by Dakota Banks
She went up behind the girl and lifted the earphones off her head. “Betty Sue,” Maliha said. “I need you to go sit on your bed. Something’s happened.”
Then Maliha saw the blood splattered on the computer screen. Betty Sue’s throat had been cut, saturating the front of her pajamas and leaving the girl to choke on her own blood as she died.
Maliha felt weak, as though her own blood had drained from her body.
Mother and child are dead.
It struck at the heart of Maliha’s personal conflicts: the death of her own infant in a dark jail cell; the assignment to kill a baby, which caused her to give up immortality; and her secret desire to regain her life as a normal woman and have a family.
All of it lay in front of her in bloody ruins.
I brought this death here, just like to the Rainiers. Someone must have been watching Jamie’s apartment or the place was bugged. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me. Someone is targeting Fynn’s family. Why? He’s done with Fynn, or close to being done with him, so he doesn’t need Fynn’s family to dangle like a carrot in front of him to keep him working.
Maliha put her hands on the dead girl’s shoulders.
Constanta.
In her mind she wailed her daughter’s name over and over, her sorrow totally overwhelming her. Then she was into the imprint of Betty Sue’s death. With music from the movie blaring in her ears, she felt her hair being pulled from behind, the sudden panic, the hot sting of the blade. Her hand flew protectively and futilely to her throat, and in the reflection of the computer monitor, she saw the tall man smiling.
Soon Maliha sensed the girl’s spirit around her and opened her eyes. She was enveloped in a sparkling mist that felt cool and soft where it touched her skin. Lifting her head, Maliha remained there as the mist slowly faded. Pulling herself away from the girl’s body, she went into the kitchen, gently lowered Jamie’s body to the floor, and took her place in the chair.
Nothing happened, and Maliha was about to leave when suddenly she slipped into Jamie’s death experience. The shots to the head were painful but quick, and Maliha saw nothing except the newspaper coming closer as her head sank to the table. She remained in place, waiting for the spirit fragment left behind to coalesce around her, but there was nothing except a vague dark fog that stung her skin. Jamie was gone, or nearly gone, and what she’d left behind was a cloud of recrimination very unlike her daughter’s soft forgiveness. Maliha tried to pull away, but the fog held her there for long, uncomfortable moments before vanishing.
Maliha left the apartment and stumbled out into the night, weak and nauseated.
If someone’s trailing me then…Dr. Cobb!
Not willing to think it through, Maliha took off at a dead run to the office she’d visited on the Columbia University campus.
Outside the office, she stopped and listened. There was light coming from under the door but she couldn’t hear any sound of struggle. The thought of another death tonight overwhelmed any planning she might otherwise do. She just stormed the door, knocked it aside with a kick, and ran into the room, a throwing knife in each hand.
Booker Cobb was face up on the floor, his hands and feet bound, his face frozen in terror as a sword descended toward his neck. One of Maliha’s knives spun through the air and struck with precision, deflecting the sword blade as it fell enough so that it missed Cobb’s neck. The sword bit into the wooden floor to the side of Cobb’s head, severing only a few strands of his hair. The second knife, already in the air before the first reached the sword, whirred to its mark, the attacker’s throat.
With the momentum of her crash through the door, Maliha’s body moved forward and slammed into the assailant, propelling both of them back against the wall of the room. With more presence of mind than she would have given him credit for, Cobb rolled and kicked a chair toward his attacker that tangled the man’s legs. Cobb kept rolling, ending up behind a heavy desk and out of the action.
Maliha finally got a good look at the attacker. Tall, thin, stringy hair flying, black robe—she recognized him. With Cobb out of the way, he bore down on her, still fighting with her knife protruding from his neck. He grabbed her and threw her against the wall so hard that she punched through the wall in places. As she slid down to the floor, he yanked the knife from his neck and flung it at her. She managed to shift her head just enough that the knife, aimed straight between her eyes, embedded deeply in the wall.
Mr. Evil wasn’t bleeding from the neck. The spot where her knife had been closed up as neatly as if it had been zipped shut.
Ageless. I’m about to die then.
