“How does it feel?”
She cowered against Zephaniah Smith's tombstone, hands flat against the surface on either side. She should sing, she thought. Just sing. How she'd found herself in such a predicament was no longer a relevant question. She had to get out, that was all that mattered now.
“Go on,” James said, mouth hovering an inch from her face. “Sing like a bird.”
“Please . . .”
“Sing!” he screamed.
She flinched and began to sing through a flood of tears. Random words unconnected to any tune she knew. “Please, don't hurt me, please save me, please, I beg you, I beg you, I beg you.”
“What else, huh, baby? What else you beg us to do?”
She could barely think straight. Fury pushed her fear backâbut then it returned, even more tangible than before.
“Sing for us that lily-white lullaby, baby,” James said, lifting the glasses from her face.
Darcy clenched her eyes and tried to sing again, but the words refused to form any tune. “Please leave me alone. Please . . .”
She couldn't do this. Any moment and she would crack; she could feel the outrage coiled inside her mind, straining against good sense. When she snapped she would launch herself at them fingernails first, take some skin with her, and then be beaten to a pulp, she knew that. And she didn't want that. But she just couldn't cower here and sing for them.
“Please . . .” she whispered. “Billy, please. Please don't do this.”
“Please don't do this,” he mimicked. The noose tightened. “Don't do what? Make you sing or hang you by the neck? Isn't that what you people want us blacks to do for you? Perform like a bunch of monkeys?”
“No, no, that's not me.”
Their leader leaned forward and licked her cheek. Her control broke then, while his tongue was still on her face.
“Don't!” She lowered her head, shoved both arms out, and pounded into his gut like a battering ram.“Don't.Don't you dare touch me! Don't, you sick beast!”
“Mother of . . .” Hands grabbed her and pinned her back against the tombstone, but she kicked out with both feet.
However noble and courageous her attack, it yielded nothing but rage from them. They smothered her, punched her in her gut. A hand slapped her face.
One of them got his arm around her throat and began to choke her so she couldn't breathe, much less beg for . . .
Then Darcy remembered her voice. A distant abstract detail floating on the edge of her mind.
Save yourself, Darcy! Look in their eyes and speak
to them and save yourself!
She snapped her eyes wide. James grabbed her face in one hand and squeezed her cheeks tight. “You're going to pay for that, lily-white.”
Darcy tried to scream at him; nothing but rasping air came out.
“Back off, James. You can't kill her,” one of them said.
“No?”His fist slammed into her gut and she jerked forward against the arm coiled around her throat. She tried to suck in some air, found none. Her oxygen-deprived head pounded; the world began to fade.
She was going to pass out! She wanted to look them in the eyes and use her voice, but now she was going to pass . . .
James grabbed her hair and jerked her head back so that she was forced to stare into his face. “It's nothing personal, lily-white, but we're going to send a message. And you're our messenger.”
His eyes were only a few inches from hers when the arm around her throat relaxed.
She forced a single word from her lungs with her last reserve of air. “No,” she breathed.
Then she sucked at the air. Her lungs filled with oxygen. James continued to drill her with his malignant stare.
It isn't going to work
. Tears blurred her vision. And then Darcy did the only thing left in her heart to do, knowing that they were going to kill her.
She screamed her rage. “No, no, no!” she screamed, each word growing in volume. “Let me go, you sick dog, you have no right to touch me, no, no . . .”
The arm tightened, cutting off her voice.
James froze, breathing hard. His eyes were wide.
“Let her go,” one of the others said.
The guy with his arm squeezing her neck wasn't getting the message.
James pulled back, confused, still fixed on her. “Let her go.”
“What? What doâ”
“Let her go!” he snapped.
The arm released its grip.
Darcy doubled over, gasping. Oxygen flooded her lungs, seeped into her blood, swarmed her with life. She breathed deep and hard, and they watched her.
