Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

In the Season of Rains Ellen Steiber

IT WAS THE GARDEN that drew her. A garden of desert flowers. Hidden among sweet herbs and citrus were those she loved best, the flowers that opened only to the moon: evening primrose and sacred datura and the jagged white petals of night-blooming cereus. The garden was heady with scent. She had only to touch her foot to the earth and the air was sweet with sage and rosemary. She had lived in deserts for many generations now, and for more years than even she could count she had longed for that first garden.

So she appeared in his. He heard the noise out back behind the house, and was sure one of the cats had gotten out or a rabbit in. He opened the screen door and strained to see into the shadows. He listened more carefully. The crickets who’d fallen silent when he stepped onto the porch began singing again.

He did a quick mental inventory of cats. The old tom was asleep in the living room; the tiger stripe in the kitchen, eating. Which meant it was the little black female.

“Seena!” he called. He’d named her for an ex-girlfriend. Like the woman, the cat demanded great affection and endless indulgence, but over time the cat had proven more endearing.

And more responsive. He called her again. It was unusual for her not to answer.

Something moved inside the garden gates. He stepped into the yard, surprised as always by the softness of the summer night. He rarely came out to the garden after sunset. He’d water at dawn before work, and do the occasional weeding and trimming on weekends.

The garden hadn’t been his idea at all but a legacy from another girlfriend, Cassie, who couldn’t stand the sight of his barren yard and had decided to do something about it. It made him uncomfortable, actually, that Cassie had worked so hard on his land. Still, it had made her happy at the time and he’d ignored the premonitions of obligation as long as he could. Eventually, after she put in the star jasmine and the gardenia, but before she could plant the wisteria that was meant to wind round the trellis, he broke it off. She was giving him gifts he could never repay, and it had to stop before he fell too deeply into her debt. So he told her it was over and he sent her from his house and her garden. He still missed her sometimes. Cassie was a sweet one. But it was cleaner this way. He had no regrets. And now he had a garden that bore the imprint of one who loved the earth and knew how to work it, one who knew how to coax life from the desert’s parched ground.

He heard the sound again. It was an animal but not Seena, he decided. Whatever it was, was wearing some sort of bell. He called the cat again and was answered by a woman’s laughter, low and throaty and mocking.

She came toward him and he honestly couldn’t tell if she was walking or dancing or floating above the ground. She moved slowly, her body swaying lightly as though the evening wind moved through her. She had long, glossy black hair that shone in the moonlight and a body that was too full to be fashionable — high, full breasts, a long waist with a round stomach, and stocky, muscled legs. She wore a white gauzy skirt tied just above her pubic bone, and he realized that what he’d thought were bells were tiny golden disks sewn to the skirt. Brighter disks hung from her ears and from the bangles on her wrists. She was barefoot, bare-chested, bare-armed, and she faced him without shame or surprise.

“Who are you?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he tried his first language, Spanish. “Quién es?”

“I came to enjoy your garden,” she replied. Her English was accented, an accent he didn’t recognize.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

She smiled. “I’ve told you what you need to know.” She gestured to the garden. “Did you plant it?”

“No,” he admitted. “Except for the birds of paradise.”

She regarded the delicate plants with scorn. “They’re not doing well.

You bruised them when you planted them, and then you gave them too much water. The poor things are waterlogged.”

He didn’t doubt his senses. He was a scientist, trained to make accurate observations. He rubbed his forehead, knowing full well that this was real and yet unable to make sense of it.

“Who are you?” he asked again.

“How long has it been since you’ve lain with a woman?” she countered. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it. Nearly half a year. And you wake up hard and frustrated and you tell yourself it’s better that way. Easier.”

“I think you’d better leave,” he said quietly. He remembered that he hadn’t heard any kind of vehicle approach. “If you don’t have a ride, I’ll call you a cab.” He stared at her dark nipples. “I’ll even lend you a shirt.”

“Your generosity is overwhelming, Enrico.”

His name wasn’t anywhere on the outside of the house or the mailbox.

She reached a hand toward him and the scent of the datura became stronger. “I want to show you something,” she said.

She took his wrist in strong, cool fingers and despite the heat of the summer night, the coolness went through his body like snowmelt poured through his veins.

He pulled away from her, chilled, unsure of what it was he’d just touched. A gust of wind bent the branches of the jasmine, tumbling tiny white stars toward the ground.

She stepped deeper into the shadows, and the golden spangles clicked together softly. “Here,” she said, pointing to the garden path where it was arched over with cassia branches. “Lie down.”

He was getting hard and he had a horrible feeling that she knew it. “You are one strange lady,” he said.

“Not a lady,” she told him. “Never that. Lie down, Enrico, and let the earth give you her gifts.”

He wasn’t used to taking orders from women, but he was too curious to refuse this one. He knelt then laid himself down, descending into a layer of air woven through with the scents of the garden. He hadn’t known the rich tapestry of smells. Rosemary overlaid with cassia, the musk of sage intertwined with the nectar of honeysuckle.

He looked up at her and swore for a second that behind her back two large dusky wings were rubbing together. No, it was a trick of the shadows.

He held out a hand to her. “Come down here with me.”

“You like to invite women in,” she said. “And then to make them leave again. It’s a rhythm with you, no?”

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. She’d spoken with Seena’s exact inflections.

“You won’t have to ask me to leave,” she promised. “I never stay.”

Overhead, a screech owl winged through the night, and he remembered something his grandmother had told him. His abuelita, who’d grown up in a tiny mountain village in Mexico, was as superstitious as they came. “The owl brings death, Enrico,” she’d say. “When you see the owl, you must pray to la Virgen de Guadalupe. Then only she can help you.”

The woman was standing by his side now. She moved one hip and her skirts brushed the ground, then his chest. The tiny golden spangles were like thin disks of ice against his bare skin. It was impossible, he told himself. The temperature was in the nineties. Nothing could stay so cold in the summer night.

“You’re chilled,” she observed.

He took it as his way out. “I must be coming down with something,” he said, and got to his feet. “I’d better go in.”

The laughter again. “What about your little cat?” she asked. “Don’t you want to find her?”

Somewhere to the north lightning flickered in the skies, and the scent of creosote began to fill the air. The skies were unusually dark, the desert stars hidden behind a mass of cloud cover. There would be a storm, he knew, quick and hard and loud. The female cat was terrified by thunder. Astrid, another ex, was a therapist who had told him in no uncertain terms that the young cat suffered from an anxiety disorder related to noise.

“The cat will be fine,” he told the woman.

“That she will,” the woman agreed.

