Read The Valkyries for Free Online Page A

canteen. The dehydration is so rapid that we feel as if we’ve drunk an entire bottle of whisky, or taken an overdose of some tranquilizer.” He suggested that, starting now, they drink water periodically—even if they weren’t thirsty—because their bodies needed the water.
    “But an angel did appear,” Gene said.
    Before Paulo could say what he was thinking, Gene ordered him to stop at the foot of a cliff.
    “Let’s get out here and go the rest of the way on foot.”
    They began to walk along a narrow path that led to the top of the cliff. Before they had gone far, Gene realized he had forgotten the flashlight from the car. He went back, picked it up, and sat on the hood of the car for some time, staring out at the desert.
    Chris is right; solitude does strange things to people. He’s behaving strangely,
Paulo thought as he watched the youth down below.
    But, a few seconds later, Gene had climbed the narrow path again, and they pushed on.
    In forty minutes, with no great difficulty, they had reached the top. There was some sparse vegetation there, and Gene asked that they sit down facing north. His attitude, usually expansive, had changed—he seemed more distant, and looked as if he were concentrating hard.
    “You’ve both come here in search of angels,” he said, sitting down at their side.
    “That’s what I came for,” Paulo said. “And I know that you have spoken with one.”
    “Forget about my angel. Many people in this desert have already seen or conversed with their angel. So have a lot of people in cities, or at sea, or in the mountains.”
    There was a tone of impatience in his voice.
    “Think about
your
guardian angels,” he continued. “Because my angel is here, and I can see him. This is my holy place.”
    Both Paulo and Chris thought back to their first night in the desert. And they imagined their angels once again, with their raiment and their wings.
    “You must always have a holy place. Mine once was a small apartment, and at another time, a square in the middle of Los Angeles. Now it’s here. A sacred hymn opens a gate to heaven, and heaven appears.”
    They both looked around at Gene’s holy place: the rocks, the hard ground, the desert plants. Perhaps snakes and coyotes passed through here at night, too.
    Gene appeared to be in a trance.
    “It was here that I was first able to see my angel, although I knew that the angel was everywhere, and that the angel’s face is the face of the desert I live in, or of the city where I lived for eighteen years.
    “I was able to talk with my angel because I had faith that the angel existed. And because I loved my angel.”
    Neither Chris nor Paulo dared ask what they had talked about.
    Gene went on, “Everyone can make contact with four different kinds of entities in the invisible world: the elementals, the disembodied spirits, the saints, and the angels.
    “The elementals are the vibrations of things in nature—fire, earth, water, and air—and we make contact with them using rituals. These are pure forces—like earthquakes, lightning, or volcanoes. Because we need to understand them as ‘beings,’ they traditionally appear in the form of dwarfs, fairies, or salamanders. But all one can do is use the power of the elementals—we never learn anything from them.”
    Why is he saying all this?
Paulo thought.
Has he forgotten that I’m a master of magic, too?
    Gene continued his explanation, “The disembodied spirits are those that wander between one life and another, and we make contact with them by means of a medium. Some are great masters—but all that they teach us we can learn on earth, because that’s where they learned what they know. Better, then, to let them wander in the direction of their next step, to look out at the horizon,and to take from
here
the same wisdom as they did.”
    Paulo must know all about this,
Chris thought.
He’s probably talking to me.

Chapter 14
     
    Y ES, G ENE WAS SPEAKING TO C HRIS—IT was because she