“What's wrong with you fools?” the one who'd choked her said. “You think this will bring Samantha back from the dead? We have this whore dead to rights here and I'm beâ”
“Shut up!” Darcy screamed, jerking her head around to face him.
He returned her stare, speechless.
She stood up, rubbing her throat. The anger she'd felt before dread had set in returned with a vengeance. “You want me to sing? Is that what you want? You want your pretty little rock star to sing for you? Huh?”
Darcy glanced over their shoulders. A few from the edge of the crowd were looking their way, but no sign of the cavalry.
“Go ahead,” she said, glaring at them again. “Beg me. Beg me! Beg me, James. Beg the rocker girl you tried to kill for forgiveness.”
His faced had lightened a shade. “Please . . .”
“You should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you!”
“Iâ”
“Shut up. Get on your knees.”
They hesitated, so she put it another way. “You know you should grovel at my feet for what you've done. It's unforgivable! Get on your knees! Now!”
They sank to their knees, all five of them, and Darcy learned then that she didn't need to look at each one as long as they were looking at her eyes. They seemed to be more responsive than Annie Ruling.Why? Because of her own passion, perhaps.
She paced in front of them, breathing deeply. “You're petrified, aren't you? Well, you should be. You should feel terrified by yourselves.”
Tears sprang to the eyes of the one in the red shirt. “Please, oh please, we're so sorry.”
They were like putty in her hands, she thought.Not robots who would do whatever she wanted them to do, but minds inclined to do what she could convince them was the right thing.
“I'm leaving,” she said. “And I don't want you to tell anyone what happened here. You don't tell them you tried to lynch me, and you don't tell them you broke down like a bunch of babies. You hear?”
They all nodded except for James, who still looked like he'd been hit by a comet.
“James? You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Get up.”
They stood.
“Now shake my hand, so anyone watching believes we were just messing around.”
She shook their hands one by one, then left them standing by Zephaniah Smith's tombstone.
So . . . now she knew. She most certainly did have a gifted voice and it wasn't giving out. The power of it made her dizzy.
BOULDER CITY High School had been flattened to the ground and rebuilt three years earlier to accommodate the swelling student body, a move that had sparked outrage from those who thought adding trailers to the old school would suffice in the face of rising taxes.
From the air, the academic halls looked like a plus sign, a Swiss cross, with a large circular atrium at the center. Directly to the west stood the gymnasium and lunchroom. All new, all beautifully furnished thanks to the taxpayers.
But the real beauty of the campus lay outside the buildings. Here the desert had been transformed into a lush greenway that could be mistaken for a golf course at first look. Twenty acres of manicured lawn, broken by small pockets of desert landscape and gazebos where students could escape the sun to study or loiter.
The greenway ended at a small concrete pond with a twenty-foot-high fountain that sprayed water behind a placard: From the Desert Rises a Fertile Mind, Never to Be Wasted.
As was so often the case, when the dust settled and the buildings stood proud, the tax-hike controversy had been long forgotten.
Other controversies among the 2,429 students that roamed the beautiful new campus, however, were new every morning.
Like every school in the United States, the race-religion controversy was more felt than spoken, because the public school system had long ago learned that some things were best left out of the classroom. Issues like freedom of religious expression, which had taken a brutal beating early in the century. Like politics, which was best discussed at home. Issues like racial prejudice, which had come full circle in its failure to be resolved. After all, whites, the historical perpetrators of most racial discrimination in the United States, were now a minority.
But the lynchings in Kansas City over the past week had sparked a flame among the students in most schools across the country, and Boulder City High was no exception. Principal Joseph Durst had used the public address system for a reasoned speech about the absurdity of racially motivated hate crimes. “Tolerance, students, is the pathway to harmony. Diversity should be celebrated, not snuffed out. Just remember we live in the twenty-first century, not the Dark Ages.”
Although his intentions were undoubtedly sincere, the announcement only highlighted the news of the two latest lynchings in a Kansas City graveyard this morning.
