“Can we communicate with them . . . him . . . her . . .” the Sheikh said softly. Then he cocked his head. “What is the right pronoun for a demon, by the way?”
“It,” said Liv without hesitation. “A demon is an entity that has never walked in human form. It transcends gender, just like the angels. So there’s no him or her. It’s just an it.”
“Well, that does not sound like very much fun,” the Sheikh said, his hand moving to her bottom again. “No wonder demons always seem grumpy. Come. Let us talk to it. Ask it what it wants.”
Liv shivered for a moment, glancing at the light fixture, then around the room, almost not wanting to look at any reflections in the windows. “I know what it wants. It wants what all demons want. To walk in the flesh. To use our bodies and then discard them after we are used up. At the end of it, they are simple entities, drawn by simple emotions.”
“Simple but powerful,” said Hakeem.
“Depends on how much power you give them. And one way to give them power is by communicating with them. We need to think carefully before taking that step, Hakeem.”
But the Sheikh wasn’t listening. He was already halfway across the room, his muscular buttocks shining in the yellow overhead light. Liv watched as he went back out to the living room, popping open that black bag and pulling out his equipment: cameras, wires, sensors, lights, and what looked like . . .
“No way,” Liv said, almost laughing as she walked toward the Sheikh. “Is that a Ouija board?”
Hakeem nodded. “Got it from a toy store. Can you believe this is considered a board game?”
Liv glanced around the room, shaking her head and trying to smile. “OK, I feel like we’re in high school or something.” But the smile just sent a shiver through her when she glanced at the flat board with the letters of the alphabet neatly laid out like a keyboard, the big labels for “Yes” and “No” clearly marked at the top. She knew that Ouija boards were often an entry point for demon possession, mostly because the folks messing around with them didn’t know what they were messing with, didn’t know that opening up the lines of communication with the demonic was in essence giving them permission to enter your life. The word “Ouija” itself was simply “oui” and “ja” smushed together: “Yes” in French and German! Consent! Come hither! Talk to me! Enter me!
Possess me.
But if we’re already possessed, Liv thought, then talking to the demon isn’t going to make it any worse, is it? Of course, she knew it very well could. But the Sheikh was right. This was the next step. It had to be. Either they were crazy or hallucinating—in which case nothing would happen. Or they weren’t crazy, in which case . . .
“We should probably put on some clothes before turning those cameras on,” Liv said, looking around for her jeans and top. “We might be taken a bit more seriously.”
The Sheikh grunted, glancing at his cock and looking up at her. “All right,” he said. “Hand me my pants.”
Liv tossed his silk trousers at him, smiling as they landed on his head. This was fun, she thought as the Sheikh frowned at her and then stood and dressed.
“All right,” he said when the scene was set. “How do we do this?”
“Where’s the slider that came with the Ouija board?”
Hakeem shrugged, looking inside the black bag and shrugging again.
“How about a coin?” Liv said.
“Do I look like a man who carries a coin-purse?”
Liv searched her pockets, but she had no change. She thought for a moment, and then frowned as she glanced down at the pendant hanging from her neck. “This should work,” she said, turning her back to the Sheikh. “Do you mind? I can’t reach the clasp.”
She felt the Sheikh’s fingers undo the chain, and his touch made her tingle again. She could feel the electricity in the room, sense their heightened state, the fear and apprehension adding a potent mix to the air.
“You never told me where you got this,” he said softly as she slid the pendant off the chain and turned back to him. “Who gave this to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It is the only piece of jewelry you wear. Clearly it does matter.”
“No. It really doesn’t. In fact I wear it mostly out of guilt.”
The Sheikh frowned. “Guilt for what?”
Liv took a breath as she thought back to what her parents had told her all those years ago, about how guilt was one of the most common entry points for a demon. Guilt weakened the human spirit more than almost anything else, making a person feel unworthy, undeserving, weak, forsaken.
“My ex-boyfriend's parents gave it to me,” she said softly. “A week before he died.”
The Sheikh nodded, looking at the pendant intently. “What is this symbol?”
Liv shrugged. “I don’t know. He said his parents gave it to him years ago. He’d always worn it.”
“So why did he give it to you?”
Liv smiled. “OK, are we going to do this Ouija thing or not?”
The lights flickered again, and this time both of them just laughed. It was too weird to be true. Was it ghosts? Demons? Witchcraft? Or was it possible that lights in an old house just flickered sometimes! Just like it was possible for there to have been some weirdness with the water pressure that could have caused it to spurt out and go down the drain against all laws of gravity. Just like it was possible this guy could have dug up some old information about her parents doing exorcisms? Then he could’ve made up some story about demon possession, knowing it would create a connection with her childhood and upbringing. All of it was possible. And all of it was more likely than believing in Satan and his minions!
But even if he knew about my parents, she thought as she watched the Sheikh turn the pendant over and look at it with a strange focus, why would he stage something like this? Is it just ego? He wants to mess with me for winning a goddamn negotiation? That doesn’t make sense, does it? After all, he could have simply backed out of the deal before paying up. He didn’t need to honor his “word” or whatever. People changed their minds about purchases all the time! No, that made no sense. This wasn’t some plan to mess with her—or if it was, it wasn’t his plan!
