There was a cry behind him, and he spied another militiaman falling as a lean, muscular young woman smashed him down with a blow from her crossbow, arcing it wide like a club. Then, with a speed and agility he found impressive, the woman wheeled, loading the crossbow as a third rider drove down on her. She fired, falling back, her arrow lodging in the rider’s shoulder, flinging him backward off the horse to smash on the rocks.
And now all was confusion, a blur of bodies and blades, of crushing movement. Something slashed along his cheek, he drove the attacker back with his boot. Others tried to take him around the waist, bring him down, but he threw them off, battered them away.
Beyond this, as if lit by lightning, he glimpsed the young swordsman, forcing back two of the militiamen, who parried with big hunting knives, eager to gut him. The young man was no professional, that was clear. But he fought with a fire, a determination, that brought to Shango’s mind his own crazy-ass self as he’d gone screaming up the creek bank.
And there was another man, too, an older man, wielding a length of pipe against the bastards, shouting a torrent of curses in something that sounded like Russian.
Shango sought again for Cadiz, couldn’t find him. A man with three gold teeth lunged at him with a bayonet. Shango sidestepped it, drove the head of his hammer into the man’s solar plexus, sending him staggering back to collapse amid the rushes, choking.
Shango straightened, saw the girl with the crossbow firing off a shot into the thigh of one of the Russian’s adversaries, unaware that a spearman was running at her own undefended back.
“No!” The word rang out over the clearing and-though it was high and musical-it took Shango an instant to realize it wasn’t his own thought.
Then in the green dusk, there was a brightness like a second sun.
He saw to his astonishment a glowing, beautiful child skimming in the air like a stone skipped over water. The creature overtook the spearman and settled near the woman, the light extending out to canopy her.
The spearman cried out in terror, but his momentum was carrying him, and his spear struck the glowing canopy, its wood fracturing as though the light were solid, sending the barbed metal tip of the spear shooting back and upward into the man’s own throat.
He made a gurgling, surprised sound and fell, gasping out his life.
The fear-caster wheeled his horse and pelted away into the trees.
Shango swung around, to find the surviving men gone. He was panting, trembling, the rush of anger that had lighted his whole body ebbing, leaving ash and shock and dizziness in its wake.
The ghostly, glimmering girl hovered over the dead man, staring down at her handiwork, and she looked sickened. She appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old, Shango’s niece Kitta’s age, and smaller than she should have been, were she human.
“How’d you do that?” the muscular young woman asked her quietly, and it was clear to Shango that she both knew this girl and knew nothing of her power.
“I–I don’t know,” the girl stammered, settling like a dragonfly, ready to rise and flee. Her white hair floated weightless around a thin, haunted face. “I was just mad and scared, and I wanted him to stop.”
Shango had heard of such creatures in his travels, had even perhaps glimpsed one far in the distance over Arlington, a light moving quickly through the midnight sky, in this world where he had thought lights no longer moved in the heavens. Fireflies, he’d heard them called, or feys, or little bright fuckers.
The man in the Hawaiian shirts was clambering up the bank, panting, helped by the curly-haired young swordsman. “You okay, Goldie?”
“I’m fine,” said Goldie, looking around him with those hectic brown eyes, “though there are mental health professionals in several metropolitan areas who might beg to differ.”
The glowing girl-angel regarded Shango with her blue-in-blue eyes and whispered, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Thank you, miss.” He inclined his head and, looking around him, saw that he’d killed one of Cadiz’s men on top of the stream bank, though he had no conscious memory of it.
Kneeling, he cleaned the head of his hammer in the stream, the blood trailing away, his hands shaking as they’d never shaken on night bombings raids in the Gulf.
“Thank you for helping him,” the young man said, sheathing his sword and approaching Shango and, in the way he held himself, his easy air of authority, left no doubt as to who was leader of the group. “I’m Cal Griffin,” he added, and introduced the others.
Shango regarded them as they stood together, and, though it was obvious they were travelers, they seemed neither refugees nor brigands. Perhaps, he reflected, they were pilgrims. Like himself.
“My name’s Larry Shango,” he said, sliding the weapon back into the straps of his backpack, standing up again. “And I’d suggest we make tracks out of here, before more company comes.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
With the young man called Cal Griffin, with Colleen Brooks and Dr. Lysenko and Goldie and Tina, Shango returned to Angels Rest. As he expected he found the house looted, the old men and women who had sheltered there dead. They had been clubbed like cattle, presumably a fate Cadiz considered more merciful than being left to starve.
In the potting shed behind the shady, silent house, under the dispassionate moon, they found a broken-handled shovel Cadiz had left and began digging a mass grave. Through all of this, Shango said little of himself and nothing of the business that had brought him here.
“The guy’s military or security services, I know the vibe from my dad,” Colleen told Cal, as the others spelled them on the digging. “Maybe AWOL.”
“No,” said Cal. “He doesn’t strike me as a man to walk away.” He glanced over at the big man working the shovel, shirtless now, the lantern light showing the dark sheen of him in the night air. His eyes were mirror mazes that reflected back the viewer, that gave up nothing. But in his actions by the creek, in his watchfulness and in the quiet, deep tenor of his voice, Cal read compassion.
As they laid the bodies in the pit, Goldie murmured some words from the Bhagavad Gita, and Doc said a blessing. Then they filled in the hole, and Shango found them a campsite that was shielded and secure.
Huddled beside the fire, Cal told Shango of the events in New York, of the man who’d changed into a dragon, and of what he’d seen in the tunnels. He spoke of the miracles they had encountered, cruel and otherwise, along the road, and of the Plant Lady in the little town off the Patuxent. And he told him of the place they sought called Wish Heart.
To all of this, Shango listened attentively, and nodded, and observed, “Staying off the beaten path, sounds like you’ve had an easier ride of it.” But he didn’t tell them of the Source Project, or of D.C. And looking across the fire at Cal, seeing the lines of weariness on the face that was so youthful, and the way those hazel eyes followed the flare-girl Tina with such worry and such grief, Shango thought of the ties of obligation and affection and relation, thought of his family in New Orleans, and of Czernas and McKay.
A log broke and fell in the sheltered fire. A flake of light fell across Colleen Brooks, nearly invisible in the trees, listening, standing guard; Shango saw her eyes, and they were on Cal, with a look in them that told him things that Cal had probably never seen. And Cal was watching Goldie, worried about the man but believing, caring for him. And Doc’s gaze moved among them, concerned and at rest.
People holding each other’s hands in the night.
“What about you?” Cal asked Shango. “Where are you bound?”
“Here,” said Shango, the word speaking double to him. Where are you going, and to what place are you tied?