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  “Now sit,” the woman said.

  Glad for a seat, Daley complied. She tapped the top of her head. “It landed right in the middle there.”

  The woman said, “Right where it needed to,” and started to probe Daley’s scalp with her fingertips.

  “You know about these things then?”

  “It’s called an ‘alaret,’ and they tend to be deadly.”

  Daley’s stomach did a flip. “It knocked me out but … deadly?”

  “Very. In all my days keeping watch here, you are the first one I’ve seen survive. We have a saying about the alaret’s victims: ‘Of a thousand struck down, nine hundred and ninety-nine will die.’”

  Daley could barely speak. “How … how long have I got?”

  “Oh, not to worry. They kill you right away or not at all. But as I said, we have never seen anyone survive until you.”

  Relief flooded through her as she said, “‘We’?”

  “My people: the Desert Cahuilla—the Torres-Martinez tribe.”

  Well, now Daley knew her tribe. Not that it meant a damn thing to her.

  The woman continued fiddling with Daley’s scalp. “My name is Juana. And yours?”

  “Daley.”

  Her fingers stopped. “No one names their daughter ‘Daley.’ Tell me the truth.”

  She sighed. “Stanka Daley.”

  “I’m sorry,” Juana said.

  Was she hard of hearing?

  “I said—”

  “Oh, I know what you said. I’m just sorry that’s your name.”

  “Not as sorry as me. You know how long it takes in high school for ‘Stanka’ to become ‘Stinka’ or ‘Skanka’?”

  “I will guess two seconds.”

  “Try half that.”

  “Stanka … I’ve been around awhile and never heard that one before. Who would name their baby girl Stanka?”

  “A Bulgarian father.”

  Juana frowned. “I know Bulgarians, but none named Stanka. And they are lighter than you.”

  “My mum said my father was what she called ‘swarthy.’”

  “And so are you, a little, but your eyes are blue.”

  “I wound up with my mum’s Irish eyes. She told me my father insisted on naming me Stanka because it was his grandmother’s name.”

  Daley understood reverence for a grandmother. Her father was murdered on the day of her birth and she lost her mother to cancer when she was thirteen. Her maternal grandmother took her in and gave her a warm and loving home.

  “I shall call you Daley, as you said.” Juana then showed her a handful of black hair. “You will find out soon enough so I might as well tell you now: It’s falling out.”

  “That’s mine?” Daley grabbed it. “Oh, shit. Oh, crap.”

  “Not to worry. Legend says it will grow back.”

  “What else does legend say?”

  “That you will never be alone.”

  “‘Never be…’ What does that even mean?”

  Juana shrugged. “Everything is open to interpretation.”

  “But I like being alone. I’m not exactly a people person.”

  Juana seemed not to have heard, or perhaps simply ignored the remark.

  “Where is the alaret?”

  “In the back of my car.”

  “I must have it.”

  Daley shook her head. “No way. I’m taking it to UCLA or USC or someplace where someone can tell me what it is.”

  “You already know what it is. I have told you.”

  “Yeah, well, I appreciate that and all, but I’m afraid folktales won’t cut it with something that knocked me out cold and is…” She reached up, tugged at the point of her skull, and came away with another handful of hair. “And is making me bald!” Daley was aware of the woman staring at her. “What?”

  “Dawn has come. I will drive you back where you can arrange to have your car towed.”

  Daley wasn’t worried about the junker Jeep. She’d tell the Indio garage owner where he could find it.

  “My real car is in Coachella.”

  “Then I will take you there.”

  What was going on here? “Why are you doing this for me?”

  Juana smiled. “You survived the alaret. You are one in a thousand. It is my duty to help and guide you now.”

  Seriously? Was she talking about like a spirit guide or something? Daley wasn’t in the market for a life coach—last thing she wanted, in fact—but a free ride was a free ride.

  Then she thought about touching that dead thing.

  “Before we go, do you have a bag you can spare for the alaret?”

