And Evangeline walked, destruction following in her wake. She did not notice. She did not care. She was looking for someone, and she could not stop walking until he was found.
Smoke curled from her footsteps, and behind her were screams and flames and rent flesh, but they were distant to her, something already past. She looked ahead.
The sun scorched the sand and rocks and Evangeline’s bare skin. Her belly rounded and swelled, and her white skin grew brown. She carried a water jug from the village that burned behind her, but even that was only for the child, for she cared nothing of her own discomfort. She swallowed some water, and her lover’s son flapped his wings inside the taut and straining mound of her belly.
Two thousand miles had passed beneath her feet, and many villages, as she left the green lands and walked into the desert. She walked, searching for her lover, every step bringing her closer to ash- and cloud-covered gray mountains—the Forbidden Lands. Evangeline walked, always hearing his voice in her ear: “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.” She did not care where her steps led her so long as he was there at the end of it all.
And then one day she woke to find his voice no longer in her ear, and she looked over the horizon and saw the jagged fingers of a white tree reaching to the sky. Beneath the tree there was a dark shadow haloed in starshine, and Evangeline no longer felt the sand of the desert beneath her feet as she ran. For three days and three nights she ran, the horizon always just out of reach, until on the fourth day great mountains suddenly loomed before her, and there was the tree, with him beside it.
“I have come to you,” she said.
His smile dazzled like the Morningstar, and his great black wings opened, and Evangeline went into his embrace. He closed his arms around her, and his wings beat around them, and the wings in her belly beat in time, and he lifted her up and carried her away, and she lifted her face to the brightness of his kiss.
The next morning I woke in my own bed. I’d had a dream, a vivid dream, about a girl called Evangeline, but the memory of it slipped away as I lay in the hot autumn sunshine pouring through my window. Darkness and blazing eyes mixed in my head with a monster and the smell of burnt cinnamon, and fire pouring from my hands.
Somehow I had survived, and someone had brought me home. That same someone had bathed me, twisted my long black hair into a single braid, put me in a clean nightgown, changed my bedsheets and bandaged the palms of my hands. Since I wasn’t close enough to anyone who could have performed such intimate services for me, I was more than a little freaked out.
“Beezle!” I shouted. He flew in through the bedroom door so quickly he must have been hovering in the kitchen just outside.
“Maddy,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I said, surprised to hear myself say it. I felt . . . rested, more rested than I had felt in a long time. “But how did I get here? Who brought me home?”
Beezle looked surprised. “No one brought you home. You brought yourself home.”
“No, I didn’t. I remember someone picking me up and carrying me. I could hear you arguing with him.”
“With who?”
“Whoever carried me home, Beezle! Why are you acting like you don’t remember this?”
“Well,” he said slowly. “Maybe because it didn’t happen?”
“Who were you talking to, then?”
He looked affronted. “I don’t talk to any humans except you. And ...”
“Don’t you think I’d remember coming home, taking a shower, braiding my hair? I never braid my hair.”
“You did last night. I mean, you did seem pretty out of it, but you told me that you were okay to walk home.”
“You’re telling me that I got up and walked home and did all of those things?”
“Yes.”
“Why are my hands bandaged?”
“Burns,” Beezle said, and he frowned at my palms as if they offended him.
“From what?”
“That ball of fire you conjured up. The burns were there when we got home. You put some cream on them and wrapped them up.”
I didn’t remember doing any of it, and I was certain I’d heard another voice. My head started to ache as I strained to remember.
“How did you do that, by the way?” Beezle asked, and his voice sounded funny.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Call up nightfire.”
I stared at him. “Nightfire? What the hell is that?”
“Funny you should mention hell,” Beezle muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Beezle said, shaking his head. “Anyway, how did you call it?”
My brain felt a little fuzzy around the edges. “I have no freaking clue. I didn’t even know that Agents could call nightfire.”
Strangely, Beezle looked relieved by this pronouncement. “So what happened, then?”
“I don’t know. That thing was talking about Mom . . . talking about eating her as if she were an hors d’oeuvre. And I just got so angry. All of a sudden I felt all this power build up inside and it hurt me to keep it there, so I let it go. Wait,” I said, remembering why I had been below that overpass in the first place. “Wait. What happened to the monster? To Patrick?”
“The monster . . . ran away,” Beezle said. There was something about the way he said it that made me think he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. But before I could pursue that line of inquiry, he spoke again. “Patrick was dead, Maddy. He was dead before we even got there.”