Nightwing (20 page)

“Oh, no,” she moaned, terror plummeting her heart to her toes. “Nekhat.”

The wind lifted, tangling her hair, filling her nose with the stench of blood and sun-bleached sand. The low growl Raven made shot her with gooseflesh and spun her around. His eyes were red and glowing, his fangs and claws sprouting.

Willie thought she couldn’t possibly be more frightened, until the moonstone on his finger went suddenly dark and began to smoke like a snuffed candle flame. Johnny moved beside her, his hands hovering above her shoulders.

“Get out of here,” Raven snarled, shoving the backpack at her. “Run for the nuraghe. You’ll be safe there.”

“And leave you here?” Willie clutched the bag to her chest to keep her hands from shaking. “No way!”

“It’s the only way.” Raven wrenched the moonstone off his finger, laying two of his knuckles open with his claws.

Willie saw the skin split, but no blood. She thought she’d faint when his flesh zipped back together almost instantly. She didn’t, though, only because she couldn’t run if she fainted. She couldn’t leave Raven here, either, any more than she could leave Johnny.

“You guys seem to be forgetting something,” she said, managing to sound calm in spite of the scream stuck in her throat. “Without you there’s no Ritual.”

“We’ll be there. Make sure you are. Tharros by sunset tomorrow.” Raven grasped Johnny’s hand, slapped the ring into it and closed his fist around it.

The silvery nimbus shimmering around Johnny flared like a torch. Spears of light shot between his fingers, so blinding Willie flung her gaze away. She blinked and saw the shadow roil and twist above the heath, heard a faint howl above the wind that bristled every hair on her body.

The moonstone burned like fire in Johnny’s hand. So did the memories flooding back to him. He
remembered.
Everything that had befallen him—and Raven, too—in the past 117 years. The camp at Thebes, Jolil and his dusty prayer rug, the black Arab mare whose name he still couldn’t pronounce.

He remembered the moonstone flashing in the amulet around Nekhat’s throat as he’d wheeled and toppled Yusef and Jolil. Johnny knew, somehow, that so long as he held it now, the moonstone would be safe—and that Raven would not.

It was happening again, as it had so long ago in Nekhat’s tomb, but he couldn’t let it. He tried to break Raven’s hold on his wrist, to give the stone back, but couldn’t. Weak as he was—and Johnny felt the tremor in his fingers—Raven was still unbearably strong.

So were the other lives and recollections trapped in the moonstone, crying and clawing to be free of the shadow billowing like a dark sail above the heath. There were thousands of them, dark skinned and light, young, old and in between. Now he knew why the stone was so important to Nekhat, why he could not be allowed to reclaim it.

The howl on the wind rose to a shriek, ringing in Willie’s ears. The shadow wheeled toward them, shriveling the gorse in its path, spinning her on one foot toward Raven.

“You can’t fight that!” she cried.

“I don’t intend to,” he said, his red gaze narrowed and fixed on the shadow. “I mean merely to distract it while you run for the nuraghe.”

“You’re crazy! You’re insane! You can’t—”

“I’m dead, Willow.” Raven gave her a bleak smile, let go of Johnny’s wrist and brushed his knuckles across her cheek, his claws carefully tucked against his palm. “He can’t kill me twice.”

“No!” she shouted furiously, but Raven had already leapt over the edge of the trail, and Johnny had already grasped her arm and yanked her toward the steps.

His hand on her elbow was as solid and unyielding as the mountain. How it was possible she didn’t know. She was mindful only of the shadow, booming like thunder behind them. She looked back once, when she tripped on the steps, and saw Raven standing on an outcrop of rock below the trail. She saw the shadow engulf him. Raven close his arms around it and tumble off the mountain into the darkness.

A chorus of screams rang across the heath. Or maybe just one, just hers. Willie thought she’d faint, but she didn’t. Johnny’s hand on her elbow kept her up and running, stumbling through the gorse tangling around her legs; she sobbed with terror and effort.

A gate in the nuraghe wall opened. A robed figure appeared, faceless in the spill of yellow light through the gap.

Her lungs
were on fire, her legs numb. But she was almost there, almost safe. Relief washed through her, guilt hard behind it and then a jolt of panic when the figure moved out of the gate and into the light.

