Wireman

^{CHAPTER 1} THE LITTLE DEATH

She could barely breathe she was so hot. She could hear the night birds call and the rustle of her mother’s palm grass skirt as she moved about the small hut. She could see just the light from the flames of the fire in the center of the floor, but she could not make out anything beyond.

She closed her eyes to blessed darkness and wondered when she would die. She knew she would never be well again, never stand and walk, never kiss her mother’s cheek, or feel the comfort of her mother’s loving embrace. She had not lived long, a handful of years, so there was not much to miss. Yet she knew she must fight against death. She must not willingly let it take her.

A blanket of coolness slipped over her bare skin and it was not from the water her mother had been sponging onto her. She tried to reopen her eyes to discover the cause, but her lids were too heavy. She was so hot! The coolness that temporarily enveloped her was not helping. She wished they would carry her to the sea and float her in the waves.

Dark grew darker. Grew to pitch black. Grew to encompass a vast void. She struggled to take a breath. It would not come; her lungs would not obey. She thought, Death has me. Death has slipped his arms around me and holds me so tightly I cannot breathe.

Faintly she heard her mother’s wails, but she couldn’t lift a hand for her to come near, nor could she whisper the compassion she felt for the loved one she was leaving behind. She couldn’t even say goodbye.

Take me to the sea, she begged of Death. Take me from this heat and pain and let me float in the cool frothy waves. I always loved… I always loved the sea.

The heat grew like a malevolent cloud in the darkness until it filled the void. She couldn’t feel her body. She knew she was but a pinpoint of matter, a tiny bit of consciousness floating in the emptiness. It seemed time had stopped or it was moving so slowly it would last forever and nothing for her would ever change.

I’m not ready, the child complained. I’m too young.

And then she was swept off into the dark beyond where there was no more thought or heat or life.

She was done with this world.

^{CHAPTER 2} A NEW TRUE BEGINNING

“Life. A wriggling mass of cells blindly replicating, always in motion, endlessly in search of food. Is that life? They say it is.”

The girl lay dying. Her week-long fever had put her into a coma and though her mother kept bathing her with cool water, her skin felt like hot coals. Though fevered, her light coffee-colored skin shone smooth and beautiful as a river stone in the flickering firelight.

In the little one-room shack made from date palm leaves the heat was stifling. Not one stray breeze made its way through the open doorway. Flies were so thick they congealed the air and had to be batted away constantly from the comatose child.

The mother, frantic about losing her only child, knowing in her heart death stood close with a skeletal arm extended, ran from the hut crying to the night heavens. She sped along the lone path through the jungle to the witch doctor’s hovel and stood outside wailing loud enough to wake the dead.

In her native tongue she told the witch doctor about the dying child and begged for him to save her.

It seemed to take him forever to gather his special feathers, shells, rocks, and sticks tied in bundles with strings of dried pig skin. As the mother raced back along the path to her baby, the witch doctor stayed at her side, pacing her, a pale sickle moon at their backs.

Bursting into the hut where a small fire in the center of the floor burned, grotesque shadows swathed the little girl who lay against the back wall. Both mother and witch doctor knew it was over and done with.

The child’s arm lay limp off to one side, her head was turned toward them, her eyes open, glazed, and forever stilled.

The mother turned to the witch doctor and in her grief made the ultimate request. She knew of the rumors.

“They say you have raised the dead. Raise her up!”

“I have only raised a few animals,” he said. “Never a human being.”

“Raise her!”

It was true he was renowned across the island as the most powerful witch doctor ever to have lived, but what the woman was asking he thought was surely beyond his powers. He had brought a dead chicken back to life. A dead dog. And once, even a dead panther, just to see if he could. But a human being? He had not dared try. He was not even sure that the gods would allow him that kind of power.

“I will give you anything,” the mother cried. She beat her chest and rolled her eyes. “Anything! Anything!” She was close to madness.

The witch doctor’s countenance darkened, his eyes took on a glow. His gaze left the mother and settled on the child. He stepped closer, two steps. Three. He went to his haunches and studied the girl. She was undeniably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her skin was lighter than most islanders, as if it were lit from within by soft white flame. Her nose and lips and eyes and brow were perfection, and the face was shaped like a heart. Her long dark hair was smooth, shiny with whale oil, and it fell in curls like coiled snakes from her scalp. He reached out and trailed his fingers along her cheek. It was cold, so cold. It was a shame she was dead. It seemed to Mujai that the gods were intentionally cruel when children died.

