Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

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?”