He started toward the house, aware that he was leaving a cat to a storm and a half-naked woman in his yard, aware that it was high-summer in southern Arizona and he was colder than he’d been after being stranded for hours in a Montana ice storm. He would not try to puzzle out who she was or how she’d known the things she had, for all of it was impossible.

He went into the room that he’d made into a study and sat down at the computer. The map of the watershed was still on the screen. He studied flood plains, diverted water courses from their natural routes, and “protected” banks, lining them with steel and concrete to prevent erosion. Long ago, he’d realized that it was the land that needed protection from the developers and engineers, and that there was something perverse and futile in all the shoring up and redirecting of streams. Not that he let it stop him. He was good at what he did, he made good money, and he found pleasure in the numerical equations that defined the flow of water, the drainage of soil, and the momentum of a given flood. Now he worked a set of equations, allowing the familiar discipline to calm him. There was great comfort in knowing one’s variables and being able to manipulate them with precision.

Lightning flickered again, followed by a shudder of thunder. He counted the number of seconds between them. Twenty. The lightning was approximately four miles away. Close enough to fry a hard drive. He saved the map of the watershed, and disconnected the computer and printer. Then he made himself a cup of hot tea. He was still freezing, probably running a fever. He’d take two aspirin and go to bed.

The wind rose in a high whine, almost a cry, then dropped again, pulling the storm down from the skies. Needles of rain hurled themselves against the house, then sank into the earth. He heard one of the blue wooden shutters blow open and slam back against its frame.

The cat, he thought. She was still out there.

He started toward the porch to call her in then stopped as he reached the screen door. What if the woman was still in the garden?

There is no woman, he told himself. But he could not make himself step outside. He called the cat from the porch. He called for a good three minutes. And when she didn’t answer, he went back into the house, shut off the lights, and got into bed.

He lay there, conscious of the hollow next to his hip where Seena liked to lie. Every night, seconds after he got into bed, she’d curl up beside him. This was the first time in the year since he’d gotten her that he’d gone to sleep alone. He missed her warmth. He made himself concentrate on the sounds of the wind and rain, and let the storm lull him to sleep.

She had told him that she wouldn’t stay. She didn’t bother to mention that she would also return. But she knew he would wonder and when his fear had waned, he would secretly hope. And so she would let him hope for seven nights, until the moon waxed from a bone-white semicircle to a full silver sphere.

He didn’t let himself think about her at first. He was disturbed only by the fact that the female cat hadn’t come in for breakfast that morning, nor was she there when he’d returned home from an afternoon of meetings. He wondered if she’d found a way over the garden fence or perhaps burrowed beneath it. He hoped she hadn’t been too badly frightened by the storm. And that she’d managed to keep herself safe from the roaming bands of coyotes. She was a smart little animal, he reminded himself. Cats were, after all, natural survivors.

That evening, just to be sure he sweated out any toxins from the previous night’s strange malaise, he ran six miles. He returned home slick with sweat and reassured by his own strength. A blinking light in the study caught his attention. He pushed the answering machine’s PLAY button and a woman’s voice spoke, “Enrique, it’s Liora. I just got back into town, and I’ve brought you a souvenir …”

Liora was an Israeli archeologist, doing research for the university. They’d met on campus last fall when both of them cut out early from a mind-numbing faculty meeting. He’d gone out with her only a few times before they made love, after which he’d explained quite clearly that he didn’t do commitment, ever. He was always honest with them; it was for their protection, really. She had met his announcement with a sleepy yawn and then explained that she would be working on a dig in northern Mexico for the next six months. He hadn’t really expected to hear from her again. Now he welcomed the idea of seeing her, a real, flesh and blood woman, one who happened to be very good in bed. The perfect prescription to banish last night’s crazy fever dream. Sometime during the day he’d decided that the problem was he’d simply gone too long without sex.

Liora declined the invitation to come to dinner at his house. Instead they met two nights later at a coffeehouse near the university.

She sat at a table in the far corner, making notes in a small spiral-bound notebook, her duck, black hair gathered in a silver clasp at the back of her neck.

She glanced up when she saw him approach and smiled. “Holá, Enrique, cómo estás?” she said. Liora’s family were Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain. She spoke Hebrew, English, Greek, and Spanish, with English being the only language in which she had a noticeable foreigner’s accent.

“Okay,” he replied, sitting across from her. “How was Mexico?”

“Good,” she said, accepting his decision to conduct the conversation in English. “Actually, better than good. The dig is going well. We’re finding even more than we’d hoped.” She was wearing a faded blue denim shirt, her skin dark against it. A thick silver hoop hung from each ear.

“Finding,” he echoed. “Does that mean you’re going back?”

She nodded. “The rains. We had to take a break. There’s serious flooding right now.” She gave him a wry smile. “The people in the villages there could probably use your help, though I doubt they could afford you … Have you been busy?”

He told her about the summer grad classes he was teaching, about his various consulting jobs. How he’d built detention basins for flood waters by redesigning the local golf courses.

She found this very funny. “I see,” she said. “We must make the desert safe for rich, white suburbanites.”

He was finding her both irritating and compelling. He would feel much better when he had her slim, muscled body lying beneath his own. He touched the back of her wrist, then took her hand.

He turned it over and stroked the underside of her forearm. “The moon isn’t up yet,” he said. “Is there any way I could persuade you to go look at the stars with me?”

“Where would you want to do that?”

He named the range of mountains that bordered the western edge of Tucson. “You can’t see the city lights from there, so the stars are really bright.” He glanced at his watch. “We could drive there in twenty minutes.”

Her dark eyes studied his, and he noticed the fine lines at their edges. Too many days under the suns of too many deserts. She’d worked in the Sinai and the Kalahari and on the blazing slopes of Mediterranean islands. The Sonora was just the latest in a string of hot, dry lands whose secrets she sought to unearth.

“You never struck me as the star-gazing type, Enrique. I think this is a not-very-well-disguised invitation to fuck.”

There was no anger in her voice, so he played it a little further. “And that’s not an invitation you’d want to take me up on? As I remember, our bodies liked each other.”

“They did, but not tonight.” She glanced at her watch. “I promised to help one of the undergrads catalog pottery shards.”

He released her arm. “Oh, that sounds fascinating.”

Her dark eyes danced with amusement. “Uh-huh.”

“Is this why you called?” he asked. “So you could tell me about pottery shards?”

“Enrique, calm your ruffled ego. I told you why I called. I brought something back for you.” She reached into the large woven bag on the seat next to her and drew out an oddly shaped object wrapped in a Mexican newspaper. “I found this in one of the mercados. It had your name on it.”

