A long, low, moving dark cloud appears; the thunder becomes the pounding of hooves. A hundred, no, a thousand, buffalo race toward the single tiger in their path.
They don’t appear afraid of the huge cat that does not belong. Perhaps they’ve never seen one and therefore don’t know enough to be afraid.
Before the herd tramples him, the tiger veers off, loping around them, hunkering down, tail twitching as he waits. His gray-green eyes remain focused on the whirl of brown stampeding past like props in an old-time western. He springs, straight up and onto the back of a huge bull with massive hooked horns and a shaggy, matted ruff.
The buffalo stops, snorts, bucks. The others gallop around them, managing not to turn both the bull and the tiger on his back into dust.
Sawyer sinks his claws into the beast’s hide for leverage, then leans over and tears out his throat.
I wait for the buffalo to stumble, perhaps throw Sawyer to the ground where he’ll be trampled by the stragglers. Blood will spray everywhere, and if the animal is lucky, he might be able to gore the tiger once, even twice, before he dies. Obviously none of this will kill Sawyer—in reality he is still alive and right next to me—but it will be bloody and ugly and painful.
Instead, the buffalo bursts into ashes, disintegrating beneath Sawyer like an imploding Vegas casino. Sawyer lands on all fours, and as he races away gray particles swirl off his coat like mist.
The sun, which had been rising, not setting, now blazes with fury from a crystal-blue sky. When the bird circles back, diving toward the earth like a missile, it is easy to see what kind of bird it is.
Peacock-bright feathers mixed with red and gold, a huge wingspan. Definitely not a bird found in America. Technically not a bird found in nature.
The Phoenix dips close to the ground, shifting in a flare like a sunburst so that when my mother’s feet meet the earth they have toes.
She is naked. If I were actually in the desert I’d turn away. Who wants to see their mother like that? But this is merely a memory, and not even my own.
Lifting her face to the sun, she breathes in as if its rays are liquid gold, then runs her fingers along Sawyer’s ruff. “I told you he’d be here.”
The tiger shimmers beneath her hand and becomes a man, naked, gleaming, exquisite. “You did.” He looks down at her; she is much shorter than me, and his gaze is softer than I’ve ever seen it. “And as always you were right.”
She tilts her head as if someone has called her name, the move birdlike; then her gaze lifts to the sky, focusing fiercely on the sun. Her eyes flare, yellow, then orange, the black pupil forming the shape of a bison.
“There’s another,” she intones.
“Show me,” Sawyer says.
The Phoenix lifts her arms, and they become wings that carry her into the sky. A flash of light and Sawyer is again a tiger loping after the bird, and I tumble back into my body, still trapped beneath Sawyer’s on the bed in Cairo.
“She was a seer,” I whispered. “Like me.”
CHAPTER 29
“Yes,” Sawyer agreed.
His eyes were now closed; his forehead remained pressed to mine. I couldn’t hear any emotion behind that single word, couldn’t see any reaction in that granite face.
“And you were her DK.”
He stayed silent and still, our bodies aligned, our hands making a gesture of prayer against the bed.
The memory explained a lot. The connection between a seer and a DK is strong—a bond of secrecy and trust. Was that why Sawyer had come back to her when she’d risen? Had he been unable to stop himself?
“What happened?” I asked. “When did things go wrong? Why? How?”
Sawyer’s fingers threaded between my own, clenching so that our palms rode ever closer. The room receded as I returned to the past.
The scenes flash quickly, images like photographs tumbling from an album and cascading across the ground.
The flare of her eyes, yellow to orange, the shifting of her pupil to reflect what she saw, creatures that populated legends all dying by his hand. Time passes; together they fight, always together. He is as gifted at killing as she is at seeing what needs to be killed. Nothing can stop them.
Until it does.
“Where have you been?” Sawyer asks.
The shadow of Mount Taylor casts over them, purple against a dusky pink sky. Sawyer’s place looks almost the same as the last time I saw it. Perhaps the hogan is less weathered, the outside of the house less faded.
Time in the West is hard to determine. If the house hadn’t been there, the year could be B.C. for all I knew. The Navajo arrived on this continent back when Moses was still bobbing in the bulrushes, although they didn’t migrate south until much later.
I had no idea when the Phoenix had decided to come from Egypt or why. Maybe she’d had a falling-out with Cleopatra. I guess it didn’t really matter.
“I’ve been busy,” she says.
“People are dying, Maria. We’re supposed to stop that.”
She lifts her chin. “We can’t save everyone.”
“We’re supposed to try.”