With a small gasp she lets go, topples over backward to land on the nest of pillows she’d made for herself earlier, when she’d been making pretence of watching television.
“…what the Axis forces had not been prepared for was the tenacity of the French resistance, for the…” The television presenter drones on with his clipped British accent and my gaze momentarily shifts to the occurrences on the screen, to grainy black-and-white images of Paris when the Nazi banner is torn down from a monument.
The child’s body twitches spasmodically, glowing violet-blue at its edges, as though a spectral shape is superimposed for two or three heartbeats. She stills, and the stench of urine pervades the atmosphere.
I scrabble backward with an oath, gazing in horror at the slow-spreading pool of liquid puddling between her thighs. She’s dead. There’s no sense of any spirit fleeing, only cold silence; The Book of Ammit is even heavier in the backpack, drawing me to sit hard on my rear while staring at the small corpse.
I’ve killed, really killed. I’ve destroyed someone’s immortality, cut off any soul’s energy from returning to the Sea of Nun. The realisation is crushing and my chest closes, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. Those fateful words flash through my memory, etched indelibly. It is so easy to say them again. Too easy.
Is Ma’at satisfied? Was there any other possible outcome? If I’d killed the Kha, the Akh would keep returning, keep bedevilling me.
On the screen the Nazi insignia goes up in flames, and I know, in my heart of hearts, that House Montu’s involvement must have been somewhere in that regime. I have made myself immortal enemies this day, eternal enemies who will hunt me down through the ages for as long as Nefretkheperi is my Ren. House Adamastor is finished.
This prompts me to scramble to my feet, my legs unwilling to obey my command. Damn, where the hell is Ashton? I need to find Marlise, if she’s still alive, and get both of us out of this place before we’re caught.
Who knows what retribution we face? If the girl child’s powers were anything to go by, what could a mature member of House Montu do? Ending Jonathan Binneman had been mere fluke, a temporary victory. He’ll be back.
I turn and rush out of this chamber of horror.
“Marlise!” My voice echoes in the empty passage and I try each door I encounter until I enter a bedroom to find her curled in a foetal position on the bed, her back to the door.
She mumbles something incoherent and turns, rubbing at her eyes before blinking blearily in my direction. Once again I’m struck by how young she looks, her dark red curls spilling out of the hair band that has loosened during her sleep.
Rushing toward her I pull her by her hands into a seated position, kneeling to embrace her hard. Her breath tastes of the bitterness of sleep but her comforting mint scent offers some ease.
“Ash?” she murmurs in my ear.
“I’m here, baby. I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
“I’ve had some terrible dreams…”
I can feel her yawning, the tension in her muscles as she straightens her spine then tightens her grip about my waist. It must register where she is because she stiffens. “It’s so quiet.”
“We’re okay, but we’re going to have to get out of here, like as in yesterday.” I can only hope the car I left down the road is still there, that it doesn’t have some sort of tracking device…but that would be easy to deactivate.
She lets me help her to her feet and she sways groggily. We make a cursory sweep of the other rooms and I find her cell phone and wallet on a bedside table, and I hand these to her. There’s a picture of Cynthia and Paul on horseback in a forest. For some reason I turn the picture over.
“I need to call my parents.” Marlise snatches the phone from me and switches it on.
I’d like to tell her it’s not a good idea, but she scrolls down the menu and presses the call button, her expression one of concern while she waits for someone to answer. All the while I hold her gaze steadily, giving a small shake of my head when I hear the line crackle and someone answer on the other end.
Her pupils dilate and she pulls the phone from her face, killing the call.
“What?”
“It was my mother.”
“She’s fine?”
Marlise nods.
“Why did you end the call then?”
“I can’t go back, can I?”
I offer the slightest shake of my head. The phone starts ringing shrilly, and Marlise ends the call. We both look at the device in her hand.
“Put on your shoes.” I incline my head and motion at her feet.
“Oh.” She hands me the cell phone, which immediately buzzes into life again. Marlise’s expression turns to one of wild hope.
The caller ID displays an unknown number and I answer, just for the hell of it, a small clench of suspicion in my belly.
“Hello?”
A man speaks. “I need to talk to Lucy! Immediately. I’ve been trying to get hold of her the last two days. Who are you?” My god he sounds pissed.
A faint glimmer of suspicion rises, and I recall the querulous old granny who’s been pestering Marlise with the wrong number for the past week or two. I don’t know what it is that makes me say what I do. “You can’t speak to Lucy right now. She’s in the shower.”
I break the connection then switch off the phone, glancing up to see Marlise’s slight grin.
“What did you do that for?”
I can’t keep a straight face. Everything that’s happened over the past forty-eight hours has me howling with laughter. Ashton would have pulled a stunt like this, and it feels good to laugh until my stomach aches.
Marlise follows suit, realisation dawning. “That sounded like a guy on the other end of the line.” She wipes at her eyes. “Her boyfriend?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” I straighten and draw a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get out of here.
