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  The guy with his arm squeezing her neck wasn’t getting the message.

  James pulled back, confused, still fixed on her. “Let her go.”

  “What? What do—”

  “Let her go!” he snapped.

  The arm released its grip.

  Darcy doubled over, gasping. Oxygen flooded her lungs, seeped into her blood, swarmed her with life. She breathed deep and hard, and they watched her.

  “What’s wrong with you fools?” the one who’d choked her said. “You think this will bring Samantha back from the dead? We have this whore dead to rights here and I’m be—”

  “Shut up!” Darcy screamed, jerking her head around to face him.

  He returned her stare, speechless.

  She stood up, rubbing her throat. The anger she’d felt before dread had set in returned with a vengeance. “You want me to sing? Is that what you want? You want your pretty little rock star to sing for you? Huh?”

  Darcy glanced over their shoulders. A few from the edge of the crowd were looking their way, but no sign of the cavalry.

  “Go ahead,” she said, glaring at them again. “Beg me. Beg me! Beg me, James. Beg the rocker girl you tried to kill for forgiveness.”

  His faced had lightened a shade. “Please . . .”

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you!”

  “I—”

  “Shut up. Get on your knees.”

  They hesitated, so she put it another way. “You know you should grovel at my feet for what you’ve done. It’s unforgivable! Get on your knees! Now!”

  They sank to their knees, all five of them, and Darcy learned then that she didn’t need to look at each one as long as they were looking at her eyes. They seemed to be more responsive than Annie Ruling.Why? Because of her own passion, perhaps.

  She paced in front of them, breathing deeply. “You’re petrified, aren’t you? Well, you should be. You should feel terrified by yourselves.”

  Tears sprang to the eyes of the one in the red shirt. “Please, oh please, we’re so sorry.”

  They were like putty in her hands, she thought.Not robots who would do whatever she wanted them to do, but minds inclined to do what she could convince them was the right thing.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “And I don’t want you to tell anyone what happened here. You don’t tell them you tried to lynch me, and you don’t tell them you broke down like a bunch of babies. You hear?”

  They all nodded except for James, who still looked like he’d been hit by a comet.

  “James? You hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Get up.”

  They stood.

  “Now shake my hand, so anyone watching believes we were just messing around.”

  She shook their hands one by one, then left them standing by Zephaniah Smith’s tombstone.

  So . . . now she knew. She most certainly did have a gifted voice and it wasn’t giving out. The power of it made her dizzy.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  BOULDER CITY High School had been flattened to the ground and rebuilt three years earlier to accommodate the swelling student body, a move that had sparked outrage from those who thought adding trailers to the old school would suffice in the face of rising taxes.

  From the air, the academic halls looked like a plus sign, a Swiss cross, with a large circular atrium at the center. Directly to the west stood the gymnasium and lunchroom. All new, all beautifully furnished thanks to the taxpayers.

  But the real beauty of the campus lay outside the buildings. Here the desert had been transformed into a lush greenway that could be mistaken for a golf course at first look. Twenty acres of manicured lawn, broken by small pockets of desert landscape and gazebos where students could escape the sun to study or loiter.

  The greenway ended at a small concrete pond with a twenty-foot-high fountain that sprayed water behind a placard: From the Desert Rises a Fertile Mind, Never to Be Wasted.

  As was so often the case, when the dust settled and the buildings stood proud, the tax-hike controversy had been long forgotten.

  Other controversies among the 2,429 students that roamed the beautiful new campus, however, were new every morning.

  Like every school in the United States, the race-religion controversy was more felt than spoken, because the public school system had long ago learned that some things were best left out of the classroom. Issues like freedom of religious expression, which had taken a brutal beating early in the century. Like politics, which was best discussed at home. Issues like racial prejudice, which had come full circle in its failure to be resolved. After all, whites, the historical perpetrators of most racial discrimination in the United States, were now a minority.

  But the lynchings in Kansas City over the past week had sparked a flame among the students in most schools across the country, and Boulder City High was no exception. Principal Joseph Durst had used the public address system for a reasoned speech about the absurdity of racially motivated hate crimes. “Tolerance, students, is the pathway to harmony. Diversity should be celebrated, not snuffed out. Just remember we live in the twenty-first century, not the Dark Ages.”

  Although his intentions were undoubtedly sincere, the announcement only highlighted the news of the two latest lynchings in a Kansas City graveyard this morning.

  Katrina Kivi walked down the covered walkway that led to the first set of gazebos in the yard, as they called it. The fountain rose majestically a hundred yards directly ahead. Carla walked beside her, noisily popping gum, rambling on about how Mexicans were worse than the whites and if there was anyone the cops should suspect, it should be a Chicano.

  Katrina Kivi couldn’t say that she didn’t care, but compared to events that had forever altered her own world these past twenty-four hours, two hangings in a Kansas City graveyard, however tragic, seemed distant.

  In fact, most of the day had felt disconnected from Kat. Like everything around her was actually part of a world to which she didn’t belong. She’d awoken to discover that she was really an alien and had been sent here at birth by the mother ship as part of an experiment.