Suddenly, and without knowing how it happened, the witch doctor fell in love with the dead child. If he hadn’t known better, he might have suspected he was under a spell not of his own making. His face softened, his lips parted, and he let out a little sigh. He swiveled on his haunches to face the mother at the hut’s door opening.

She was silhouetted in the firelight, a gaunt figure with clenched hands held before her breasts. He could feel her grief as if it were an extra person in the hut. It loomed over her, a dark, heavy figure bearing down on her thin shoulders.

“You will give anything if I raise her up? Anything? You will even give up your child to me?” He must make sure she meant it.

A look of dawning understanding and then dismay filled the mother’s eyes. She hung her head. Her tears kept falling, drenching her sweaty naked breasts. She had to decide. Bury her child in the cold ground or see her rise up and walk again, alive and well, but belonging to someone else. Belonging to…

“Yes,” she said, jutting out her chin in defiance. “Yes, I told you, yes. Anything. If you must take her, then take her, as long as she is alive again.”

The witch doctor stood and came to the child’s mother. “When I raise her, she will be mine. You understand? Forever mine. I will take her from here and she will live with me. One day, when she is old enough to wed, she will be my bride. Tell me you understand.”

Since the mother made no protest beyond the horror of what she was doing to her only child reflecting from her eyes, the pact was sealed.

“If you break your promise, I will kill you,” he said. “I will come in the night like a shadow and kill you.”

She turned aside, unable to look him in the face.

He left through the low door and stood a moment staring up at the starry sky from whence he derived part of his power. The sky, the earth, the sea, they all gave him just a particle of their powers, but it was enough. Enough to raise a human being he did not know yet, but enough to hope to raise one.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep away the family, let no one see her, allow no ceremony for her spirit. Tell no one, ever, of what happens here, good or bad, you understand? And while I’m gone keep the flies away too,” he added. “She must be kept clean and free of vermin.”

He hurried off into the night, loping like a gazelle. His talismans were left behind, discarded on the floor near the dead girl. For this he would not need them, and in fact, they would play no part. He required special plants that grew deep in the interior of the jungle, and water from the sea, and earth from the foot of the great sacred rock where all former witch doctors had been buried. Three times he had raised the dead with the secret potion, but if he was successful this fourth time it would be such a great accomplishment he might think himself a king rather than a witch doctor.

And the little girl would be his queen.

The island the witch doctor searched in the dark for his magic ingredients had no name for the people. Later in history it would be called Hispaniola. It was home to a few hundred aborigines who did not remember how any of them had come to be on the island and none of whom had ever tried to leave it. The land was merely home, the place where they lived out their lives. Centuries later the island would be conquered and ruled by the Spanish, who changed the name to Santo Domingo. In 1697 a formal division of the island occurred changing the name again into Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue. Finally, it was changed to Haiti, what an ancient people used to call it. From that period the island was ruled over by despots and dictators.

But in this time before time was kept, it was nothing more than a jungle-encrusted plot of land in the Atlantic, neglected and ignored, its people savage and superstitious and alone, so very alone.

There were other witch doctors, and other small tribes, on various parts of the island, but Mujai knew he was the greatest of all. He had learned well everything his father and his grandfather had taught him about the witch arts, until he surpassed them and discovered, really by chance, the potion that brought the dead back to life again.

His reputation had spread and, after it was known he raised up a panther, some even feared him so much they let themselves die of fevers and infections rather than call for him. Others, however, knowing his value, came to his door and kept him rich with food and weapons for his prized wisdom. Perhaps, he thought, they were afraid, too, so they left him bribes. They gave him feathers of the rare ni-ni bird that had tail feathers of royal purple and emerald green. They brought beautiful shells taken by skilled divers from the sea floor, shells radiant with rainbow colors. And every fruit and every fish and every varmint that walked the island had at one time or another been deposited before his door as a gift.

He had never really wanted for anything or worked to feed himself. Yet there was one gift he had never been granted. Mujai had never had a woman. He was too feared. He was not good marriage material, never even considered as a mate for a father’s daughters. A man who could raise the dead was a fearful being indeed. He expected to live a solitary existence and die old and alone. Until tonight, with the little sleeping-dead girl who he knew, some way, some how, he would be able to raise up. She held a promise of the one thing he wanted and missed the most.