Hand in hand we sweep through the house, looking for anything that may be useful. Out of spite I trash the computer in the study, stomping the hard drive and other bits and bobs on the inside until they’re nothing more than a clinking pile of fragments. We find a wad of cash in a wallet in the master bedroom. It’s not much, but hell, two grand is better than nothing at all. It should buy us bus tickets, or something.
I lead Marlise out the front. I’d prefer her not seeing the mess at the back. Her mood is light, her essence giddy. She doesn’t ask about what happened, but I see the question in her expression when we go downstairs. I’ve kept her away from the room where Catherine’s Kha is cooling.
I stop by a walk-in closet by the front door where I find a number of coats. This is where Marlise notices that I’m bleeding.
“Ash! You can’t go out like this.”
The pain is hardly an issue when my entire being is thudding with exhaustion, but I stop to look numbly at the blood still dripping from my sleeve. I need time to hole up, heal myself, which is time we don’t have. Not now. I glance up at her. “We must go.”
She grips my jacket and shakes me. “Are you stupid? Besides you bleeding to death, do you think we can go about out there with you leaving a blood trail?”
Marlise has a point and I allow her to lead me to a ground floor bathroom where, as luck would have it, we find a small first aid kit stowed in cupboard in which the sink is set. House Montu doesn’t mess around.
I can’t look at the wound. My daimonic senses suggest the bullet has gone all the way through, and I have to bite the inside of my cheeks when Marlise dabs spirits on the wound before wadding it with sterile dressing and what seems like an entire roll of bandage. All the while my gut sense warns that we need to leave, we need to get out of here. Someone must be onto the disruption by now, perhaps a security company with dogs and men armed with big guns.
I still can’t draw much power to me, and Ashton remains obstinately silent, though I send my thoughts out, nebulously, in a vain hope of making contact. Has he completely blown his souls to smit
hereens? That he may no longer be in existence upsets me on a deeper level. I may not admit it to him but I’ve grown fond of my angry ghost.
“Are you done yet, woman?” I ask.
“Patience!” She tugs a few times, sending sharp shooting pains through my nervous system.
The sense of urgency has me on my feet before she can fuss any longer. I grab her upper arm and rush her down the front stairs. We stop long enough for me to get a jacket from the closet—a bulky thing made from dark blue synthetic fabric. A random Blessed memory I encountered a lifetime ago suggests this is a good colour for night-time when stealth is required.
We dash down the front steps not a moment too soon. Despite the night, I hear a helicopter and a random flash of a search light illuminates the garden at the back of the house. Miraculously the gate is half open. The electronics must have shorted or perhaps the fleeing guards had forced it open when they made their escape.
It doesn’t matter now. We pelt along the street, our shoes’ soles slapping on the tarmac. The screech of tyres around a corner has me jerk Marlise into a hedge as a convoy of sleek dark cars screeches past us. I press her face against my chest and allow my hair to spill over my features, praying the headlights don’t pick out our shapes. The momentary discomfort offered by twigs pressing goodness knows where is nothing, considering what could happen should we get captured.
The roads are going to be hell, and no doubt they’ll have other methods for tracking us. We need to get the hell out of Dodge, that much is for sure.
Desperately I rack Blessed memories, looking for some sort of knowledge to aid our escape. It comes to me in bursts, a child’s remembrance of hunting tadpoles in the streams criss-crossing the green belts threading this neighbourhood. It’s not ideal but it’s an improvement on taking the obvious routes and risking detection. No doubt they’ll trawl the green belts, too, but there’s far more cover.
Where the hell is Ashton? I could use him round about now. We crash into a riverbed choked with low brush that slaps into our faces. As fate would have it, the helicopter rattles off to the south. For now. It’s quite possible they’d double back. This entire area is shot through with tangled greenery. Marlise stumbles, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from going down, jerking her onto her feet. Let there not be obstacles hidden. A little to the right our feet find a narrow track that snakes beneath willows.
The rain-swollen stream gurgles and gushes over its bed, but it’s so dark I can’t see my hands in front of my face. A beam of light slashes through the darkness and I turn to look into Marlise’s grinning face.
“You found a torch?”
“Men won’t think of these things. It was in the cupboard next to the first aid kit.”
I pause long enough to squeeze her to me and we run. Sirens blaze though the stillness, in the rough direction from whence we came, lending urgency to our steps. Please let them not have dogs.
For how long we run I don’t know. We have to stop often so I can catch my breath, bright sparks wiggling in my field of vision. Marlise asks me if I’m okay for the nth time but I don’t want to let on that I’m about to keel over.
We pause again just before an embankment and I look back the way we came, to where torch beams flash.
“They’re on to us, aren’t they?” Marlise says.
We’ve switched off our light and I rise from the rotted log I’ve been half-leaning against. My legs buckle, my lungs burning from the effort of going. When I try to snatch at the aethers, desperate for some flicker of daimonic energy, the skeins are mere tatters.
Disappointment burns at the back of my throat. We’ve made it this far. How can we lose out now?
A car engine rumbles in the distance and wild hope soars. We’ve reached Constantia Main Road. Before I can react, Marlise has my hand in hers and she tugs me upslope. The headlights of the passing vehicle blind us as it roars past, but the level surface of the gravelly verge is a blessing after our mad chase through the bush.