The Sheikh finally looked up. “You were never curious about the symbol depicted on this pendant? You never looked it up?”
“What do you mean, look it up? Glance through every symbol known to man and see if I can find a match? It just seemed like a design. Some twists and turns, a circle in the middle. Just a design.”
“Ya Allah,” Hakeem muttered, smiling and shaking his head. “Hand me your phone.”
She did it, watching as he took a photograph of the image. She moved behind him and watched as he ran a reverse-image search on the web, frowning as the search results produced matches that seemed close to the design of her pendant.
“Huh,” she said. “Didn’t know you could do that.”
“Clearly not. You must have been living under a rock. I am surprised you know how to use the camera on the phone.”
“I know how to dial 911, which is what I’ll do if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” Liv retorted when she saw that the top results on her phone were from a demonology website. “This is a setup. You’re engineering this to mess with me. It’s all a hoax, isn’t it? Scare the hell out of me, make me look like a fool, and then walk away laughing.”
“I am not laughing,” the Sheikh said, and Liv felt a rush go through her when she looked into his eyes. Immediately she felt ashamed. She could see the emotion in his eyes, and she thought back to the intimacy they’d just shared. She was still stretched from the way he’d taken her. She could still feel him inside her.
“I’m not either,” she whispered, slipping her hand around his massive bicep and pulling close as she looked back at the phone. “Certainly not now. That’s my pendant right there. That’s the desig
n. It’s almost a perfect replica.”
A chill passed through her when she saw that it was a symbol for a demon that appeared in various forms in several of the world’s mythologies and religions—from the Greeks and Romans all the way through Judaism and up to Christianity and Islam. She thought back to when she’d been given the pendant as a gift from her boyfriend’s parents, and only now did she think how strange it was to have gotten a gift from them. After all, it wasn’t her birthday. There was no occasion. She hadn't invited them over for dinner, or cleaned their garage, or even walked their oversized, chronically bad-tempered Rottweiler.
They’d given it to her in a black box, and when she’d opened it the pendant was wrapped in black velvet. They’d told her they wanted her to have it, that they would have given it to their son but it seemed more appropriate for a woman. She’d assumed it was something that had been in the family for some time, with some emotional value for the parents. She’d already decided to break up with their son, and in a way she’d accepted the gift out of guilt, not wanting to disappoint the parents. After all, she’d told herself when she saw the older couple smile at each other as she put it around her neck, a gift provides as much joy to the giver as it does to the recipient, right? It creates a bond between the giver and the recipient. A connection.
“Oh, God,” she said, taking the pendant from the Sheikh and turning it over in her hand. “Why would they . . . oh, God, Hakeem!”
Liv’s head spun as she thought back to her interactions with Steve’s parents. They’d always been polite with her, if a bit reserved. But there’d been something about them that had stuck out, and only now as she thought back to their faces did she pinpoint it: They had exceptionally smooth skin on their faces. It seemed minor, almost ridiculous, but she’d seen that phenomenon before on the faces of some of the folks who’d come to her parents for help. Not all of them—just the ones who seemed strangely at ease with their supposed possession.
Liv had asked her mother about it once, and Candice had explained that it was indeed one of the many signs of near-complete possession: unusually smooth skin on the face, almost expressionless, like a pond without a ripple.
Now Liv thought back to Steve’s death, and she almost choked as it all came together in a way that seemed unbelievable but almost obvious now: A ritual murder in the woods. A couple sacrificing their only child as a show of faith?! Was that possible, or was she seriously going insane in this old house, imagining things that were ridiculous.
Is it that ridiculous, she wondered as she rubbed the pendant absentmindedly between her fingers. After all, Steve was killed at close range. It couldn’t have been mistaken identity. And I knew the guy as well as anyone: He wasn’t mixed up in anything that would have brought him into contact with drugs or gangs or whatever the hell the police chalked it up to when they shelved the case. Despite what came through on the fear-mongering TV news every day, most murder victims were still being killed by people they knew, people close to them: a friend, a lover, a spouse, a . . . parent?
“Who can we ask?” Liv found herself muttering as she rubbed the pendant again, feeling it get hot between her fingers. Her gaze drifted to that Ouija board, and she blinked and took a breath, looking up at the Sheikh and nodding. “All right,” she said softly. “Time to face this thing. Find out if I’m crazy or not.”
The Sheikh grinned, but in his smile Liv could see an edge. “What if you are not?” he asked, his green eyes lighting up in a way that reminded her she couldn’t trust him, she shouldn’t trust him!
“If I’m not crazy,” she said, placing the Ouija board on the floor and staring at it for a long moment before looking up into the Sheikh’s eyes, “then things are about to get crazy.”
16
Liv stared at the board. They’d been at it for almost an hour, the two of them placing a finger each on the flat metal pendant and asking the “demon” questions. The process was typically carried out with a coin or slider, and supposedly the participants would feel the coin move as the demon operated through the physical link provided by their bodies. But it had been an hour and Liv had felt nothing. Even the house lights had stopped flickering!