  Juana pulled one of those flimsy plastic grocery bags from a drawer in the kitchenette.

  Daley had to laugh. “Where did you get that?”

  “Like it says: Stater Brothers.”

  “But these things have been banned like forever.”

  “They don’t go bad. And in case you failed to notice, I tend to save things.” She picked up a set of keys from the counter. “Follow me.”

  Outside, the sun had yet to clear the mountains but the sky was turning a faint blue. In the light she was startled to see that the lumpiness of the trailer’s skin was due to a random assortment of seashells glued to the metal, and the whole thing painted an awful light green.

  She ran a hand over them. “Did you used to live at the beach?”

  “Never.” She sounded insulted.

  “Then where—?”

  Juana gestured to the desert around them. “Right here. This whole valley used to be underwater, from above Palm Springs all the way down to the Gulf of California, one big inland sea. Dig most anywhere and you’ll find shells.”

  All very interesting, but Daley wanted to get back to her car.

  “Fascinating, but can we get going?”

  “Yes—going to Coachella. Did you know it was supposed to be called ‘Conchilla’? Concha is Spanish for shell. But the original mapmaker screwed up and printed it as ‘Coachella’ and the name stuck.”

  “Well, I know you have the Salton Sea.”

  “A mere puddle on the fault.”

  “Which fault?”

  “The big one—San Andreas. Runs right down the middle of the valley. Come this way.”

  She followed her around back to where a tarp-covered object sat between the RV and a big propane tank.

  “I don’t believe this,” Daley said. “Is that…?”

  Juana pulled off the tarp to reveal an old Harley with a sidecar attached.

  “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Juana slapped the sidecar. “Take those cinder blocks out and get in.”

  Daley didn’t know about this. She couldn’t say Juana was too old to be driving a hog, but she was no spring chicken either.

  “Are you sure?”

  “This is how I get around.”

  “Who’s the sidecar for?”

  “It’s handy. Used to be my dog’s, but he up and died. Now I keep it hooked on for groceries and supplies and better balance.” She handed Daley a banged-up helmet. “Put this on.”

  Daley took it but could only stand and stare as Juana jammed an ancient leather helmet onto her head and adjusted huge goggles over her eyes. She followed those with a long scarf she wrapped around and around her neck.

  “Aren’t you worried you’re gonna choke?” Daley said.

  “Better than ending up like Isadora Duncan.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” She gestured to the helmet in Daley’s hands. “What are you waiting for?”

  3

  Juana handled the Harley like a seasoned biker. It seemed she’d been back and forth to the cave so many times the bike knew the way on its own.

  When they reached the Jeep, Daley hesitated after lifting the rear hatch. She stood there, Stater Brothers bag in hand, and stared at the alaret where it lay limp and flat and gray, just as she’d left it. She tried but couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

  “Juana
, would … would you mind putting it in the bag?”

  Still straddling the bike, Juana said, “It won’t bite you. It’s dead. Dead things don’t bite.”

  “I know, but it’s skeevy.”

  “What’s ‘skeevy’?” She raised a hand before Daley could try to explain. “Never mind. Your face says it all.”

  She stepped up beside Daley, grabbed the bag—none too gently—and, with a two-finger grip, placed the alaret inside—very gently, almost reverently. Then she carried it back to the Harley and placed it in one of the saddlebags.

  Daley had felt slightly ridiculous riding to the Jeep in the sidecar, but once they got on the 86 and started racing north, she felt like a totally retro dork, sending up thanks every minute for the helmet’s dark visor.

  She’d always traveled this route behind the wheel, never as a passenger, so she leaned back and took in the scenery. Almost surreal. Mountain ranges to the east and west, their bases obscured by a ground-hugging haze in the low desert between—really low, as in below-sea-level low. Patches of virtually bare sand alternating with lush green farms with irrigators spraying, then back to trackless desert. She’d never really wondered where LA got all its palm trees, but now she knew: the desert south of Coachella sported acre after acre of palm-tree farms between stretches of bare sand.

