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  Sandeus swallowed a larger gulp than intended and breathed in; the wine burnt his nostrils.

  “They came into the bar wearing the same clothing and talking about the same things Kennen described. The woman even asked for clove cigarettes.” The Priestess brought one leg over the other. Her peach stockings had the loveliest floral lace Sandeus’d ever seen.

  He grounded his thoughts in a hurry. “I understand Kennen paid dearly for this prediction. His wife of many years offered herself to the feast. Dear me. To build the foundation of the future, you must tear down something permanent from your past. So the Tomes read.”

  Eggert and the Priestess bowed their heads a moment to acknowledge the words. It was a gesture too few in Sandeus’s own church observed.

  “Archbishop Kennen should be praised. To have given over his beloved only proves how anxious he is to cross over. Do you know any of his plans for the unification? How he envisions the Church structure?”

  “I don’t spread rumors,” said the Priestess, “especially not about the Archbishop of Morning.”

  Sandeus’s patience ran dry with these outworlders’ constant reverence of her Archbishop, as though he were not an equal. He took his wine, sipped and chuckled a bit. “So what are you willing to spread, Priestess?”

  The bodyguard’s eyes flared.

  The Priestess of Morning, not as affected, set down her glass and folded her slender hands on her lap. Sandeus found his eyes sliding over the deep crevasse between her breasts. The Priestess eyed his interest coolly. He could see the soft tip of her tongue just behind her teeth. “It’s hardly fair—the woman’s flesh in this world is devoured constantly with the eye and yet the male’s flesh is always obscured. Has your kind purposely tried to starve us?”

  Sandeus touched his makeup accidentally and cringed. “I’m afraid my fascination can’t be helped, Priestess. After all, you know midnight always seeks the morning.” The bodyguard Eggert’s gaze cut through him. Sandeus cleared his throat. “So you put the Nomads in your sight then, Priestess? You can see them in your mind. Well then, where are they now?”

  “Driving their big, horseless wagon—van.”

  “You can see everything happening to them. Clearly? How does your sight work? It has been a constant fascination of mine.”

  The Priestess bit into a chocolate cherry. After a moment, she dabbed her lips with a bar napkin. “I share the same ability as the Interloper, although not as superior. It is said that I share bloodlines with the Messenger, the Interloper, or whatever you may call him, or her.”

  “Interesting. So how many people are in your sight?”

  “I see the Nomads now, but I can also see my own church, out there. I put them in my sight before I left last year. There.” She pointed to the passing waves of brown desert and Joshua tree. “The Church of Morning gathers on Ekki fields, singing for the gateway to open, sharpening their staves, offering the feast. Anything I put into my sight fills my mind, until I look away.”

  “Sounds overwhelming, Priestess.”

  “I like taking more than I can handle. It exposes my limits.”

  Sandeus finished his wine and set it on the wet bar. He crossed his legs almost as well as she had and he felt childishly proud about it. “I let your Church operate in its own fashion, but I must ask this. I still don’t understand why we couldn’t just kill the Nomads at the bar.”

  “Cloth needs them to lead us to the Heart. There can be no delay.”

  “Cloth and his children track down the Heart of the Harvest, every year.”

  “Perhaps,” she remarked, “but Cloth wishes to go at this new Heart with speed and precision, not an extra breath of effort spent. The opening will be taxing on him once it comes.”

  “Cloth speaks to you?”

  “Through Archbishop Kennen’s offerings.”

  Sandeus suddenly felt empty; he’d hoped to put all the worrying aside this year, but to learn Chaplain Cloth wanted to go cautious made him fear the worst. These Nomads worked well together. It was a miracle how well. Most Nomads lasted one October, maybe two. Not Martin and Teresa. It had been two decades now. They won some, lost some and always came back for another go. Sandeus heard that the woman, Teresa, had been protecting Hearts for thirty years. That was longer than his tenure as Archbishop.

  This conversation started to depress him, so Sandeus wheeled around the subject yet again. “Anyhow, I want to speak of a new Bishop, Paul Quintana. I believe you met briefly at the Celebration last year.”

