“I need to get to Mait before he stops practicing on people and starts bringing back half demons.”
“He won’t,” Ruthie said. “At least not right away.”
“Of course he will. What good is an army of humans who can easily be demolished by anyone with supernatural powers?”
“We don’t much like to kill people, Lizbeth. We’re supposed to protect them.”
“Which makes them the perfect foot soldiers.” I rubbed at the pulse pounding between my eyes. “Why would human beings fight for the dark side?”
“What would you do for someone who raised you from the dead?”
I dropped my hand. “There’s a price.”
“Ain’t there always?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember that.” Ruthie held my gaze. “Nothing on this earth ever comes for free.”
“So the risen dead will pay their debt on the front lines.”
“They were trampled in the winepress outside the city,” Ruthie quoted, “and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of sixteen hundred stadia.”
“You wanna translate?” When she started talking about stadia, my head just spun.
“In the final battle blood will rise as high as a horse’s bridle.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” The last time I’d stood next to a horse, the bridle’d been as high as my chin.
“A stadia is like a furlong,” Ruthie continued. “Sixteen hundred stadia would be about a hundred and eighty miles.”
“Blood as high as a horse’s bridle across a distance of a hundred and eighty miles,” I repeated.
Ruthie spread her bony, bird-like fingers. “So it was written.”
Since a lot of what was written had come to pass, my stomach pitched like the Red Sea. Prophecy is tricky, but once it starts to make sense, things fall into place like the last few pieces in a very big puzzle.
“Nephilim would be ashes,” I murmured. “No blood.” Which only lent weight to Ruthie’s belief that Mait would raise humans—at first.
“For centuries scholars argued over the meaning of Revelation nine-sixteen,” Ruthie said. “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand.”
“Two hundred million,” I translated.
“The number was too big to be taken literally for a very long time. But then came a nation with not only a huge population, but a mammoth standing army with uncountable reserves.”
“China.”
“Yes. The force will come out of the east, and the population in what is now considered the east is more than three billion.”
“The scholars focused on China,” I said. “But they were wrong.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“What about the coming out of the east part?”
“East is relative, child. March east-to-west and bam,” she smacked her palms together, “you’ve got an army from the east. All the Bible really says is that the big ol’ army will march across the Euphrates.”
“Which happens to be east of Israel.”
“Last time I looked,” Ruthie agreed.
“I gotta go.”
“Hold on.” Ruthie laid her hand over mine. “The book is gone. The only being capable of bringing back the dead is Mait. You know what that means?”
“Charmed dagger to the left eye and fast.”
“You also have to consider what’s best for the world in the long run, not what’s best for any one person right this minute.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You wanna raise Sawyer.”
I didn’t bother to lie. Not to Ruthie. “So?”
“No one comes back the same, Lizbeth.”
“You sent me to Sani to learn how to raise ghosts.”
“I sent you to Sani because I was told to send you to Sani.”
That made me pause. Though Ruthie often behaved as if she were the lead singer in our rock-and-roll end times band, she wasn’t. She took her orders from the biggest voice of all—the one that had serenaded Moses on Mount Sinai. Or at least that’s what she told me.
And if she wasn’t telling the truth about that . . . well, I was in bigger trouble than I’d ever get out of.
“There’s a reason—” she began.
“For everything,” I finished, having heard it before.
I didn’t much care for being ordered around without an explanation, but I was used to it. No matter how much I disliked operating half blind, the truth remained—I had to have faith. In more ways than one.
“Sani knew where the book was,” Ruthie said.
“Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t anyone know what Mait was up to before he was up to it?”
“The spell of protection cloaked everything.”
“Then how did Sani know where to find the thing?”
“Sani isn’t one of us. He’s one of them.”
I wasn’t surprised. Still . . . “Why would he tell me—” I paused as my brain answered the question before Ruthie could. “Payment.”
The twists and turns of fate, or God’s will, or prophecy were far too complicated for a mere dumb-ass like me.
“Perhaps,” Ruthie said.
“Don’t we need Sawyer?” I asked.