It was true the chicken did not cluck after it was raised. And the dog did not bark. But the panther, yes, it had been almost as before, roaring, leaping, hunting prey. But it had seemed to Mujai, following the dead-before-now-alive panther’s trail for several weeks out of curiosity, it had seemed the big cat had turned into quite a voracious beast. Keeping well-hidden and down wind, Mujai watched it many times take it’s prey apart nearly on the very moment of impact, at the instant of its death from the panther’s vicious long teeth. Flesh went flying skyward, to the right and to the left, and still the beast attacked, ripping and tearing in such a frenzy that its entire face and chest was slathered with blood from its victim. It did not feed so much as battle and destroy.

Mujai loped harder and tapped on his chest for protection, thinking of the beast he had raised and how dark the night still was, dawn some hours yet in the distance. Where was that hungry beast now? And was it on the prowl anywhere nearby for the fearful master who had raised it from the dead?

And what of the child, he wondered, suddenly, his lope faltering. Mujai was not a stupid man, and could follow a line of logic as neatly as anyone. What if when raised the little girl was changed? Was vicious? Was rapacious? What if she became a beast who could not be satisfied?

Again Majai tapped his chest for protection, for good luck, for help from the gods, for the heavens to favor him, as they had done all his life. He possessed but this one chance and he would take it, no matter what the outcome.

He took up his running lope again, for he had to hurry. Many of the plants he needed for the potion were scattered far and wide. He had much work to do, much territory to cover. And already the child was cold, so cold.

The breeze from the ocean wafted across his face, filling his nostrils until he could taste the brine on his tongue. He could smell the fecund earth and his nostrils flooded with the scent of various night-blooming flowers whose perfume was so strong it could dull a weaker man. He concentrated so the spirit gods would lead him to the plants he needed. Once calm, it came again on the wind, the scent of the deep, mysterious sea. He breathed in deeply and smiled. This is my island, he boasted to himself. I am king here. I am a god here. No one can do what I have done and what I am about to do. I am afraid of nothing, nothing. If I fail, no one will know. If I succeed…

He went into a trot and then into a true all-out run. He had to hurry, hurry, hurry.

He had a child bride to save. He had a beautiful, innocent, perfectly proportioned queen to raise up from the dead and to make his very own. She could not remain dead too long or even the potion would not work.

Yet if it worked! He would be alone no more. He swore it. Like his grandfather and father before him, he had found a woman he could take and make his own. That she was so young did not matter. He could teach her everything and be patient until she was a few years older. He would spend those years tutoring her how to work for him, bathe him, fetch and cook and climb the trees for his honey. He would teach her how to behave. How to love him as her king, as her Giver of Life. She would, after all, owe him everything, forever. She would be his Child-Lover-Mother-Companion-Inspiration, his alone, forever.

^{CHAPTER 3} COMING ALIVE

The instant the potion was massaged down her throat so that it slid into her belly, the magic began to work.

The potion mixed with the contents of her stomach, permeated the cells of the stomach wall, drifted into the silent blood stream. Like a horde of marauding ants, the potion properties invaded the cells. Those cells twinkled to life and began to move, invading the cells next to them. Within an hour all the cells of the child’s body had been changed, replaced, even down into the marrow of her bones. Human cells still, yes, but the DNA had been tweaked into something beyond human and life now was not like any life existing on the planet earth.

After waiting the proper amount of time, Mujai said a wild prayer beneath his breath and began to pound on the child’s chest. He must get the heart moving again. This is what he had done with the animals. With each mild thump he whispered wilder and more desperate prayers to the gods, asking for this miracle, this one if no other ever again.

He had pushed the mother from the hut and forbade her from speaking of this death and this ritual to anyone. He promised to take her life if she did. This was one raising he did not want to broadcast. In fact, if this raising worked, he had promised himself he would never do it again. Somewhere in the center of him where his man spirit resided, he felt what he was doing was against all nature. Already he had broken the very rules of the world by raising animals, but to raise a human being was… well, it was a bad business. He knew that, sensed it, even though he could not stop from trying to do it.

