want to deal with it.'
Again he looked at her with regret and sympathy, and she realized with a pang how much she'd depended on Sam for the last five years.
Still she stood in the doorway, unwilling to move yet unable to ask him one last favor.
He couldn't meet her eyes, but his voice was gruffly compassionate when he spoke again: 'I know, Julieta. I won't tell anyone what I saw. This place'd be empty by sunset.'
When Julieta put her head into Lynn Pierce's examining room, the nurse looked up with a start, and the pencil she'd been writing with snapped in her fingers.
'Any word from Joseph?' Julieta asked.
'He'll get here around eleven.'
'How's Tommy?' The blinds over the window to the ward room were half slatted; all she could see was a mound of twisted bedclothes.
Lynn's eyes darted to the window, and she bit her lips. She gestured at the patient voice monitor on her desk. Through the soft hiss pouring from the speaker, Julieta could make out gentle snoring.
'Sleeping now. But it was worse this time. It lasted longer.'
'His spine again? The right arm?'
A tiny nod.
'Why didn't you call me, Lynn? I would have-'
'Joseph told me I should let you rest. Unless it was a crisis. Yazzie and I were able to keep him from hurting himself. By the time I could get free to call you, he'd stabilized.'
'Is there any point in my going in with him?' All Julieta could think of was to hold him.
'No. Wait until Joseph gets here.'
The thought of Joseph's earnest face and skilled, strong hands soothed Julieta a little. It helped that he knew how much this meant to her. That there was someone who knew it all. Surely he'd have some solution, he'd think of the next step.
'Have you talked to his teachers?' Julieta asked.
'I sent out my usual absence notice. I didn't go into details, just said he wasn't feeling well.'
'Who else has seen him? Is anybody talking about it yet?'
Lynn would know this was the school administrator turning to damage control, the need to contain superstitious gossip. The nurse was one of the few non-Navajo staff at the school, a solidly built woman in her midfifties with silver hair pulled back into a thick braid that hung down to her waist. She had dazzling blue eyes made more startling by an iridescent bronze fleck in her left iris that was distracting and sometimes made her expression hard to read. She had come to the rez as a VISTA volunteer in the 1970s and had married a Navajo man from the Nakaibito area. Childless, her husband now dead, she seemed to have taken the stream of student patients here as her family. Somehow Julieta hadn't really gotten close to Lynn in her three years here, but right now she took comfort in the fact that the nurse shared her concern and distress.
'Nobody's called me for details,' Lynn said, 'so if Sam doesn't talk, it'll probably be all right for a few days. Sam says the other boys don't remember anything, but I wouldn't count on that-I don't know what kind of gossip they might be spreading. The teachers will inquire if he doesn't show up in class soon, and his grandparents will need to be informed… ' Lynn finished with a gesture: And soon everyone will know.
Julieta shut the examining room door and leaned against it. 'Lynn,' she whispered. 'What is this? Be honest with me. Have you ever encountered anything like this?'
Lynn toyed with the snapped pencil, her fingers drawn again and again to the jagged break. 'The brain is a wilderness, the strangest things can happen. All I can guess is that this is a profound neurological aberration. But I can't square that with what Sam says-the way it affected the other boys.'
They thought about it for a moment, listening to the deceptively serene noise of breathing coming through the monitor.
'What're we going to do?' Julieta whispered at last. 'Where do we go from here?'
Lynn shook her head, and she looked at Julieta with her lopsided, startling gaze, her eyes now moist, nested in wrinkles of worry, and very guarded. 'I have no idea.'
2
Cree glanced up to see that a shape had materialized at the rear of the auditorium. Backlit by the ceiling lights near the entry, at this distance, it was no more than a dark silhouette: no face or features, just the outline of heavy shoulders and a large head so low above the body that it seemed the being had no neck. It loomed low behind the last row of seats like someone crouching or stooping, both menacing and disturbingly familiar.
In the instant it took to place the profile, Cree lost her train of thought. The last echoes of her words rang out over the speakers, and she wished she could somehow retrieve them and discern what she had said only an instant before.
Mason Ambrose. Here in Albuquerque. It had to be.
Sure enough, as she hesitated, another figure took up a post above the man in the wheelchair: Lupe. The ceiling spot haloed her gray hair and gave exaggerated dimension to the sockets of her eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her thorn of a nose. Lupe, thin as a bone and as hard, not so much Ambrose's eternal personal assistant as his familiar, the sorcerer's mysterious creature companion.
Covering her surprise, Cree cleared her throat and took a sip of water from the glass on the podium.
'Excuse me!' she apologized. She scanned the nearer rows of the audience, located the earnest face of the woman who had spoken, smiled, and found her thought again. 'It's hard to explain, but I've been asked that question before and I've given quite a bit of thought to how to answer it. I think I can convey the sensation to you if you'll follow along with me.'
Moving to the side of the podium so that everyone could see her clearly, she raised her voice. 'Put your index and middle fingers together and place them just under your right ear, where your jawbone meets the muscle that comes up the side of your neck. Got it? Now move the fingers forward, just under the jaw, until you feel them slide into the notch there. About halfway to your chin.' Cree tipped her head and tossed her hair back as she demonstrated. There. Most of the audience were obligingly putting their hands to their throats, wondering where she was going with this.
'You might have to push fairly hard. But you should be able to feel your carotid artery there-a rubbery cord about as big around as a pencil? You can feel it stiffen and soften with every heartbeat.'
She gave them a moment just to feel it.
'You're putting your finger right on your physical life. That throb-it's always been with you. Your heart's keeping you alive without your conscious thought-it's living inside you almost as if it's a separate creature alive in your chest. It does its job day in, day out. Most people don't like feeling it. We don't like to be reminded that there's an automatic part of ourselves, going about its business without our conscious supervision. It's a little creepy, isn't it? Vital, insistent, sort of foreign somehow? Yet of course it's deeply intimate, that pulse-deeply familiar, right?'
The audience was silent; most of them had their heads tilted, hands at throats. Some serious expressions, a few uncomfortable grins. Two hundred people feeling the secret pulsing inside.
'So, to answer your question, that's how it feels. That's how.. intimate it feels. That's how real it feels, how disconcerting it feels, to experience a ghost. Both physically and psychologically, that's the closest analogy I can come up with. That's the way experiencing a ghost reminds you of what you really are.'
And if you don't like that, Mason, if that's too 'spiritual' for you, she thought defiantly, screw you.
At the rear, the silhouettes of Lupe and Mason Ambrose hovered, motionless as a trompe l'oeil painted on the back wall.
The woman who had asked the question was clearly among those who were uncomfortable with touching that pulsing serpent. She nodded seriously, two fingers still held against her neck.
There was another moment of quiet, and then Dr. Zentcy, the conference's coordinator, moved from the wings and took over the microphone. He was a pleasant-faced man who struck Cree as rather too young and too
