Chapter One
Scorpion Flats, Arizona
Seventy-five miles south of Tucson
November 4,2000
It started this way, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.
It started this way, with a man named Dan Cody driving a battered Jeep down a lonely stretch of highway.
It started this way, with an armload of roses scattered atop a worn canvas bag that lay on the passenger-side floorboard of that Jeep.
It started this way, with an armload of roses riding shotgun ... and a worn canvas bag filled with a thousand writhing scorpions.
To Dan Cody, the roses were frightening. Pooled in bruised shadows and silver-white moonlight, their petals were moist and full as a dozen wet, openmouthed kisses.
And just as dangerous, too. Cody knew that.
Beads of sweat gleamed on his upper lip. He wiped the back of his dusty right hand across his mouth and smelled the dirt and dried sweat that smeared his rough, tanned skin. He inhaled deeply, and for the duration of that breath he was transported to the cool midnight canyons and inky desert crevices he'd so recently, visited.
The smell of dirt was to Cody a brief respite from the roses' cloying perfume.
He didn't much like that smell, but he could not escape it tonight.
He would not escape it.
Tonight it was his destiny.
Cody wiped his hand on his black denim-clad thigh, and his hand returned to the steering wheel ... where it belonged, where it was comfortable. But he couldn't stop thinking about the roses. They were strange things, born far away from the desert. Valentine hearts from a land that was fresh and cool and green. In this hard and barren place, nothing survived that couldn't live broken and twisted and ruinedby the relentless beatings of sun and wind.
The desert was a land Dan Cody knew well.
It was the land where Dan Cody had been born, twenty-five years ago, and had died, twenty-five years ago.
And perhaps, just perhaps, tonight he would be born again.
"It started this way," thought Dan Cody, as he drove into the deep end of midnight.
"It started this way..."
The old Jeep tore blacktop as Dan drove toward the woman who haunted his thoughts during the day and waited in his dreams every night.
One busted headlight was dark and blind above the Jeep's twisted bumper; the other headlight was flared to BRIGHT--a cyclopean eye that spotlighted all the things that hid in the night and just as quickly abandoned them to the darkness
First: a rusted road sign pockmarked with shotgun fire.
Second: a patch of teddy bear cholla and prickly pear cactus.
Third: a memorial tribute Cody had driven by many, many times.
Once Dan had stopped by the roadside memorial in the bright light of day, had knelt on the hard-packed dirt stained with motor oil. He wasn't much on prayers, but he'd said one before the plain white crucifix with its faded wreath of plastic flowers that encircled a fifth-grade photograph of a smiling, dark-haired girl.
A pretty little girl whose short life had come to an end on this road. A girl who'd never lived to enter junior high with the rest of her class. A girl who'd never had the chance to fulfill her dreams of becoming a doctor or an equestrian, dreams that Dan had read about on a yellowed, plastic-protected newspaper obituary stapled to the crucifix.
As if you can sum up dreams like that, Dan had thought bitterly as he'd squinted against the sunlight onthat far-off day, staring at the faded photograph of a girl whose beautiful blue eyes seemed achingly familiar to him.
Dan Cody knew he had changed on that day. It was as if he had found a lost part of himself here, on this road, in the gaze of a dead girl whose eyes could have been twins to another's ... a woman whose eyes were every bit as beautiful and blue and bright.
The cross was nestled in a patch of cholla where a drunk driver, nodding at the wheel like a downed cork in a bottomless bottle, had swerved off the road and onto the scrub-choked shoulder. The driver--sleeping, lost in a dream--had plowed into the blue-eyed child who was collecting pop bottles on a moonless night.
There had been no skid marks. None at all. The pavement was dry, and clean. A straight shot into nowhere. The driver, dead himself--metaphorically, if not physically--hadn't even seen his victim.
But Dan Cody had seen her, and he saw her still. Though he tried not to, Dan sometimes imagined her last moments as he drove the solitary highway: the girl kneeling on the shoulder, red dust staining her knees, counting deposit bottles that would supplement her mother's welfare checks. Her blue eyes reflecting headlights that bleached her skin white as a desert flower. Her last breath, drawn deeply ... and held. Then a flash of pop bottles exploding like firecrackers against a black backdrop of sky, and death in the form of a half ton of steel smashing through the child as easily as if she were a tumbleweed that had come head to head with a tornado.
Sometimes, in Cody's mind, the girl would hear the car as it approached. She would look up, unable to do anything else, and fear would devour her like helplessprey.
But sometimes, in Cody's mind, the girl would not hear the car. She wouldn't look up, wouldn't see death coming for her. Tonight--many nights--she did not. Dan Cody knew it was better that way.
The Jeep raced forward, the cyclopean headlight beam washing the darkness, and there was more to see...
The Eternal One
At our human limits, when we've gone as far as flesh and imagination can take us, we meet the Eternal One.
The Crow
Immemorially old and inconsolable , he is there only for those who seek both revenge and love, and are willing to go all the way-and beyond.
Wicked Prayer
On a coal-black night, on a desolate stretch of Arizona highway, two last-chance lovers die badly.
In these, the final, cruelest moments of his earthly existence, Dan Cody watches as the lifeblood of his lady is sucked down by the thirsty desert sands.In an instant , his heart and his redemption have been blown away by a postmodern witch and her sadistic goth-giant companion on their gor-soaked joyride to immortality.
But even as one life ends in pain and anguish for Dan Cody, another begins .He is about to join those chosen to walk beneath the shadow of the Crow's wing.Revenge will be the sole reason for his return; revenge on tow who are speeding into the night in a '49 lamb's-blood Mercury on the fast track to Hell..or Nevada.And thought Kyra Damon and Johnny Church have embraced evil with a zealor's fervor, they underestimate the power of what's pursuing them from beyond the grave-the rough beast that's now slouching toward Vegas with murderous rage in its dead eyes.