She placed the gift firmly in his hand, left money on the table to cover their coffees and tip, then stood up. She was wearing a short black skirt that revealed long, tanned legs and sandals that laced round her ankles. He got up to follow her out, remembering what it felt like to have those legs wrapped around him, pressing against his back, clasping him to her.

She stopped just outside the cafe’s door. “The clouds keep building,” she said, looking up at the dusk skies. “We wouldn’t have seen any stars anyway.” She reached up to kiss him lightly on the mouth. “Ciao, Enrique.”

She left him standing on the street, holding her gift. He was so annoyed it didn’t even occur to him to open it until he was back in his truck. Then he tore open the newsprint wrapping. He was holding a small stone carving of a voluptuous, high-breasted woman with talons for feet. And an owl’s wings folded behind her back.

He was in a mood by the time he got home. He did not like dates with women that did not end in bed. And tonight he’d wanted Liora. Wanted her badly.

What was that all about? he asked himself. Was meeting for coffee the opening move in a new flirtation or the close of an old one? Did she really just want to give him that strange little lump of stone? He resolved to call her the next day and find out.

The wind was up again and sheet lightening creased the western sky. The night had the heavy feel of a dry storm, of a rain that wouldn’t break. Still, he could hear thunder over the mountains, so once again he called the young black cat. Though she’d been gone nearly four days, he found he couldn’t give up on her. This time he made himself go out into the garden. He took a flashlight, searched the shadows. The cat wasn’t there, but under the cassia bushes the ground glittered with round, golden spangles.

He knelt to pick one up. It was made of a light metal, the weight of aluminum but the color of ancient gold. Had it fallen from her skirts the other night — or had she returned? The idea pleased him, and for the first time he let himself wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t bolted. He pocketed the golden disk, imagining how he might have taken her there under the cassias, what it would have felt like to be inside her. If opportunity presented itself again, he wouldn’t let himself get scared off by a case of the chills. And he wouldn’t let her get away so easily. He turned as he sensed a movement beyond the garden fence, but his light picked out only the form of a very large jackrabbit.

The sound of the phone ringing brought him back into the house. He heard his mother’s voice and decided not to intercept the machine. He listened as she left a message telling him that his Tiá Carmen had taken sick in Mexico City and she was going to stay with her for a week, and would he please pay a visit to his abuelita while she was gone. His grandmother, who’d had a series of strokes, had been in a nursing home for the last year. She was partially paralyzed and barely spoke. She spent her days waiting for aides to change her and feed her, put her in the wheelchair, then back into the bed. He didn’t visit her often because it saddened him. He preferred to remember the abuelita who made the finest tortillas he’d ever tasted and a mole sauce that was heaven, who went to church every morning and lit candles to the Virgin every night. He didn’t know who it was he was supposed to be visiting in the wheelchair. He did not call his mother back.

He worked instead, reading through a developer’s plans to re-direct a wash away from an eastern tract of the desert.

He studied the topographic map of the flood plain and the builder’s blueprints. Then he began to work the numbers, losing himself in the elegance and surety of the calculations.

His sleep was broken that night by a cat’s blood-curdling scream. He sat bolt upright in bed, knowing it was Seena. He heard it again, louder and closer this time, and he knew with certainty that she was fighting for her life.

A coyote must have her. Or a bobcat.

Still caught in the heaviness of sleep, he forced himself out of bed. He stumbled out of his bedroom and stopped halfway down the hall. The two male cats were blocking his way, both of them arched and hissing.

He walked toward them slowly then drew back as the tiger stripe swiped at his bare legs, drawing a clean line of blood.

Swearing softly, he knelt to face them. “What the hell’s got you so frightened?” he asked.

He stood up and again tried to pass, but the old torn went after him, closing its teeth around his ankle so fast it made his stomach lurch — and stopping just short of puncturing his skin.

“Okay, okay,” he said. Gently, he stroked the tom’s head and the side of its jaw, until the animal released his ankle. His bone ached where the cat’s teeth had gripped him.

“You’ve both gone loco,” he told them. “What am I doing living with crazed cats?”

Their eyes glittered in the dark hallway. He could feel a low growl coming from the torn.

“Relax,” he told them, his hands raised in surrender. “I’m going back to bed. But in the morning, I expect you both to behave.”

He started back to the bedroom, wondering what had gotten into the animals and why on earth anyone would put up with it. He’d all but forgotten about Seena. Until he flicked on the bedside lamp and saw her sitting on his bed, contentedly washing her face as though she’d never been gone.

The phone woke him the next morning. He glanced at his alarm clock. It was seven, exactly. Usually he was up by six. Without opening her eyes, the little female cat rearranged herself so that her head pressed against his hip. Then he remembered. He’d overslept because of that nonsense with the cats.

“Welcome home,” he murmured, running a finger down the cat’s nose.

The phone rang for the third time. He rubbed his eyes and put the receiver to his ear.

“Enrique Ortiz?”

“Yes?” He didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is Evelyn Mitchell at the Desert Hills Home. I’m sorry to disturb you so early. I’m calling about Maria Teresa Hernadez. Your mother listed you as next of kin.”

María Terésa … abuelita. “My grandmother, she’s—”

“She had another stroke, Mr. Ortiz. Several hours ago.” The woman’s voice reminded him of a television reporter’s, frighteningly well practiced in the art of delivering devastating news. “Your grandmother has suffered additional loss of movement on her right side but she is conscious. We were hoping you would stop by today. Dr. Donovan thinks it might be beneficial for her to see a member of her family.”

He was sitting up now, staring at the receiver as if it were a rattler who’d struck him.

“Mr. Ortiz?”

“Yes.”

“Can you come in today?”

He groaned and tried to recall what it was he had planned. He had eight and ten A.M. classes to teach, followed by a lunch with the developer, and then an on-site visit to the wash that was being diverted. Then he’d planned on calling Liora, taking her to dinner, bringing her home …

“Mr. Ortiz?” Evelyn Mitchell was relentless.

“I have a lunch meeting at twelve-thirty,” he said. “I’ll try to stop by after that, though I can’t stay long.”

He could hear Ms. Mitchell penciling him in to whatever appointment book lay open in front of her. “That will be fine, Mr. Ortiz. I’ll try to ensure that Dr. Donovan is available.”

“I’m sure you will,” he told her, and hung up.

The smell of the nursing home hadn’t changed: urine and age and tasteless steamed food all blended together with a dun wash of antiseptic. He bypassed the patient information desk and walked down the spotless hall to his grandmother’s room. He was carrying a bunch of carnations he’d picked up at a nearby supermarket.

