"I'm listening," Bron said, and unexpectedly, his voice cracked. His eyes stung. "Tell me. Please."
"I'll make a phone call, as soon as we get home. By law, I can't tell you. But there's someone who can. I was going to call anyway, once I realized the truth, to get the process started."
"How long will it take?" Bron asked.
"A week, maybe two," Olivia said. "I can't be sure."
Bron leaned back in his seat and drew a long breath. He tried to block out his excitement, cast away all hope, until he felt comfortably numb.
"Make the call now," he dared her. He didn't think she'd do it.
Olivia studied him, pulled out her cell phone, and punched in a number. "Father Leery?" she asked.
Bron could hear a voice on the other end, solemn and grave. "Yes?"
"This is Olivia. I have a problem. I found a songbird."
"Oh... bloody... hell! A nightingale?"
"Yes," Olivia said.
"Black or white?"
"Black."
"Oh ...bloody ...hell!"
"There's more," Olivia said. "We went to a store. The enemy spotted him. We got away, just barely."
Bron had to lean close in order to hear the priest. "Enemies? How many?"
"Five. A master hunter, I think, and four acolytes."
"They'll be after you," Father Leery warned.
"I don't know what to do," Olivia said. "I'm thinking we should leave town...."
"That's just what they'll expect," Father Leery said. "They'll be watching the freeways for suspicious activity."
"So what should I do?"
"You live what, forty miles out of the city? Go home, Olivia. Go home and hide. I'll see if I can handle this."
"There's another thing," Olivia said. "Our songbird, the boy, wants to know what's going on."
"He needs to know," the priest said, "but you can't tell him. The law protects him as much as it does us."
"He needs to know soon" Olivia urged.
"I'll alert the Weigher of Lost Souls," the priest said, and the phone clicked off.
Olivia sat for a moment, breathing hard.
"He sounds as crazy as you," Bron said.
She grinned. "We're not crazy, Bron. We're in more trouble than you can imagine. There are good reasons for our laws, profound and important reasons. You're special. You don't know how special yet. But your world is about to grow very large indeed."
Bron studied her, made his decision. He wanted to know now, but he knew that he wouldn't get that. Still, he knew that if he put it off indefinitely, Olivia might hold out on him. "Two weeks," he agreed. "I'll give you two weeks."
Olivia smiled a terse grin, appraised Bron's broken window, and shook her head regretfully. There was a bit of jagged glass edging up near Bron, and she leaned forward, hit it with her fist, breaking it off. Now the window looked as if it were rolled down instead of as if it had been shot out.
She checked behind to make sure that they weren't being followed, then eased back onto the road and drove slowly through Saint George, heading out through the desert into the mountains.
"Bron," Olivia said when she'd settled down a bit. "You mustn't ever tell anyone what just happened. If this gets into the news, or even if the police hear about it, those people will hunt us down. You can count on it. Promise that you won't tell anyone. Not the police, not social services, not even Mike!"
Bron weighed the alternatives. "Are you sure that we shouldn't go to the police?"
"Very sure," Olivia said. "The police aren't equipped to handle people like these." She seemed convinced that she was being honest.
But why would they want us? he wondered. A more pressing concern struck him. "What about our license plates? They had to have gotten a good look!"
"If they check the plates," Olivia said, "they'll find that the plates are registered to another car. I've been afraid that something like this would happen. So the plates are stolen. I've got my real ones in the barn. We can switch them out in the morning."
Bron's head did a little flip. Certainly witnesses in other cars had seen the altercation, but what would they have seen? A bunch of freaks attacking Olivia's car? Anyone in their right minds would have been writing down the license plate number to the Mercedes, not to the Honda.
With Olivia's tinted windows, no one would have gotten a description of Bron or Olivia.
"So what's in the paper bags," Bron asked, "the things that you threw on the road?"
Olivia shook her head, as if to clear it. "They're called caltrops. A thousand years ago, in the midst of the Crusades, peasants were often forced to fight mounted Arabs armed with scimitars. So during the night before a battle, they would take pieces of metal welded together and armed with barbed spikes, and hide them in the grass on the battlefield. When the cavalry charged, the warhorses would step on them and ruin their hooves. They were called 'cavalry traps,' but the name got shortened to caltrops. They work well on tires, too."
For a long moment, Bron thought about this. You couldn't just go down and buy caltrops at Home Depot. You probably couldn't buy them anywhere. Olivia had either made them herself, or had them made.
And she kept a loaded pistol in her car, a big heavy one.
What kind of person did that?
She obviously wasn't your average mousy little school teacher.
Olivia was so rattled that she didn't speak at all anymore. Instead she followed Highway 18 past a small, perfectly conical volcano near the town of Diamond Valley, then past two more volcanoes and the towns of Dammeron and Veyo, until they turned off the highway,
following signs that directed them toward Pine Valley.
The ringing in Bron's ears faded and his heart slowed to a steady thump. He decided that maybe Olivia knew what she was doing. He'd just have to pretend that this was "life—as usual."
He settled back, determined to remain calm.
"What are you going to tell Mike when he sees the window?" Bron asked.
"We'll say that we went to the store, and someone broke into the car—maybe a burglar, even though nothing got stolen."
It sounded believable.
"Do you lie to Mike a lot?"
Olivia flinched, as if Bron's words were a slap in the face.
"Not if I can help it," she said. "I love Mike. He's a good man. I'm sorry that he wasn't able to come meet you today. But there are some things that he doesn't know about. Some things that he'd never understand."
"He's not like ...us?"
Olivia smiled secretively. "He's not like anyone."
Bron decided to let the matter go, for now.
"You live way out here?" Bron asked. In the middle of nowhere?
"It's quiet, and pretty," Olivia said.
Bron didn't think it was pretty. The only vegetation had been sagebrush until they turned onto a smaller road. Big trees that looked like pines, except that the bark had a yellowish cast to it, backed some houses on the turn. Then they drove through a dense forest of juniper trees, with their sharp scent and tiny blue berries.
It wasn't pretty, Bron decided. It was remote, so removed from civilization that Bron suspected Olivia was in hiding.
He felt nervous about that, and about her husband Mike, who had not bothered to come meet him.
A dozen miles down the road, the car dropped into a small valley where a silver stream wound through emerald fields. A tiny town grew in the shade of a few pine trees on the far side of the valley. The town was dominated by a picturesque old church painted such a bright white that it was like a pearl lying upon green velvet.
Pine Valley didn't have more than a hundred homes, Bron guessed. The car reached the first and only intersection, then turned left and headed farther up into the hills.