I swallowed another mouthful of palinca. “It was partly by accident, but mostly through the fortune-telling. I don’t have any kind of natural ability for it, not like Amelia, but even the dumbest person in the world has some psychic sensitivity. Even though I never really believed in it, I guess I dealt out so many Tarot cards and read so many tea leaves, I started to make contact with the spirit world.”

  “And this Misquamacus? What’s his beef?”

  “His beef is that he doesn’t like America occupied by white people, or any other kind of people for that matter, only Indians. He tried to call down his ancient gods to get rid of us, but that didn’t work, so he tried to demolish all of our buildings, but that didn’t work. So this time it looks as if he’s using one of our own superstitions to get rid of us. It’s like spiritual karate—use your enemy’s own strength against him. Like al Qaeda used our own airplanes, only this is going to be a million times worse.”

  “But he went back into the mirror,” said Jenica. “He was about to seize me, but then he turned away. If he is a Native American, and not Romanian, why could I send him back with a ritual that was meant for svarcolaci?”

  “Well, I guess your ritual must have weakened his host,” I suggested. “But I’m pretty sure that this bone had a lot to do with it. I waved it at him, and all of these words came out of my mouth and it wasn’t even me speaking. And it buzzed, you know. I felt like Luke Skywalker with a light saber.”

  Gil took the bone, and waved it from side to side. “Maybe it’s some kind of magic wand.”

  “Of a kind, yes, it probably is. My guess is that Misquamacus used it to wake up Vasile Lup, and that he left it in his casket for a reason.”

  “If you are right,” said Jenica, “perhaps we can do to this wonder-worker what he is trying to do to us, and use his own weapon against him.”

  I took the bone back. “First of all, I think we need to find out exactly what it is, and how to use it.”

  “And how do you suggest we do that?”

  “We ask the expert. My spirit guide, Singing Rock.”

  Gil stared at me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  I lit three of Jenica’s spicy candles and arranged Singing Rock’s bracelet around the biggest of them. We had finished almost the whole bottle of palinca between us, and although Jenica had opened a tin of Romanian tea cookies, I was feeling slightly unsteady, to say the least, like crossing over to Staten Island on a choppy day.

  While I was preparing the table, Gil went around the Dragomir apartment and broke every mirror he could find, although he hesitated when he came to the gilt-framed antiques. Jenica took the baseball bat away from him and smashed them herself. “Better that my father comes home to find a few broken mirrors, rather than a dead daughter.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I told her. “How about one more shot of palinca, to give us some Romanian courage?”

  “I’ll grant you one thing, Harry,” said Gil. “You can sure put it away.”

  “I’ve had a disappointing life, Gil, that’s why.”

  “You know what your trouble is, buddy? You expect too much. Me, I’ve never expected nothing, so everything that’s ever come my way, it’s like a bonus, you know?”

  “Gil—I’ve never expected nothing, either, but that’s precisely what I got. Nothing.”

  We sat around the table. I thought that we were all looking exhausted. All of the adrenaline that had charged us up while we were fighting the strigoi had drained away now, and none of us had slept well. But I needed to talk to Singing Rock, if only to confirm that it was Misquamacus who was wreaking so much havoc in New York City, and to tell me if this decorated bone was really as powerful a weapon as I thought it was.

  I clasped my hands together and said, “Singing Rock, I know that I’ve been making a whole lot of demands on you lately, but I really need some advice. It looks like it was Misquamacus who brought all of these vampires back to life, and if that’s the case, we’re in much more serious trouble here than I first imagined, even though I never imagined that we weren’t in serious trouble, only this is a whole lot more seriouser. You know, given that Misquamacus is just about as powerful as any enemy that you could think of.”

  Gil frowned at me, but Jenica gave him a little shake of her head. Jenica knew that you didn’t need to be too logical when it came to summoning up spirits. It was your concentration that counted, your belief.

