I wasn’t sure I liked this plan. Alastor and I had formed a détente, but it was still an uneasy one, based mainly on mutual sadness over John’s death. Now John was alive and well. I swallowed.
“Great idea,” I lied.
John whistled, and Alastor came thundering up, a Fury clutched in his jaws by the neck of his shirt. John shook his head in disapproval, and the horse reluctantly dropped the man, who fell panting in front of the massive silver hooves. I quickly flicked him with the end of my whip, and he cried out in pain, rolling into a ball, though the diamond had barely scratched him. A puff of smoke floated into the air from the back of the man’s head. Alastor whinnied approvingly, enjoying the sight of another’s pain. That’s the kind of horse he was.
“Nicely done,” John said admiringly to me.
“It was nothing,” I said.
“Mr. Liu?” John called.
The gentle giant came lumbering forward, dragging two Furies by their heads. “Yes?”
John handed a still-shaken Kayla over to Mr. Liu while I quickly touched the tip of my whip to his two captives. “We’re going to put an end to this. Would you look out for her?”
Mr. Liu dropped his dazed Fury friends and nodded at Kayla, his expression, as always, implacable. “My pleasure.”
Kayla looked up at him with tear-swollen eyes. “Let’s go kill someone.”
“Kill?” Mr. Liu shook his head. “Maim is better.”
Kayla shrugged. “Okay.”
John mounted Alastor, then reached a hand down from the saddle. “Step on my boot,” he said as I grasped his fingers, “and swing yourself up ….”
I gave Alastor the evil eye, which he returned, but he allowed me to swing myself up into the saddle in front of John … undoubtedly because John was right there, watching.
If I’d known I’d be riding a death lord’s horse around the Isla Huesos Cemetery, swinging a whip at people possessed by Furies, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to wear a dress. But things never seemed to work out as I planned.
I’m not going to lie and say there weren’t parts of it that were fun. It was hard work and required a lot of concentration. Swinging a whip from the back of a moving animal isn’t as easy as they make it look in Westerns. But I wasn’t trying to rope cattle, all I was trying to do was touch Furies … who, granted, made pretty challenging targets, since they were running away from a thundering hell horse. Several times I misaimed when they dodged and was certain I got them in the face. Not that I didn’t think they deserved it, but I had to keep in mind what Mr. Smith kept saying, that they were humans possessed by demons and didn’t know what they were doing.
Maybe.
Reed and Chloe and the others soon caught on, and then it was a matter of them herding the Furies into areas where Alastor could reach them. And all I had to do was flick them.
“You know, Pierce,” John said in my ear, his arm tight around my waist as we chased down a woman in an Outback Steakhouse uniform who was running from us without fear, her gaze as dead-eyed and glazed as every Fury before her, “I think we’re winning.”
“Against the human Furies, maybe,” I said. I caught the woman, sending her sprawling, moaning, into a pile of decorative funeral wreaths, smoke funneling up from her right shoulder. “But not them.”
I raised my gaze. The ravens were still gathered overhead, squawking angrily.
“Wait,” John said, pulling Alastor to a stop. “Look. Do you see that?”
“What?” I shaded my eyes with one hand and looked.
At first I didn’t see anything. The sun was so bright, and the sky so achingly blue, it was difficult to see anything but the black vees the ravens made against it. But then I saw what John was talking about. A flash of white, fluttering amidst the black specks.
“John,” I said, sinking my fingers into his arm. “Is that … ”
A fat mourning dove, pure white except for a few inky black feather tips on her wings and tail, suddenly swooped down to land between Alastor’s ears. The horse, startled, reared up a little, snorting.
“Hope!” I cried, reaching for her. The bird allowed me to snuggle her against my cheek, cooing happily. “Oh, Hope, where have you been?”
Hope only cooed some more, rubbing her face against mine, then began to search my hair, obviously looking for food.
“I don’t know where she’s been,” John said. “But wherever it is, she found some friends.”
He pointed upwards. There were now white vees visible amongst the black ones. First only a few, then more white birds than black ones, and the white ones seemed to be battling the black ones. The ravens, under attack by a larger and superior force, quickly gave up, disappearing from the sky at a rapid rate.
Only the white birds weren’t completely white, I noticed, when one swooped close enough for me to get a better look at it. They were —
“Pigeons!” I cried in surprise.
“Mourning doves,” John corrected me. “I told you. Hope’s a mourning dove. They vary in coloration.”
The one that had swooped close to me was much larger than Hope, and gray … as silver-gray as my diamond when there weren’t any Furies around. As silver as John’s eyes. It was black, however, on its wingtips and tail. It landed, exactly as Hope had, between Alastor’s ears, but since it weighed so much more than Hope, its landing was nowhere near as graceful.
Alastor gave an angry whinny and shook his head, attempting to fling the bird from it, but the mourning dove was determined to cling to its roost and hung on, cooing loudly, in what I considered a decidedly masculine manner.
“Hope,” I cried. “Is that your husband? Is that where you were this whole time? Did you fly off to find your family and then bring them home to help us fight those nasty ravens?”
“Okay,” John said, his grip tightening on me. “Now you’re talking to the birds. I think you’ve killed enough Furies for one day. Let’s go round up the others and head home —”
“Of course I talk to Hope,” I said. “You talk to Alastor. And why wouldn’t that be Hope’s husband? You’re the one who told me mourning doves mate for life. I think we should name him. What do you think would be a good name for —?”
“Excuse me,” said a deep, masculine voice behind us. “But would you two mind getting down off that horse? We’d like to have a word with you if we may.”
I turned my head and looked down. It was Chief of Police Santos. Standing next to him was my father and my cousin Alex.
29
And, he to me: “Thou’lt mark, when they shall be
Nearer to us; and then do thou implore them
By love which leadeth them, and they will come.”
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto V
Patrick Reynolds,” Chief of Police Santos said, looking at the notepad he’d drawn from his belt. “Says here he’s in stable condition after surgery for blunt-force trauma to the head. Neighbor found him and called an ambulance.”
Mr. Smith buried his face in his hands. “Oh, thank God.”
I laid a hand on Mr. Smith’s back. We were all gathered on the front porch of the cemetery sexton’s office. Even though the roof of the back of the cottage had been smashed in by the Spanish lime tree, the front of the house seemed sturdy enough, and the porch offered a rare bit of shade. Though it was late afternoon, the sun was still beating down like it was … well, an island in the subtropics.
“It was Mike,” Kayla said, her voice as cold as the bottle of water we’d each been handed by one of the emergency medical services technicians who’d shown up shortly after Chief Santos and his officers. “Mike did it.”