 It was a man. A rough-woven robe had been thrown over his dark clothes and burly shoulders. He held a rifle with a webbed strap at a meaningful angle across his chest.

He looked squarely at Johnny, who still shimmered in the wash of the moon and pulled Willie to a staggering halt beside him just inside the ring of light. She could see now that the man had a clipped, salt-and-pepper beard and that the crown of his head was bald. It was natural, she thought, not tonsured.

“Oh, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you,” he said to Johnny in perfect and Willie thought Irish-accented English. His grip on the rifle relaxed and he glanced at her with a quizzical smile. “However, young lady, you are a surprise.”

So was the push forward Johnny gave her. Willie should have seen it coming; Raven had wanted Johnny to take her, not stay with her. Still, it caught her off guard and off balance. If the commando-sized monk hadn’t slung his rifle over his shoulder and caught her she would have fallen on her face.

It was bad enough that her heart fell when she tried but couldn’t twist out of his grasp. All she could do was fling a backward, how-could-you glare at Johnny.

He was already backing away, still shimmering, the moonstone glowing in his hand. He signed something to Brother Brawny, too rapidly for her to follow.

“I understand,” he said. “I’ll see to it.”

Johnny raised his right hand and signed, “I love you” to Willie. His tight-jawed expression softened, but only for a moment, then he wheeled abruptly away, out of the light and into the darkness.

Chapter 20

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Willie gritted her teeth and stomped on Brother Brawn’s foot.

“Ow!” he howled, his grip loosening enough for her to wrench free and race after Johnny.

She’d run only a few yards when she realized he was gone. She couldn’t believe it. She’d turned her head for just a second. She whirled, one-footed, but there was no sign of him anywhere. He’d vanished, disappeared.

So had Raven and the shadow. The heath was suddenly as empty as Willie felt. She stopped and stared blankly at the hillocked stretch of gorse. The wind—just the wind, no shriek, no howl to it—tugged her hair and stung her eyes.

“I’m afraid you can’t follow where he’s gone,” Brother Brawny said behind her.

Willie drew a shaky breath and turned around. “I don’t suppose you know where he is.”

“Not exactly, no. Nor do I want to   especially.”

“Raven said you have something for me. A stake.”

“I have several things for you, beginning with a nice hot cup of tea.” He gestured toward the gate, the Irish that had sometimes found its way through Betsy Boyle’s starched Yankee vowels lilting in his voice. “Interested?”

She wasn’t, but since she had nowhere else to go, she shrugged and walked into the nuraghe. Brother Brawny followed after shutting the gate and dropping a roughly hewn crossbar the size of a felled tree. It boomed into place, the sound echoing down the narrow, circular passageway, along with the rattle of thick chains he used to secure a lock the size of his fist.

“Crude but effective.” He winked at Willie, unlooped the rifle from his shoulder, ejected the bullet from the chamber and pursed his whiskered lips as he held it up to the light.

The lamps hung from the stone walls were electric but not very bright and they flickered every few seconds. Still, Willie had no trouble seeing that the bullet Brother Brawny held between his thick fingers was silver.

He must have heard the gulp she made, for he looked up at her and smiled as he hung the rifle on two sturdy, well-spaced pegs tapped into the gate wall.

“Can’t be too careful on the full moon, you know.”

“Do you have many
banditos
who howl at the moon?”

“Not like we once did, praise God.” He crossed himself quickly and led Willie away from the gate.

The nuraghe was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. The stone walls were chinked, the floor mortared, but only in places. Some of the short hallways connecting the circular passages weren’t paved. Some adjoining rooms had doors, some floors, some had both and others neither.

In the center of the nuraghe was a courtyard, and in the center of that a tower. Round and built of stone.

“Welcome to my wizard’s tower.” Brother Brawny opened the door and led the way up a wooden spiral staircase.

Except for two glassed bay windows facing north and south and a telescope resting on a tripod in each, the room at the top looked like a nineteenth-century country squire’s study. The only hint that it was a monk’s cell was the narrow bed beneath a crucifix. The rest was a jumble of rugs and shelves, tables piled with books, and a big, cluttered desk near a hearth built out from the wall where a peat fire hissed.

“I dig my own peat.” Brother Brawny laid his robe over an armchair behind the desk, his broad back to Willie as he moved toward a small gas stove in a squared-off curve in the wall. “There’s a lovely bog at the bottom of the heath.”