  “Singing Rock, I know that you’re probably going to be very reluctant to square up to Misquamacus again. He killed you, after all. But there has to be a way of beating him again, and I’m ready to take him on myself, but I really need some tips about how to do it.”

  I carried on for over fifteen minutes, begging and cajoling Singing Rock to help me. As time went by, I even began to lose my temper. “All right, don’t help me! I don’t give a rat’s ass! I’m a white man, leave me to fight your Indian demon all by myself! I don’t need any help from you!”

  Jenica reached across the table and held my hand. “He is not coming tonight, is he? Never mind, maybe we should get some sleep and think about what we are going to do.”

  “Yeah, come on, man,” said Gil. “Let’s finish the bottle and crash out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. He’s probably sick of trying to help me.”

  We drained the last of the plum brandy. Gil told us some long and rambling story about trying to teach the Bosnians to play baseball, and totally lost the thread. I helped him to bed, even though I was so drunk that I nearly fell into bed next to him.

  Jenica stayed up a little longer, but she was still recovering from the shock and strangeness of what had happened today, and she didn’t say too much.

  Before she went to bed, however, she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “I think I have to thank you. I think that creature would have killed me today, if not for you.”

  “You were very brave,” I told her. “I think that it would have killed all of us, if you hadn’t said that ritual. Misquamacus is hiding inside Vasile Lup, and ifVasile Lup has to go back to his casket, then what is Misquamacus going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all about Native American magic.”

  “It’s very strong. That’s because it takes its power from the elements. From water, and wind, and earth, and fire.”

  “I am sorry that your spirit guide did not come to you.”

  “Well, me too. He’s probably sulking. But don’t worry, we’ll think of something.”

  “Harry?”

  I don’t quite know what she wanted to say to me, but when people are stressed or frightened they often say very emotional things that they don’t really mean. In my experience they do, anyhow. So all I did was squeeze her hand and say, “Sleep well, okay?”

  19

  BLOOD PACT

  I opened my eyes. It was 3:47 in the morning and the first hallucinatory light of dawn was beginning to lighten up the sky toward the east. I lifted my head from Razvan Dragomir’s sandbag of a pillow, and Singing Rock was sitting in a chair in the opposite corner of the room.

  “Singing Rock?”

  “Of course, little brother. You didn’t really think that I would leave you to fight alone against Misquamacus, did you?”

  I shuffled on my butt down to the end of the bed, like a kid. “Did you know it was Misquamacus? Right from the beginning?”

  “No. He concealed himself very well. I only caught the smell of him when your friend recited her ritual, and the spirit in which he is hiding himself started to weaken.”

  “Vasile Lup, the Vampire Gatherer.”

  “A spirit, yes, and the spirit of a very strong man, a warrior. But only a man, and not a wonder-worker, like Misquamacus.”

  It was so dark in the corner where Singing Rock was sitting that I couldn’t see more than his outline—the shine from his glasses, and his combed-back hair, and the buffalo-bone necklace that he always used to wear.

  “I thought that I had gotten rid of Misquamacus for good,” I told him. “I thought that he was totally dispersed, into the elements.”

  “You did, and he was. But one element is greater than all of the others, and that is fire. Fire can dry water, and split rock, and fire can swallow the very air that men breathe. It was fire that brought Misquamacus back to life—fire that fused his soul back together again.”

  “Fire? What fire?”

  “A fire that killed many, but which had far greater consequences. A fire that burned at one thousand four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and was intense enough to draw back together the separated parts of his being.”

  “You mean—you mean nine-eleven? The World Trade towers?”

  “I have spoken to the souls of many who died that day. Each one of them remembers a great light, and a great rush of wind, and a word spoken in a language that they could not understand. Some of them believed that it was a last Islamic prayer, as the terrorists offered themselves to Allah. But the word they heard was ‘Ma’iitsoh!’”

