He pulled away from her angrily. His lips were blistering. “Did anyone ever tell you it’s toxic?”
Again, she nodded, blithely unconcerned. “Some say datura is poison. Others say, it gives you vision.”
He cupped his hands, hoping for enough rain water to rinse his mouth. It wasn’t necessary. The burning sensation stopped as a wing brushed his face.
He glanced up, confused. She was kneeling in front of him. The clouds freed the moon and in its light he saw that she had changed. The long hair was gone, her head covered in what looked like a cap of glossy black feathers and her feet curved into talons. She had no arms, but long, black wings.
“Who are you?” he asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.
“That depends on how you meet me,” she replied. “As I came to you, I’m called Lilith. But you’ve had other names for me.”
The wing brushed his face again. The feathers that covered her head became finer, thinning into silky black fur. She sat on her haunches, her arms straight in front of her, and as he watched, the edges of her body blurred and rounded. The fur covered her skin completely and she became a small, very familiar black cat.
He backed away from her, until his back was pressed against the garden gate, its wire cutting into his skin. “No,” he said. “I won’t believe that.”
The wing brushed his face, lingering over his eyes, then Seena was gone, and in her place he saw a jet black screech owl.
“Owls aren’t black,” he said, desperately trying to hold onto reality.
The owl stared at him with burning golden eyes and extended a monstrous black wing.
“No!” he screamed.
He covered his head, tried to dodge, but the owl’s wing found him, brushed his eyelids closed, and when he opened them he was no longer in the garden.
He lay on the bank of an arroyo, inches from a river of flood water that was flowing fast and cold, absorbing a cool, light rainfall. He was still naked, and he could still smell her scent all over him.
He forced himself to his feet. His head was pounding. His throat was raw. His entire body ached. Somewhere close by, a lone coyote called and the pack answered with a shrill harmony. He rubbed his throbbing temples, trying to banish a thought completely at odds with what he knew from years immersed in science: that the coyotes were calling down the rains.
The clouds and the winds were still playing games with the moon. He waited for a moment when he could see and tried to orient himself. Even at night, he could usually identify at least one of the four mountain ranges, know which way was north. Tonight rain veiled the mountains.
The coyotes sent up another round of calls. For animals who usually kept a safe distance between themselves and humans, they were much too close. He began walking along the edge of the arroyo. He’d follow the water until he recognized a landmark.
He hadn’t gotten five yards before he slowed. The moon was swathed with clouds again, and he couldn’t see it, but he sensed something directly ahead of him.
A furious scream rang out and he stumbled backward as something ripped into his shoulder. In a flare of lightning he saw his attacker. He hadn’t believed it earlier, couldn’t believe it now. He was staring at a coal black cat, its body thicker, larger than a mountain lion’s, its ears flattened, crouched to spring. His hand went to his shoulder and came away slick with blood. He felt his stomach churn. There was no skin left.
The coyotes shrieked, even closer, and the jaguar whirled to face them. A coyote, fully the size of the jaguar, edged toward the cat and howled a challenge. In the moonlight its fur was tipped with silver. The jaguar launched itself at the coyote and the two met in a fury of screams and howls. Enrique stood, transfixed, knowing the battle impossible, these creatures belonging to a world that no longer existed.
“They are mine, Enrique.” Lilith’s hands snaked out from behind him, pulling him against her breasts and thighs. “This night belongs to me.”
He turned to face her and for a foolish moment felt reassured. She was a good half foot shorter than he. How could any man be afraid with a small, voluptuous woman in his arms?
Then she was gone, as were the coyote and the cat, and he would have thought it all a dream except that the earth shook with thunder and the sky opened. The rains streamed down, drenching him, drilling into the exposed flesh of his shoulder.
You have got to get out of here, he told himself. But he stood, paralyzed, unable to make his body obey.
And then the landscape strobed white and he saw her.
Not Lilith. But a tall, thin woman wearing a long, black dress and a black shawl. She stepped toward him, and pure terror returned movement to his body. He edged backward toward the wash. He didn’t have to hear her cries or see her desiccated face to know who she was. She was exactly as he’d imagined her as a child, her fingernails so long they curved and gleamed like polished tin, her eyes burning red fire. She cried out to him, and her voice seemed to be the coyotes’ song, then the jaguar’s scream, then wind itself carving the face of the land. She was grief become madness and she would take all in her path. Her hands stretched out, reaching for him.
He risked a quick glance over his shoulder. He stood inches from the edge of water. He knew the soft earth beneath his feet would not hold. The waters were rising swiftly, nearly even with the top of the arroyo. They were going to take him, the ultimate irony, a flood-control engineer drowned in the floods.
Lightning flared and the black owl winged above him, enfolding him in the shadow of her wing, enclosing him in a desert transformed from familiar home to unrecognizable terror. And for the first time since childhood, he prayed to the Virgin, “Dios te salve María, llena eres de gracia, los señores contigo …” asking her mercy before giving himself to the floods.
He woke in his garden. The rains had stopped. A thin red line of dawn sketched the tops of the eastern mountains.
He lay on wet, soft earth. Lilith stood over him, her spangled skirt glinting softly in the gray light. “You’re lucky, Enrico,” she said. “You asked for help and it was given. The night didn’t take you, after all.”
Lucky was not the word he would have chosen. His shoulder felt like it was on fire. He knew he ought to get it cleaned, bandaged, but he was weak with exhaustion and probably blood loss. He couldn’t even imagine moving.
She knelt beside him, her fingertips tracing the line of his throat. “ ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.’ ” She smiled at the question in his eyes. “Yes, that poem again. But also what was tonight. Give thanks that you are the grandson of a curandera, Enrico. Know that it was her love that saved you.” He flinched as she touched his ripped shoulder. “Though you will have a scar to show for it.”
She ran her hand through his hair, as a mother might caress a small child. “So what shall I do with you?” she mused. “Take your mind? I’ve done that before, to others. It is no great feat to drive a man to madness.”
Her hand dropped to his penis. She stroked it once and he was instantly hard, too sick to move but aching for her. Even after all that had happened, he still wanted her.
“Take your cock, of which you’re so proud? Yes, I could leave you unable to ever fuck another woman, but that seems unfair since you gave me pleasure. And I won’t take your first-born, though I’ve done that too.”
She scared him. Thoroughly. And yet he found himself saying, “Just make love to me again.”
“No, Enrique, the time for that is over.” Her fingertips pressed against his right temple, then his throat. “So what happened to your soul?” she asked. “How did you lose it so completely? I think you must have given it away.”
He blinked, too dazed to respond.