I swallowed, unsettled by the oddly familiar sound of the words. I slid my arm around his waist and we limped along an alley, our uneven steps taking us over hot pavement beneath a washed-out sky.
Finally we reached a house with a weathered porch. The screen door was closed but the inner door hung open, drooping on its hinges, suspended between the decision to stay attached or to clatter to the floor. Inside, the living room and its couch drowsed in the heat, also a table and bookshelf, and a rug made from what had once been bright cloth.
“Where is this?” Althor asked.
“Mario’s family lives here.” As he sank down on the couch, letting his head fall back against its beige top, I said, “You wait here.”
Although the house was quiet, I knew Mario might be around if he hadn’t found a job. I didn’t see anyone until I reached the kitchen. Then I froze. Jake, my old boyfriend, was sitting at the table eating a sandwich and reading the newspaper. His real name was Joaquin Rojas, but years ago a teacher had stumbled on the pronunciation of Joaquin, making it sound like “Jaken.” People started calling him Jake and the name stuck.
He stared at me with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. Then he smiled and spoke in Spanish. “Where did you come from?”
I thought of Althor in the next room. “Around.”
His smile faded as he looked at my blouse. “Tina, is that blood?” A footstep sounded behind me. Jake glanced over my shoulder and the last of his smile disappeared as fast as one of Nug’s men running from the cops. He jumped out of his chair and lunged behind a counter. When he straightened up, he was holding a 12-gauge shotgun aimed at the door.
I spun around. Althor stood in the doorway, one hand clamped over his bleeding shoulder while he stared down the bore of the gun.
“Tina, get back,” Jake said.
“Jake, don’t.” I went to the door. “This is Althor. He’s with me.” *
Jake gave me an ugly look. “Since when did you hook up with Nug’s garbage?”
I spoke quietly. “He killed Nug. And probably saved my life.” Jake didn’t lower the gun. His hostility made granular smoke in the room, with confusion wafting behind it.
A voice came from across the kitchen, deep and rumbling in Spanish. “Who saved your life?”
I turned to see Mario in the doorway of an inner room. He walked into the kitchen, overwhelming it with the massive build that, when he had played football in high school, earned him the name Destruidor. Destroyer.
Mario considered Althor. Then he turned to me. “Why is he here?” .
“We need your help,” I said. “Please, Mario.”
He motioned for me to come into the back room. I shook my head, afraid to leave Althor alone with Jake and the gun.
Mario turned to Althor and pointed at a chair. He spoke in English. “Sit down.”
Althor sat, giving me a look that plainly said: I hope you know what you’re doing.
Mario spoke to me in Spanish again, using his no-arguments voice. “I want to talk to you private.”
I followed him into his mother’s sewing room. When we were alone he regarded me with his protective look, the one that made me feel as if I were his little sister. “What did Nug and them do to you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Althor stopped them.”
“Stopped them from doing what?”
“It was nothing, Mario.”
“Don’t tell me ‘nothing.’ What happened?”
I swallowed. “They were going to take me in their car. But Althor stopped them.”
His face hardened. It was the same look he had worn the day we buried my cousin. Two days later the police found one of Nug’s men left for dead in the sewer, the one we knew had fired the gun that killed Manuel. They never found enough evidence to convict anyone, but I had no doubts about who left him in that sewer. I had seen Mario’s face.
He spoke quiedy. “We’ll take care of it.”
“No more fighting. Please.” When he didn’t answer I said, “Promise me.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Mario, please. Nug is dead. Who’s next?” My voice caught. “You?”
He paused. “We’ll see.”
I knew that was the closest to a promise I would get. “I only came to ask you to help me and my boyfriend.”
Mario scowled. “Who is this guy?”
“His name is Althor.” I plunged ahead before he could ask more questions. “After he finished with Nug, the police arrested him. There was a fight. I stole a police car.”
“You what?”
“I stole a police car.”