It was still hard for him to believe that she was the one who was ill. All through his childhood, whenever he was sick, it was his abuelita, not doctors, whom his mother called. Abuelita would sit beside his bed and explain that being sick meant that your alma, your soul, was a little lost. Even fear, she’d say, could shake the soul from a body. So what they had to do to make him well was to call it back. He remembered being wide-eyed with wonder as she explained that his soul had not traveled far — it hovered near his pulse points: his wrists, his temples, his throat, his heart. Solemnly, she would touch these points, calling his alma back into his body. She would then supplement this therapy with candles and incense, soups and fruits and herbs, hot compresses and her omnipresent prayers to la Virgen. Her cures had never failed him.

The door to her room was open. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair, a thin crocheted blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When had she gotten so small and wizened and gray? She used to be so round. He remembered sitting next to her in church as a boy, leaning into the soft warmth of her body.

“Abuelita. It’s Enrico.”

There was no movement or response. Her eyes, he noticed, seemed focused somewhere beyond the room.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “I brought you red flowers,” he said in Spanish. Red was her favorite color. “Do you want me to put them in water?” He did not ask her how she was feeling. That would have been absurd.

He busied himself filling a drinking glass with water and attempting to arrange the long, green stems inside it. He put the carnations on the night stand where she could see them. When she’d first come here, his mother had brought her one of the tall votive candles, with a decal of the Virgin on the red glass. She never even got the chance to light it. An aide informed them that the nursing home forbade candles.

He sat down on the neatly made bed. “They told me you had another stroke last night.”

A trickle of saliva ran from the corner of her mouth. He grabbed a tissue and dabbed at it gently.

“Are they treating you okay here? … Can you hear me at all?”

His grandmother’s only response was to continue to drool.

“Mama’s in Mexico with Tía Carmen,” he told her. “So it’s just going to be me visiting for a while. Is there something I can get you? Something you want?”

As far he could tell, she didn’t even know that he was in the room with her. He laid his fingertips against her wrist, as she would have done for him. But he detected nothing beyond her heartbeat.

He glanced at his watch. He’d been here fifteen minutes. He’d stay another ten and then he really had to take a look at that wash.

He sat with her in silence, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning system, to the sound of medication carts being wheeled down the hall. Neither Dr. Donovan nor Ms. Mitchell appeared, and he had no desire to seek them out.

When the twenty-five minutes were up he got to his feet.

“I’ve got to go now,” he said. “But I’ll be back later this week, okay?”

He was halfway to the door when she spoke. “Te …” Her voice was weak and slurred.

“Qué?” he asked. “Digamé, abuelita.” He tried in English, “What? Tell me.”

She never once looked at him, but she struggled to speak. “Te … te … ten miedo,” she said at last, her voice a whisper.

He listened for more, but there wasn’t any. He waited another five minutes, until he was convinced that it was all she would say. He wondered if she were sensing her own approaching death. If her soul had been shaken loose. What she’d struggled so hard to say was: Have fear.

He stroked her cheek. “No miedo,” he told her, and kissed her once again before leaving.

“You related to her?” A voice stopped him as he walked down the hall.

He turned to see a tall, black woman dressed in a nurse’s white uniform. A blue cardigan hung from her shoulders.

“I’m her grandson,” he answered.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” she said pointedly. “What’s your name?”

He told her.

“Guess you’re not him.”

“Who?”

“Yesterday afternoon, I went in to give her her medication. She was in a state. Very agitated. Kept repeating, ‘Elbooho, elbooho, elbooho.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. I checked her elbows — nothing. So now I see you coming out of her room and I think, maybe his name is Elbooho.”

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

The woman gave him a long look. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Guess I can’t tell a grown man he ought come around and visit his grandma more often, now can I?”

“Point taken,” he told her. “You’re very subtle.”

She finally smiled at him. “It’s my talent.”

It was not until he was halfway across town, driving toward the wash, that he let his grandmother’s words run through his mind. He thought about the way she’d phrased it. She hadn’t meant that she had fear, he realized. It was a command, a warning, perhaps even for him. An even odder thought occurred to him. Maybe elbooho wasn’t the name of a person. Maybe it was two words: El búho. The owl.

The wash was at the very edge of town, in the foothills of the Rincons. The area was still rural — dirt roads, a few houses, mostly cactus and palo verde and a few soft green mesquite bosques hidden in the folds of the land. It was slated for two different developments that would include houses, a strip mall, and a small industrial park.

He drove down a wide, graded dirt road that had once led to a ranch, then took a smaller road, branching north. He parked the truck beside the wash, surprised to see a dust-covered Jeep a few hundred yards away. He hadn’t expected company.

Curious, he stepped out of the truck and glanced up and down the wash. The owner of the Jeep wasn’t in sight, nor were there footprints in the soft, sandy soil. The channel was fairly deep here, and the banks and even the middle of the wash were covered with green, a thick growth of acacia, desert broom, scrub oak, and mesquite. A striped lizard skittered across the sand and disappeared behind a rock.

He knelt to check the soil sediment, then began walking upstream to see if the banks were stable, to see where the erosion was going. He glanced up as he heard a low rumble of thunder. It was still early in the afternoon, and full white clouds were rising from behind the Catalina Mountains to the north. The clouds were already a good deal larger than they’d been when he’d left the nursing home half an hour ago. Another storm was building.

He stopped walking as he saw her. This time she was wearing loose khaki shorts and a black, sleeveless T-shirt. Her hair hung in a single, heavy braid. She was kneeling in the wash, brushing gently at the soil.

“Ah,” he said, “just the woman I was hoping to meet up with. ¡Qué casualidad!”

Liora shaded her eyes to look up at him. “Not a coincidence,” she corrected him. “The State Historical Commission hired me to do some sampling.”

“Let me guess. We are standing on the site of a prehistoric Native American village. Or better yet, a sacred burial site.”

“If we are, your developer doesn’t get to divert the wash,” she said, rising to her feet.

He stared at her, aware of the sheen of sweat on her arms and chest, of her eyes being nearly as black as her hair and of both being darker than the faded cotton T-shirt. “Maybe I ought to wait on my report until you tell me whether or not you’re going to stop the project.”

“I’d like to,” she said. “It would give me great pleasure to prevent you from destroying the wash. Unfortunately, I can only tell them what I actually find.” She gave him a perfectly friendly smile. “Why don’t you leave me to my work and then we can both file our reports?”

He shook his head and walked closer to her until he stood only a few inches away. “I’m not going anywhere until you explain that little gift you gave me.”