  She was even more thankful for the helmet once they reached Coachella. She doubted any of her angry scamees would be out at this hour, but on the off chance they were, they’d never recognize her. She directed Juana to the Walmart parking lot on Avenue 48 where she’d left her Subaru Crosstrek.

  As Daley extricated herself from the sidecar, Juana lifted her goggles and said, “Your life will change now.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wish I knew. We’ve never had to deal with a survivor before.”

  This wasn’t making a whole lotta sense. But then, the source was a native woman who lived alone in the desert.

  “Well, thanks for the ride.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can. You need only ask.”

  Daley couldn’t see that happening, but said, “I appreciate that.”

  “You know where to find me.”

  As Juana adjusted her goggles and started rolling away, Daley remembered—

  “Hey! You’ve still got the alaret!”

  “And I’m keeping it.”

  “No, wait.” Daley started toward her. “You can’t. It’s mine.”

  “An alaret belongs to no one!” Juana looked angry now. “They are sacred. We have a ceremony for their remains. They must not be defiled and their home must not be disturbed.”

  She couldn’t be serious. “But I need to know—”

  “You know all you need to know. Alarets have a purpose, a destiny, and you are now part of that destiny.”

  With that she twisted the throttle and roared off.

  For an instant Daley considered chasing her, then rejected it. What was she going to do—run her off the road and wrestle her for the damn thing? Truth was, she was feeling pretty good right now. Except for losing her hair—no little thing, for sure—she seemed no worse for the incident. Probably better to simply let it go and let it be.

  And, of course, stay out of caves in the future.

  4

  “I don’t get it.”

  Rhys Pendry stared at the computer screen. He’d run last night’s images as he did every weekday morning, but on this particular morning he’d run them three times, and each pass had yielded the typical array of interpretations from the scrolls. But each pass included an added message at the bottom:

  A PAIRING HAS OCCURRED

  He’d never seen it before. A “pairing”? What did that mean? A pairing of what?

  Time to call the expert.

  He grabbed the intercom handset and punched 1—his father’s office.

  “Yes, Rhys.”

  “Hey, Dad. I just ran last night’s scans and keep getting this weird message tagged on to the end: ‘A pairing has occurred.’ You ever seen that before?”

  “New one on me. Run them again.”

  “I already have—three times, in fact—and keep getting the same thing.”

  “How odd. Shoot it over to me and I’ll see what I can make of it.”

  Rhys captured a screenshot and zapped the image to his father’s desk, then followed on foot.

  Rhys’s father, Elis Pendry, had started the Pendry Fund in 1992, four years before Rhys was born. He limited his clientele to the four other families of the Pendry Clan. That way he could keep his investment strategy secret.

  Rhys was learning that strategy. An ill-informed outsider would no doubt laugh it off as astrology and be done with it. But while technically correct, the comparison was as inept as it was inaccurate—like equating algebra with quantum physics. The levels of complexity were like night and day.

  The door to his father’s office stood open so Rhys breezed through. The Pendry Fund took up much of the first floor of the Lodge and the family lived on the second. Like his parents’ master suite right above, his father’s office offered a primo view. Set in the Sawtooth foothills, the Lodge had a commanding view of the lower Imperial Valley.

  “You were right to bring this to my attention,” his father said without looking up from his monitor. “Most odd.”

  A trim man in his midsixties, Elis Pendry wore his dark hair long and combed it straight back. He sported a few wrinkles around the dark eyes and some gray at his temples, but could easily pass for ten years younger. When he and Rhys were in the same room, no one ever had a problem pairing them as father and son.

  Rhys cruised to the giant windows and gazed down at the patchwork quilt of varying shades of green that ran down the center of the valley, all the way to Baja.

  Amazing how a steady supply of water could turn a desert wasteland into a breadbasket.