  A satisfied expression crossed the Priestess’s face. “He is the winner of the gauntlet? He wasn’t allowed in the celebration ballroom with the envoys and other Bishops. The blonde, who looks like a film actor?”

  “Very good looking, yes.”

  “I would like to meet him, formally of course, now that he has ascended. He might be of use to me.”

  “Forgive me, but wasn’t there just a new Bishop recently?” Eggert the bodyguard asked, beard bouncing with worry. “Jason? Or somebody?”

  “Justin Margrave. Yes, he’s no longer with the Church.”

  “Something happened?”

  Sandeus shrugged. “Some of us fight against the wind, and some of us are taken with the dust. We are too strong to embrace the departed.”

  They bowed their heads again. The Priestess finished her wine but held onto the empty glass as her eyes roamed the desert. Those eyes saw everything great and small, everything near and far. Those eyes saw their destination ahead, for better or worse. There was equal parts pain and pleasure languishing in their brilliance.

  Sandeus Pager gazed at her in breathless admiration, despite Eggert’s stare. The Priestess of Morning was too lovely to ignore. So unbelievably superb. If only Sandeus could steal such perfection and make it his own.

  EIGHTEEN

  Teresa became startled in her seat as Martin punched the horn. A convertible Mustang rocketed around them and a chubby finger sprung into the air, the nail polish a stop-sign red.

  Teresa smacked her sleep-gummy lips. “Welcome to Southern California.”

  Martin still hadn’t recovered. He was strangling the steering wheel, muttering, and probably fantasizing about pushing each sleek silver car into a shallow ditch. When he finally got over it, he leaned back in the seat and shook his head. “They’re bad in Arizona but out here there are just so damn many.”

  “Makes you wonder why we bother to save the world.” She snapped open her box of cloves. Only three left. Better conserve, she thought.

  Driving weariness had branded into the contours of Martin’s face. A creature of the road. “If you could dress up for a party this year, what would you be?” he asked.

  “Adults don’t dress up.”

  “Sure they do, Teresa. They go to parties and dress up. You can buy one of those pirate outfits, a rock chick, a tiger woman, maybe a refrigerator or one of those fat lady suits—I dressed until I was twenty, up until when I met you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So answer the question,” he prodded.

  “I’d be one of those ghosts with the holes cut in a sheet.”

  Martin shook his head. “That’s the lamest costume ever.”

  “So what would you be?”

  He shrugged. “I’d show up as anything if it meant going to a party on that night rather than... you know.”

  “Yeah, that’s something we gave up. Halloween parties.”

  “Hey, you want to play?” he asked.

  Their eyes met for a moment and she tilted her head. “Haven’t done that in a while. A few years?”

  “I’ve got more things to add to the list. It’ll be hard to top me this time around.”

  She folded her arms. “You go ahead and start. Tell me your first thing. Martin, what has the Messenger taken from you?”

  Martin sat up, excited to play. “Aquariums.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’ve always wanted an aquarium, but I think it’d be difficult to maintain one on the ro
ad. Not with how you make those jackrabbit starts and sharp lefts.”

  “Oh, you’re going to have to do better than that,” said Teresa. “Cruises.”

  “Oh but we’ve been on ships before.”

  “They weren’t vacation ships. Can you imagine us going to Jamaica? Being trapped on a boat for weeks? Then on the island, walled in by the Jamaican chapels? The church would be all over us.”

  “Point taken. Mowing the lawn.”

  “Oh now you’re just being silly.”

  “Give me a dark Heineken, some sunglasses and the early morning allergies—ah! We’d need a house though first. I’m not mowin’ other people’s damned lawns.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Weddings.”

  “Are you proposing?”

  “A friend’s wedding or, God forbid, a family wedding. The ceremony, the reception, the dancing, the bouquet—”

  “The garter belt. What about pets?”

  “Now hold on, we’ve not been deprived there. We picked up at least half a dozen strays this year alone.”

  “And then gave them to a shelter. It’s not the same.”

  Teresa looked out the window, disconnecting from the conversation. “Pets just die too early anyway. Guess we’re better off.”

