I PLUNGED INTO sleep, too exhausted to dread my usual nightmares. No problem. Desert scenes in living color-all muted shades of brown and beige and sage green-flickered through my fading consciousness. Not my usual crisp black-and-white Silver Screen movie backdrop at all...

I felt the silver familiar sidle up my side and snake down my arm. Small beads twined our clasped hands, linking them, binding us together. I tightened my fingers on Ric's hand and dreamed...

OUR RESCUE PARTY had fought our way to the dungeon's darkest, farthest corner. I had to push through the Gehenna Hotel werewolf pack and Christophe's Inferno Hotel security forces. They had stopped, frozen silent, intentionally blocking me from seeing what they'd found.

Only his head and forearms were visible. He lay on the naked stone floor, his wrists manacled above his head to the wall behind him. I cursed the bloody gaping hole in his neck... not the bite of merely one vampire, but the banquet site of an entire convention of bloodsuckers. The once-human vampires had sated themselves and left. Now a writhing sea of vermin-feeding vampire tsetse flies and leeches-served as his blanket.

They said he was dead, dead, dead, Delilah, and tried to hold me back. No one could stop me from falling to my knees beside him, or my frantic application of CPR, the brutal chest-pounds alternating with blasts of my breath blown into immobile lungs.

My thumping heart seized when my old-fashioned revival efforts brought Ric's eyes open for a precious instant. Had my extreme efforts triggered a faint pulse of life in his ravaged circulatory system?

Minutes later, exhausted, even I had to admit that single eyelash flutter had been a postmortem twitch. I bent to bestow what I considered the Kiss of Death on his pallid lips, a final passionate farewell.

As my lips met his, I felt a deep primal pull in my belly... desire or a last spasm from my recent period, which always hurt like hell? We were linked by both pain and pleasure and love and loss and maybe now even blood-bonded.

Beyond all human and inhuman hope, Ric responded, bloodstained arms lifting to seize mine and curl fresh-bleeding knuckles around them. The voices that had urged me to give up went silent, astonished.

My passionate farewell kiss had become the Resurrection Kiss. From the interlocking forks of our bodies to the marriage of our mouths and the mated mantras of the past in our minds, I could imagine liquid-silver hope running like hot blood through my veins and into my beating heart, which sensed an answering rhythm in the body beneath it.

Now his dreaming mind stirred to fill mine as I shifted past the shards of my dream into his oldest nightmare...

... AND INHALED the scent of charred cedarwood. It masked the spoor of predator tracks in the sand. The air broadcast the musk of animals with hooves and coats rather than fur. I was glimpsing a scene distant in time and geography.

That's when my dozing self realized that I wasn't simply falling asleep. I was falling into Ric's coma, dreaming his dreams. Eavesdropping on his nightmares was like watching his own personal oldie midnight movie.

THE DEVILS SLEEP inside their adobe shelter, their campfire only ashes. The great desert grows cold at night and coyotes always circle the camp, but I sleep against the warm, swollen side of Mother She-goat.

The human coyotes, the evil men who illegally cross the border to trade in their own kind, have noticed that the she-goat has adopted me. I hear them laughing into their tequila, threatening to slaughter her and her kids.

"Kids," they call out so I hear and can't sleep, not even in the dark and animal stink of the corrales. They use the gringo word for children. Me. I am one of the "kids" to be slaughtered. At least they want me to worry that I might be.

They suspect I know more English than I should, know more of everything than I should. I often overhear them dealing with the gringos for what I can find under the shifting sands.

The scent comes again, sweet as fresh goat milk, heavier than the cactus blooms that fade so fast within their eternal crown of thorns. Jesus had a crown of thorns. I think of the Passion of Jesus when El Demonio whips me and it is better.

"No!" a strange voice calls in my mind. "Sweet Jesus, no!"

This voice has a warmer, lighter tone than the shouts of the devils. I heard such sweet voices from the time before the devil coyotes came and took me away. I remember as far back as when I first walked. I always found toys around my casa, forked branches of mesquite wood I had to wrest from the dogs.