The full weight of the apprehension she’d been feeling now nearly crushed her. She’d sensed her approaching death, through all the despair over the deaths of innocents around her.
He approached her but stopped far out of reach. She drew herself up to face him. She had one thing left to try, but if he attacked from across the room, she was doomed.
“I would tell my demon who sent me back to him, if I knew your name.”
He grinned and edged closer, but not close enough. “Mogue is one of my many names. Tell him Mogue sent you.”
Maliha felt a rush of air. Unseen in its passage, a crossbow bolt sprouted in the center of Mogue’s chest. He roared in anger and clutched at it.
Mogue was distracted and Maliha knew she’d been given a chance. Maliha stepped forward and launched her last desperate effort to kill Mogue. She pulled the whip sword from its sheath and with all the concentration and skill she could draw upon, she sent the blades snaking almost invisibly toward Mogue’s neck, one blade on each side, intending to wrap them around his neck and sever his head.
For half a second she thought it would work. But Mogue’s hands flew toward his neck and arrived there first. His hands took the brunt of the whip sword strike. The blades tore through the flesh, muscle, and bone of his hands and by the time they struck his neck there was not enough force left to do more than rip a notch on either side.
Maliha had no time to wait around and see what happened next, or to strike again with the whip. She pulled the blades back in a wide swing toward her and let them hit the floor, chipping paths in the wood as they slowed down. She scooped up the blades and spun them back into position around her waist. A glance at Mogue showed his butchered hands holding his head in place as the wounds along his neck began to heal. Some of his fingers were on the floor at his feet. He had plenty to deal with, even for an Ageless one.
Time was up. She pulled Cobb from behind the desk. He’d fainted, probably a good thing. He didn’t need to see what had just happened. With Cobb over her shoulder she fled the room, the building, and the campus.
Later, when Maliha’s scale rewarded her for saving Cobb’s life, she felt it was undeserved. Lucius had saved them both.
Is he really my enemy? Or my greatest friend?
Chapter Fifteen
A man whose ticket identified him as L. Anthony Cinna sat in the train car, half a dozen rows behind Maliha in an aisle seat. With a suit and tie, a briefcase, and a BlackBerry, he looked like any other businessman on his way to the capital, on the Acela Express to Union Station in Washington, D.C. Maliha passed him once, on her way to the café car. He saw her coming and raised a newspaper to his face, feigning intense attention to it. He needn’t have worried. She seemed preoccupied and wasn’t looking in his direction. On the way back, she was seeing him from the rear and he was just one head of hair among the others.
Lucius had been following Maliha since soon after she left his island. His recovery from the broken neck had been swift. For the Ageless, repairing bone and tendons was, he told himself with a small laugh, a snap. Maliha knew it and knew that a broken neck wouldn’t slow him down for long. He was also aware that his life had been in her hands while he was incapacitated, and even after the way he’d treated her, she hadn’t pressed her advantage and killed him as he lay on the floor. The bruises she’d given him showed spirit, and anyway, he deserved it. Thinki
ng back over what he’d said, he realized that she could have thought he was planning to take her against her will.
He wanted to talk to her again, but the opportunity hadn’t arisen yet. She hadn’t done anything lately that he could identify as searching for a shard, so the imperative from his demon, Sidana, wasn’t driving him to stay with her.
He had an imperative of his own: a growing attraction to the rogue that was spreading beyond sexual. He admired what she’d done to change her life, and from that and many things—the sound of her voice, the way her hair swept across her cheek when she bent her head, her intelligence, her strength—Lucius was feeling something he hadn’t experienced in nearly two thousand years of servitude. He thought he could love again, and that Maliha was the one who could help him experience this very human emotion.
And she’s not even fully human.
When she got off the train in Union Station, it was easy to move from place to place in the crowd, never letting her see him.
Just as she walked outside, Lucius felt the tug of his demon summoning him to Midworld. He felt a flash of resentment, of wanting to tell Sidana to leave him alone, but he wouldn’t do that. It was always a gut-wrenching transition for him, and when the fog of Midworld coated his skin with unwelcome dampness, Lucius bent at the waist and vomited. When he lifted his head, the demon was already close. The last several times Lucius had been here, the demon had taken the same shape, so he wondered if it was his real shape or at least one that was easy to assume.