“I thought you were smarter than that.”
“We didn’t have any choice.”
“Why not?”
“Just believe me. We had to do it.”
“This is one of the first places the cops will come asking questions.” He shook his head. “I hide you here, they catch you.”
“I just need a car. And your sister’s red wig and a blanket.”
“Why?”
I touched his arm. “Don’t ask. Then when people come with questions you won’t be lying if you say you don’t know.”
He frowned. “This Althor isn’t one of us.”
“Please, Mario. For me.”
As he watched me, his face gentled. Finally he said, “There’s keys to my car on the shelf out front. If the car disappears, if it gets ripped off, I don’t know nothing about it.”
I pulled down his head and kissed his cheek. “You’re a prince.”
He gave me a half smile, which for Mario is a lot. “If my car gets ripped off, where do you think I can find it again?”
“You remember that party we went to in Pasadena? Look on the street outside the apartment house there.”
“Pasadena? What’s in Pasadena?”
I went to the door. “I’ll never forget you helped us.” Then’I ran to the kitchen. Jake still had his gun trained on Althor, but he had given him a dish towel to soak up the blood from his shoulder. “Althor and I have to go,” I said.
Jake didn’t move. He wouldn’t look at me, just kept watching Althor, his face impassive.
“Let them go,” Mario said from the doorway.
Jake’s hand clenched on the shotgun. But finally he lowered it. I took Althor back to the living room and grabbed Mario’s keys off the bookcase. “Go get in the green car at the end of the alley.”
He glanced toward the kitchen. “It’s not safe for you here.”
“I’ll be fine. I just have to get some things.” I didn’t like sending him out alone, bleeding, but I knew he was the one in danger if he stayed in the house.
Althor frowned, but he went. I ran into Rosa’s bedroom. Her red wig was on a Styrofoam bust on her dressing table. I grabbed it and pulled a blanket off the bed. But as I turned to leave, Jake appeared, holding the shotgun down at his side. He stood in the doorway. “Tina, wait.”
I stood in front of him, the wig and blanket clutched in my hands. “I can’t.”
‘Are you all right?” He glanced at my blood-stained blouse and brought the shotgun to his shoulder. “If this guy hurt you—”
“He didn’t.” I wanted to push the gun away. That was why I stopped seeing Jake in the first place. After Manuel died, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing anyone else I cared for to violence. Now, with Althor, everything seemed out of control.
“If this guy could finish Nug, you shouldn’t be nowhere near him.” Jake touched my cheek. “Let us help you.”
“I have to do this myself.” I pressed my palm against his chest. “But thank you, hijo.”
His voice softened. “Tina…
I shouldn’t have touched him. It brought back that familiar sensation, that bond he and I had shared, what drew us together in the first place. It wasn’t necessarily sexual; I felt it with Joshua, too, and it had been even stronger with my mother. Althor had finally given me a word for it. Empath.
“Jake, I—I’m sorry. But I have to go.”
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He watched me, a tangle of emotions hidden behind his stoic face. He wanted to tell me something. Something important. It hung around him in an iron-gray mist. But the words remained unspoken, indistinct shapes in the fog. Instead he said, “You need us, we’re here. Just say the word.”
I swallowed. “Thanks.”
Outside, I found Althor lying in the backseat of the car. I handed him the blanket, then got in the front, scooting the seat up so I could reach the pedals. As he pulled the blanket over his body, I started the car. We backed out of the alley, into the afternoon’s fading sunlight.
4
Storm Harbor
It was dark when I pulled onto the shoulder of the road. Trees rustled in the desert wind. Althor sat up, letting the blanket slide off his body. “Where is this?”
“Mount Wilson.” I opened the door and a warm breeze wafted in. “There’s a place you can hide. I’m going to get a friend. But if I bring you to him in Mario’s car the police might trace us.” I got out of the car. “Josh showed me a cave up here. Actually, just some rocks that fell together. No one else knows about it.”
