The Binding (23 page)

Tshompa shook his head. “The great ones, they leap from
nzombe
to
nzombe.
We call them travelers.”

It took me a minute to absorb this. “These travelers . . . they inhabit different bodies over time?”

“Yes.”

“And what do they do in their new bodies?”

“Do?” Tshompa snorted. “The ones I have heard of, they have a mission beyond merely living. They seek revenge for crimes committed against them. Old enemies disappear, and their children and grandchildren suffer strange accidents.”

I got the feeling Tshompa was becoming impatient with the subject, but I pressed on. “So this is about vengeance?”

“It can be. Or the traveler, he simply wishes to defeat death, to become the only human creature to escape death. This is what I have heard. But for myself I cannot say.”

“Why not?”

“This is the great mystery, eh? No, the great joke.”

“I don’t get the joke.”

He stared at me; then his eyes dropped. His voice was quieter now. “Because for some reason, the evil ones make the best travelers, the only travelers. Look at me. I am not bad enough. I have only peeked in the doorway of a few houses. Eh?”

He brought the glass up for another sip, gulping back the last two fingers of whiskey. He coughed, then looked at me levelly.

“The world doesn’t want good sorcerers doing this. It saves the power for the dark men.”

With the sound of sleet tapping on the picture window of the condo, Nat slowly read through the rest of the piece. Tshompa went on to say that salt can protect you from the lower-order
nzombes
, but that little else works. And that in order to kill a
nzombe
,
you have to surprise the host body. You have to surprise it and kill it before the sorcerer can bind with another. When the host dies, the traveler inside him goes, too. If you’re quick enough. And when the traveler dies, his
nzombes
go back to their former state. If he raised it from the dead, the
nzombe
dies again. If he possessed a living person, the person simply wakes up as if after a long sleep.

That was it.

Nat closed the laptop and stretched. How much to believe? he wondered. How much of this could be true?

He tried to keep Becca Prescott’s face out of his mind as he thought about what he’d just read.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
he next morning, it was snowing and the flakes bloomed briefly in the headlights, the storm clouds above casting a black pall over the city. Nat hurried to his Saab and then steered the car down Minotaur, heading toward State. He kept his face composed, the muscles under the cheeks taut. He wanted to check on Becca, to see if reading the account of the
nzombe
hunter changed anything, made him notice new details about her.

Nat drove through the streets of east Northam. A man with a newspaper held over his head hurried down the slick sidewalk. Passing cars threw sheets of freezing water that slapped hard against the windshield.

He reached the city square and turned left on State. He stopped at a red light and watched the pedestrians cross. The light glimmered crimson through the sleet-dappled windshield, then green. Nat hit the gas. But twenty feet from the intersection, he caught a glimpse of a pale face above a dark green slicker, made a noise in his throat, and quickly swerved into a parking space by the curb. The driver behind him honked, and the smear of the horn grew and then faded as the car roared past him and down State.

That was just her
, he thought. It was Becca, her profile unmistakable underneath a tan waterproof hat. She’d just crossed State, going toward the old town square. The sight of her out here, outside of her room in the Shan, had sent a shock through his chest.

Nat opened the door, and pelting ice struck his face like little daggers. He ducked and ran around to the sidewalk, cold water
splashing above his ankle and giving his heart an electric shock.

Becca had already disappeared in the small park that lay between State and the old town square.

Nat raced ahead, his feet sinking into the snow-covered grass, crossing the little park diagonally. A statue—a rotund figure in a military coat pointing his sword vigorously back the way they’d come—loomed above. He crossed the little park and took the lane on the other side. At the corner, he stood stock-still.

He saw the figure in the dark green turning at the end of Cross Avenue. He strode off after her, crossing the street without looking. A passing car had to brake suddenly, and its horn blared in his ears. Cold rain streamed down the back of his raincoat.

Nat reached the corner of Cross and made a sharp right onto Williams. The rain was clattering on the slate roofs of the houses nearby. The houses were old Victorians, of course. There was no one moving on the street, just a few glowing windows in the homes.

He looked again, and now he saw the girl, a dark blot of a figure thirty feet ahead. She was standing on a sidewalk in front of a run-down Victorian with weeds spilling out through the iron railings of its front fence. Nat could see only the long coat, black boots, and those details of her face not obscured by the upturned collar and the rain hat.

A wave of weakness went through him. Whose house was it? He’d never spent much time in this part of the city. He didn’t know anyone who lived here.

He watched as Becca Prescott took a step forward and opened the metal gate. She moved ahead as if she were walking across a frozen pond in late winter, wary the ice would give way.

Nat stared. Wet strands of dark hair were plastered across his forehead, and the skin under his eyes was wet with rain. But he didn’t seem to notice the rain or cold.

Becca was walking down the front path toward the house, but
suddenly the white glimmer of her face disappeared. A low hedge on the side of the yard obstructed his vision.

The number. The old family homes in this part of town had the house numbers engraved on the porch steps. He would have to find the number without losing her.

Now Becca reappeared, and she came out of the gate but didn’t turn to fasten the latch. The metal gate swung in the wind as the figure turned left down the street. The thin profile of her coat was quickly lost in the darkness and slanting rain.

He hurried after her, glancing left as he came to the house and hurried by.

52 Garmin. He repeated it to himself.

He followed Becca Prescott for another three blocks. She would appear under a streetlight like a miniature float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but one filled with menace and strange intentions. Then her figure would be snuffed out by the blackness and she would appear again ten yards ahead. Nat felt a fresh rush of dread every time she bloomed into view.