With each thump on the girl’s dead chest, he prayed harder. Do this for me, he prayed. I want her. I need her. She is mine. Sweat dripped from his face. Outside the moon had slid around the edge of the world and soon the sun would peak from over the lip of the blue sea. He could not be found here in the day, performing this ritual on the child. If others discovered he could raise a human being, they would bring every death on the island to him. Corpses outside his hut would rise higher than the thatched roof and drown the sky.

If they knew of it and he failed, they would dismiss him as a charlatan. He’d be thought of as someone who had cruelly made a grieving mother believe in the impossible. Rather than a king, he would become a pariah. His people knew no forgiveness. When you did a horribly wrong thing, you were cast out.

He pounded. He prayed. He feared defeat. And then life happened like a spark taking hold on massed palm tree shavings.

Her eyes opened.

Mujai sank back onto his heels in true astonishment, his hands frozen over her still body. He had not really, in the heart of him, believed that this could happen. He wanted success and now that he had it, he was mortified.

“Speak to me,” he whispered in sudden fear. “If you can hear me, speak.” Would she be mute like the chicken, the dog?

“My master,” she said. “I have come back for you.”

Mujai nearly passed out. He could not move even an eyelid. His mouth gaped.

She slowly sat up, woodenly, like a doll made of sticks. The black irises of her eyes were so enlarged they nearly covered the original mud brown color of her eyes.

“I saw Death,” she said. “I was lost in the dark.”

“Yes.” He gasped the word, the air in his lungs so short he was on the verge of fainting. “You were dead. I brought you back. You… you will live with me now.”

The girl pulled her legs beneath her woven palm skirt and she leaned forward on her hands so that her perfect little face was mere inches from his.

“Of course I will,” she said in a breathy voice that sounded nothing like a child’s voice. “I will come live with you.”

It felt like a threat to Mujai. At the very moment he knew he should feel exultant and powerful, he was overwhelmed with the greatest fear he had ever experienced.

What could he do? He had brought the dead to life and now he owned her. He had bargained for her life and she belonged to him, whether he feared her or not.

He rose shakily to his feet and held out his hand. “Come with me, then,” he said. “We will go.”

Her hand was shockingly cold. He forced himself not to cringe from her touch. He wondered if she would ever feel warm, feel human again.

Outside the hut the girl’s mother fell to her knees, mewling like a newborn. Tears ran down her face. “My baby, my baby, my baby lives,” she cried.

“Goodbye, Mother,” the girl said formally and without emotion. Then she moved forward, pulling the witch doctor behind her.

It seemed she knew the way home.

In the first days of her second life, the girl gave herself a new name. “Call me Angelique,” she instructed the witch doctor. “I do not like my old name. Tell me now how you raised me up.”

The question caused him to pause in the whittling he was doing on a bow. He looked up at her. “I cannot tell you,” he said.

“You mean you won’t.”

He shrugged and went back to his whittling, shaving long slivers of green bark from the limber wood.

“Tell me how you raised me up,” she insisted.

Something told him the girl wanted to know his secrets for reasons other than just to know how she came to be alive again. She wanted to steal his power. With his special knowledge, she could replace him as the village witch doctor. She could perform miracles and demand the respect that was reserved for him.

He looked up again. He frowned at her, hoping to instill fear. “I will never tell you. I will never do it again so you will never see how I do it, even if you were to shadow me the rest of my life. The magic that made you come back is now forgotten.” He tapped the side of his head and shook it a little as if throwing out the recipe for the potion.

She smiled. He hadn’t expected that response and he frowned harder. “I swear you will never know how I did it! Get the idea out of your head, you hear me? I will never tell and you will never know.”

She stood. She moved now with more grace, almost the way any child might. She said, “Mujai, my master, you are a silly, suspicious man.”

Smiling, she left him sitting with his unfinished bow, wondering at how she could insult him when he was the adult, he was her master, her king, her life-giver. How dare a little child speak to him with such disrespect. “Ungrateful little witch,” he muttered, and went back to his work.

She never spoke of it again, but then she had almost stopped speaking to him at all.

Out of fear or revulsion, Mujai did not know which, he kept his distance and went about his normal routines without dealing with the girl very often. She was sullen and withdrawn. She might get over it, she might change and be nice to him if he left her alone enough.

