A much younger Ruthie steps into the frail moonlight—forties maybe—her dark skin unlined, her Afro still tight and short, but pitch-black, without a single strand of gray. Her breasts don’t sag; her legs aren’t veined, her hands not yet gnarled with arthritis.
I’ve never seen her like this, not in a photo or any dream or vision. To me she’s always been Ruthie—my only mother. Soft heart, bony hips, firm but gentle hand. But seeing her young has me wondering for the first time why she never married, although maybe she did. Maybe he died; maybe he left her. Being a seer isn’t for sissies. Being the leader of the light leaves precious little to spare for anyone else but those in the federation and those just begging to die by it.
Her thin arm is framed by a charcoal-gray house-dress, which only makes her appear even thinner, as its voluminous folds fall around her skinny body like a tent. That arm is wrapped in a stark white bandage; a tiny dot of blood has leaked through.
“Careful, or some nosy neighbor might call the DNR with a wild tale of an eagle in my yard. Been enough stories ’bout strange goin’s-on. Don’t need any more.”
That voice. I want to crawl out of Sawyer’s memory and right into her lap. When she’d died I’d been devastated, but having her pop into my dreams, flit through my head, speak to me even if it was to announce impending death by Nephilim had made her seem less gone.
Exchanging Ruthie for a whispering, whining demon had been like losing her all over again. Every time I saw her in my memories or the memories of others, or heard her voice coming out of Luther’s mouth, I wanted to weep, and I was not the weeping kind.
“There’s somethin’ I need done.” Ruthie lays her dark hand on Sawyer’s head, and he fluffs his feathers, preening. “I’d do it myself, but I got kids here can’t be left. Besides.” Her bony shoulder shifts beneath her sagging dress. “I’m the leader now. No more fieldwork for me.”
Those were the days. Since the battle is now it’s fieldwork for everybody. Although . . .
Ruthie was a seer. What in hell was she ever doing in the field? Funny how some answers only bring more questions.
“Someone came to kill me.” Ruthie glances at the dark house, and silvery moonlight spills across her face. Is that a shadow or the hint of a bruise along her jaw? “Tried to bring about Doomsday.” Her dark eyes narrow. “We ain’t ready for that yet. Someone knows where I live, what I am, and that can’t be. Only way to make it not be is for them to no longer be.” She lowers her gaze to the eagle’s. “Understand?”
Sawyer dips his head, waddles back and forth, back and forth on taloned feet.
“This ain’t gonna be easy.” Ruthie sighs, long and sad and deep. “It never is.”
She reaches into her house dress and pulls out a feather. Even in the moonlight, which seeps color from everything, making the backyard appear like a scene from 1940s film noir, the plumage is radiant.
Sawyer makes a different sound—caw, screech—an unearthly howl of shock and pain.
“Hush now,” Ruthie whispers, and lets the feather go. “Just hush.”
The feather coasts downward, a bright red slash canting to and fro, coming to rest half on Sawyer’s bird feet and half against the thick carpet of ebony grass.
He lifts his beak. Gray eyes meet black.
“You know what you have to do,” Ruthie says.
Sawyer picks up the feather and heads back to New Mexico, to the Glittering World, the Dinetah, where he can walk as both man and beast. He feels stronger there, in the shadow of that mountain where he first changed.
He waits, still and silent, the light from the fire flickering across his naked skin as he stares at that red feather night after day after night.
I appreciate his confusion and pain. There is right and there is wrong and attempting to kill the conduit to God . . .
So wrong.
That Sawyer’s seer, the one he trusts most on this earth to guide him, has obviously gone to the dark side . . . Well, it takes some getting used to.
Not that he isn’t going to kill her when she shows up. He has to. The only question is how. As far as he knows, there is only one Phoenix, which makes legends on how to kill them nearly as rare as they are.
He pulls out his ancient book, pages through it over and over. There are beings of fire and smoke. Hell, his mother is one. He’s tried to kill her every way he’s heard and read and learned, but he’s never had any luck.
He snaps the book shut. Lack of oxygen, dousing with water, covering with earth. The evil bitch has survived all of them. She has more magic than he does, and she probably always will.
The Phoenix is a shape-shifter. He can try silver; he can fight her as one of his beasts, and if that doesn’t work, he’ll just strangle her, drown her and bury her alive, one after the other, until something does.
At last the sound of great wings fills the sky, and the Phoenix appears, circling lower and lower until she lands on her feet in the yard.