  “ ‘Ma’iitsoh?’What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘Wolf’in Navajo. It was Misquamacus calling for the spirit of Vasile Lup to rise up, so that he could possess him. After Misquamacus was dispersed to the elements, he no longer would have had any coherent spiritual substance of his own, so he could not have appeared in the world of men without Vasile Lup’s spirit to wear . . . like a borrowed suit of clothes.”

  I climbed off the bed and went to the window. The sky was growing lighter and lighter, and I imagined that all of the strigoi who now infested Manhattan were slinking back to their coffins, or their mirrors, or wherever they were hiding during the day.

  “You were going to warn me about Vasile Lup,” I said. “You warned me about the strigoi, for sure, but you never got round to Lup.”

  “I did, but once your friend had told you about the strigoi, you stopped looking for the signs. Don’t you remember walking past the Hudson Street Grill?”

  I smacked the back of my head. “You’re right. Hudson Street Grill, with only the ‘l’ still lit up, and ‘supper’ with only the ‘up’. ‘L’ and ‘up’. Lup. Mind you—I probably wouldn’t have realized what it meant.”

  “It is of no consequence now. You have discovered who your enemy really is, and you know that he is far more dangerous than Vasile Lup.”

  “But if Misquamacus can’t appear in the real world without using Vasile Lup—we can seal Lup back in his casket, can’t we, and then Misquamacus won’t be able to get out?”

  “Misquamacus gives Vasile Lup’s spirit a far greater resistance to your friend’s rituals than he normally would have possessed. Vasile Lup has considerable strength of his own, but Misquamacus has also given him the influence of the Great Old Ones. Your friend’s ritual was able to weaken Vasile Lup, yes, to the point where Misquamacus had to reveal himself, but it was not enough to force him to return to his casket.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “You must follow Vasile Lup, and find out where he is hiding during the hours of daylight. Even with your friend’s ritual, you won’t be able to send him back to his casket because Misquamacus won’t allow it. You will have to destroy him, utterly, so that Misquamacus no longer has a spirit in which to hide himself.”

  “I see. But Vasile Lup hides in mirrors. How am I going to corner him, without smashing every single mirror in the continental United States?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I know Native American magic, but nothing of svarcolaci.”

  “Well, you’re a terrific help. Not.”

  “I am always willing to give you my advice, little brother, but I cannot tell you what I do not know.”

  I sat down on the end of the bed again. As the morning brightened, Singing Rock’s image grew fainter and fainter, and now I could barely see him at all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there’s no easy answer.”

  “There is one thing I can help you with. I can help you to fight against the strigoi, and if the strigoi are beaten, Vasile Lup will no longer have an army to protect him.”

  I looked up. “You can do that? How?”

  “Have you ever heard of Changing Woman?”

  “No. Except that she sounds like every woman I ever tried to have a relationship with.”

  “The story of Changing Woman is the Navajo story of creation. In the time before time began, the world was ruled by the Great Old Ones, who were the gods of chaos and destruction. Those were the gods that Misquamacus first called upon to destroy the white man, and which are still giving him strength.”

  Singing Rock was talking in that deep, portentous voice he always used for telling Native American legends, but I was too tired to rib him—and, besides, if he knew something that could help us to beat the strigoi, I wanted to hear it.

  “In those times the world was terrorized by monsters that the Navajo used to call Binaayee’, and it was a place of darkness and appalling violence. Almost all of the human race had been slaughtered, except for First Man and First Woman, along with their two young children. But First Man and First Woman were too old to bear any more children, and their children were related by blood.

  “One day, however, a black cloud came down upon the mountain Ch’ooli’i’i, and there was thunder and lightning around its peak. First Man climbed the mountain and found a turquoise figurine. It was only the size of a small baby, yet it had the body of a fully grown woman. He took the figurine back to First Woman, and at first they were unsure of what to do with it, so First Woman suggested they take it back to the top of the mountain.

  “Up on the mountaintop, in a storm, Nilchi the Wind transformed the figurine into two living deities, Changing Woman, and her sister White Shell Woman.