She gazed at him calmly, making no attempt to explain. Once he had been able to pull her toward him simply by letting her see the desire in his eyes, knowing that it was matched perfectly by the desire in hers. The current between them had been so strong, he’d understood what it was to be an iron shaving in the presence of a magnet. Then it had been impossible to be with her and not take her into his arms.

He let the past go, intent on the present. “Did you find it on one of your sites?”

“I don’t give away artifacts,” she told him. “I told you, I found the carving in a market.”

“Where?”

“She’s actually from my part of the world, Jerusalem.”

“You said it was a mercado.”

“That’s because you wouldn’t have understood if I’d used the Hebrew. But it was in the Old City, lots of tiny dark stalls, a market more similar to Mexico’s mercados than to say … Safeway or Kmart or—”

“I get your point,” he said. “I thought you were working in Sonora, Mexico. When did you get back to Israel?”

“I went home for a visit.” Liora folded her arms over her chest. “Enough of the third degree, Enrique.” The thunder rumbled again and her eyes went to the tops of the mountains. The clouds were massing now, their undersides a dark gray. “We don’t have long before the rain breaks,” she said.

He couldn’t help himself. His hand closed on her upper arm. “I want to see you again.”

She pulled out of his grasp easily. “Look, my schedule is very tight—”

“So is mine,” he said. “But I’ll make time for you.”

Something different entered Liora’s eyes, a flicker of interest perhaps. “Enrique, what did you do with the gift I gave you?”

“It’s in my truck. On the front seat.”

“Where you left it after you unwrapped it.”

“Is that a problem?”

She met his question with a gaze that was impossible to read. It made him uncomfortable, needlessly defensive. “It’s perfectly safe,” he assured her. “I’ll show you—”

She knelt again at the spot where she’d been working and began to make notes on a pad. The wind was rising now. Tendrils of her hair pulled loose from the braid and brushed her cheek.

He watched her, wondering what he’d done wrong. Had he offended her? No, he decided, she was just playing the game. She liked being pursued, and she was well worth pursuing.

He knelt beside her. “You know what I’ve always wanted to do? I’ve always wanted to make love outdoors during a storm.” He nodded toward one of the large mesquites farther up the wash. “Perhaps … under that tree.”

Liora didn’t look up from her notes, but a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to play in washes? She didn’t tell you la llorona would get you?”

La llorona, the wailing one. He hadn’t thought of her in years. The spirit who haunted the washes, a Latino Medea, grieving the children she’d murdered, and searching for others to take in their stead.

“Not my mother,” he told Liora. “My abuelita. Every time the wind rose, she was sure it was la llorona calling for me.”

Liora’s black eyes bored through him. “Like now?”

His grandmother’s healings were one thing, her stories quite another. Even as a child, he’d been skeptical of them. La llorona was no more real than the bogey man or Santa Claus. But here in this wash with the clouds darkening and the wind keening through the trees …

“Maybe she is calling you,” Liora said. She tucked the pad into her pack and stood up. “You’re the hydrologist. You ought to know it’s not a good idea to hang out in a wash with rain coming.” She started toward her vehicle. “It sweeps things away, Enrique.”

“Thank you for explaining that,” he said curtly. The last thing he needed was an archeologist lecturing him about floods.

He caught up with her as she reached the Jeep. “You didn’t give me an answer,” he said. “How about going out? Just until you return to Mexico?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A relationship with a pre-arranged date of termination. Clean, finite. Saves on all those messy break-ups.”

“Why are you twisting around my words?” he asked, exasperated. “I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just trying to ask you for a date.”

“It’s not a good idea,” she said.

“Well, if it’s such a bad idea, then why did you bring me ‘a gift’ all the way from Jerusalem? Why’d you bother to call at all? Is this some kind of payback?”

“For what?” Liora asked, seeming genuinely surprised. “You and I had a fine time together.”

“That’s what I thought.” He was going to ask if she was teasing him, but the calm in her eyes told him that she wasn’t. “So … why the souvenir?”

“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” Liora asked.

The chill was back, racing through him like a disease. They were still in high summer. Since nine this morning, the mercury had hovered near 103. And he could see goose bumps on his arms. He forced himself to speak normally. “Why do you say that?”

“You’re the perfect candidate.”

It was all he could do not to shake her. “Liora—”

“I can’t tell you everything,” she said, cutting him off. “If I did, you wouldn’t believe me. But the statue, it’s meant as a warning of sorts.”

“A warning,” he repeated blankly.

“She is very ancient. The Babylonians called her ardat lili, the ‘maid of desolation’ … not so dissimilar to la llorona.”

“My grandmother isn’t even dead yet and she’s haunting me,” he muttered.

“The ancient Hebrews called her Lilith, the word for screech owl. They said she was Adam’s first wife, even before Eve. They said that she would not submit to Adam’s will, and so she fled from the Garden of Eden to a cave on the shore of the Red Sea. There she mated with demons and gave birth to all the evil spirits in the world.”

Enrique stared at her wordlessly. The last thing he’d expected was biblical fairy tales.

Liora went on, “According to Hebrew legend, she was a shape shifter, who often took the form of a cat or an owl. And like la llorona, she was a baby killer — though she was typically said to take children in the first week of life. Right up through the Middle Ages, the Jews regularly used amulets that invoked the angels to protect their children from her. She is also known as a night demon and a seductress, who preyed on men who slept alone, who possessed them and drove them mad. She—”

“Why are you telling me all this?” he broke in.

“You wanted to know about the statue.”

He shook his head, weary of explanations. “Forget the goddamned statue. Just tell me whether you’ll go out with me.”

“I can’t,” Liora said. “You’re not for me anymore, Enrique. You already belong to someone else.”

That night Enrique found himself unable to sleep despite the sound of a soft, steady rainfall. Liora’s oblique answers taunted him. Her inability to explain anything worth explaining annoyed him. And her refusal to see him stung his pride and made him play out mental scenarios in which she confessed her stupidity and begged his forgiveness; and he then graciously made love to her all night long.

At one that morning, having tossed and turned since ten, he got up and turned on the computer, hoping that crunching numbers would lull his brain into a state of relaxation. The three cats sat on his desk while he worked, clearly pleased that he was finally acknowledging the joys of being nocturnal.

At two he went back to bed. The soft rain had intensified into a downpour. He drifted off only to be startled awake by a deafening clap of thunder. At two-thirty, he ignored the rains, strode out to his truck, grabbed the statue and its newsprint wrappings, and brought the whole soggy mess into the house and set it on the kitchen table with a thump.