  She dressed the same: blue jeans, black blouse. Still had the snake tattoo on her shoulder blade that could just be seen slithering around her neck when she wore a T-shirt. Same dark hair, same hazel eyes, same skull ring on her left forefinger.

  But she didn’t feel like the same person who walked down this very same outdoor walkway with Carla and Jay yesterday.Kat’s friends had long ago agreed they were three of the school’s twenty-seven “true” witches, who didn’t dabble in the craft but lived by a respectable code.

  It was the kind of hogwash Kat normally would have shot down in flames, but she went along with this to be included. A person had to belong somewhere. Today, though, she knew that she was a foreigner even among her own clique.

  “So you gonna tell me?” Carla asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “C’mon, Kat. Don’t you try to tell me nothing’s wrong. Why you being so quiet today? You sick?”

  “No, I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine, of course. She was far better than fine.

  “Okay . . . so what happened?”

  The events of last night spun through her mind for the hundredth time since leaving Johnny’s house late last night. Her eyes had been opened to another world. She’d seen herself as she truly was, but that wasn’t the main thing.

  The main thing was that for the first time in her life she became completely and utterly aware of a greater reality, of which she was a part. Simple statements she’d once heard as distant, annoying barking dogs in the night, yapping, yapping at the world, had thundered through her mind. A huge monster had grabbed her by the hair, spun her around, and roared in her face with enough power to rip her skin off.

  Okay, that wasn’t the way Johnny had put it, but it was what had happened. Only the huge monster had turned out to be God. Not in a million years would she ha
ve figured. How ludicrous.

  God.

  Walking next to Carla now, the word sounded so . . . strange.

  “God,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “What?” She remembered that Carla was waiting for an explanation. “Never mind.” But then Kat couldn’t keep it back any longer.

  She smiled, gripped her books tight against her chest. “Carla, what if I told you that everything you thought about life was wrong?”

  Carla was looking at Charles Wright, who loitered with a group of football jocks. All blacks.“He thinks he’s so hot.” But the devilish grin on her face betrayed her infatuation with the running back, who was watching them.

  He smiled and nodded. Carla lifted her fingers in a tempered acknowledgement, then turned back to Kat.

  Carla feigned nonchalance, but her crush on Charles was well known to the group. “You see that look?” she said.

  “I saw it.” But Kat wasn’t interested in it.

  “Sorry. You were saying?”

  Kat had thought through countless ways to spill the beans to her fellow witches, and none of them seemed particularly compelling.

  “What if I told you that God was real?”

  “Yeah? So what?” Carla glanced back at the group of jocks.

  “I mean, really real? Like in Moses-in-the-ark real?” Or had she got-ten that mixed up?

  “Moses? I’d say you were starting to sound like a Muslim.”Her friend grabbed her arm playfully. “Don’t tell me you’ve decided to put aside your witchery and follow hard after Moses and Jesus! Oh, that’s just wonderful news, Kat.”

  “Muslims? Do they follow Jesus?”

  “’Course they do.” Carla’s voice was tinged with bitterness.

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Before my father converted to Islam, my family used to go to church. Trust me, I’ve had an earful. Muslims think Jesus was the only sinless person, prophet, whatever, to live. They worship the ground he walks on.”

  “They do?”

  She shrugged and grinned. “What would I know? I’m just a witch.”

  After picking herself up off the floor last night, Kat had sat on the couch and wept in Kelly’s arms for two hours as Johnny served them tea and talked about the truth of the matter, as he put it. But he hadn’t spo-ken much about religion.

  But what did that make her? She couldn’t be a witch, surely. Was she a Christian? She supposed so. She was most definitely a follower of Jesus, because in the world that her eyes had been opened to last night, there was no difference between Jesus and God. Together they’d ruthlessly and yet so lovingly ruined her to this old world, with its cars and boyfriends and designer jeans.

  How could she express all of that without sounding like a complete fool?

  Carla punched her arm. “You’re not serious, right?” They reached the gazebo and ducked out of the sun’s hot rays.

  “I . . .” As a heart attack, honey. But could she just say that? “As a heart attack, honey.”

  “Serious about what?” Carla asked. “Being a Muslim, or this bit about thinking God is real?”

  “About God.”

  “Two black crows alone in their nest, eh?” Carla and Kat faced the familiar voice, surprised to see that Asad had appeared out of nowhere with twenty or more of his friends.

  “Who you calling a crow, towel-head?” Carla snapped.

  A square white bandage covered Asad’s cheek where Kat had cut him with her fingernails yesterday. He hopped over the wall, joined by the others, mostly Arabs.

  “I am calling you a crow, you black witch. In my father’s court you would be nothing more than a slave for mopping the floor.” His eyes moved to Kat. “And you, with your milky brown skin, might make for a good whore.”

  Some of them had straddled the wall, others hung behind. All watched expectantly. And Kat didn’t have a clue what should be done.

  “This coming from the desert donkeys who have nothing better to do than to hack each other to pieces over women and oil.”

  Had Carla lost her mind?