  The desert wasn’t vanquished, however. It waited patiently, bordering the farmlands and stretching to the base of the mountains, ready to reclaim its territory and reassert its dominance if the water ran out.

  Directly below the Lodge sat the sleepy little desert town of Nespodee Springs. And out in the flat wasteland between the town and the farms lay acres of solar panels to the south, and a pinwheeling wind farm to the north.

  “Negative results on a superficial search of the Scrolls for ‘pairing,’” his father said. “I’m going to run a deep dive to see if anything pops up.”

  The Scrolls … informally known as The Void Scrolls, formally titled Teachings of the Empty Places, had been discovered by Rhys’s triple great-grandfather Alwyn Pendry in a Cairo souq, and they’d changed the course of the clan’s life.

  Not necessarily for the good, in Rhys’s opinion. The Scrolls had sparked Alwyn to form a silly cult of worship around the entities described in the tales they recounted.

  Total bullshit.

  On the good side they’d persuaded his double great-grandfather Osian to move the clan from Wales to Southern California’s Imperial Valley.

  Rhys loved the Imperial Valley. Too bad it was in California.

  His father, a true believer, had digitized and indexed the Scrolls. He used the star charts within to guide decisions for the clan and, most important, its investments. Telescopic cameras on the roof of the Lodge took nightly photos of the skies which were digitized and run through the computers to be compared to the ancient charts in the Scrolls.

  Rhys would have called bullshit again, except he couldn’t argue with the results. The astronomy-based Pendry strategy had backed the fund out of tech stocks before the rupture of the dot-com bubble, retreated from the entire market before the post–9/11 crash, the 2007 recession, and the Internet-triggered crash earlier this month. They were now in the process of buying back in. As a result of all these moves, the financial status of the five families who made up the Pendry Clan could be summed up by the simple phrase sitting pretty.

  A soft grunt f
rom his father made him turn in time to see an odd expression cross his features.

  “Something wrong, Dad? You look spooked.”

  “I’m not spooked. Just an odd conjunction in the heavens bringing up a suitably odd interpretation from the Scrolls.”

  “The ‘pairing’?”

  His father nodded. “According to the Scrolls, the ‘pairing’ refers to something called a Duad.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m going to have to do some deeper digging. It may be good news, it may be bad.”

  “And if it’s bad?”

  His father’s eyes narrowed. “Then we’ll deal with it—decisively.”

  The man strides downtown along West 6th Street, slightly hunched against the February wind cutting across the open space of Pershing Square and swirling around the corner up ahead. He’s hungry and looking forward to a burger and a brew for lunch. His view of the street ahead of him suddenly dissolves into a vision of a huge, contorted face leering horribly. For an instant he thinks he can feel the brush of its breath on his face. Then it vanishes.

  He stops and blinks. What was that? He’s never experienced anything like it before. He tentatively scrapes a foot forward to start walking again and kicks up a cloud of—

  —dust. An arid wasteland surrounds him and the sun regards him cruelly, reddening and blistering his skin. And when he feels his blood is about to boil, the sky is suddenly darkened by the wings of a huge featherless bird that circles twice then dives in his direction at a speed that must smash them both. Closer, the cavernous beaked mouth is open and hungry. Closer, until he is—

  —back on the street. The man leans against the comforting solidity of a nearby building. He is bathed in sweat and his respiration is ragged, gulping. Must find a doctor. He pushes away from the building and—

  —falls into a black void. But not a peaceful blackness … hunger there. He falls, tumbling in eternity. A light below. As he nears, the light takes shape … an albino worm, blind, fanged, and miles long, awaits him with gaping jaws.

  A scream tears from him, a scream with no sound.

  Still he falls. But the horror has just begun. It becomes unspeakable.

  5

  Daley drove straight from Coachella to her place in North Hollywood. She’d have liked someplace flashier than her dinky one-bedroom rental above a bookstore on Burbank Boulevard, but the price was right and it served her needs for now.