They had cauterized a part of this man’s soul, Palestrina thought… and how much could be murdered of conscience or outrage before a man was, essentially, dead?

So perhaps he was talking to a dead man.

The thought was chilling and unwelcome.

“You followed them,” Palestrina said. “That’s what you were trained for.”

“Followed them for years.” Again that distant look, Walker’s old eyes gone diffuse. “It’s hard work, you know. But I can smell them out. They leave trails.”

“Julia and William? You found them?”

“Eventually.”

“Brought them back?”

“Killed them.”

Cardinal Palestrina blinked.

Walker said, “It was unavoidable.”

His face was bland, affectless, smiling. Palestrina thought, He is dead. “But then it’s over, surely? Your work is finished… the project is finished?”

“There were children,” Walker said.

“I see… and they have the power?”

“They have it strongly. More strongly than they know.”

“You’ve hunted them?”

“I’ve been close to them. Often! But it’s not as easy as all that, bringing them back. These arms won’t hold them. A cage won’t hold them. That’s the paradox! It’s a lifework. Spells and geases are the only weapons we have. And they work less well far along across the worlds. But we’re very close now.” He bent toward Cardinal Palestrina; his breath was sour. “They’ve learned things in this building since I was young.”

“I’m sure they have,” Palestrina said faintly.

“And there’s one other,” Walker said. “Child of a child. Hybrid, but the genotype is true. He’s what we worked for all these years. We’ll bring him back. I’ll bring him back. And he can do what you want, you know. He’s powerful enough. A few adjustments—” Walker tapped the pale line of his scar. “He’ll do what you tell him. Lead armies against the Holy Land if that’s what you want. Call up forces across the plenum. Armies that would terrify a god, weapons that would devastate a city. It’s all out there.” Walker showed his teeth again. “Would that suit you? Is that what you’re after?”

And Cardinal Palestrina thought, It might save us.

Or damn us.

He moistened his lips. A cramp seized his belly; it was all he could do to keep from crying out. He drew a breath and said, “You can do that—you can bring him here?”

“Oh yes.” Walker put his hands in his pockets, reclined happily against the chair back. “This time,” he said, “we have help.”

Part Two

HEARTLAND

Chapter Eight

They pulled in late Wednesday afternoon at a motel called the Stark Motor Inn somewhere west of Barstow.

Stark it was indeed, Karen thought. There was no shade but the meager shadow cast by a juniper rooted in the gravel courtyard; the tiny swimming pool out back stood pure and empty as a turquoise chip in the brown vastness of the desert. The room smelled of false lilac and air conditioning.

She reminded herself that they were back home now. Not home in the very specific sense—this desert was surely as exotic a place as she had ever been—but in a world where the verities were familiar: John F. Kennedy dead all those years ago, handguns for sale in the highway malls, no gentle bohemian ocean towns for people like her sister. The real world.

Home—the other kind of home—was still a long way off.

Michael unpacked his bathing suit and went out through the searing afternoon light to the pool. “Dibs on the shower,” Laura said. Laura had driven all the way from L.A. and looked weary. From Los Angeles, Karen thought, and across a canyon of time. They had passed between worlds out on the empty highway, amid the scrub brush and the dust devils. Miracles and murders and hotels in the desert.

She read Time magazine while Laura showered. The news was as dour as it had ever been. AIDS was on the increase; there was trouble again in the Philippines. Laura emerged finally from the tiled cavern of the bathroom, toweling her hair. She had thrown on an old flower-print shift; the cloth adhered to the damp angles of her body and Karen was momentarily jealous of her sister’s youth, preserved somehow while her own had slipped mysteriously away. Laura had never married. Laura was a single woman. While I, Karen thought, am that very different thing: a single mother.

Laura said, “They don’t know we’re coming.” Mama and Daddy, she meant. “No,” Karen agreed.

“We should call them.” “We?”

Laura admitted, “I don’t want to be the one.” “I guess you haven’t talked to them all that much.”

“I guess I haven’t talked to them for years. I’m the wayward daughter, right? Bad seed. Anyway,” she said, “they’ll take it better from you.”

But Karen had never liked telephones. She disliked the sounds they made, the click and hum of fragmentary dialogues, foreign voices holding foreign conversations. Long distance was the worst. There was something so lonely about a long-distance call: the extra numbers, like mileage, tokens of separation. She punched out the area code tentatively. Michael was still swimming, out there in the blistering light.

In truth, Karen had not been very good about phoning home either. She called every couple of months, sometimes less. And on holidays. But mostly she tried to call weekday afternoons, when the rates were higher but when Daddy was likely to be at work or out drinking. It was a long time since she’d spoken directly to her father. Years, she wondered, like Laura? Yes, maybe: maybe that long.

She imagined the phone ringing at the house in Polger Valley. The family had moved there the year after Karen went off to college, but she remembered it clearly. The phone was in the parlor. Fat textured yellow sofa, telephone on the walnut end table. Sunlight, maybe, sifting in through dust motes and the glacial ticking of clocks. Karen understood intuitively that none of this would have changed, that the Polger Valley house had become a kind of fortress for her parents, that they would live there until they died.

The buzz of the telephone ended abruptly and her mother’s voice came crackling out: “Hello?”

“Mama?”

There was a brief, cautious silence down the long lines from Pennsylvania.

“Karen?” Mama said finally. “Is that you? Is everything all right?”

“I’m with Laura,” Karen said.

It was bad, of course, blurting it out like that. Her mother could only repeat, “Laura?”

“Michael and I are with her. She’s here, she’s right here in the room with me.”

The silence again. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, it’s too much to explain. Mama, we’re out here in California. In the desert. We’re driving back East.”

“Back here?”

“Yes, Mama.”

The phone line stuttered.

Karen said, “Mama?”

“Yes…”

“Mama, is it all right?” Her own voice suddenly high and childish in her ears. “We’ll be a few days, driving, you know … it takes time …”

“There’s your father.”

“I know. But it’s all right, isn’t it? You can talk to him?”

“Well—I will.” Doubtfully. “I’ll try.” Then, “But if there’s something wrong, baby, you know you should tell me.”

“I can’t do that now.”

“Is it Gavin?”

“I’m not with Gavin.”

“He phoned here, you know. He’s looking for you.”

That surprised her. “Gavin’s not the problem.”

“No,” Mama said, “I didn’t think so,” and Karen wondered at the echo of old grief or fear there: had it been inevitable all along, this phone call, the journey back?

Karen said, “I love you.”

The telephone crackled with static. “I know you do … I know it.” “Tell Daddy.”

“I’ll try.”

“We’ll see you soon, then.” “Yes.”

The silence was sudden and vast.

Arizona, New Mexico, then the Rockies and an early threat of snow; the autumn plains. It was past the vacation season and so there was not much traffic on these big interstates, mainly diesel trucks. Nevertheless it was possible to think of this as a vacation. We’re family, Karen thought, and we talk and we act like family now; we sing songs in the car and we eat at the Howard Johnson’s. At times, suspended in the motion of the car, she would feel complete: memoryless and happy.