Bastards, the woman’s voice curses, sounding furious.

That can’t be my Virgin of Guadalupe. She would never use such a word. But I agree. I like this voice. It is brave, as angry as the Virgin would be if she were still visiting me. I doubt the Virgin would like the strange dreams I have now. She would shower no roses on me.

For on the back of these evil pages is a beautiful colored picture showing a cigar like the gringo devils smoke. I can almost smell its pungent scent, and in that cigar’s huge cloud of smoke appears a new Virgin.

I unearth and stare at her every chance I get by the light of the abandoned, dying campfire.

She wears no white gown and blue cape. She wears nothing but a sunset-purple skirt. Glittering bridles of gold coins circle her flanks and chest. Her hair is not hidden by a veil, but hangs long and black and glossy. No flea and fly bites mar her pale arms and face. Her skin is as white as the mountaintop snow, her smiling lips are rose-red, and her eyes are the blue of the Virgin’s cloak.

I feel a strange, warm sense of recognition. I pretend the Virgin has come to me again, after all this time. She smells as clean as the night wind. My heart opens like a desert flower and my whole body feels such a heavy, alien ache that my head lolls back on my neck.

I feel her lips there, leaving a kiss despite my filthy skin. I know they’re as soft as a burro’s nickering lips in the palm of my callused hand.

Her lips have settled on my skin to draw from it like a horsefly, but the sensation is painless, soothing. My body basks in unthought-of happiness.

I reach up to touch my neck… and touch no silken hair, no smooth skin. I capture a furred, struggling form, a mouse wrapped in hairless hide.

In the ember glow I open my fist to reveal a leather-wing-wrapped bat, its eyes small black beads between tiny but donkey-tall ears. The mouth gapes wider than the Virgin’s cloak, bloody fangs poised to bite again.

This vampire bat preys by night on sleeping cattle and burros and goats… and one goat-boy who dreams alone by a dying fire in the desert.

I release the struggling form. I live off the Dead, as the coyotes do. This bat at least feeds off the living. The wings whoosh as they flap away.

A flare of light makes me gaze with horror at the fire. It’s catching flame again, reaching for my beautiful Virgin’s image, curling black along the edges.

I try to snatch her from the greedy tongues of fire, my fingertips swelling with instant blisters. She vanishes before my eyes, burning me as she departs: my hands, my heart, and the new dowsing rod at the fork of my body.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I hear my alien voice crying for the lost Virgin, for me. No more.

And so I understand when I am asleep and she comes to me again, many years later and miles away, after I’ve long since put my desert memories in a barbed-wire-bound box.

I’d grown into forgetting her and the desert and the devils, but the bat has been at my neck again. This time it wore El Demonio’s face behind an exotic mask of twin pharaohs and wanted to drain all my life and soul. This time I might sink into sleep forever.

I lie there lost, and then I sense her coming for me again as if in a dream to save me…

AND THEN I struggled to open my eyes.

Ric and I were alone in the bedroom-turned-hospital room. He was still in a coma. I’d been dreaming, rehashing recent all-too-real nightmares, Ric’s brutal childhood past and my anxiety for his future, not to mention my own guilt and fear about what he might have become after my intervention.

Ric’s eyes remained shut, his breathing so deep and slow I had to watch his chest for a full minute to see it.

I studied our interlocked hands. The silver familiar had bridged them as we slept, adapting a form both comforting and a bit alarming to a good-girl graduate of Our Lady of the Lake Convent School.

A rosary.

Sweet Virgin Mary and Sweet No-Longer-Virgin Me!

I’d been channeling Ric’s coma nightmares. His near-death experience had unearthed the trauma of his enslaved childhood. I knew Ric would rather die than betray the zombies he could be used to raise. I would rather die than see him become something he loathed.

To ensure getting him back whole and sane, he needed more than unconscious fantasies about visitations from Virgin Mothers and belly dancers, or even of his best girl in avenger mode.

I now knew I needed more too… expert help beyond doctors. And I knew just where to get it.

Unfortunately, it was on the opposite side of the country.

TWELVE HOURS LATER I turned my hybrid rental car down a winding gravel driveway. Main roads in pricey suburban Virginia ran alongside fenced and thickly wooded acres. The impression was of farms rather than residences. All the streets had Scottish names. I was leaving Braeburn Glen Lane for a private entry.

Autumn would turn the winding driveway ahead of me into a carnival of falling colored leaves. Now everything was green and lush. The rental car nosed around descending curves until a low, sprawling house came into view.

I parked in the circular driveway before the double-doored entry and got out, smoothing my narrow navy skirt.

A heavy dark cotton suit would make me swelter in Las Vegas this time of year. Here, the summer temperature was lower but humid. I felt the film of a nervous sweat.

I’d bought this vintage suit in Wichita because I loved the 1950s details: white piqué collar and matching cuffs, eight brass horse’s-head buttons down the jacket front and a singleton at each short cuffed sleeve.

The silver familiar retained its discreet default mode: twin of the so-not-me silver hip chain I bought in the crazy rush of first romance with Ric. I figured the hidden familiar was too too tasteful to clash with my current outfit’s brassy touches.

Tough. I’d chosen this suit for this mission, for what its color and cut would unconsciously imply to the people I wanted to see inside this pleasantly expensive house on the groomed and expansive grounds.

I even wore the Suit Era’s regulation white, wrist-length gloves and carried a neat navy patent leather envelope-style pocketbook. I took a deep breath before ringing the small round doorbell button with one gloved forefinger. Avon lady calling.

I hoped they answered soon. My heart was beating like I was auditioning for the class play. A knob turned on the right-hand wood door, allowing me to glimpse the occupant as it opened slightly.

A woman. Good. She registered my gender and opened the door further. The handsome blonde looked forty-something but was probably a poster child for the Washington, D.C., “well-preserved” matron set. She eyed me quizzically.

“Is your husband at home as well?” I asked. “I have important news for you both.”

My vintage apparel had subtly distracted her, causing a faint frown to materialize on her smooth forehead.

“Yes?”

She eyed my face again, hard, then silently stepped into the shadows behind her, swinging the door wide.

The entry area was paved in black marble, so the heels of my open-toed pumps made a military marching sound over the polished stone.

The living room was carpeted in deep shrimp plush wool, gorgeous and madly expensive to maintain. I almost wanted to step out of my shoes before I walked on it. Couldn’t afford to lose one iota of authority, though.

Her husband was reading a thin newspaper in an easy chair, hair thinning on top to match, half-glasses perched on a strong Roman nose. Old-fashioned habits died hard in this house.

He looked up, glanced at her, then eyed me again, rising slowly.

“My name is Street,” I said crisply. “I’ve come from Las Vegas with unwelcome news, but it’s not dire.”