He glared at it for a few moments before taking the funny little statue out of its newspaper cocoon. A bird woman. Great. What was he supposed to make of that? He looked at it back and front, examined it top to bottom. Disgusted and more exhausted than ever, he gathered up the tattered newspaper to toss.

Which is when he saw it. A thin strip of yellowed paper in the very bottom of the wrappings, and on it, written in bright, red ink: Set me as a seal upon thine heart …

He studied it, surprised. Obviously, Liora’s cool disinterest was a ruse. Clearly, she’d meant for him to find this; that was why she’d been so pissed that he’d left the thing in the truck. She wanted him, after all. She just couldn’t come out and say so. And he’d almost thrown it away.

Mystified but pleased, he turned off the kitchen lights and was about to return to bed when he decided on a little extra insurance, just to make sure he slept this time. He reached into one of the cabinets for a bottle of tequila.

His hand closed on the glass bottle and he pulled it out of the cabinet. He reached for the cap and realized it wasn’t a bottle at all. Turning on the kitchen light, he saw that he held a red glass votive candle. A decal of the Virgin of Guadalupe graced its front, a fiery sacred heart its back. It was the same candle his mother had brought his grandmother. She’d stopped by his house after the nursing home ordered it removed. She’d said that abuelita wanted him to have it.

He shook his head, set the candle on the counter, and once again rummaged for the tequila. The bottle was half empty. Nearly a year ago Lupita, another ex, brought it to him as a gift. She claimed tequila was medicine, that it opened the heart. What he’d found was that Lupita didn’t like making love without it. The tequila buzz dissolved her Catholic-school inhibitions. Two shots and she was all over him, her body swaying to some inner music. Three shots and she began murmuring about love and after the fifth, she had a positive gift for the scatological. On one such high, she’d told him in revelatory tones that the outline of his balls and the shaft of his erect penis combined to form the shape of the sacred heart. Ultimately, though, Lupita had been a good Catholic girl who wanted a husband and babies in white baptism gowns. He’d explained that he wasn’t the marrying kind, then had promptly taken up with both Madeleine and Gwen to prove his point.

He opened the half-empty bottle and swallowed. He felt the golden liquid burn its way through him, then swallowed several more times, letting the liquor melt him into ease. Ten minutes later, he felt sure he would finally sleep. He turned toward the bedroom then on impulse turned back.

Feeling foolish but too drunk to care, he struck a match and lit the votive candle. A tiny yellow flame danced inside the red glass.

“You know I don’t believe in you,” he told the Virgin. “But my abuelita does. So maybe you’ll help her out, okay?”

It rained without cease all the next day and the day after. The washes ran high on the first day. By the afternoon of the second, they began to flood. Roads were blocked off and a bridge washed out. The city traffic became a tangle of detours. The Rillito River, normally a dry wash, had risen so high that people were canoeing and swimming their horses, and one of the riverside university buildings was in danger of joining them in the drink. Enrique found himself doing crisis management, assessing the damage to the river bank, consulting on the repair of the bridge, assuring assorted politicos that the city of Tucson would not be swept away, and even doing an inane forty-second TV interview that somehow took an hour to tape.

It was dark by the time he got finally home from the TV station. The rain was still falling. His driveway was a sheet of mud. Inside the house, the cats greeted him impatiently, demanding their dinner. The kitchen glowed with a dim red light. The votive candle was still burning. He turned on the overhead, took care of the cats, and found himself staring at the candle. La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary who had miraculously appeared in sixteenth-century Mexico as a pregnant, dark-skinned Indian woman. She was depicted as she’d been for the last four hundred years: wearing a blue cloak scattered with golden stars, standing on a crescent moon upheld by an angel, and surrounded by a spiky golden halo.

He nuked himself a frozen dinner in the microwave, listened to phone messages (Liora hadn’t left one), and made a brief call to the nursing home. His grandmother’s condition hadn’t changed.

Seena rubbed up against his ankles, plaintively crying to be let out into the garden. He turned on the porch light and let her onto the porch. The rain had thinned to a drizzle.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s wet out there.” The cat replied with a definite affirmative. He shrugged and opened the screen door. “It’s your fur,” he told her.

He waited through the tedium of the evening news, only to find that his interview had been cut for a report on the sighting of black jaguar roaming the outskirts of the city. Jaguars were extinct in Arizona, though there was a remote chance one had wandered up from Mexico. It was typical that they’d bumped his interview for a highly doubtful rumor. More storm hysteria.

Two hours later he called Seena in. She made a guttural sound in response but did not come to the door.

Resigned, he stepped outside. As there’d been no need to water, he hadn’t gone out into the yard in days. The garden, he saw, had been transformed by the rains. The sage was taller than he was. The grape vine so thick and heavy that it was snaking along the roof, blanketing the porch screens, the kitchen and bedroom windows, and wrapping around the western edge of the house. The datura had climbed all the way up to the top of the fence, covering it in white blossoms; a hibiscus he hadn’t even remembered being there was wound with pink flowers; and a carpet of purple verbena covered even the garden paths. Just beyond the gates a chorus of coyotes began their eerie harmonies. It reminded him uncomfortably of the night he’d seen that woman, the night the cat had disappeared.

“Seena!” he called again. He was embarrassingly relieved when she trotted right up to him. He scooped her into his arms and took her back into the house, making sure to lock the sliding glass door. He locked the other doors, then turned in for the night. He fell into a deep sleep at once.

He never knew what woke him. Not thunder or lightning or coyotes or the cats. It was curiously quiet for a summer night in the desert. Even the crickets were silent.

Thirsty, he got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. The votive candle was still flickering, burned nearly halfway down, the Virgin gazing at him with compassion.

“And a good night to you,” he told her as he finished his water. It was beginning to seem like she was the only woman he was actually having a relationship with.

He started back to bed when he thought he heard something on the porch. He switched on the porch light and peered through the sliding glass door. The wicker rocker was rocking and the porch swing swaying, as if both had invisible occupants.

It’s the wind, he told himself. But he was not certain enough of that be able to go back to bed.

He unlocked the glass door and walked onto the porch. It was the wind, rising again, rippling through the leaves of the grape vine, carrying the scents of orange tree and honeysuckle, washing him in the garden’s perfume. He hadn’t put on a robe, but he stepped outside anyway, drawn by something he couldn’t begin to name.

She stood beside the Rose of Sharon, waiting for him to register her presence. He was naked, exactly as she wanted him, and comely. And his garden made her very happy. It reminded her of that first garden, awash in the sweet mix of scents that she had known when she first came into the world.