  “Changing Woman and White Shell Woman felt very strong attractions toward the elements. So one day Changing Woman lay naked on the mountainside, with her thighs wide apart, and opened the lips of her vagina with her fingers so that the Sun could shine its warmth directly inside her as it made its way across the sky. White Shell Woman did the same in a shallow stream, letting the water flow into her body.

  “In four days, both women discovered that they were pregnant, and in four more days they both delivered boys. White Shell Woman’s son was named Water Child and Changing Woman’s son was named Monster Slayer.

  “Four days later, when he was grown up, Changing Woman’s son called on his father the Sun to help him to exterminate the Binaayee’. Like the strigoi, the Binaayee’ could be fatally burned by sunlight, and when Changing Woman’s son had picked up their scent, and dug them out of their dark hiding places under the earth, he would shine his eyes on them and incinerate them into ashes.

  “Changing Woman’s son killed all of the Binaayee’ and so the world became a safer place where humans could flourish once more. All his hundreds of children were born to be monster slayers, too, so that the tribes would no longer be threatened by creatures from the time before time began. Monster Slayer’s children were called People-With-Sun-Behind-Their-Eyes.

  “Monster Slayer had the constancy of his father and the changeability of his mother—both different, yet in harmony, which is the way in which all Navajo men and women were encouraged to live.

  “Changing Woman said, ‘You are male and I am female. You are of sky and I am of earth. You are constant in your brightness but I must change with the seasons. You move constantly at the edge of heaven while I must be fixed in one place. Remember, as different as we are, you and I, we are of one spirit. Unlike each other as we are, there can be no harmony in the universe as long as there is no harmony between us.’

  “Changing Woman rubbed skin from different parts of her body and each time she did so, she created two adult males and two adult females, and these males and females created clans of their own—the Bit’ahnii, the Within-His-Cover People; the T-d’ch’ ’nii, the Bitter Water Clan; the Hashtu’ishnii, the Mud Clan; and many others.

  “She took all of these people to the west, where they lived together in prosperity and peace. This was centuries ago, in the time when time had just begun. But Changing Woman is still alive today, because she constantly rejuvenates herself, with every season. As winter approaches, she becomes a grandmother, all curled up. But in spring she hobbles on a cane of white shell and walks into a room to the east, and grows stronger. Then she takes a cane of turquoise, and walks into a room to the west, and comes out a proud young woman. Finally she walks into a north-facing room, and returns as a young girl so beautiful that people bow their heads in wonder.

  “She is the cycle of human life. She goes forward, with the seasons, and the turning of the sun, yet she walks in the opposite direction, from old age to youth. Do you understand, little brother?”

  “Well,” I said, uneasily. It was a fascinating legend—even more entertaining than Adam and Eve and the Serpent. But I couldn’t see how it going to help us to destroy the strigoi.

  Singing Rock must have read my mind. He opened his left hand and held it out flat, and then his right hand. “On one side, Harry Erskine, you have the demons of darkness and chaos, who are trying to destroy you. On the other, you have the power of human life, and fertility, and light.

  “You have to ask Changing Woman to help you. Only she can call on her son the Monster Slayer, the People-With-Sun-Behind-Their-Eyes, and only they can kill the strigoi for you.”

  “Is that it? That’s all I have to do? Talk to the mother of all human creation?”

  Singing Rock nodded.

  “And what do I say—like, always supposing that I can get in touch with her? ‘Dear Changing Woman, I’d really appreciate it if you could send your boys around to kick some strigoi ass for me?’ ”

  “Why do you always mock?”

  “Because I’m confused, that’s why, and I’m scared shitless, and I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to call on Changing Women or any other kind of gods. Sure, I believe you believe in all of this earth-mother stuff, and monster slayers, and I believe it all exists, in some reality, someplace. I’ve seen it, and I’m talking to you, aren’t I, and by all the usual criteria you don’t exist. But it’s not my culture, is it? I don’t have any affinity with it, I don’t have any faith. It’s like asking me to talk to Buddah.”