  Martin kept driving. Dealing with the tailgaters and excessive lane-changers almost became a therapeutic diversion, even as they hit rush hour.

  ~ * ~

  The Messenger never led them to five star hotels. They were lucky if they even got a hotel instead of a motel. The Happy Moon Lodge was the prototype for this manner of dwelling. A two-story building with a barren, sun-scratched roof and lazy air vents spinning. The place slumped in the bottom of a depression just off Mount Vernon Avenue. The second floor overlooked a swimming pool filled with some kind of limeade and dappled with mosquito larvae.

  “A hospitable resort,” Teresa read from a travel book.

  “Oh so they got massages here?”

  “Yeah but have to go up the street and meet the leper with the shopping cart.”

  “Is it far?”

  Teresa smirked before slipping outside. Martin checked that his door was locked. “I wonder. What about the God thing? Like this is our test? Just think about it this time. It makes more sense than anything else.”

  “I thought this conversation died about a thousand times ago.”

  “No conclusion was ever drawn,” he replied.

  “If the Messenger was God that would make us guardian angels and you’re no angel. I’ve known you too long.”

  He grinned and leaned in to put her in a guillotine chokehold. A nervous laugh died in his throat as he stopped and withdrew. What the hell am I thinking?

  Teresa cocked an eyebrow. “I better not be that brittle yet.”

  “I know but—”

  He missed a beat and she fell sideways, swung around and grappled him. Though he knew how to break a blood choke, he couldn’t believe her speed, this woman who’d been barfing a lung for the last hundred miles. Teresa applied gentle pressure to a carotid artery, just to show him she’d found it. Martin didn’t need reassurance. She could have given him a case of cerebral ischemia right then, and he didn’t have to speculate long about that. He raised an arm buzzing from blood restriction, aimed a pulsing finger to the motel office. “After you, wonderful, brilliant, beautiful lady.”

  She gave him a cool kiss on the neck and released the hold. “There’s a good boy.”

  There was no front door, just a wobbly screen. The office had two cubicle-sized rooms. A man sat on a stool, his plump tropical shorts running down the sides. An Asian soap opera played on a nine-inch television sitting on top of several torn maintenance manuals. The air in the room hung with the odor of cheap cigarettes and Martin could tell that in the summer this place would be the worst kind of hell imaginable—he could almost foresee the sweat waiting behind the man’s broad forehead.

  “We’d like a room through the first of November.”

  The manager tweaked his chin. Martin and Teresa waited a moment, while the man completely ignored them. After politely reading the subtitles for a spell, Martin opened his mouth to repeat their request, this time with a spicier conclusion, but the man cut him off. “Cash and Card?”

  “Cash,” they chorused.

  He turned one eye to them. “Five hundred, seventy-five. Credit card for deposit please?”

  “We don’t have a credit card.” Martin glared at Teresa.

  “Two hundred cash for deposit.”

  Martin knuckled his way into his pocket. There was plenty of money but he wished it spent elsewhere, not given for this rundown pusbucket of a motel. They had broken a few thousand at a credit union in San Bernardino and deposited the rest in the Messenger’s secure checking account. After the credit union they went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant called El Sombrero. Martin could still feel the onset of a carbohydrate crash; the beans, rice and tortillas anchored around his waist. It was not doing anything to improve his mood. Besides which, this motel manager looked like he could have been Tony Nguyen’s father. It made last year sharply return. Did they have to stay here?

  They did. Teresa taught Martin to never question the Messenger’s instruction, no matter how unreasonable. It was a code to live by, he guessed.

  After the manager put the cash in his safe, he handed over a torn copy of the receipt. He took down a pair of keys. “Second floor. Room 218. You come here for a pool key. No loud TV. And this is for you.” He brought up a black envelope from under the counter.

  Martin felt dizzy. The second letter? This soon? Teresa looked differentially at him. “Did you see who it was?” she asked the manager.

  “Watching TV—I didn’t look up. Nice voice. They had a good voice.”

  Teresa gently took the envelope.