Enrique found himself moving tentatively, aware of being barefoot on land that had long been the province of scorpions, black widows, rattlers, and a host of other venomous creatures. The desert, he’d always known, was searingly beautiful and far from benign.

The night was soft and warm and heavy. Humidity from the rains still hung in the air despite the winds. Thick patches of cloud scudded across the full moon, concealing it, then gliding on and revealing it again. And so the light kept changing, there one moment, gone the next. He couldn’t make his eyes adjust; every time they did, everything changed again and he found himself unable to see. Yet he was becoming more sure by the second that he was not alone in the garden. She’d returned and was waiting for him.

Thunder rumbled through the skies followed by a white streak of lightning, forked and branched, like a map of a stream bed illuminated in the sky.

He walked along the soft dirt path that ringed the outer edge of the garden then spiraled to its center. He spun, alarmed, as he felt something behind him, and then felt the fool, realizing it was only the soft fronds of the cassias blowing against him, tickling his naked buttocks.

He stopped walking as he reached the hibiscus. He could swear Cassie hadn’t planted one. And he certainly hadn’t. Had the tree grown from seed? The clouds slid over the moon again, plunging him into darkness, and when the moon cleared she was standing in front of him. She was dressed exactly as she had been before — in nothing but bracelets and earrings and the sheer skirt made of tiny golden disks.

“Enrico,” she said. Although her upper body remained still, her hips began to sway, the metal disks clicking against each other.in a rhythm that rose and fell with the soughs of the wind.

“I—” He didn’t know what to say to her.

A light rain began to fall. He ignored it, his eyes on her hips, her waist, the round, full breasts. He reached a hand out and touched the side of her neck. He felt the pulse inside her, warm and even.

The clicking of the golden disks stopped. She took his hand from her neck and touched it to one of the hibiscus’s pink flowers, now furled against the night. “Rose of Sharon,” she said. “There were endless rose of Sharon in the Garden — pink, white, yellow, purple, even a blue — and I was so fond of them.” When he didn’t respond she explained, “I thought they would go well in your garden.”

He found his voice at last. “I want you.”

“Of course,” she said. “And I want you — and if you had half the sense of a jackrabbit, that would send you running in the opposite direction.”

“No,” he said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t run from you again.”

“More’s the pity,” she said softly. But she took his hand and led him to a place where the verbena grew thick and green over the brown earth. And she drew him down next to her.

She touched one hand to his collar bone and trailed her fingers to his groin. “‘Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant … our bed is green.’”

The word beloved, uncomfortable close to love, nearly snapped him out of it. “Wait—” he began. “I don’t know you—”

“And you don’t love me,” she finished, amused. “Relax, Enrico. It’s just a line from an old poem.” She bit down gently on his chest and for a split second, lightning turned the night sky white, and it seemed to him that she was not biting his chest at all but sinking her teeth deep into the center of his being. And as she did he thought he heard his grandmother’s voice, calling on the edge of the wind, “El búho, Enrico, ten miedo!”

He forced himself to sit up, to hold her at arm’s length. She rocked back on her knees. “What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head, unable to explain. At last he said, “Would you turn around for a minute?”

She gave him a questioning gaze but did as he asked. He wove his hands through the fall of black hair and sighed with relief as he found them: shoulder blades. Normal, human shoulder blades.

“Okay,” he said.

She turned back to him, her eyes sharp in the moonlight. “What were you searching for?”

“Wings,” he said to his own surprise; he found impossible to lie to her. “I thought maybe you were an angel,” he joked.

“No,” she said. Her tongue circled his nipples. “Angels aren’t to my taste.”

“That’s good.” He pulled her into his arms and tugged on the waist of her skirt. The golden disks fell from her body. “Mine either.”

The rain became heavier, but he didn’t notice. All he knew was her. She smelled of amber and musk. Her body fit against his as if she’d been made for him. Each breast exactly filled one of his hands. He traced the curve from the small of her back to the fullness of her butt, and she made a sound that was almost a purr of pleasure. Her skin was so soft that he actually believed she was vulnerable.

He licked her body. She tasted like the juice of the cactus fruit, tart and sweet. He made her lie still while he drank her, and what streamed inside her tasted like the desert itself, a nectar of sun and wind and all the life that fought so hard to survive there, subtle and strong and infinitely precious.

She suddenly twisted away from him as he drank.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Let me,” she said. And then she was kneeling by his side, taking him into her hands, then her mouth; his cock and his balls, the very center of him, inside her.

She knew exactly how close he was to coming. So she took her mouth from him, let the rain baptize his cock, and then she straddled him, lowered herself over him, opening to him, enclosing him and yet somehow keeping herself maddeningly out of reach. He couldn’t touch the center of her. He arched his hips, held her close, thrust into her. She danced above him and he knew that it was she who controlled his every sensation. Every shudder, every moment of pleasure and release he felt because she gave it, she allowed it. She taught him a rhythm that was all her own. She was fiercer than any lover he’d ever known. She wouldn’t let him hold back. She took everything from him. It went on forever and it was over too soon. She taught him what it was to be truly lost.

After, she lay in his arms, the rain rinsing the sweat from their bodies. She was murmuring something in a language he didn’t recognize. “What?” he murmured drowsily.

“That poem again,” she said. ‘”My beloved is mine and I am his. He feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break and the shadows flee … ’”

He stroked her cheek. “There are no lilies in this garden. Just about everything else but—”

“This will do,” she said. She reached up and plucked a large, white flower from the plant behind them, then brushed it across his mouth.

Seconds later his lips began to feel chapped and then to sting. He licked them. No taste but a scent he recognized. “What the … datura?”

She nodded. “Sacred datura. I’ve always loved it.”

He pulled away from her angrily. His lips were blistering. “Did anyone ever tell you it’s toxic?”

Again, she nodded, blithely unconcerned. “Some say datura is poison. Others say, it gives you vision.”

He cupped his hands, hoping for enough rain water to rinse his mouth. It wasn’t necessary. The burning sensation stopped as a wing brushed his face.

He glanced up, confused. She was kneeling in front of him. The clouds freed the moon and in its light he saw that she had changed. The long hair was gone, her head covered in what looked like a cap of glossy black feathers and her feet curved into talons. She had no arms, but long, black wings.

“Who are you?” he asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.

“That depends on how you meet me,” she replied. “As I came to you, I’m called Lilith. But you’ve had other names for me.”

The wing brushed his face again. The feathers that covered her head became finer, thinning into silky black fur. She sat on her haunches, her arms straight in front of her, and as he watched, the edges of her body blurred and rounded. The fur covered her skin completely and she became a small, very familiar black cat.