He climbed out of the car. “I don’t think I want to meet more of your friends.”
“You’ll like Joshua fine.”
Althor grunted. He was silent at first, as we picked our way through the pine trees and underbrush. After a while he said, “What is wrong here, that children arm themselves?” The faint moonlight leaking past the branches made his eyes look sunken in hollows.
I spoke softly. “Nug doesn’t deserve your remorse. If he could have killed you, he would have done it in a second.”
“That doesn’t make what happened right.” He paused. “And that boy at the house—why the gun?”
I walked for a while, thinking about my answer. “Mario, Jake, my cousin—they’re fighting a war too. Like you. Except their enemy is one you never see, one that says you’re nothing, nobody, you got nowhere to go, no place in the world.”
“Your friend Jake isn’t like the others.”
“What do you mean?”
“Empath.”
“You could feel it?” When Althor nodded, I said, “It doesn’t stop the anger. It only makes it hurt more.”
“Nothing stops it.”
I swallowed. “Seems to me people have to stop killing each other. There must be a better way.”
It was a moment before he answered. “I hope we find it.”
I felt what he left unsaid. He feared none of us would, neither his people nor mine.
After a while Althor said, “Tell me a story. About your life. A story without anger.”
“I’ll tell you about my best day. My quinceanera.”
“Quince…? Fifteen?”
“That’s right. It’s for a girl’s fifteenth birthday, a church ceremony and then a dance. Jake was my escort, my chambelán de honor. And Manuel—” I swallowed. “I don’t have a father, so Manuel walked with me and my mother down the aisle, in church, for Mass. They were all there, my corte de honor. My damas and chambelánes.”
“Ladies and lords?”
“That’s right. Twenty-eight of them. Los Halcones and my girlfriends.” I smiled. “And Joshua too. He looked pretty funny, with his yellow hair and blue eyes. And my mother, she made me a beautiful white dress. The guys wore tuxedos. Can you see it? Los Halcones in tuxedos with blue sashes, or whatever you call those things. Cummerbunds. They pooled their money so they could rent the outfits. I made them promise no weapons.” My voice caught. “It was such a beautiful day. It seemed like Jake and I danced forever.”
“Why your happiest day make you sad?”
“It’s all gone. Everything.”
His arm tightened around my shoulder.
I thought of my mother, how she had cried that day. I had felt her joy, tasted it. Smelled and heard it. She used to tell me ancient tales to explain the bond we shared. Her words painted luminous pictures of the ceiba, the axis that exists everywhere: a tree with its roots anchored Olontik, the Underworld, its trunk rising through the Middleworld where humans live, its branches stretching through all levels of the heavens. She believed our minds coexisted the same way the spiritual and material universes coexist through the tree that spans them.
My mother had been a h’ilol, a holy woman. She prayed for those whose sickness came from a loss of their inner soul, or from a witch practicing his craft against them. Few women held the title, yet no one doubted her claim to it. Her ability to heal had been legendary. She taught me the prayers, verses to Christ and the kalvario, the sacred mountain. She told me about the girl from Chamula who became the Morning Star in the sky, where she swept a path for the sun, just as assistants swept the earthen path for their h’ilol during a curing ceremony.
I can still hear her weaving the stories, her voice murmuring in the slumbering heat of a Chiapas night. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the curing ceremonies were actually ancient Maya rituals blended with the Christianity brought to us by Spanish missionaries.
A rocky hill loomed on our left, half hidden by darkness and trees. We followed its sloping sides until I found a pile of rocks to one side of it. Two huge slabs stood leaning against each other, creating a small cave with a crack for its entrance. “Through here,” I said.
Althor turned sideways and slid into the opening. Inside, he sank down to sit on the rocky floor, still holding the blood-soaked towel over his shoulder. Moonlight silvered him like liquid metal over human metal.
I dropped down next to him. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
I knew he was lying. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Tina—”
“Yes?”