He set food before her, but after the first time watching her eat, he made sure to go into the jungle after serving her. No human being ate the way she did. It was like the panther, only worse because it was a child devouring food like a beast who has lost its mind. She shredded the meat he made in the fire without even dusting off the soot first. She broke the bones and sucked the marrow, licking her fingers of the grease. She put her whole face into a mango, until her nose disappeared as she feasted. If he did not bring her food at least three times a day, she would rummage in his gift pile the people brought for him, and ate whatever she found there in its raw state. A bird, feathers and all. A muskrat, tail and head and all. An entire melon, skin, seeds, and all. Nothing she ate seemed to bother her stomach or make her sick.

If it had just been the insane way she ate, her sulky silence, her utter lack of respect for him, Mujai thought he could come to accept it. But there were other things and these he could not countenance.

She rarely slept. It was as if death had given her all the sleep she would ever require. She sat up during the dark hours, watching over him in the hut. He turned his back to her, trying to cleanse his mind of those black eyes staring at him, but often he failed and lay awake himself, praying for the gods to make her right. Make her right, he prayed. Make her as she was before.

She took no direction whatsoever. If he asked her to do something for him, she pretended not to understand. “No entiendo,” she’d reply. I do not know what you mean, she said. What do you mean?

After patiently explaining the most rudimentary elements of gathering firewood or climbing a tree to gather honey, her reply was always the same. “No entiendo.”

He suspected she was being deliberately obtuse, the claims of not understanding his orders more examples of a lack of respect. He thought she knew exactly what he wanted, but she wasn’t going to do it. She had from the first refused his rule over her. This was her way of letting him know he did not own her.

He once thought of beating her. He lost his temper early on and after a week of feeding the girl, bringing clean drinking water, and doing all the chores, he asked for her to bring over his spear that stood against the giant umbrella tree near his camp.

“No entiendo.”

He asked her again.

“No entiendo.”

He asked her six times, raising his voice higher in anger each time, and six times she pretended not to understand.

He stood and raised his hand to slap her into submission, but when she lifted her face to him and looked him in the eyes, his hand was stayed as if paralyzed.

I will kill you if you lay a hand on me, her look said. You will die if you ever touch me, her look said, mocking his impotency.

From that time forward when she wouldn’t do as he said, he let it go. Finally he stopped asking anything of her and realized instead of gaining a queen, he had inherited a master. He was the child’s slave.

She was useless to him. She was truly a burden. He knew when she was old enough to mate she would never let him come near her. At wit’s end, he went to the girl’s mother and questioned her.

“Before she died, was your daughter obedient? Did she help you out with the chores?”

“Certainly. Very obedient. She is a good girl.”

“And respect? She showed you respect?”

“Yes!”

“Before she died, did she ever… did she ever scare you in any way? In how she acted or how she looked at you?”

“Never! My baby was full of love, a gentle, loving child. What do all these questions mean?’

“She is not right,” he said simply, and left it at that. He thought of sending the girl back to her mother, but had a feeling Angelique would not go. She cared no more for her mother than she did for him. That was evident in the way she’d left her and how, when the mother visited, she backed away without letting her mother touch her. When called by her name she said, “Call me Angelique!” Then screaming like a wild thing, “I am Angelique!”

As his absolute last resort, and after much inner turmoil and argument with himself about the morality of it, Mujai decided he would have to kill her. He would never be free if he didn’t. He’d tell the villagers she had died of the fever. So many did and no one questioned it. When she asked, as he knew she would, he would tell the girl’s mother he would not raise her again. And then all this would be over. What he had done was so against the law of nature that it had created a creature he did not want around him. He had to fix his mistake. He certainly would never make it again. He was forever through with the raising of the dead.

The day he meant to murder the child, he broke a large shale rock from a sea cliff wall and slipped it beneath his woven sleeping mat in the hut. The rock had a sharp cutting edge and fit his hand perfectly. It would slice into her face like parting water. He would cleave her ruined brain in two.

Though she did not sleep and kept watch over him, she would never expect him to rise up with the rock in his hand to bludgeon her. He had never, after the first time when he raised his hand to her, indicated that he was dangerous or violent. The opposite, in fact, seemed to be his beaten demeanor around the girl—even subservient.