My toys. I remember laughter then, and eyes high above me, watching. Then the twigs were snatched from my small hands, scratching them. Big sandaled feet kicked sand at me, into my eyes.

"No!" the foreign woman's voice is crying, murmuring now, growing used to things as they are, as I have already done.

Small Me is bewildered. My cheeks are wet as well as stung. I touch the dry, whole hide of the lizard my stick has found, hoping another poke will awaken it to play with me.

"No. Agua!" a deep voice shouts. "No. Agua," a high voice shrieks. "No muerto." More kicked sand makes my eyes squeeze shut. Blows hit my head and shoulders. I am "malo!"

I try to run away and finally do. I find only more forked branches. I can't keep my hands off them. They quiver like live things against my burning palms. They hurt me. Holding them brings curses and beatings. Yet they are all I know.

"Oh, baby, baby, no!" the odd voice in my head cries in English.

I don't fully know that language, but I hear the voice again now and understand it weeps for me. After that, the coyotes take me for theirs. They like what my forked branches find, the quiet, dry, dead things. The quiet dead people beneath the desert sand who walk after my pricked fingers bleed on the divided branch. They call them "zombies," and laugh.

I don't know where the visiting gringos take these quiet raised dead, but they pay well and ask no questions and when their light-colored demon eyes pass over me they are empty.

The Devil has a forked tongue, I heard once, but the only devils I know are here, all around me. I give them more and more of these People of the Depths, and they still don't like me.

I run away to find people who will like me, but the desert is empty and the devils' legs are always longer than mine. I am always caught and returned to the camp, thrown in with the burros they drag along and beat, and the goats they slaughter and eat.

El Demonio's bullwhip, when they find me again, is longer than the farthest Joshua tree I can see is tall. His whip has a thirty-foot-long tongue he can flick into the herds to kiss me good night. If he misses me, a four-footed friend suffers instead.

I wear pieces of the clothes I steal from the People of the Depths. The flies buzz all day. I crouch beneath shit-caked tails to escape them. I smell worse than the goats, and that keeps the devils at a distance. Even El Demonio.

Yet the night is my time. The night brings peace to the burros and goats. Some nights the sweet smell off the desert almost covers the stink.

And then she comes, the Virgin of Guadalupe. She wears a white gown and a blue cape. Her arms are always outstretched. I know she would wrap them around me and shelter me in her cloak, only there is no room because the cape spills forth bloodred blossoms that smell sweeter than any goat milk, sweeter even than burning cedarwood.

The flowers fall at my feet as I sleep.

Then comes bright day again and the burning sun of Hell.

No, no, no, the distant voice is chanting. I don't want this dream. Take this nightmare away.

I realize the Virgin is praying for me. I'll never forget the pain and beauty in her voice.

***

THE VIRGIN IS angry with me. No... sad. She no longer comes to see me. I smell only filth and blood and death. My thoughts buzz like the big blue flies that torment my friends with hides. My thoughts also swarm with anger and hatred. I look at the wood in my hands that raises the Dead day after day and think how a bigger branch would gash the devils' filthy heads. But the desert grows small brittle trees. I need metal to fell a devil, brown or white, and they have guns.

Despite them, I'm growing bigger, and hunch to hide it. Cabro-niño, goat-boy, they call me. Some always guard us stock when the others are gone. My escape plans now consider the comings and goings of the gringos. El Demonio is hardly here and hasn't used his whip on me for months. I've learned to sneak close to their sleeping place and listen. I've stolen food they don't miss, even a handful of shiny papers as brittle as cactus flowers I buried.

When I dig them up to study, the pages throng with naked people doing what goats and donkeys do to birth young. The animal young are so soft and smell sweet. I guard them as much as I can, but some are destined for slaughter and all for pain and servitude. Still, I know that these pictures do not celebrate new life but are as dirty as the looks the drunken demons slide my way. If I did not smell so bad...

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.