Sonoran Desert, Arizona
Dan stood in the desert for a long time.
The Crow, perched once more on the roof rack of the Dodge Durango, didn’t make a sound. Respectful of Dan’s own silence, the bird seemed to be waiting for the man to make the first move.
But Dan wasn’t ready yet. He stood there for an hour . . . and then two. He stood there, as still as death, knowing that in truth he
was
a dead man.
He imagined that he could stand there forever, if he pleased. His corpse would not roast beneath the unforgiving desert sun, for his sunburned flesh would heal as soon as it was damaged. Though he did not live, his carcass would stubbornly refuse to deteriorate and join the desert soil. He would go on and on, lingering in a single moment, a single silence, until the world was no more.
There were reasons to linger, certainly. There was much that Dan did not know, more that he did not understand.
A thousand memories boiled inside him, each one stirring a thousand emotions. Leticia’s first kiss . . . and her last warning . . . and a wedding band ringing against hard black asphalt. Gunshots and murder and blood . . . and the cry of the Crow. Kyra Damon’s dark vision . . . and the black bird’s earnest truth . . . and Leticia’s voice: now a lost whisper in a gnarled, fog-choked forest. . .
Dan stood in the desert and remembered all of it as the sun peaked in the sky and drifted west. He lived each memory again and again and again as morning became afternoon. But he could find no answer for any of it, no cause that made sense.
Maybe there was no cause. No grand design, no eternal plan mapped out on high. Maybe there was no reason for any of the little tragedies that seemed to form his life, no explanation for the stolen pleasures that had come so few and far between, no secret seed of truth that could explain what had happened to him, or why.
Or maybe the cause of all the horror that had entered Dan Cody’s life was so hideously simple that he hadn’t seen it at all.
Maybe the answer was as simple as a length of rope.
A hangman’s noose. Kyra Damon had fashioned one from instructions in a forbidden book. She had looped that rope around her neck, and it had delivered a vision to her tortured mind. That rope—twisted thirteen times as ceremony demanded—had led Kyra to Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin . . . and to Dan Cody, as well.
That rope had wronged Dan and Leticia. And, in wronging them, it had provided an avenue for the Crow’s dark magic.
But the Crow had been wronged by the witch’s rope, too. The noose had joined the black bird to Kyra’s vision, right along with Dan and Leticia. And now, because of the rope and the thing Kyra Damon had done with it, the Crow needed an avenger, someone to stand against the woman in ways the bird couldn’t.
Dan thought about it. A simple length of rope. He concentrated on the image, coiled it in his mind. He fashioned the noose, tested its strength, heard the soft whisper of the rope as it pulled tight around Kyra Damon’s neck.
That sound banished the questions from Dan’s mind. All the unanswerable
whys,
all the impenetrable
wherefores.
The hangman’s knot embraced the sliding rope, and the sound it made whispered like a strong, sure tide over the
would haves
and
should haves
and
could haves
that had haunted Dan since he returned to life in a sepulchre manufactured by Westinghouse.
Dan stood in the desert, and he listened to that whisper until the wind died down.
In the silence, the sound of the rope was suddenly gone.
Just that fast, Dan didn’t want to hear the whisper of a hangman’s noose anymore.
It was another whisper he longed for, another sound.
The whisper of Leticia’s voice.
Dan had heard that sound in the land of the Crow.
If the bird was to be believed, he could hear it again.
That was the only thing that mattered to Dan Cody, and he knew, at long last, that he really did have a second chance.
He took it.
The Merc pulled into the mall parking lot. As was his custom, Johnny ignored the carefully painted white lines and parked the ’49 in the middle of four empty spaces.
“Our boy’s no mathematical genius,” Raymondo cracked, hanging from the rearview mirror. “He’s especially got problems with
spatial relations.”
As an ice-breaker, the joke went nowhere. Johnny was still too shaken by Kyra’s close call in the hotel bathtub to even notice that he’d been insulted.
For her part, Kyra didn’t feel like smiling, let alone laughing. At anything. She stared across the parking lot, watching heat waves radiate off asphalt, her gaze drifting over row after row of suburban steel.
Kyra sighed. They weren’t
even
close to the stores. Getting there would be a major walk.
“You could have parked a little closer, Johnny.”
“I know, Ky. But, shit, I don’t want any steroid-pumped SUV scratchin’ my ride.”
Johnny got out of the car quickly, before Kyra could protest. “C’mon,” he said. “I noticed this bridal
boo-teek
when I was shopping for my wedding duds. The place looks really hip. I’ll bet my left nut that you’re gonna love it.”
Kyra didn’t move for a long moment. The hot air boiled off the blacktop and the dry wind slapped it hard, stuffing it into the Merc’s interior like a rag down a choking man’s throat. Kyra sat there, staring at the dashboard, at the scorpion encased in plastic resin that Johnny had taken from the Spirit Song Trading Post, and she felt like that scorpion had felt in the moment before death took it, like hot waves of plastic resin were pouring down on her, hardening, and in another minute she wouldn’t be able to move or breathe or—
Suddenly Kyra didn’t want to sit in the car anymore. A minute longer and she’d really get mad, because the heat would drive her crazy enough to
think.
About the Crow . . . and the people she and Johnny had killed at the trading post.
The people who were supposed to be dead.
The people who had now entered her vision.
Or her dream.
It might have been nothing more than that,
Kyra told herself
.