He backed away from her, until his back was pressed against the garden gate, its wire cutting into his skin. “No,” he said. “I won’t believe that.”

The wing brushed his face, lingering over his eyes, then Seena was gone, and in her place he saw a jet black screech owl.

“Owls aren’t black,” he said, desperately trying to hold onto reality.

The owl stared at him with burning golden eyes and extended a monstrous black wing.

“No!” he screamed.

He covered his head, tried to dodge, but the owl’s wing found him, brushed his eyelids closed, and when he opened them he was no longer in the garden.

He lay on the bank of an arroyo, inches from a river of flood water that was flowing fast and cold, absorbing a cool, light rainfall. He was still naked, and he could still smell her scent all over him.

He forced himself to his feet. His head was pounding. His throat was raw. His entire body ached. Somewhere close by, a lone coyote called and the pack answered with a shrill harmony. He rubbed his throbbing temples, trying to banish a thought completely at odds with what he knew from years immersed in science: that the coyotes were calling down the rains.

The clouds and the winds were still playing games with the moon. He waited for a moment when he could see and tried to orient himself. Even at night, he could usually identify at least one of the four mountain ranges, know which way was north. Tonight rain veiled the mountains.

The coyotes sent up another round of calls. For animals who usually kept a safe distance between themselves and humans, they were much too close. He began walking along the edge of the arroyo. He’d follow the water until he recognized a landmark.

He hadn’t gotten five yards before he slowed. The moon was swathed with clouds again, and he couldn’t see it, but he sensed something directly ahead of him.

A furious scream rang out and he stumbled backward as something ripped into his shoulder. In a flare of lightning he saw his attacker. He hadn’t believed it earlier, couldn’t believe it now. He was staring at a coal black cat, its body thicker, larger than a mountain lion’s, its ears flattened, crouched to spring. His hand went to his shoulder and came away slick with blood. He felt his stomach churn. There was no skin left.

The coyotes shrieked, even closer, and the jaguar whirled to face them. A coyote, fully the size of the jaguar, edged toward the cat and howled a challenge. In the moonlight its fur was tipped with silver. The jaguar launched itself at the coyote and the two met in a fury of screams and howls. Enrique stood, transfixed, knowing the battle impossible, these creatures belonging to a world that no longer existed.

“They are mine, Enrique.” Lilith’s hands snaked out from behind him, pulling him against her breasts and thighs. “This night belongs to me.”

He turned to face her and for a foolish moment felt reassured. She was a good half foot shorter than he. How could any man be afraid with a small, voluptuous woman in his arms?

Then she was gone, as were the coyote and the cat, and he would have thought it all a dream except that the earth shook with thunder and the sky opened. The rains streamed down, drenching him, drilling into the exposed flesh of his shoulder.

You have got to get out of here, he told himself. But he stood, paralyzed, unable to make his body obey.

And then the landscape strobed white and he saw her.

Not Lilith. But a tall, thin woman wearing a long, black dress and a black shawl. She stepped toward him, and pure terror returned movement to his body. He edged backward toward the wash. He didn’t have to hear her cries or see her desiccated face to know who she was. She was exactly as he’d imagined her as a child, her fingernails so long they curved and gleamed like polished tin, her eyes burning red fire. She cried out to him, and her voice seemed to be the coyotes’ song, then the jaguar’s scream, then wind itself carving the face of the land. She was grief become madness and she would take all in her path. Her hands stretched out, reaching for him.

He risked a quick glance over his shoulder. He stood inches from the edge of water. He knew the soft earth beneath his feet would not hold. The waters were rising swiftly, nearly even with the top of the arroyo. They were going to take him, the ultimate irony, a flood-control engineer drowned in the floods.

Lightning flared and the black owl winged above him, enfolding him in the shadow of her wing, enclosing him in a desert transformed from familiar home to unrecognizable terror. And for the first time since childhood, he prayed to the Virgin, “Dios te salve María, llena eres de gracia, los señores contigo …” asking her mercy before giving himself to the floods.

He woke in his garden. The rains had stopped. A thin red line of dawn sketched the tops of the eastern mountains.

He lay on wet, soft earth. Lilith stood over him, her spangled skirt glinting softly in the gray light. “You’re lucky, Enrico,” she said. “You asked for help and it was given. The night didn’t take you, after all.”

Lucky was not the word he would have chosen. His shoulder felt like it was on fire. He knew he ought to get it cleaned, bandaged, but he was weak with exhaustion and probably blood loss. He couldn’t even imagine moving.

She knelt beside him, her fingertips tracing the line of his throat. “ ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.’ ” She smiled at the question in his eyes. “Yes, that poem again. But also what was tonight. Give thanks that you are the grandson of a curandera, Enrico. Know that it was her love that saved you.” He flinched as she touched his ripped shoulder. “Though you will have a scar to show for it.”

She ran her hand through his hair, as a mother might caress a small child. “So what shall I do with you?” she mused. “Take your mind? I’ve done that before, to others. It is no great feat to drive a man to madness.”

Her hand dropped to his penis. She stroked it once and he was instantly hard, too sick to move but aching for her. Even after all that had happened, he still wanted her.

“Take your cock, of which you’re so proud? Yes, I could leave you unable to ever fuck another woman, but that seems unfair since you gave me pleasure. And I won’t take your first-born, though I’ve done that too.”

She scared him. Thoroughly. And yet he found himself saying, “Just make love to me again.”

“No, Enrique, the time for that is over.” Her fingertips pressed against his right temple, then his throat. “So what happened to your soul?” she asked. “How did you lose it so completely? I think you must have given it away.”

He blinked, too dazed to respond.

She touched the center of his chest. “Your heart.” Her voice was a whisper. “You’ve kept it closed for so long — even the ones you loved, you wouldn’t let in. So now, know that it is safe. Know that it will never open again for another. It is mine for eternity.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You will remember me, Enrico. I will be there in your dreams. You will see me in every storm. ‘The only peace you know, you shall find in my eyes.’”

He watched transfixed as she lifted her hand and a fine red streak of light danced between her palm and his chest. Her hand touched his skin again and went deeper, as if she held his beating heart in her hand.

“ ‘I set my seal upon thy heart,’ ” she whispered.

He reached for her, but the owl’s wing brushed the length of his body, closing his eyes once again. He felt her lips press against his.

“ ‘Turn to me, my beloved.’ Now you will always turn toward me.”

He opened his eyes, tried to do as she had asked, but she was gone. He was alone in the garden. A shrill cry called his gaze to the sky. Above him a black screech owl flew west, away from the dawn.