Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

She was unsurprised, when she woke in the morning, to find Shango and all of Shango’s baggage already gone. She imagined she could hear the faint squeal of Shango’s lunatic rail bike somewhere down beyond the thin line of the horizon.

She could have caught up easily if she had saddled the horses then and there. But she didn’t. She tidied up the campsite, made sure the fire was thoroughly doused, packed her saddlebags equitably and at last rode north at an easy trot. There was no talking Shango into this deal, Mama Diamond realized. Larry Shango would have to come to certain conclusions in his own way and on his own time.

For two more days she followed the government agent as the land rose and fell and the temperatures just fell. Both nights she showed up at Shango’s campfire with game she had trapped or shot with her Indian bow. Shango accepted the food and seemed not to object to the company-Mama Diamond learned a little about Shango’s childhood in the New Orleans projects, and shared some stories of her own-but he was adamantly silent about his long-term goals. Shango traveled alone. That was nonnegotiable.

He was a stubborn man. Well, Mama Diamond thought, that figured. Shango was a man on a quest, stubborn almost by definition.

Her fourth day out, Mama Diamond spent too much time stalking an elusive antelope. In the end the animal outmaneuvered her and she wasted an arrow on the prairie grass. By the time she had ranged back to the railway tracks, night had fallen. A fingernail moon shimmered through faint, high clouds. The old moon in the arms of the new, she had heard it called.

Missed dinner, she thought, riding alongside the moon-silvered rails, and the night was darker than she would have preferred for this kind of traveling. She didn’t want Marsh or Cope to step in a gopher hole and break a leg. She would have preferred to have them watered and resting by now. Stupid old woman, she had miscalculated the time….

But at the next turn of the breeze, she smelled dinner ahead. Pork and beans, wafted on a southerly wind. She was surprisingly hungry. She had not had an appetite so voracious since she was a much younger woman-Mama Diamond had been a picky eater for at least a decade. Her appetite had come back to her on this trip like a welcome if demanding guest.

Then she saw Shango’s campfire flickering ahead of her, and she smelled something new, something she didn’t like, something akin to the reek of burning hair.

Distantly, she heard Larry Shango shouting. Mama Diamond urged Marsh to a trot, pulled her bow from her shoulder and nocked an arrow. A gust of howling and barking came to her on the wind.

The wolf, Mama Diamond thought. That damned Old Dog!

The rank smell was the stink of singed fur.

Closer now, she saw that Shango, under siege, had thrown one animal into the fire. The government man circled the campfire warily, as if waiting for the next attack. He carried a weapon: a huge hammer, presumably liberated from his travel gear.

The burned wolf had escaped the flames and rolled in a patch of dust outside the circle of firelight. It howled its pain. The boss wolf-and it was indeed the Old Dog she had met in the train tunnel-stood bristling but silent at the front of a pack of some ten or fifteen other animals.

That wasn’t the whole story, however. The Old Dog wasn’t in charge tonight. Something else prowled the shadows, half seen, silkily invisible except for its motion. Something large, sleek and self-confident. Something that made the horses tremble and dance. Mama Diamond climbed down from the saddle feeling frightened but oddly elated, energy coursing through her from her fingertips to the sockets of her eyes. She planted her feet firmly and said, “Stand back, you Beast!”

Her voiced boomed out of her, so loud and so resonant that it sounded alien even to her own ears. All that air, she thought; how had she drawn all that air into the leathery old marble-sacks that passed for her lungs?

The pack turned toward her, dozens of glowing yellow eyes. Shango, gap-jawed, also stared.

But in the shadows the Boss Beast prowled on, unimpressed.

Mama Diamond strode forward, fearless and ecstatic. Wolves fell back from her heels. She said:

“Carrion eaters, you! Kitten stealers! Leave this man alone! He’s a good man! Back away, mouse biters! Stand down, you louse-furred scavengers!”

The wolves whimpered and backed away.

“Good God,” Shango whispered, “is that you? ”

His speech was nearly unintelligible to Mama Diamond’s ears.

Even the alpha wolf, Old Dog, ducked and drooled and moved muttering from her path. That prowling, pacing shadow, however-

“Behind you,” Shango said.

Mama Diamond turned.

This was no wolf.

This one was-a cat. A big one.

A black one.

“You’re not native to these parts,” Mama Diamond said, her confidence flagging at the sight of bared, bright teeth. The big cat stepped into the firelight, its eyes giving back the fire, its coat as black as a starless night.

A panther.

Escaped from some zoo? Liberated by the Change? Liberated and, worse, somehow altered ? Those eyes were not merely bright. They were intelligent, uncanny.

“So you’re the one behind this,” Mama Diamond said.

Give us your friend, the panther said. Give us your friend, or be our dinner with him.

“I’m no dinner for the likes of you, Shiny Flanks. Nor is my friend.”

We don’t care. He was given to us.

“Given? By whom?” The panther blinked but did not answer. Its muscles, Mama Diamond saw, were tight as steel springs. “What makes a big cat like you travel with a pack of stinking dogs? Who is it that gives you men to eat? It wouldn’t be some dragon, would it? Some big smelly red-eyed batwing dragon?”

Stern, she thought. But she detected something fleeting in the big cat’s eye-lack of recognition? — then it was gone, replaced by naked, brute ferocity.

Stand out of our way.

“I will not ! You heed me, you Barnum and Bailey castoff!”

The panther pounced.

Mama Diamond ducked aside, faster than she had imagined possible. Nonetheless she felt hot air as the cat flashed past her face, smelled the burnt-wood smell of its fur a fraction of a second before it landed foursquare, beyond the campfire, and swiveled to face her once more, eyes glittering like furious opals.

Reflexively, Mama Diamond snatched up a cottonwood branch from the perimeter of Shango’s crude fire. The stick was not alight, merely smoldering at the far end. She brandished it at the monstrous cat, feeling the ludicrous inadequacy of it.

But then a word formed on her lips, and Mama Diamond couldn’t say that she intended it before it was said.

“Fire.”

Nothing changed, really, not that she or Shango could observe. Looking down at her arm, she saw that the blackened branch remained the same.

But in the huge eyes of the cat, her reflection told a different story. There, the branch burst instantly alight. Blue flame, like the subtle fire of an alcohol lamp, scuttled up the branch to the mirrored image of Mama Diamond’s hand, then her arm, then all of her.

It occurred to Mama Diamond that this must be something akin to the trick Stern had first played on her when he had emerged from the death-black train, when he had appeared human for a moment.

I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.

A trick of the eye. Or, more appropriately in this case, the voice.

Mama Diamond suddenly remembered that moment in her shop, when Stern reached out to her and that spark of blue devil flame leapt from his hand to her shoulder and filled her with renegade lightning. Just what in the name of creation had happened there?