All day he was excited about his plan. He sneaked looks at her as he worked around the camp site, thinking of her dead and buried and out of his life. Then it came to him. He would not bury her! She might in some way be a magical creature after her tryst with Death. She might know how to rise up on her own and had been asking after his secret potion as a ruse. In order to be safe he would throw her into the sea and let the fish nibble her pale little body down to the bones.

If he had to watch her tear into a slab of meat one more time he thought he would go mad. Living with her was like living with the undead monster panther. As far as he could tell there was little difference between them.

That night he went to bed not long after darkfall, as was his custom. He had said few words to the girl all day and had looked into her eyes not once. He feared she might know of his murderous plan if she could see what lay behind his eyes.

After a few minutes she slipped inside the hut with him and sat cross-legged at his back. He could feel her there, her dark eyes staring. But this night he was not unnerved and sleepless.

He bided his time. He wanted to make his move when he had his wrath worked up to killing pitch. He wanted nothing to go wrong. If he missed on the first strike, she might skitter away into the jungle. He would never get a second chance, he understood that implicitly. This was an intelligent, conniving child. A manipulative child. An evil child.

After an hour he had his mind ready. What he was about to do was not a sin. Besides, she was supposed to be dead. He was going to do her a favor and send her back into the dark where she belonged.

He grasped the rock, feeling the rough hardness of it, the cold heaviness of its weight. He must move fast and not falter. He must strike like a snake, without remorse, without a moment’s hesitation. He could not dare look into her eyes.

He flexed the muscle of his right arm that held the rock. He drew in one breath and then he made his move. He sat up and swiveled around in the same motion, raising the rock high above his head. Though he didn’t know it, he was screaming one long, sustained furious scream.

He felt a sudden horrible pain strike him in his midsection, but nothing was going to stop the downward motion of the killing blow.

He swung. But where she sat, she no longer existed. The rock struck the ground so hard he broke two of his fingers and cut his palm. He dropped the rock, looking around in the near darkness for where she had moved. Panic caused him to lose his breath. He had missed! He had failed! But she had been right there a second ago, right there below his raised arm.

A shadow fell over him from the doorway, blocking the moon. He turned and saw her, so beautiful, so small, so perfect. The island child beauty with the long dark hair, the perfect features. The little dead ten-year-old.

“You will die a slow death, my master. Look to your belly for your future.” As were all her words, these were said without emotion or inflection.

He glanced to his lap and saw the long spear sticking from his stomach. Blood poured from the wound, soaking his naked legs.

“What have you done?” he asked plaintively. The unfairness of this situation was so great, greater even than the pain that was now like fire burning him inside out, that tears sprang into his eyes.

“Only what you would have done to me.”

“Death invaded you. You have a soul from a god of the deep down under.” He took hold of the spear, but he could not dislodge it without fainting outright. He knew he was doomed, but his mind railed against the injustice. Hadn’t he given her life? Hadn’t he raised her up?

“Demon,” he hissed. “Monster.”

“I am what you made. You snatched me from the dark and now you ask why the dark has come to fetch you. Goodbye, Master.”

She turned then and walked out of the clearing, leaving him alone. He had no talismans to save himself. He had no potion to bring him to life. He was going to die in her stead. He had cheated death of her presence and replaced it with his own.

He lay his head back and stared at the palmed ceiling that rustled in a breeze from the sea. At the very least he would be rid of her. Let the living be party to her baneful corruption.

He, the greatest witchdoctor who had ever lived, was now through with it all.

His body sagged to the side. His last fleeting thought was that he hoped no one ever chanced on his secret potion ever again. A world populated by the living dead would be no world for the living.

What had he done? What had he done?

^{CHAPTER 4} RULING THE TRIBE

First she had to find the panther. She hadn’t gotten Mujai to tell her how his magic brought her back from the dark but he had spoken—bragged really—of the three animal experiments before her.

It was the panther she felt closest to, more than to any human. She knew she was not the person she had been when alive. She was all new. And all different. If she managed to escape accident (and enemies who meant to murder her) by using her new-found powers, she thought she might live forever.

It was a pity she had to take Mujai’s life, but he had tried to destroy her. She had known he would come to that. He feared her as he would fear the green venomous viper that trailed in the island’s tree limbs.

She knew she could outwit and out live him. He was just a man. A normal unchanged man. He could not move from one place to another in an instant. He could not tell what a person was thinking by looking into his eyes. He could not hear the whisper of padded feet in the forest a mile distant. And, of course, he could not see and hear and interact with the People from the Dark, who gave her all sorts of secret knowledge useful against living men. He had none of the gifts she’d been graced with after her awakening.

