"I know where the enemy is taking your child," I say.
She nods. She believes me, she always has. Such faith.
"Your friend," she says.
I grab her arms." Seymour!"
Shen ods her head to the side. "He is out front. He has been shot."
"Is he dead?" I ask.
She hesitates. "He is close."
I gaze at the small island in the center of Emerald Bay. I had swum back ashore. It had not been easy to leave my daughter's body.
"Find a boat," I say to Paula."That was my daughter who took your child, but she was only trying to protect him. Her body is on the island, in the house. Please bring her back here and wrap her in a blanket until I return." I turn away. "I will take care of Seymour."
She stops me. "I will help you with your friend first."
I shake my head. "No, Paula.I have to be alone with him to help him."
There are tears in her eyes. "Your daughter gave her life to save John?"
"Yes. She gave more than any of us knew."
Seymour lies on his side in a pool of blood fifty yards up the hill from Paula's house, wedged cruelly between two large rocks. James had shot him in the stomach. One close-range blast was enough. He is unconscious and slipping away fast. The child is gone, and this time I do not have the mystery and magic of the universe in a convenient vial in my pocket. The only way I can save him is to grant his oldest wish. That I will do for him because I love him, and I know Krishna will forgive me. Indeed, if I can only find the child again, and give him a chance to grow old enough to understand me, then I can ask him to take away my vow. Leaning over, I open a vein and whisper in Seymour's ear.
"Now, old buddy, just because you're going to be a vampire doesn't mean you automatically get to sleep with me. We'll have to date first."
I give him my blood. It is all I have to give.
18
The next evening,at sunset,I arrive at the gruffin the desert where the child was conceived.Thetall Joshua trees stand around me like guards that would offer me help if they could.But there is no one tohelp me. Even my own strength and cunning cannot aid me if I am to believe my daughter and Suzama.
I have brought the dagger James stuck into me.
It is my only weapon,pitiful as it is.
Faith is stronger than stone.
James will not simply murder the child. The divine blood isas important to a demon as it is to a saint. Only the two do not make the same use of it. I know he will have to bring the child to this spot.
He did not locate the Suzama Center in Palm Springs, so close to this place, by coincidence. Plus my old friend has said as much.
Then the place of sanctityw ill be defiled by red stars, and only the innocent will see the blue light of heaven.
Am I the innocent? At the moment I feel far from it. I knowK alika told methat my thoughts blinded me but I still cannot stop thinking how she let James get so close to the child when she clearly knew what he was and where he was. Of course it could be argued that I stopped her from fleeing,yet in the last minutes of her mysterious life she was content to quit running and sit and play with the child to let what was to be be. James clearly used me to defeat Kalika; he could not have done it alone. Yet Kalika let herself be defeated. Was it because she wished to fulfill the ancient prophecy?
There the dark forces will once again converge on him, but a powerful angel of mistaken color will rescue him only to lose him again.
No one mistook Kalika more than her own mother.
But what am I to do now?
The rest is a mystery.
For once, I wish Suzama had hinted a little more.
What am I to have faith in? I do not miss the fact that Suzama placed faith and stone together in the same sentence, since it was Ory's control of the earth element that allowed him to defeat me the last time. All right, I have faith in the child.He seems like a cute little guy with incredible vibes and a darling smile. I love him, I really do, and I only got to hold him for a short time. But what am I supposed to do with this faith? It seems I should be able to use it somehow.
The sun slowly sets. The stars come out.
The moon has yet to rise.
I stare at the stars and pray for them to help me.
Then I realize something quite extraordinary.
The last time I went to see Suzama,she was wearing ablue scarf that had gold threads woven in it deputing the constellations in the sky, both thenorthern and the southern sky. Last night Paula was wearing a blue scarf as well, also woven with a pattern in gold thread. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the scarves are identical.
I am hardly given a chance to wonder how that could be possible.
Because something strange starts to happen.
The more I visualize those hauntingly beautiful star patterns in Suzama's scarf the brighter the stars above me grow. And what is even stranger is that this experience has already been described to meby Paula.
"The sky was filled with a million stars. They were so bright! I could have been in outer space....It was almost as ifI had been transported to another world, inside a huge star cluster, and was looking up at its nighttime sky."
The stars grow so bright I can feel their energy on the top of my head, streaming down into my whole body. One star in particular, a bright blue one straight overhead, seems to soar in brilliance as I look up and concentrate on it. It grows in size. It could be a blue saucer racing toward the earth. A high-pitched sound starts to vibrate through the area. Paula's words are still in my mind.
"The rays of the star pierced my eyelids. The sound pierced my ears. I wanted to scream. Maybe I was screaming.But I don't think I was in actual physical pain. It was more as if I was being transformed."
I think I am screaming too. This is how it felt when the moon would pour into the topof my head and turn me into a nice friendly ghost that could float off on the desert wind.But this vibration is thousands of times more intense. It feels as if the starlight is irradiating the nerve fibers in my spinal cord, changing them into magnetic circuits on a cosmic grid, a stellar system of communication and propulsion that has been there since the beginning of time, even though no one imagined it existed. I only have to want to plug into it tobe able to use it. At the same time, I don't know if I am in physical distress. Blissful terror is a better expression for it; the entire experience is destroying everything that I thought is me, and yet there is relief in the destruction as well. But just when I think I will either explode or turn into a galactic android, it stops.