“Maybe it left,” Liv said, sighing and taking her finger off the pendant. She leaned back on her arms and stretched her neck. “Can we turn the cameras off now, please? I’m tired of sucking in my gut.”
The Sheikh laughed and reached for the camera. He pressed a button on it, and then his expression changed.
“What?” Liv said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have not. But perhaps I will in a moment,” Hakeem said, his voice trembling as he pressed a few more buttons on the camera. He frowned and shook his head. “Look at this. Look!”
Liv crawled over to him and stared at the small display screen on the back of the camera. “What?” she said. “I don’t get it. You haven’t even started playing the recorded video.”
“I will in a moment, but I want you to look at those numbers at the bottom. That is the duration of the video recording.”
Liv squinted at the numbers, and she almost choked when she saw what Hakeem meant. “That can’t be right. It says 8:43. Eight hours and forty-three minutes? How can that be right?! We’ve only been doing this an hour or so! How the hell can that be right, Hakeem?!”
She looked up at the windows, and sure enough, the sun was coming up. Then she grabbed the Sheikh’s wrist, turning it so she could see his watch. It had stopped. “Lost time,” she said, her eyes going wide, her gaze meeting the Sheikh’s as he nodded. “Oh, my God. But . . . but we were conscious. Awake. Alert. How could eight hours have passed without us realizing it?!”
“We shall see,” said Hakeem, looking back at the camera screen and pressing play. “We shall see.”
17
“I see it!” Liv said excitedly, leaning towards the window, pressing her face up to the double-paned glass of the Sheikh’s private jet. “It’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”
The Sheikh smiled as he let his gaze move down along her curves as she leaned over. He was still amazed she’d agreed to make the trip back to Ramaan with him. But in a way she didn’t have a choice, did she? Not after what they’d both seen on that video screen.
“Is that me?” Liv had asked as the two of them had huddled together and watched themselves in horror. “Am I . . . singing?! What language is that?! Oh, God, this is so goddamn freaky!”
Hakeem had been silent as he held the camera still, pressing the “forward” button so they could skim through the parts where it seemed they were just sitting silently, cross-legged and frozen like statues, each with one finger on the pendant. There were hours of footage like that, with seemingly nothing happening. Then suddenly they’d both jumped to their feet in the video, Liv twirling around and singing in a high-pitched voice while the Sheikh clapped his hands like he was providing the beat. It would have been comical if it hadn’t terrified him to the core. He had no memory of it. Not of him, not of her. This was lost time and lost memory in a way he’d never believed was possible. And it was all right there on camera.
“But there is nothing here on film that proves anything,” he’d finally said when they’d forwarded to the end of the video. “No hazy images of demons or monsters. No flickering of lights. No strange mist floating across the camera. Anyone watching this would simply assume we are pretending. Or that we are crazy. There is only one person who will believe us, and although I hate to say it, perhaps it is time to visit that person.”
“Who?” Liv had said, pulling her legs up against her body as she rocked back and forth beside him. “Who the hell is going to believe that what’s going on in that video happened without us knowing, without us remembering, without us even noticing the time passing! And even if someone does believe us, what use is it going to be? No one can explain this!”
“Someone can,” Hakeem had said, flipp
ing off the camera and grabbing his phone. “Iidha qumt bitarjamat hdha, sa'ursil lak ktabana mjanyana,” he’d said into the phone. “Iidha qumt bitarjamat hdha, sa'ursil lak ktabana mjanyana.”
“What did you say?” she’d asked.
“I ordered my private jet to be prepared for takeoff from Raleigh-Durham International Airport in two hours,” he’d said, calmly packing up the equipment and slipping on his shoes. “We are going to the kingdom of Ramaan. We are going to see my mother.”
The Sheikh smiled again as he blinked and forced himself to look away from Liv’s magnificent ass as she leaned up against the window. What was happening here, he wondered. What did he want to have happen? Were they going to get answers here or simply more questions? What questions would his mother have when he brought an American woman into her chambers and said . . . said what?! What would he tell her? What would he ask her?
“Fatima Al-Ramaan,” said the old Sheikha, her eyes focused intently on Liv, her dark red lips pursed as she waited for Liv to respond. “And you are . . .”
“Liv. I mean Olivia. Olivia O’Reilly. Pleased to meet you, Your Royal Highness!”
Liv blinked and looked down, and then she bended a knee, doing something that the Sheikh assumed was her version of a curtsey. He smiled and shook his head.
“Do not encourage her delusions of grandeur, Liv,” he said with a straight face. “You are the guest of the Sheikh, and you do not need to bow before my mother.”
“Stop chastising the woman for being gracious and polite,” said Fatima, finally breaking a smile and waving her hand as Liv looked at mother and son, her round face turning red—and not just from the sun beating down through the open balcony of the sprawling day-chambers of the Royal Palace of Ramaan. “All right, child. At ease. Relax. There is no need for formalities. Come. Sit. Eat. Drink.”
She gestured in the general direction of a massive oakwood table laden with bowls of dates, almonds, sweetmeats, and savories, and Hakeem shook his head and sighed. “What are your blood sugar levels these days, mother?”
Haunted for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 15) Page 8
