Prologue: The Desert’s Voice

(Gallup, New Mexico — Six Months Earlier)

The night was a bowl of stars, deep and endless, and the road stretched out like a ribbon of dark glass leading straight into it. Hannah’s old Pontiac rattled down Highway 491, the headlights slicing through ribbons of dust. The desert stretched in every direction. Mesas crouched like sleeping beasts, and the wind was thick with the scent of sage. Somewhere behind them, Gallup slept, neon signs flickering over half-empty motels and broken gas pumps. Ahead, the desert opened wide and endless, painted silver by moonlight.

Hannah drove barefoot, one foot tucked beneath her, black nail polish chipped at the edges. Raven sat in the passenger seat with her bare feet on the dashboard, boots tossed somewhere in the back seat. The window was rolled down halfway, and her hair whipped across her face in the warm wind. The radio fought to stay alive, the old speakers trembling under the bassline of Bauhaus, something about vampires and loneliness spilling into the night.

“God, I love this song,” Hanna said, tapping the steering wheel with chipped black nails. She was grinning, one of those reckless, wide grins that made you think she’d never been afraid of anything in her life. Her eyeliner was smudged, her blond hair streaked with dust, and the silver hoop in her nose glinted every time the lightning flashed over the far hills.

Raven turned to her, half-smiling. “You love every song after midnight.”

“That is because everything sounds better after midnight,” Hannah said, turning the volume up. “Even your brooding.”

“I don’t brood.”

“You absolutely brood. You’ve got this whole tragic desert poet thing going.”

Raven laughed, soft but genuine . “You're confusing tragic with tired.”

“Then you need less tragedy and more caffeine.” Hannah reached over , flicking her fingers through Raven’s long hair. “ You’re supposed to look free right now. You’re supposed to feel it.”

Raven looked out the window towards the open, endlessly dark horizon. “I’m working on it.”

Raven leaned her head out the window, letting wind sting her eyes and whip her hair. “Leaving Gallup always feels like breaking a promise,” her mother had once said. “The desert remembers when you leave.” No ghosts tonight. Just the road.

“Where are we going, anyway? Raven asked, dragging the word ‘we’ out like a dare.

“Wherever the hell the map stops.” Hannah took a long drag from her soda straw like it was a cigarette. “Farmington, maybe. Or Durango if we’ve got enough gas.I heard there is a club there that doesn’t card.”

Raven snorted. “You just want to dance with older girls.”

Hannah grinned, not denying it. “Maybe. You could too. Might do you some good.”

Raven rolled her eyes, but smiled. “I don’t think dancing’s what I need right now.”

“Oh yeah? What do you need, Rae?”

Raven hesitated. She could see her reflection in the cracked window. Her dark eyes looked stormy even in the glow of dash lights. “Just… out. Away from her. From everything.”

Hannah nodded. “Your mom still doing the dreamcatcher sermons?”

“She’s not…” Raven started, then sighed. “Yeah. She’s getting worse . Every day it’s omens, symbols, or the ancestors telling her something. She says the crows have been watching me.”

In a flat voice, Hannah said, “Maybe they are bored.”

Raven laughed, but it cracked at the edges. “She says that I am changing. That I’ve got my grandmother’s sight.”

“You mean like… seeing things?”

Raven didn’t answer.

Hannah reached across the seat, brushing her hand lightly against Raven’s arm. “Hey. Look at me.”

Raven did.

“She is just scared,” Hannah said. “Your mom’s stuck with her own ghosts. You don’t have to believe everything she sees.”

“Yeah,” Raven said quietly, “But what if she is right?”

“Then we run faster.”

The simple and certain way she said it made something ache deep in Raven’s chest. For a moment, the car was filled with nothing but the hum of the road and the low drone of the music on the radio. Outside, the desert wind whispered through the sage brush.

“Promise me something,” Hannah said suddenly.

Raven looked over. “What?”

“When we get out of here… really out, I mean… we don’t come back. Not for them, not for this place, not for anything.”

Raven smiled faintly. “You planning to drive forever?”

“If I have to.” Hannah’s grin returned, but softer now. “You and me. The open road. Music loud enough to drown out all the bullshit. We’ll find a beach, maybe. Or Mountains. Or Tokyo. I don’t care.”

“Tokyo?”

Hannah shrugged. “Why not? You always talk about it. Neon lights, ghosts, weird food, sounds like your kind of place.”

Raven laughed, shaking her head. “You’d hate the humidity.”

“Maybe. But I’d go for you.”

Raven looked at her. Really looked. For a second, she almost said something. The words hung there, fragile as the thin silver chain around her neck. But the radio shifted again, the static swallowing the song.