She moved stealthily through the jungle, unafraid, but alert, her mind on a quest. If she could get to the panther and make it her friend, she could demand great power over the people on the island. They might not, at first, fear her, but they would immediately fear a panther, especially one that walked at her side as if her guardian. And most of them knew the rumor of a panther brought back to life by the witch doctor, a panther that was now supernatural and so fierce it was like a new beast walking the earth.

It took some time, and much concentrated thought, but finally Angelique came down a narrow ravine, following the thin ribbon of water washed silver in the moonlight and there she saw the panther.

He stood majestic, a large cat with rippling muscles and a great smooth head with widely spaced yellow eyes. He was sipping at the water when she approached. He raised his imperious head and his lips rolled back from long, sharp teeth. Water and saliva dripped down his massive chest. He growled deep in his throat.

“Don’t fear me,” she said calmly, moving ever closer to him. “I am like you. Come. Smell me and you will know. Let us be friends.”

She walked toward him, down the narrow bank path, her bare feet making no noise in the soft undergrowth. The cat did not move, but watched carefully. She could hear his breathing mingle with the gentle trickling of the waters sliding over rocks.

She got within two feet of him, holding him still and calm with her magnetic gaze. “Do you understand? I am like you. I am your brethren.”

The cat’s lips lowered over his teeth. He moved forward until he was breathing hotly on her bare skin. He lay his head against her arm where she lifted a hand and stroked him softly.

“There will be no love for us from anyone or anything else. We will be a team and help one another.” She wasn’t sure that he understood the individual words of her language, but he appeared to understand she was no threat to him, nor was she food.

The thought of food made her stomach churn. “Let’s go hunting,” she said, jolly now that she had made the panther her friend and cohort. “Come! You catch the prey and we will feast on it together.”

The panther, now completely under her power, turned with her, wheeling toward the upward bank and together they climbed back into the chaos of the jungle to look for their midnight supper.

^{CHAPTER 5} A GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE

Angelique strode confidently into the village proper, the panther she had named Sokuru, at her side. People came from their huts and dropped whatever they were doing to stare. No one moved a muscle, fearing the panther might leap. Even the children were silent and kept still.

“I am Angelique and this is my friend, Sokuru. If you obey me, I will not have him kill you. If you run or you hide or you disobey, you will die. Do you understand?”

The village elder, the tribe’s leader, stepped forward, trying to appear unafraid. He held his spear at his side, its tip in the dirt. “Are you not the daughter of Lenosa? The girl she gave to the witch doctor? Is your name not Kera?”

“I am the daughter of Lenosa, but I am emancipated. I no longer belong to my mother or the witch doctor. He is dead because he tried to do me harm. My new name is Angelique and that is what you will call me when you speak to your queen.”

The elder turned his head to the side. “Queen?”

“You dispute me?” She took her hand from Sokuru’s back and gestured for him to move forward. He went into a crouch, the way a big cat will do when it is ready to take down prey.

The elder stepped back and immediately dropped his spear, in essence giving up his title as leader. He brought his hands together before him and bowed his head. “My queen,” he said.

Angelique walked forward and again put her hand on the panther’s back. He stopped, straightening, awaiting command.

“I want a runner to go to all the tribes, island wide, and invite them to this place. There will no more be separate villages and groups. We will all be as one. And I am the queen of all. Obey me.” She glanced around at all who had gathered before her. “All of you.”

The elder motioned to their fastest runner and gestured for him to go. He immediately set off into the woods to disappear into the thick jungle to summon the tribes.

Angelique smiled now. Had she not tamed the panther and made him her vassal, this would have been vastly more difficult. She patted the head of the big cat.

“Now call for my mother and tell her I will need a maid servant and she will be that maid servant. I also require a hut.”

After dispatching another runner to collect the child’s mother, the elder went to his own hut, which was the largest in the village, and swept open the grass door. “This is yours,” he said. “Please. I can build another.”

She liked the elder and when she passed him by on the way into his hut, she tapped his arm. “I make you my chief food gatherer and advisor. Sokuru and I require large quantities of fresh food, preferably meat and seafood. Be sure to keep us well supplied and your fate is secure.”