Nat moved on to Hicks Street and saw nothing at first. Then he spotted Becca up ahead, near the end of the block, still, her back to him. Her head was raised up, as if she were listening. Then she turned left, her ghostly face appearing briefly in profile.

He watched her black shape move across the lawn, head down, in that strange floating gait. He began to run.

The field was an empty lot between two Tudor homes, overgrown with black weeds and pricker bushes. There was a path beaten down there that appeared to Nat as a trace of brown in the dark grass. He followed it. The wind picked up and the long grass soughed.

Can this really all be happening?
he thought. But he knew it was just a reflex, an expression of bewilderment. Of course it was
happening.

There was a stand of trees in his way, black-branched in the
gray sunlight. Becca was nowhere to be seen. Nat brought up his arms and began to push his way through the tree limbs and vines. His feet sank into the mud as he struggled through, turning and twisting, looking for an opening not blocked by the thick foliage, dripping with cold rain. Strips of wood snapped and for a moment he thought he was going to be entangled in the tree, that he was being wrapped in strong green coils that he couldn’t escape. A thorn raked painfully across his cheek. He felt a drop of blood bloom at the corner of the cut. He swore violently and swept the vine back with his arm, then bent at the waist and crouched down. A smell of pungent decay swept into his nostrils: the sickly sweet smell of mold and tree rot.
How are these vines so strong in wintertime?
he thought.

The little copse of trees smelled almost like . . . jungle. Hot, ancient, alive.

Nat floundered in the gloom, touching thick branches. What felt like a frond leaf, stinking of mold, brushed against his face, and he recoiled. He looked around wildly.

He saw the sun through a curtain of webbed black, and he pushed toward it, turning his back as he crashed through the bush. The vines tensed and then broke, and he was out of the foliage. His foot caught a hard root, and he fell. Nat cried out as his hands sank into mud.

The gray sky was now above him. The mass of foliage he’d passed through appeared as a black hump, with the streetlights of central Northam beyond. He wiped his hands on his jeans, then crouched and slowly stood.

Becca was thirty feet away, standing in the middle of the field that backed the copse of trees. She was facing to his right, and he saw her in sharp profile, even down to the red of her lips. The rain was slackening, and a break in the clouds allowed sunlight to pour down on her as if it were a pale spotlight.

Nat caught his breath. He wanted to approach, but he was
afraid of breaking the trance.

Becca was staring at something in the distance. Her hat was now off, and stray tendrils of her hair were flying out behind her. She appeared to be leaning forward, and her hands were gripped at her side, and even from here Nat could see the bone-white knuckles. She appeared to be glaring with unconcealed hatred at something off to the right.

Puzzled, Nat slowly followed her gaze. Opposite the field they were standing in was a building on a small hillock. It was two stories high, squat and heavy, clad in gray limestone. Its odd horizontal windows were dark. The Northam Museum.

Nat had expected some ruin, a burned-down shell of a building, a Victorian pile where a family had been murdered a hundred years ago. Northam was old, as the locals never got tired of saying, and there were more than a few houses like that in the city. But this place was familiar to him. He looked at her, bewildered.

The wind picked up, and a gale raced over the meadow, shrieking in his ears.

Why is she here?
You’re making a mistake!
he wanted to shout.
Nothing horrible happened here. There is nothing buried here. It’s a harmless museum. I even know the old prick who runs it—his name is Atkins—from his upstairs bedroom!

He cried out. “Becca!”

As he watched, Becca seemed to go limp and lose her balance. She put her hands to her knees and then pitched forward, turning away from him as she sank to the ground.

Nat went to her, his feet slipping in the mud. He also stumbled, and his bare hands slapped at the grass and the dark clay beneath it as he struggled to stay upright. Nat steadied himself, then came up straight and started running toward the dark shape on the ground. The wind was whipping the rain slicker around her,
strands of hair twisted in the swirling gusts. The burning energy that had seemed to stand Becca up straight was gone.

Nat was a few feet away when he slid to her side and reached for her. “Becca,” he said. He cupped her face in his hands and thought,
Too cold, too cold.
Her body was slack, and he reached across and braced her shoulders, pulling her up.

Her head rolled onto her shoulder and her hat fell back to the ground. He saw that under the dark green slicker she wore a black turtleneck. The cotton was folded once over her thin throat and held tightly to it. He wanted to reach and touch her jugular, but he couldn’t even seen the pale violet line of a vein in the flesh.

Don’t do that
, he said to himself.
What if there is no pulse there? What if there is no pulse but her eyes still open? Then Becca will be dead, or undead, and you will live in a different world.

The scratchy voice from the child’s record floated into his mind.
The black velvet band fell to the floor.
And . . . off . . . came . . . her . . . head.

“Becca!” he yelled, and he took his hand and slapped her face. The eyelashes were a dark, unmoving line against the pale eyelids. The wind blew her hair into his eyes, and he arched his neck back to get away from it. Becca was still out. He shook her violently. “Damn it, Becca. Wake up.”

He felt the bones move beneath the thin layer of flesh. Another memory of childhood—bats in a heavy canvas baseball bag at the Pruitt diamond. What living thing felt like this?

Becca’s head lolled back lifelessly, and Nat grimaced. “Goddamn it!” he cried, and let it fall back, laying her gently on the ground. He began tapping his pockets and felt the shape of his cell phone in his right jeans pocket. He reached for it, swore as his fingers fumbled against the cold glass, then brought it up.

“Just give me a bar,” he whispered.

The screen loomed up, and Nat saw that he had three bars. He was about to dial 911 when he looked down and saw Becca’s mouth move. He leaned over and brought his lips down to her ear.

“Becca, can you hear me?”

She mumbled something, but the words were blurred and shapeless, as if she were talking underwater.