Only a bad dream. After all, I was tired when I got into the bathtub . . . and a little drunk . . . and the water was really, really hot. Too hot. No wonder I passed out. No wonder I had a bad dream. And sure, I nearly drowned . . . and sure, I came out of the tub looking like a shriveled-up prune . . . but the important thing is that I'll never look that way after I finish with the Crow. Dream or no dream, my skin will never wrinkle. I'll be immortal, eternally young and beautiful, and my skin will always be as smooth as a marble headstone, as white as
—
Johnny slammed the driver’s side door, and Kyra nearly jumped out of her skin.
And why? Because deep down, beneath all her carefully considered explanations and rationalizations, Kyra Damon was
scared.
And why was she scared? Because she’d started
thinking,
that’s why.
Well, fuck that,
Kyra decided. If that was the problem, she just wouldn’t think. Not now. She’d keep moving. Stick with the plan. Get through this day and the coming night.
When she did that, she’d be stronger.
Maybe even as strong as the Crow.
That was all that mattered. Not bad dreams, not accidents in a bathtub. Not even
spiritual visitations,
if that was indeed the correct interpretation of her nasty little aquatic tango.
Whatever the cause of that particular nightmare . . . well, it really didn’t matter, because Kyra Damon wasn’t going to fucking
think
about it.
Kyra opened the passenger door and stepped into the afternoon’s scalding embrace.
“How about me?” Raymondo protested. “You’re not going to leave me hanging from this damned mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice, are you? It’s broiling, and I’ll absolutely
cook
in here without the air conditioner.”
Kyra sighed. It was just more bitching and moaning—this time from an external source—and she was way past tired of it. “You should have expected such problems when you booked passage to the land of piranhas and witch doctors, Raymondo,” she said. “You made your bed, now lie in it.”
“Wait! At least you can roll down the window a little bit! You’d do that for a dog, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Kyra said. “I’d do it for a dog . . . but not you.”
She slammed the door, glancing at her reflection in the smoky glass.
Well,
she thought
,
shit travels down. That’s what my daddy used to say in the black heartbeat before his fist lashed out, and he was right.
Kyra Damon didn’t waste a second thinking about the complaints of a freon-deprived shrunken head. Neither did she think about bathtubs, or vengeful revenants, or dead assholes who maybe didn’t want to stay dead. She just stood there in the afternoon heat, hating every hellish degree. And she didn’t even smile.
“You’re cold, Ky.” Johnny laughed. “Real, real
cold.”
The afternoon sun was dropping in the western sky when Dan Cody slipped behind the wheel of Emily Carlisle’s Dodge Durango.
Startled, the Crow cawed from its perch on top of the vehicle:
Where are you going?
Cody didn’t answer. Instead, he twisted the ignition key, and he stomped the gas pedal, and he listened to the satisfying rumble of the big Detroit engine.
The Crow could barely be heard above the mechanical roar.
No, Dan! It's not even dark yet! We have to wait for the stars to rise! The Corvus constellation will guide us to Kyra Damon and her familiars. Without the stars, we’ll never find them
—
Releasing the emergency brake, Dan shifted into gear and punched the gas pedal hard. He smiled as the wheels churned dead- white sand, gained purchase . . . and then the truck rocketed forward, speedometer notching zero-to-reckless in less time than it had taken Johnny Church to aim a hogleg pistol and shoot Dan Cody in the back.
The
boo-teek,
as Johnny had called it, was open by appointment only.
Naturally. The little sign that dangled from a gold chain—no doubt
solid
gold—on the other side of the glass door said so in carefully painted, impeccably grammatical script.
“Shit, Ky,” Johnny moaned. “I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else.”
An appraising glance from Kyra chilled Johnny.
"You can’t be the man I’m going to marry,” she said, knowing just how to get to him.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“The man I’m going to marry wouldn’t let a silly little sign stop him.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Johnny laughed. “Fuck if I’ll let
any- thing
keep
your inner-fashion-chick from finding satisfaction today.”
Johnny’s wallet was connected to his belt loop by a chrome-plated chain, and he yanked it like a gunslinger drawing his weapon. His thick fingers plucked a wad of money from folds of oil-stained leather.
“Watch this, babe,” he said. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He pounded on the door, held the bills up to the glass. Soon
sharp little footsteps sounded inside the shop, and a shadow fell on the glass as a slim silhouette approached on the other side.
A silhouette that shook its head at the sight of Johnny’s greenbacks and turned away.
“Fuck that,” Johnny said, because he didn’t give up so easily.
He added more bills to the wad, then knocked again, louder this time.
And this time, he got what he wanted. The woman who unlocked the door was a dark-eyed Asian beauty, model-thin, dressed in a crisp, monochromatic Vera Wang suit. She took the money from Johnny’s hand, slipped it into her pocket without even making eye contact.
“My time is valuable,” she said. “I hope you understand that.”
“Sure,” Johnny said, not complaining at all. “I’m cool with the price of admission.”
The woman held up a hand. “I can spare you thirty minutes . . . and not one minute longer.”
Then she turned on her heel, and showed Johnny and Kyra her back.
They followed her into the
boo-teek.
Johnny Church locked the door behind them.
He felt like a real man.
The kind of man Kyra Damon would marry.
Dan Cody clutched the steering wheel, driving much too fast, oblivious to the hazards of a scarred desert landscape that jostled his dead bones and made the Durango’s shock absorbers scream.
As pain went, this was minimal. Dan had already endured the main event. He couldn’t forget that.
One more time, he felt the .357 slug ripping through him. But this time he wasn’t facedown on his belly. This time he could see Johnny Church, see the twisted expression on the bastard’s face as he pulled the trigger.