An exquisite crystal ball in a clawed pewter stand took up one corner of the desk. On the shelves tucked among the books were chunks of quartz and amethyst. A Native American dream catcher hung on another wall by the bed, and spears of crystal and gemstones were suspended everywhere with nylon wires.

A wizard’s tower was definitely more like it than a monastery. Brother Brawny was the only monk she’d seen. And there was no sanctuary. Not that he’d shown her, anyway.

From this height and the south-facing window the heath was a lumpy, stubbled expanse silvered by the moon. A warm draft from the fire stirred the suspended crystals, bumping one gently against Willie’s temple; a deep blue spear shot with green. Lapis, she thought, touching it with a fingertip, watching it flash with moonlight and fireglow.

“It’s azurite and malachite,” Brother Brawny said. “They often occur together like that in nature. A marvelous stone for promoting vitality and transformation.”

Willie looked at Brother Brawny, standing with his back to her still, pouring boiling water from a kettle into a pot. She sat on a folding campstool next to the telescope and clutched the edges of the cracked leather seat when it rocked on an uneven leg.

“Go ahead and take it. It’s one of me things I have for you.” He glanced with a grin at Willie over his shoulder. “I’m highly attuned to rocks, especially ones I’ve lived with for a long time. I was a geologist before I joined the order.”

“Really?” Willie’s voice squeaked. “Which order?”

“I’d love to tell you, really I would,” he said soberly, “but I’d have to kill you.”

And then he laughed, a big booming laugh that made the crystals nearest his head tremble. Willie stared at him, nonplussed. Brother Brawny frowned and pursed his lips.

“I’m kidding.” He put the pot and cups, a sugar bowl and small pitcher on a table that was only half-piled to the ceiling with books and papers. “Do please take the azurite. I’ve been saving it for your friend.”

“Friends,” Willie corrected him. “I came with two.”

“You came with one in two pieces.” He glanced at her over the table, his eyes twinkling. “Humpty and Dumpty.”

Willie gritted her teeth to keep herself from screaming. Or crying. Her fingers clenched the edges of the stool so tightly the leather groaned.

“Not a laughing matter, eh?” Brother Brawny frowned and plucked a jade green crystal from the closest cluster. “Come along and bring your stool before the tea cools.”

He moved toward the desk, unwrapping the crystal from its nylon wire. Willie had two choices. Jump out the window or humor Gandalf the Goofy. She got up and moved the stool.

It put her chest high at the table, even with one foot tucked under her. Brother Brawny seemed not to notice, his attention on fastening the green crystal to a copper chain with a small tool as he came back to the table.

“Here you are, with my blessing.” He sat in a lattice-back chair and handed it to her across the table. “It’s chrysocolla. Great for eliminating tension and subconscious imbalance.” He filled the cups and put the pot down. “Alleviates guilt feelings like that.”

He snapped his fingers and Willie, in the midst of fastening the chain around her neck, burst into tears. Brother Brawny drank his tea while she sobbed. When she sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve, he put his teacup down, bent his elbow beside it and leveled a blunt index finger at her.

“And that, young lady, is why your mother always told you never to speak to a man with a severe widow’s peak.”

Willie laughed, a quavery, watery laugh. Brother Brawny smiled and produced a handkerchief from his pocket. She blew her nose until her ears rang.

“I’m Willie Evans,” she said, offering her hand.

He took it across the table and inclined his bearded chin. “Father Bertram. Drink your tea while I make you an omelet.”

He stood and waggled his fingertips. “Poof,” he said, and Willie finished with him, “You’re an omelet.”

They both laughed. Willie didn’t feel guilty, just sad remembering Raven’s doornail comment and Johnny’s line:
Gentlemen of my day used a buggy whip.
Father Bertram went to the stove and made the best omelet she’d ever eaten, a four-egg wonder sprinkled with chives he grew himself, and thick slices of bread toasted on a fork over the front burner.

He made fresh tea and let her drink two cups before he said, “That’s a confirmation cross you’re wearing.”

“Yes.” Willie started as she touched it, at the jolt she felt when her fingers brushed the chrysocolla’s chain. Dry air, she thought. “My grandmother gave it to me.”