Hannah thumped the dashboard. “Damn thing’s possessed.”

Raven frowned. “It’s not the stereo.”

The static wasn’t random. Its pulse was low and rhythmic, like someone breathing through the speaker. Then a voice slipped through, soft and deep, chanting in Navajo. Raven’s grandmother always said that the dessert had a voice. The old ones believed that the desert remembers everything. If you listen long enough, it talks back. She remembered laying in bed at night listening to the jaz station on the radio when similar voices were heard over the speakers. It scared her then, now it made her stomach turn to ice.

“Do you hear that?”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Probably AM interference. You’re creeping yourself out.”

The voice came over the airwaves in ancient Navajo. Much of what was said was incomprehensible, but it was clear that the voice kept repeating Raven’s name over and over again.

“Okay, that’s freaky,” Hannah said, turning the knob hard to off. The music died, but the voice didn’t. It lingered, woven into the wind through the open window.

Lightning flashed on the horizon, its pale strobe lighting up the mesas. The air changed. The warmth vanished, replaced by a sudden electric cold.

Another flash of lightning. A shape darted across the headlights. Black feathers and white eyes is all Hannah saw.

“Shit!”

Hannah jerked the wheel. Tires screamed. The car spun once, twice, the desert blurring into streaks of red rock and sky. Raven’s shoulder and head slammed against the door as the desert swallowed them whole in a cloud of dust and gravel. The car hit something solid, flipped once, then stopped with a sound like thunder cracking the world in half.

Something screamed, maybe Hannah, maybe the wind. Everything faded to black and silence. The car was still, the desert wasn’t.

Raven opened her eyes to smoke and shattered glass. Her shoulder burned; the radiator hissed like a dying animal.

“Hannah?”

No answer.

The world had gone soft like a dream. She tried to orient herself, her ears ringing with that awful underwater silence. She tasted iron, felt blood drip from her lip and forehead. It felt warm agains the cool desert wind.

She pushed at the door. It was jammed. So she crawled out through the window, glass biting into her palms, knees sinking into the red dust.The car lay on its roof, one headlight still burning weekly, painting the sand in a trembling, flickering cone of white. Beyond it rose a sandstone arch, its curve shining bright as a blade under the moonlight.

Her grandmother’s voice echoed in her head as a warning. “Never go near the Mouth of Fire. The old spirits sleep there.”

“Hannah!” she shouted, her voice cracking in the emptiness.

The only reply was the wind. Underneath it she could hear the low hum and feel the deep rhythmic vibrations as if the earth itself was breathing. This was not the engine of the car or the thunder in the valley. It was a voice.

Beyond the arch, shadows started to gather. Moving slowly, deliberately as if the darkness itself had learned to move. Two eyes opened within it, glowing red like coals in ash.

Raven stumbled back. Her heart was hammering so hard in her chest, that it hurt. Her hand went instinctively to her chest, clutching the silver and turquoise pendant her mother had given her. She wanted to run, but she couldn’t.

The shadow drew closer, the sound of the hum deepening, vibrating her bones. Somewhere inside all this fear another voice rose. It was the voice of her mother singing an old lullaby she had sung to her when she was child. Without thinking, Raven whispered the words she was hearing: “Walk in beauty, walk in fire, walk unseen…”

The shadow froze. For a heartbeat, the desert held its breath. Then it shattered in an explosion of turquoise light.

A storm of feathers erupted where the shadow had stood, black and silver, spinning upward into the night. The air filled with their whisperings, and the sound of a thousand wings beating in chaos. In the center of it all came a raw and endless cry. Half crow. Half human. As quickly as it began, it imploded into silence.

* * *

Red and blue lights flickered in the distance, stuttering across the rocks. Sirens wailed, muffled by distance and dust.

When the paramedics reached her, Raven was standing barefoot beside the wreck, wrapped in the smell of smoke and sand. Blood had dried at her temple, her hair tangled with glass dust.

A rescue worker draped a blanket over her shoulders, but she hardly felt it. They spoke to her, voices clipped and urgent, but she couldn’t make out the words. She just kept staring at the place where the arch met the sky.

There was no sign of Hannah. No footprints, no body, just tire tracks disappearing into the desert, and a single black feather stuck upright in the sand. It gleamed faintly in the siren light, a thin streak of oil and moon.

The sky behind the mesas was softening from black to gray — that fragile moment before dawn when even the desert seems to dream.

On the ridge above, framed against the rising light, a crow stood watching her. Perfectly still. Its head tilted, eyes catching the first hint of morning.

Raven stared back, numb, tears blurring the world. For a moment, she could have sworn that the crow had whispered her name.