Beyond the Darkness by Jaime Rush Page A

shirt. He was lean but muscular, strong thighs encased in dark blue jeans. His gaze kept slipping to the monitor mounted above the rearview mirror, which showed what was behind them. Whenever a car passed, he surveyed the driver.
    “Does the Glouk—Baal—know how to drive?”
    “I don’t think it does, but they’re good at hitching rides, either as human or canine.”
    He picked up his cell phone and issued a command: “Call Pope.”
    She heard ringing, and then Pope’s voice. “Hello.”
    “It’s Cheveyo. Everything all right there?”
    “I’ve been reading your survival manuals and studying the maps. It’s very quiet out here, except at night. What kinds of creatures reside in the woodlands?”
    His mouth quirked in a grin. “Wolves, bears, panthers—”
    “Oh, my,” she added with a grin.
    He gave her a tolerant grin. “Nothing as dangerous as the Otherling. Or the Glouk that’s tracking me.”
    “A Glouk?” she heard Pope say.
    “I’ll fill you in when we get there.”
    “We? Petra’s with you?”
    He looked at her, making it all too clear that he wasn’t happy about it. “Yes. And she’s going to stay with you. Yurek’s targeted her.”
    Silence. “Not good.”
    His words tripped her heartbeat. Terrible. Awful. Much worse than not good.
    “Not good at all. We’ll be in morning after next. Call if you have any problems, and keep an eye out for big mangy dogs—or men. You may see my cleaning lady, Suza. Try not to startle her.”
    “If I see her, I shall depart from the house altogether.”
    He signed off, settling into silence. She was a burden on him, that’s what he was thinking about, with those furrowed eyebrows and tightened mouth.
    She used the bathroom, washed her face with the plain soap he had on the counter, and applied the powder and blush she kept in her purse. She pulled a brush through her tangled hair, reviving faint memories of a mother who used to brush her hair every night. She took the stuffed Toto from her bag and sat down again, catching Cheveyo’s tug of a smile when he saw the dog on her lap.
    “What happens to your clothes when you morph into a cat?” she asked. They were wrinkled but hadn’t sustained any damage in the fight. The cat, of course, hadn’t been wearing clothing.
    “I change my energy, rearranging it into the form of the cat. Clothes, everything, is energy, and so it changes, too.”
    “Can you become any other animal?”
    “No, just cat.”
    “Your father became a hawk. We learned that from the director of the psychic research place where he’d been working before he joined Darkwell’s team.”
    Darkwell, the CIA hotshot who’d started a covert program to use first their parents’ paranormal abilities, and twenty-some years later their offsprings’ powers. He was dead now, the program dead and buried, too. Their parents had been terminated by Darkwell’s silent partner to protect the program and his political career.
    “My father only told them about becoming a hawk. He could morph into any animal he desired.”
    “How did you become a panther, then?”
    “Actually, I become a black jaguar. My father took me out into the Sonoran Desert when I was a boy. He performed a ceremony. I wish I remembered more of it. I didn’t understand all of this yet, and it was a bit unnerving as a kid to be out in the desert with a father who was chanting and dancing.
    “We sat in the desert most of the night, a fire burning. Then a jaguar—a rare black jaguar—walked to within a few feet of us. He stood there for several minutes, and I thought he was looking into my soul with those golden eyes. Something shifted inside me. He turned and left, disappearing into the darkness. My father was elated. That night, while we slept in the desert, I dreamed of being the jaguar. Somehow, through my father, the jaguar chose to be my totem animal. We all have a totem animal, but because of who I am, I become my animal.”
    When she opened her mouth to ask