Our pursuers and a chorus of clicking frogs behind us, we stagger along, Marlise dragging me across the flat expanse of tar to the other side of the road.
“What now?” I gasp out the words.
“We’re going to hitch-hike.”
“Who’s going to stop for us? It’s dark.”
“We won’t know until we try.”
“What if it’s House Montu’s people?”
“We don’t have any other options. We have to try.” She presses a flat object into my hand.
My fingers run over the surface: a leather sheath belonging to a knife. Wordlessly I grip this and shove it into the jacket pocket. I don’t want to add anything about taking a knife into a gun fight. Not now.
First one car passes, then another. Marlise turns to face the oncoming traffic, an inane grin plastered to her features as she sticks out her thumb. But who in their right mind will stop to collect a woman who has me as her companion—some six-foot stranger with a mess of long black hair that doesn’t look like it has seen a brush in years?
I’m about to point out the foolishness of this and suggest that we use her phone to call a taxi, when against all hope the next car does slow down and pull over to the side of the road. It’s a battered Isuzu pick-up truck with a double cab and we pretty much fall into the back passenger seats.
A wiry black fellow turns to grin at us as he switches on the cabin light. His teeth shine white, his hair in dreads falling down his back. “You guys look like you could use a ride.”
Marlise flashes him such a sweet smile I’d kiss her right there. “Thank you, mister.”
He laughs and turns to face the road. Before he switches off the interior lamp I catch a glimpse of the miniature figurine dangling from the rear-view mirror: a small anthropomorphic shape with the head of a jackal.
That’s when I allow myself to smile.
Epilogue
Cicadas shriek in the ragged ghost gum that offers scant shade to Camdeboo Kitchen, a small hole-in-the wall Karoo pub. I lean against the pillar leading down to the chalky dirt road that cuts through the heart of Nieu Bethesda. Even now, six months later and mid-summer since our ordeal, I still find it difficult to sometimes register that we’ve made it this far.
We’ve run this far—exactly in the middle of nowhere, a House of two, a House that no longer has a name.
Sonja waves at me from the bar, her wild mop of white-blond hair gleaming in the low light as she sets down a crate of beers to pack in the fridges for the passing tourist trade. It’s unbelievable that I’ve secured some sort of future here, in this small Karoo hamlet with a population of less than a thousand; that I could convince the Wareings to take a ragged pair of strangers in when they themselves are hunted for what they are.
Granted, I’m still looking over my shoulder, still sending out my awareness with each visitor this small hamlet draws. Maybe House Montu thinks we’ve headed out of the country. That would be the sensible thing to do. That’s what I would have done had I had the resources. But we didn’t, and we still don’t.
We could have gone missing in one of the other cities, but it’s not like I can hide this Kha, can I? Unless I hide in plain sight in a place where just about every resident is eccentric and has some sort of story to tell. I’m not the only freak with tattoos and piercings here.
Freaks like the Wareings. Who could miss them? A clan with their signature complexions, so pale they look like ghosts themselves. Psychics, seers… Witches, the lot of them.
They took one look at me and Marlise, and just about jumped us with a banishing ritual when we pulled in road-worn and weary. It’s an uneasy alliance, but then I’ve a thing or two I can teach them in exchange for shelter, safety. I’ve sure as hell not told them about the stele. The Book of Ammit has a new hiding place, and I’ve gone there every other week to lay yet another compulsion on it. When we have to run, I’m leaving it here. And we will have to run. Not today. Perhaps not even tomorrow, but the time will come. House Montu is re
lentless. Of that I have no doubt.
But it is to Marlise that I go now and, as if by unspoken agreement, she meets me halfway from the door of the small cottage we rent. It is situated off a quiet side road shaded by cypresses, which release their resinous scent when the sun reaches its zenith. Water gurgles in the furrows, bringing life in this land where the summer sun bakes down without mercy in this remote river valley.
Marlise is six months into her pregnancy. I still can’t wrap my grey matter around it when we kiss at the gate. I could kick myself for bringing an innocent into the world, but this tenuous peace has been balm to both our souls. I constantly find myself touching her belly, hardly daring to believe this miracle of new life.
“Ash?”
I realise with a start I’m holding her tightly to me, still outside the property. “Hey.”
“I don’t want to be funny about it, but I need to talk to you about something inside. Where the neighbours can’t hear.” She casts a meaningful glance to either side. Judging by the frown pulling at her features, something’s up, and a cold slice of worry cuts through my veins.
I allow her to lead me inside, my eyes taking a moment or two to adjust to the dim interior of our home. Sinking into the couch, I draw her down with me.
“What is it?”
She snuggles into my embrace, her hair tickling my arm. Marlise tilts her head so she can look up at me. “Something weird happened. It’s about Ashton.”
“I…” I honestly don’t know what to say. Since our escape I thought it prudent not to mention my angry ghost, because he has not made contact with me again.
Marlise frowns at me, tightening her grip around my waist. “I saw him. I was in the bathroom. I looked up after washing my face and he was superimposed over me and I felt something…here.” She moves my hand and presses it to her belly.
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