So get to it, he thought, beginning to lose patience with the broadcast. Enough with the rotting monsters.He knew the rest was just a postscript, that it was the “demons” that mattered, and as to who had leaked the pictures to the press, the world wouldn’t especially care. But Morgan needed the last piece of this puzzle to fall into place, and so when, at last, he heard the famous anchorman say, in a bemused voice, “As for the sourceof these startling images, well, it provides the answer to another mystery many of us had given up hope of ever solving. It’s been seven years, but you’ll remember the story. You’ll remember this young woman.”
And now Morgan Toth did elbow his way into the throng of scientists. He wasn’t going to miss this. There on the TV was the picture that had had its time in the limelight. Seven years ago the story had come and lingered unsolved before finally frittering away into the sad land of cold cases, and Morgan could have kicked himself for not putting two and two together the first moment he met Eliza Jones. But how could he have recognized her as the girl in this picture? It was a terrible shot. Her eyes were downcast, and there was a motion blur, and anyway, he’d written her off as dead. They all had.
The headline summed it up: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
Eliza Jones, a prophet. Morgan’s first thought—well, his first coherent thought, after concussive astonishment had given way to the first of many waves of mirth—had been to get business cards printed for her, leave them somewhere for her to find. Eliza Jones, prophet.And of course he couldn’t leave out the best part. Oh boy. The thing that elevated this story to its special pinnacle of Crazytown. No, really. It was the mansion on the hill overlooking Crazytown. It was “my crazy can beat up your crazy” kind of crazy. Blindfolded. With one hand tied behind its back.
Or one wing.
Oh god. Morgan had actually fallen out of his chair, laughing. His elbow still smarted as a reminder. Eliza Jones’s charming family cult? These were no run-of-the-mill “chosen ones,” not they. Their spectacular difference?
They claimed to be descended from an angel.
DESCENDED FROM AN ANGEL.
It was the best thing Morgan Toth had ever heard.
Eliza Jones, Prophet
1/512th Angel (give or take)
That’s what the business cards were going to say. But then he’d seen what she’d e-mailed to herself from Morocco and gotten a better idea. It was playing out now.
“We all prayed for her seven years ago,” said the highest-paid news anchor in the world. “Known to us then only as Elazael, she was believed by her… church… to be the incarnation of an angel of that same name who fell to Earth a thousand years ago. It’s quite a story, and it’s not over. In an unexpected turn of events, ladies and gentlemen, the young lady is not only alive and living under an assumed name, she is a scientist in the nation’s capital, on track to earn her doctorate.…”
And Morgan didn’t hear the rest, because someone gasped, “It’s Eliza!” and then the others erupted in a frenzy.
And that was all right. Frenzy all you want, my fine idiots. Frenzy away, thought Morgan Toth, strolling back to his lab. It’s good to be king.
CATS OUT OF BAGS
The next fluttering of commotion to sweep through the kasbah had a different feel from the start. No Insh’Allahs or gazing skyward this time. There was disbelief, rancor, and… they appeared to be looking at… Eliza.
Eliza had had a problem with paranoia all her life. Well, for a good chunk of her life, it hadn’t even been paranoia, but the foregone expectation of rote persecution: simple and nasty and certain. People werelooking at her, and they werejudging her. Back home in Florida, in a small town in Apalachicola National Forest, everyone had known who she was. And after she ran away, well. Then it was the chill at the nape of her neck, the dread of being found or recognized, the always looking over her shoulder.
That had gradually faded—never completely—but when you lived with a secret, the paranoia was never far beneath the surface. Even if you’d done nothing wrong (which in her case was debatable), you were guilty of having the secret, and any searching glance cast your way took on this ominous meaning.
They know. They know who I am. Do they know?
But they didn’t. They never knew. At least, they never had before, and for that, Eliza had a particular perversity of the church to thank. They shunned “graven images”—not just of God and their “foremother,” but of the prophets as well, and after Eliza’s first vision, no more pictures of her were taken. Not that there were many before that. Her family wasn’t exactly preserve-memories-for-posterity kind of people. They were more like prepare-for-Armageddon, guns-in-a-bunker kind of people. The photo used on the news had been taken by a tourist passing through Sopchoppy—that was the actual name of the town near which their church compound stood—who, alerted by a local, had snapped a picture of “those angel-cult freaks” when they came in for supplies.
“Those angel-cult freaks” had been a local story for decades, but had only exploded nationally when Eliza disappeared. Her mother—the “high priestess”—only reported her missing weeks after the fact, desperate enough for help finding her lost prophet to go to the officials she scorned as idolaters and heathens. Of course, it had looked fishy, and society is not predisposed to give cults the benefit of the doubt. The headline had snagged the national imagination like a briar: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
That’ll do it.
Eliza could have cleared them at any time. She could have come forward—she was in North Carolina by then—and said, “Here I am, alive.” But she hadn’t. There was no pity in her for them. None. Not then, not now, not ever. And, as a body was never found—though it was looked for, assiduously, for months—eventually the law had had to leave them alone. Lack of evidence, they’d cited, though this had swayed neither public opinion nor the minds of the investigators. It was a sordid affair, and you had only to look into the eyes of the mother, they said, to know the worst. One of the detectives had gone so far as to state, on camera, that he had interrogated the Gainesville Ripper in his career, and he had interrogated Marion Skilling—her name, it was not lost on the tabloids, contracted to Marion’s killing—and they gave you the same sense in your soul of pitching headlong into a dark hole.
“I find it difficult to sleep, knowing that woman is free in the world.”
A sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Eliza.
The upshot was, the girl Elazael must certainly be buried somewhere in the vastness of Apalachicola Forest. There was not an iota of doubt.
At least, not until today.
“Eliza, come with me, please.”
Dr. Chaudhary. He was rigid. Behind him, Dr. Amhali was… worse than rigid. He was livid. He was breathing like a cartoon bull, Eliza thought, her mind taking refuge in inanity even as she understood what must be happening, at long last, after seven years of dreading it.