“No,” Niki croaked, before she started coughing again.

“It’s all right,” the girl had said, had reached out and brushed Niki’s straggling bangs from her eyes. “The sea doesn’t mind. I think it flatters her, mostly.”

Niki closed her eyes, trying to untangle her racing pulse from what the girl was saying. Her nipple hurt like hell, and her throat felt raw; her mouth tasted like puke and brine.

I wasn’t trying to drown.

“My name is Jenny,” the girl had said, “Jenny Dare.”

“I was not-Christ-I wasn’t trying to drown,” and she hadn’t known which sounded more ridiculous, her rasping voice or what she was saying out loud.

For a moment, Jenny Dare had said nothing else, just sat there in the sand, knees pulled close and her bare feet sticking out from under the tattered hem of her skirt, watching Niki with eyes the color of Wedgwood china.

“Jesus,” Niki said. “I’m not-not a fucking suicide.” There was blood in her mouth, and she’d realized that she must have bitten her tongue or lip.

The corners of Jenny Dare’s mouth turned down, faintest frown, her full lips the same color as her eyes.

“No,” she’d said, finally. “No, I don’t guess that you are. It isn’t hard to drown, not if that’s what you’re after, so I guess you’re not.”

Then Niki had begun to shiver, sudden chills and fresh nausea, thought that maybe she was going to pass out, and those arms encircled her again, had pulled her close and held her. She tried to push away; there was something vaguely sexual about her bare breasts against this strange girl, and it frightened her. But she was too weak, too sick to do anything but give up and rest her head against Jenny Dare’s bony shoulder, bury her face in the musty folds of the old dress, in the yellow-brown hair that had smelled like autumn, like woodsmoke and frost.

Niki had wrapped her arms around Jenny Dare, returned the embrace and held on with what little strength she had left.

“Shhhh…” the girl whispered, soothing dead-leaf sound, and she had stroked Niki’s sand-flecked temples and cheeks, the stubbly back of her neck. Her fingertips slid across Niki’s skin like an ointment, gelid cold that bled heat. Warmth that soaked inside her.

In the car, the Hendrix tape had still been playing, cycled back around to where it had begun, and Niki let the living warmth and the singer’s voice take her down.

Niki had dreamed of ships, wooden ships with tall pirate sails, and fishing boats, too, and gunmetal ships of war. And Jenny Dare, watching silently, expectantly, as they had passed in the night. And when she’d awakened, when she’d been pulled slowly into purple-gray dawn by the squawk and screech of gulls, she’d been alone again.

Through the white scorch of July and into August, Niki had worked her way south, never more than a few miles at a time, sleeping in air-conditioned motels during the day, wandering the dunes and beaches and getting drunk on bourbon after sundown. When she couldn’t sleep, when the alcohol had left her restless instead of unconscious, she’d watched cable television or read paperback horror novels until dark.

She’d gone as far as Savannah before she felt the homesick tug of New Orleans and had turned back. But the second time around, the roads and the marshy Carolina coastline had lost their comfort, and she only made it as far as Myrtle Beach. Niki had rented a room by the week there and found a job stripping in a boardwalk dive called the Palmetto Club; she slacked off the booze, replacing the sweet amber numbness with the ache of tired muscles and the adrenaline rush of performance.

And early in October, shortly after the first guarded hints of cooler weather, the dreams of Danny Boudreaux, like something in a butcher’s window, had become infrequent and finally stopped altogether, a long and difficult fever breaking, leaving her free to face her ghosts awake.

“So why the hell did you stop in Birmingham,” the girl said, the girl with hair like cherries who had surprised her, not only by knowing what a Cubano was, but by actually knowing how to make one. Niki held the demitasse to her nostrils, breathed in the rich steam rising off the black, sweet coffee.

“You’d have to ask my car,” Niki said. “My car must have decided this looked like a good place to drop dead.”

The girl, whose name was Daria Parker, which made Niki think of Dorothy Parker, smiled slightly. She was taller than Niki, but hardly tall, and her face was too angular to be called pretty, much too handsome to ever be anything so simple or straightforward as pretty.

“Shit,” she said. “I sure as hell know I could find a better place to kick off.”

Niki sipped at her Cubano, the warmth spreading from her throat into her stomach, soothing away the road ache and exhaustion like a reward for still being alive. At least she’d found the coffeehouse, the only thing that had been open on this odd street. She’d turned the corner and at first the sight had been disorienting, almost disquieting, the gaslights and cobblestones and nothing open, planned anachronism, more of a Hollywood backlot than a street she’d have expected to find here.

“Okay, so why were you even driving through Birmingham?” Livid pink scars crisscrossed Daria’s forearms, telltale barista tattoos, marking the careless and inevitable contact of soft flesh and the espresso machine’s steam arm.

“Gee,” Niki said, setting her cup down on the bar. “I must have missed the quarantine signs.”

“The Chamber of Commerce keeps taking them down.” And this time, there wasn’t even the hint of a smile.

“Okay, I confess. I was just following directions,” and she dug a crumpled, brightly colored brochure from one pocket of her jacket, smoothed it out flat on the bar. “SEE-Ave Maria Grotto!” it commanded, in bold black typeface on glossy blue. “Little Jerusalem -AN INSPIRATION AND WONDERMENT.”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Daria said, and she picked the brochure up off the bar.

Niki shrugged. “Nope. I’m afraid it’s the truth.”

She’d found the brochure at the welcome station just across the state line, had grabbed a big handful from the display rack by the restrooms and read through them while she’d sipped a styrofoam cup of coffee that had been free and had tasted like it. She had discarded brochures advertising places like DeSoto Caverns (“Underground Fairyland!”) and Moundville (“Secrets of a Vanished Past!”). Ave Maria Grotto had been at the very bottom, last chance at direction, and she’d been hooked by the story of the Benedictine monk who’d spent his life creating a scale model of the holy city from bits of stone and trash.

“You must be one weird lady, Niki Ky,” Daria said and tossed the brochure back onto the counter.

And Niki looked at it for a moment, trying to remember why she’d made that particular choice, why it had seemed important, or even interesting, at the time. She’d driven away from Myrtle Beach with only the vaguest sense of purpose, little more than the blind need to be moving again. Had danced her last shift at the Palmetto two nights before and given herself some time to sleep before she’d settled her bill with the motel and tossed the gym bag into the back of the Vega.

“So, you got a place to stay?”

Niki shrugged again, shook her head.

“I guess I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “I guess I’m gonna have to find a room.”

“Or you could crash at my place for a few days, if you can deal with cockroaches and noisy neighbors.”

“Are you sure?” The offer made her uncomfortable, made her automatically wary, and she wondered just when and where she’d gotten so goddamned paranoid. “I mean, a motel would do just fine.”

“I have an entirely better class of roaches. And besides, it’s not every day you get the chance to offer shelter to a wandering pilgrim.”