew that meant something. "There's something else I've got to do, isn't there?"
"The only thing you have to do is the thing that you do."
"I see the spirit world, but I can't see much here - just those walls."
"Then look at them and tell me what you see."
She blinked her eyes closed on the mundane world and opened them again on the other. The inner walls were like the outer with complex woodwork inside them, spirals and radiating lines that seemed breakable but held fast against her hand when she pushed against them.
"What do you see?" he asked. "What does it look like?"
She tried to see what he wanted her to, but there was nothing beyond the wood, the delicate swirls almost like a spider's web.
Suddenly, she understood what he meant. She sprinted through the door, careless of the noise it made as it slammed behind her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Coby handled the hire car awkwardly, his left hand reaching for a gear stick that wasn't there and his foot tapping at a nonexistent clutch pedal. He'd never been to the Mojave when he lived in America and he found that he liked its stark simplicity. It was a land that could kill the careless.
Was he being careless, though, following a stranger's instructions? Whoever left the recording
had
saved his life. And he was sure the Croatoans had the shofar. They had it, but he didn't think they understood how it could be used. He had something to offer them, and he suspected they knew it. If they didn't... He felt the lump of the Glock 9mm holstered under his arm.
As it always did, the thought of killing sped his heart and caused a warmth in his groin. He indulged himself in memories of the old man he'd strangled, then put the fantasy away. He wasn't an animal. The things that gave him pleasure didn't control him.
The road that led to the Croatoan centre was narrow, only one lane wide. It dead-ended outside the fenced perimeter of the compound. One way in, one way out and it would be easy to block it.
The fence was high and razor-wired, clearly intended for more than show. The gate was sturdier still with huts for security guards to either side of it. But as he cruised closer he saw that it had been forced open, the metal buckled by some strong force.
He stopped the car and drew his gun, debating simply reversing and leaving.
But the shofar might be here. He
had
to find out.
He kept his gun in his hand as he slipped out of the car into the parched desert air. As soon as he was clear of the air-conditioned interior he smelt blood. His gut clenched, half in pleasure and half in fear, but he'd made a decision now. He would go on.
The first body was only a few feet inside the fence. A high-calibre weapon had taken him out, the exit wound a bloody mess in his back, white ribs and torn muscle glistening in the midday sun. There were a dozen or more bodies in the fifty yards between the fence and the stuccoed building, but after Coby had watched in silence for a long minute he was sure they were all dead.
He knelt beside one and flipped him over. Blood oozed over his fingers and he tried to wipe them clean on the man's own khaki T-shirt, but the fluid was too tacky, sticking to his skin like glue. He looked at it a moment, red against white. Most of his recent kills had been bloodless. He'd forgotten how much he liked to see his hands this way.
He shifted his attention from his own hand to the dead man's face. It was broad and wildly bearded, the eyes a little too small so that it seemed piggish, not fully human. There was a swastika tattoo on his neck and SS lightning bolts on his arms beneath the ragged sleeve of his T-shirt.
The Croatoans weren't neo-Nazis, or at least that wasn't their public face. Coby guessed this man must have been part of a group attacking the cult. He examined a few more bodies, finding one more like the first - bearded, over-muscled and heavily-tattooed - and the rest young and clean-cut.
So. The neo-Nazis seemed to have got the best of the fight out here. The Croatoans had been foolish to step outside when they had a defended position within their own building. Coby wondered what had driven them to do it.
Gravel crunched beneath his sneakers as he walked towards the building. The door was ahead of him, open onto gloom, but he went to the left of it, towards the floor-to-ceiling windows which took up a large section of the wall. The glass was crazed in places but unbroken, almost certainly bullet-proof. Coby's heart sped as he walked, knowing how exposed he was to anyone inside. But bullet-proof glass worked both ways.
The windows reflected the desert back at him as he approached, and his own face, pale beneath his brown hair. The gun was a blur of darkness in his hand. When he was only inches away from the glass he cupped his hand over his eyes and peered in.
He guessed the place was a canteen of some sort. Tables were ranged at one end in front of a series of silver serving hatches, and cushions lay on the floor in rings. Plates were scattered about, as if the residents had been interrupted in the middle of their meal.
There were bodies scattered over the floor, too. The pools of blood looked black in the gloom. Coby saw that one of the bodies was twitching, some life still left in it. Not for long, though. The man's left hand dangled from the wrist by a thread - a knife wound, probably. And there was another cut beneath his ribs. It must have missed his heart, but it had caught something else essential, the liver or a kidney. It would be a painful death.
It took Coby a moment to register the one living figure in the room. The man stood by the door, more still than the dying man on the floor. He was looking straight at Coby and when their eyes met he smiled and beckoned before turning and leaving the room.
Coby stared at the slaughter for a moment longer then turned and headed for the door. The man had been expecting Coby and whatever he wanted to say, Coby wanted to hear.
He was waiting for Coby in the hallway just inside the front door. "Shaman," the man said. "It's a miracle."
Coby frowned as the stranger bowed to him. If there was a trick here, it escaped him. The man seemed to know him, though Coby was sure he'd never seen him before in his life. Was it possible that, by some bizarre coincidence, he resembled the cult's leader?
"Stand," he said, injecting an authority he didn't feel into his voice.
The man squared his shoulders like a soldier before his commanding officer. He was young and startlingly handsome with thick black hair and crystalline blue eyes. But there was something... wrong about his face. The animal part of him sensed it and it prickled the skin on the back of his neck.