Katrina Kivi walked down the covered walkway that led to the first set of gazebos in the yard, as they called it. The fountain rose majestically a hundred yards directly ahead. Carla walked beside her, noisily popping gum, rambling on about how Mexicans were worse than the whites and if there was anyone the cops should suspect, it should be a Chicano.
Katrina Kivi couldn't say that she didn't care, but compared to events that had forever altered her own world these past twenty-four hours, two hangings in a Kansas City graveyard, however tragic, seemed distant.
In fact, most of the day had felt disconnected from Kat. Like everything around her was actually part of a world to which she didn't belong. She'd awoken to discover that she was really an alien and had been sent here at birth by the mother ship as part of an experiment.
She dressed the same: blue jeans, black blouse. Still had the snake tattoo on her shoulder blade that could just be seen slithering around her neck when she wore a T-shirt. Same dark hair, same hazel eyes, same skull ring on her left forefinger.
But she didn't feel like the same person who walked down this very same outdoor walkway with Carla and Jay yesterday.Kat's friends had long ago agreed they were three of the school's twenty-seven “true” witches, who didn't dabble in the craft but lived by a respectable code.
It was the kind of hogwash Kat normally would have shot down in flames, but she went along with this to be included. A person had to belong somewhere. Today, though, she knew that she was a foreigner even among her own clique.
“So you gonna tell me?” Carla asked.
“Hmmm?”
“C'mon, Kat. Don't you try to tell me nothing's wrong. Why you being so quiet today? You sick?”
“No, I'm fine.” She wasn't fine, of course. She was far better than fine.
“Okay . . . so what happened?”
The events of last night spun through her mind for the hundredth time since leaving Johnny's house late last night. Her eyes had been opened to another world. She'd seen herself as she truly was, but that wasn't the main thing.
The main thing was that for the first time in her life she became completely and utterly aware of a greater reality, of which she was a part. Simple statements she'd once heard as distant, annoying barking dogs in the night, yapping, yapping at the world, had thundered through her mind. A huge monster had grabbed her by the hair, spun her around, and roared in her face with enough power to rip her skin off.
Okay, that wasn't the way Johnny had put it, but it was what had happened. Only the huge monster had turned out to be God. Not in a million years would she have figured. How ludicrous.
God.
Walking next to Carla now, the word sounded so . . . strange.
“God,” she whispered.
“What?”
“What?” She remembered that Carla was waiting for an explanation. “Never mind.” But then Kat couldn't keep it back any longer.
She smiled, gripped her books tight against her chest. “Carla, what if I told you that everything you thought about life was wrong?”
Carla was looking at Charles Wright, who loitered with a group of football jocks. All blacks.“He thinks he's so hot.” But the devilish grin on her face betrayed her infatuation with the running back, who was watching them.
He smiled and nodded. Carla lifted her fingers in a tempered acknowledgement, then turned back to Kat.
Carla feigned nonchalance, but her crush on Charles was well known to the group. “You see that look?” she said.
“I saw it.” But Kat wasn't interested in it.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
Kat had thought through countless ways to spill the beans to her fellow witches, and none of them seemed particularly compelling.
“What if I told you that God was real?”
“Yeah? So what?” Carla glanced back at the group of jocks.
“I mean, really real? Like in Moses-in-the-ark real?” Or had she got-ten that mixed up?
“Moses? I'd say you were starting to sound like a Muslim.”Her friend grabbed her arm playfully. “Don't tell me you've decided to put aside your witchery and follow hard after Moses and Jesus! Oh, that's just wonderful news, Kat.”
“Muslims? Do they follow Jesus?”
“'Course they do.” Carla's voice was tinged with bitterness.
“Where'd you learn that?”
“Before my father converted to Islam, my family used to go to church. Trust me, I've had an earful. Muslims think Jesus was the only sinless person, prophet, whatever, to live. They worship the ground he walks on.”