  “Tall or short?” Martin asked. “Man or woman?”

  Something lit in the manager’s eyes and then instantly failed. He shrugged as though in response to a more trivial question.

  Outside rain sprinkled and every color looked crippled with black. They took up their necessaries and waited to get settled in their shabby little room before opening the second letter. Everybody had a vague story about who left the letters that controlled their destiny every year. Each story contradicted the next. And as always, the Messenger remained unknown.

  NINETEEN

  For the last twenty minutes, images of the Nomads decayed in the Priestess’s mind. Once they reached Colton, Martin and Teresa guttered like torchlight, and then they dimmed to translucence, which made the Priestess labor so hard that she had to abandon all other visions, including her homeland. The Nomads were ghosts now. They were concepts. And once they had reached some locus in the city, they evaporated.

  This was the Messenger’s doing.

  She looked for the answer outside the tinted window. Storm clouds could muddle her sight but not dissect it into a million pieces. The clouds over Colton were not weather. They rested across her eyes like a sleep shade. The Archbishop of Morning had fermented and drank of his own wife. All for this failure! Now his sacrifice had been spoiled. He would blame the Priestess. It would be painful, but not sweet.

  There had to be a way to get them back. The Priestess had the Nomads. If she focused, maybe she could reassemble all of those drifting solids in space. Just dissipate those clouds! Through lesser storms she had restored her sight. Patience. The Messenger did not have unlimited power. He could not hold those clouds forever. Could he? She?

  The Priestess’s inner eye twisted and strained and searched and groped and aborted...

  She should have killed the Nomads back in that abandoned bar. Caution. Calm. No, she had played it the only way she knew, and now it had all gone to salted dirt. She no longer felt worthy. The Church of Morning should have sent someone else to this world.

  Her eyes pushed open to their mental limit and saw only falling raindrops, fast as steel darts from the skies. Her servant Eggert and Archbishop Pag
er sat there in the limo, both scrutinizing her, both sharing a painful restraint.

  Her voice trembled. “I’ve lost them.”

  “Well, get them back!” Sandeus’ painted eyes sharpened to daggers.

  “I can’t yet.”

  “You must!”

  “I’ve tried! The storm over the city—those clouds shouldn’t be there.”

  “Where did you last see the Nomads?” Eggert calmly asked, though his beard had flattened from nervous stroking.

  “Just outside the city.”

  “Fuck!” Sandeus leaned back against the leather seat and clasped his arms together. “What good does that do us? We already know what city they’re going to! Come on, damn you. I’m not waiting another year.”

  “She’s trying.” Eggert’s eyes turned. The Priestess had seen those eyes spin into rage before. Never an amusing prospect from an Ekkian barbarian. But, to give Eggert credit, in the past she’d usually been the one to put that rage there.

  “Cloth will rip out our spines for this.” Sandeus grasped his bald dome to work out the stress there. “I trusted you Priestess. I trusted Kennen.”

  Eggert’s lips trembled more than hers now.

  “Don’t be foolish.” Sandeus looked up at him. “I’m not ruining this suit over the likes of you.”

  “I have pledged nothing to the Church of Midnight.” Eggert patted his knife under his coat. “Are you quick enough?”

  Sandeus leaned in, startling the big man. The odd she-male face hardened in the muted light. “I know a quick and easy way to send you back to the Old Domain, big guy. So stop fucking around.”

  The Priestess sensed a bluff, but she didn’t intend to prove anything. “Eggert, be calm.”

  Eggert deflated a bit. But only a bit.

  Sandeus was scarlet with annoyance. “Just keep trying.”

  The Priestess of Morning shut her eyes and opened her other, keener pair to the burning boundaries of her mind.

  TWENTY

  The last needles of light retracted as the sun was dragged under the foothills. Teresa stood at the window of the room and fought another coughing fit. Keeping her lungs calm reminded her of building mantles in a way; concentration could not be broken or there was inevitable collapse. She swallowed the itchiness and focused outside. The raining world looked so different at dusk; vibrancy had left tint, clarity had become murkiness, people had slowed down, night beasts had awoken.