“You will come back?”
That’s when it hit me just how much he had to trust me. This was far different from leaving him alone in my apartment. He knew almost nothing about me except that I had violent friends. Yet he had to believe I would bring help, and a safe place for him to recover. If I didn’t, he would probably die.
“I’ll come back,” I said. “I swear it.”
I left the cave and ran, stumbling in my heels, back to the car.
It felt as if it took forever to reach Pasadena. After I parked on the street where I had told Mario I would leave the car, I hid the wig and blanket in the trunk. Then I looked around. I had been to Pasadena twice before, once at a party and once last summer to help Joshua move into his dorm.
A tower rose above the houses, its windows lit up like rectangular yellow eyes in the night. I was pretty sure it was the building Joshua had called Milikan Library. I pulled off my shoes and ran toward it, through the streets.
I came out on a lawn in front of a campus. I thought it was Caltech, but nothing looked familiar. Then I remembered. Joshua’s dorm was behind the library. I ran across the lawns, past a guy with long hair who stared as if I came from outer space. The dorms were a cluster of Spanish-style buildings surrounded by lawns. As I took the steps in Blacker House two at a time, one thought kept hammering me: What if Joshua wasn’t in?
The second floor was painted black, with flames on the walls. Joshua once told me “flaming” meant flunking out of Caltech, and reasons why people flamed were hidden in the wall paintings. I ran past them to room 52 and pounded on it.
The door opened and Joshua stood there, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, tousled curls falling into his eyes. “Tina!” A grin spread across his face. “What are you doing here?”
I took a breath. “I need your help.”
He pulled me inside and closed the door. “What’s wrong?”
“A friend of mine is hurt. I was hoping he could stay here.” He regarded me for a moment. “All right.”
I almost closed my eyes with gratitude. Just like that. It was Joshua’s way. After everything that had happened to him, he didn’t trust easily. He chose his friends with care, but once you were among them he was fiercely loyal.
“Do you have a car?” he asked.
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nbsp; “We can’t use it. I’ll explain later.”
He switched off his desk lamp. A book lay open there, and papers covered with equations were scattered everywhere. Glancing at me he said, “You want some tennis shoes? You better wear a sweater too.”
I looked down. I was still holding my shoes and blood covered my blouse. “All right.”
His sweater hung around my hips and his shoes slipped off my feet. I crumpled a stocking into each heel to fill the space. Then we went down the hall, past dismantled pieces of electronic equipment, to another room. On its door, the initials DEI were made out of old computer chips. As Joshua knocked, I hung back in the shadows.
A guy holding a half-eaten Milky Way bar and wearing a gray T-shirt that said Confederation, 44th World Science Fiction Convention opened the door. “Hi. What’s up?”
“Daniel, I was wondering if I could borrow your Jeep,” Joshua said.
“What for—” He stopped when he saw me. When he realized he was staring, he turned back to Joshua. “Yeah, sure. Just a second.” He vanished into his room and reappeared with a set of keys. “Keep it as late as you want.”
“Thanks,” Joshua said. Then we took off.
The Jeep was open, and as we drove the wind threw my hair around my body. I told Joshua everything, except for letting him believe Althor came from Fresno. I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake, hiding Althor on the mountain. Thinking of him alone and injured made the minutes drag out endlessly.
At Mount Wilson, Joshua stepped on the gas. When he finally pulled off the road, I jumped out and ran toward the woods.
“Tina, wait.” He ran after me and caught up in a few strides.
We made our way through brush and scraggly trees. They threw shadows across our path, pools of black in the night’s darkness. Wind whispered in our hair. The walk seemed to take longer than before, until I became convinced we had passed the cave.
Then I caught sight of the two stones. We ran over and eased ourselves between them, into the hidden cavity. Joshua’s flashlight played over the walls—and across Althor’s body. He lay on his back on the ground, still and silent.