She entered the darkened hut, the panther strolling behind her. She closed the grass door and sat down on a cushioned bed of palm fronds. It had been a long night and she needed sleep, but not yet.

Sokuru paced before the door, back and forth, until she told him to lie down and rest. “Only if I am in danger,” she instructed the cat, “do you attack.”

The cat came to her and purred as he rubbed his fat cheek against her much smaller cheek. Then he moved like the majestic beast he was toward the back of the dwelling and circled twice before he lay down for a much-needed nap.

There was a small tapping outside the door and Sokuru raised his head.

“Come,” Angelique said. She motioned with her hand for Sokuru to relax.

Angelique’s mother, Lenosa, entered. She rushed to her daughter without noticing there was a beastly presence in the room. When she went to embrace the girl, Angelique pushed her away. “Don’t ever touch me.”

Shocked and hurt, Lenosa said, “But Kera…”

“Never call me that again, I told you! Kera is dead. I am Angelique and you will address me as you would your queen, for I am your master now and not your child any longer.”

“No entiendo.” Tears stood in Lenosa’s eyes.

“Listen to me, you dumb pig woman. Your Kera died. You had her raised up, which was a selfish thing for you to do, and a thing for which you will later be punished. And then you gave me, not Kera, me, to the witless soul who did this thing. Kera drifted into the dark and did not return, do you understand that? I am Angelique and I am not like your Kera, nor am I like you or anyone on this forsaken island. I will live forever, but because that witless Mujai brought back a child, I will remain a child forever, too. I am doomed to this little body because of you and I ought to have your head on a spike, but if you prove yourself useful, I’ll let you live.”

Lenosa listened to this blasphemy with wide eyes. It was evident she would not say “no entiendo” again, no matter how confused she might be.

“I will serve you,” she said, bowing her head with grave misgiving and a sharp pain in her heart where she had carried her daughter, Kera, for ten years.

“Yes, that’s right. Trust me when I say Kera is dead and gone. I see you understand. You and Mujai carried out an unholy act. He paid for it this past night when I took his life. I would not hesitate a minute to take yours.”

“Could you… could you tell me where you came from?”

Angelique cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. She smiled and it chilled Lenosa’s heart. “I like a curious spirit. But if I told you you would not believe me. Suffice it to say I am not ten years old, but ten thousand times ten thousand. It has been a thousand years since anyone was able to raise the dead so that I could return to this world. I find it…” She glanced around the bare hut and the palm leaf walls. “I find it nearly unbearable. You are a barbaric people. Nevertheless here I am. And here this is. And that is that. Now fetch clean water and come wash me, I am dirty.”

As Lenosa bowed her way backward out the hut door, Angelique sank back onto the palm mattress. She didn’t know why she had told the woman so much. She had the very human need to confide in someone and Lenosa was as good as another. She probably didn’t understand a word of it anyway. There was nothing in Lenosa’s life experience that could parse such a tale and make reason out of it.

From the moment Angelique opened her eyes and saw Mujai in the firelight of the dirty little hut, she knew she must get away from this place. Discovering it to be an island plunged her into deep despair. These people didn’t even fashion boats, but fished with their hands and bark rope nets tied to long poles, fishing from shore. They were so primitive they still had witch doctors and hadn’t even the skill to weave cloth to cover their nakedness. When she had walked the Earth alive before, a thousand years in the past, Angelique hadn’t even known this little island existed.

But Angelique had been in dire straits before. Many times. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t work with it.

She lifted one hand and held it before her eyes in the shadowy light. She turned it from palm to top, from top to palm, examining it. Her hand was so small, so frail. She would never be a woman, never know a man, never birth children of her own. Just because she had been given life it didn’t mean she would grow. In fact, she would remain as she was the rest of her days. Fully half of life’s joys were denied her. Her physical strength was minimal. This was the cruelest curse of all, to be trapped in a child’s body, and it had never happened before.

On the other hand, she could sense the nubs of thick matter in her back, at the top of her shoulder blades and knew eventually she could make them grow, splitting human skin as easily as air parting leaves in a tree. The nubs were the buds of her wings. Her wings! She had not come into this body completely without resource.

And at least the vessel was female. Not just female, but superbly beautiful. She had some advantages, she admitted. Some advantage is all she would ever need.

———

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