  Asad’s face darkened. “We are Muslims who follow the Koran and do only the will of Allah. If he commands us to kill the infidels, do you suggest we turn our backs on him? If he gives us the gift of a slave like you, do you suggest we throw his gift back in his face? You filthy crow.”

  “My father’s a Muslim, you fool!” Carla shouted. “He’d come down here and twist your creamy little neck if he heard your militant, fundamentalist garbage.”

  The fact that Carla’s father was a Muslim seemed to stall Asad.

  “Not all Muslims follow the will of Allah,” one of the others said.

  “No, only those who blow themselves up for the virgins, I suppose,” Carla shot back. “Your brand of extremism is dead!”

  “What’s going on here?” The black jocks had come up behind them. Seven of them, Kat saw. “You girls okay?” Charles asked, glancing at Carla. It didn’t take Kat much to imagine that he could do as much damage off the football field as on.

  “I don’t know, are we?” Carla demanded, staring at Asad.

  Asad was surrounded by his people, and he didn’t back down easily. “From the beginning and in the end all your type will be good for is entertaining and serving the true followers of Allah.”

  “You got a death wish, boy?” Charles snapped.

  Kat finally found herself. “Stop it! Both of you!”

  She inched away from Carla, putting herself between the boys. “This isn’t right, it can’t be. And I’m to blame. So I’m going to fix it.”

  Carla stared at her as if she’d lost her marbles.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,”Asad said. “We’re going to fix it for you.”

  “No, Asad, you can’t, not like this. I’m sorry for cutting you. I’m sorry for hitting Leila.”No sign of the girl in this group. “It was wrong of me.”

  No one seemed to know what to do with that, so Kat continued.

  “This isn’t what God would want.”

  “What could a witch know about Allah?” the boy to Asad’s right said.

  So here it was, the moment of truth.

  “I’m not a witch,” she said, looking at Carla.“Not anymore. I met God yesterday and learned of his world.”

  “So now you expect us to believe that you’re an expert on Allah’s world?” Asad said. “What do you know about Allah? Christians and Hindus don’t follow Allah!”

  “Allah means God, right? I may not be familiar with who prays to which God yet, but I know that this isn’t his way. If you were to see his world, you’d fall on your faces, crying out in fear and love!”

  The words sounded idiotic here in the gazebo. Carla was still staring at her, dumbstruck. The jocks looked like they’d rather be slamming into a defensive line than facing off with a girl spouting Allah talk.

  Johnny had introduced her to Jesus, so she dispensed with the God-Allah talk and spoke to the heart of the matter.

  “You worship Jesus, right?”

  “I worship no one but Allah.”

  “Okay, whatever, you worship the ground Jesus walks on if I remember correctly. You think he’d go for this?”

  “Since when are you into Jesus?” Carla asked.

  “I’m just saying, Carla, we got witches facing off Muslims and Arabs facing off blacks.Where does this end? Where’s the room for love in that way of thinking? We should be loving each other, not trying to figure out how to cut each other’s throats.”

  “Not if those throats refuse to pray to Allah,” Asad said.

  Kat whipped her head back to the boy. “Come on, you really think that’s what Jesus taught? Don’t Muslims believe he’s the sinless prophet? Shouldn’t we all follow his teachings?”

  She was hardly the expert on Islam or Jesus, and undoubtedly she was full of mistakes that Johnny would help correct, but her reasoning sounded decent to her. And she knew that the love she’d felt last night after her initial meltdown was ava
ilable to Asad and Carla as well.

  “As Allah wills it,” Asad said.

  “And he does!”

  They all just stared at her.

  “Trust me, I saw him. Or myself as he sees me. My eyes were opened to the world the way God sees it, and it’s changed me. I can’t be the same ever again. I can’t, because I believe in God.”

  “Even the demons believe in God and tremble,” one of the Arabs said.

  Now it was Kat’s turn to be silenced.

  “As to the infidels . . .” Asad said, regaining some confidence.

  “Okay.” Kat nodded. “Fair enough. I have a challenge for you. Rather than cut each other up, let’s call a truce. On Monday we’ll reconvene for a debate on the true will of Allah. If I lose, you may beat me to a pulp off school grounds without any retaliation from any of my friends.”

  When the idea had first presented itself to her it had sounded brilliant. But already she wondered just how brilliant. And all of this assumed that Johnny Drake could talk the judge out of a jail sentence for her.

  Maybe the jail sentence was a better idea.

  “A debate,” Asad said.

  “Yes. On Monday, after school.”

  Asad glanced at his line, seemed to receive no help either way. He evidently took this as a positive sign.

  “Fine. On Monday.” And then he added for good measure. “Infidel.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  Day Four

  “I’M TELLING you, Billy . . .” Darcy turned from their apartment window with the Capitol’s dome framed in the backdrop, folded her arms, and drilled him with a hard stare. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  “So you’ve told me,” he said. She had woken him early, unable to sleep, all wound up. He tilted his shades down, stared past her to the graying Washington sky, then replaced them. He was losing interest in the prospect of living in the perpetual shade of sunglasses.

  “This was different. Are you even listening to me?”

  “Of course I am. I’m out of bed at six in the morning listening to you.”