Divine Madness by Melanie Jackson

smiled. The old religions were here still, just obscured by the hardening sediment of four hundred years of enforced Catholicism. This was a good thing, at least for her purposes.
    Still wet, she stood in front of the spotted mirror over the sink and examined her body. It was outwardly healed from the explosion. The burns were gone. Her only marks were the fine mesh of golden scars that covered her torso like lace. It looked like a clever tattoo, but wasn’t. These powers of recuperation still amazed her. She should have been incapacitated by the fire bomb, her skin burned black and peeling, but even with her powers waning, she had managed to stagger away from her grave with only minor burns on her chest and legs.
    Still, that had been a close call. She and Corazon had left on a boat that very night, borrowed clandestinely from a neighbor, a gut-shot cocaine-trafficker who had given up smuggling but kept the yacht for auld lang syne. Or whatever. She felt that he would have approved of her actions had she taken the time to contact him.
    The crossing to the main island had been rough, but she couldn’t complain about the price of passage or the slutty clothes she had found lying on one of the bunks. And once there, it was easy to join the other tourists from the cruise ship making a surf-n-turf port of call and get lost among them. She’d made a few calls from a pay phone to friends who had friends who did useful and illegal things for large sums of money, and Seraphina of California was born two days later.
    She had debated sending Byron a telegram or e-mail to warn him of what had happened, but was certain that he and his lover Brice had left her home and that they were already on the run. And if they weren’t, her action might actually put them in harm’s way, alerting the authorities or even Saint Germain to the fact that the poet was alive and probably involved somehow in that incident with Dippel at Ruthven Towers. Instead, she had simply crossed into the U.S. at one of the illegal border crossings and headed for Byron’s wife’s last known address, hoping to pick up their trail on the way.
    The next morning she’d heard about an “incident”where some illegals had been gunned down. It was hard not to wonder if the killers had been looking for her.
    She’d known that she was too attractive to fool the other illegals in her group that she was traveling to the U.S. to pursue a career in agriculture, but no one had doubted that she would be taken care of in the land of opportunity. She looked the sort of girl who relied upon the kindness—and bedside tips—of strangers. Of course, that image only held together until someone looked into her eyes. If a person were even moderately perceptive, the role of high-priced mistress began to delaminate. A few hours in her company and the whole role came apart. Some women would never be whores. The men had wisely left her alone, and she’d left that group and joined another as soon as she could, both for her own protection and for theirs.
    She’d thought about abandoning her plan. Whore wasn’t a role she needed to play often or for long, and it was unlikely that the government would be looking for her among the illegals further north, so this was safest.
    So you will be going back to the States when this is done? the voice in her head had asked.
    Of course. As soon as I have help with my problem .
    Ninon ran a hand down her belly. Smooth—not one hint of scar tissue. Amazing. The only evidence of the fire was Corazon’s hair. Not one bit of her own body showed any damage.
    She had once asked a former island friend who was a retired sports doctor—retired early for prescribing too many steroids for what were deemed trivial reasons—to check her out on the pretext that she was thinking of running a marathon. The results of the examination had astonished him and made him want to recheck the results. Her maximal heart rate was around four hundred beats per