The great serpent sliced through the fog, reaching him quickly. He stiffened as the snake began to wind about him, encasing his body in heavy links. They were not the dry, cool scales of a snake in the Great Above, where Lucius lived. This snake was coated with some puslike substance that oozed from between its scales. Lucius felt the slime on his skin, because he was always naked in Midworld, to add to his feeling of total domination by the demon. Sidana curled around his legs, his genitals, his waist, then his chest, climbing the body of his servant. Finally, and most horrible of all, the demon threw a heavy coil around Lucius’s neck.
The stench was that of rotting bodies, and it seemed to him that it exuded from below the snake’s scales as if the demon were rotten underneath.
Lucius felt nausea rising again, but there was nothing he could do. He was held upright by the demon, and as his stomach muscles cramped, Sidana tightened its hold around his belly. The snake raised its face to his, its tongue flickering over Lucius’s cheeks, eyes, and lips.
It was hard to believe that a short while ago he was in the Great Above, Ageless and supreme among humans. Here he was nothing but a humble slave, immobilized, waiting for the words of his master to intrude on his mind.
Intrude they did. He felt Sidana begin an unsavory journey through his recent thoughts and memories. Then the demon spoke to him, not aloud, but as though the demon wrote the words on his brain.
The rogue has made no more progress.
“Forcing her will not help.” When his mouth opened to speak, the snake’s tongue darted in and out, tasting him, measuring the truth of his words. “She must search on her own. I am diligent. No shard that she finds will escape my notice.”
You took her to your home. Do you desire this woman?
“No.”
The coil around his neck tightened, pressing against his carotid arteries and his esophagus.
“Yes. But it will not interfere with my assignment.”
Make certain that it does not. I am growing impatient. It has been three months and you have captured only one shard.
“I am not in control of that. She does other things and I merely follow.”
Approach her and demand that she devote all of her time to the search. She has a skill for this that you lack.
“It is not common for one demon to meddle with another demon’s servants the way you do. There could be a backlash from Rabishu.”
Your words are insolent. It is for me to deal with my brethren, not my lowly slave. You are less than the dirt on which I crawl.
Abruptly Sidana squeezed Lucius’s legs, making it impossible for him to remain standing. He pitched forward onto the ground, with the snake still wrapped around him.
For your insolence you now have only six months to obtain the Great Lens. At that time you will kill her, whether the Lens is complete or not.
“Six months! Impossible. Ten or twenty years…”
Lucius’s words were squeezed off in mid-sentence. This time the demon tightened everywhere, compressing his body painfully. He felt the pressure crack his ribs, felt intense pain as his genitals were mashed, and started gasping in vain for air.
I will not be denied.
Lucius choked out his part of the ritual. “I serve only you.” He kept his mind clear of anything that conflicted with that.
Locked in his mind, away from the demon’s prying, were his secret thoughts. Not long after he began serving the demon, he realized that he had to have a place for private thoughts and ambitions because he was being punished often for them. It had taken him a century to perfect it, the lockbox in his mind with a single key—his.
Killing men in battle was something he understood, as was assassination for advancement, but some of the killings he performed for Sidana were not honorable. He had started to doubt, started to think that the people who died to keep his immortal heart beating had rights of their own, rights to their lives and their happiness. These thoughts were secured in the lockbox.
He wanted to learn how Maliha turned rogue, and why, and to explore a lasting relationship with her. Now he had a time limit in which to do it.
Could I love her the way I loved my wife when we married? I may never find out, thanks to Sidana’s order.
When Sidana returned him to the Great Above, Lucius added more thoughts to his lockbox: bitterness. Killing Maliha was a test of loyalty—nothing more—to Sidana.
To Lucius, it was far more. He could never be objective about Maliha as a target. Of all the women he had been with, only she could understand his true nature and his dilemma, because she had lived through it.
It was a good thing his demon had asked him only if he desired Maliha. Lust was something that often figured in the demon’s plans and he understood it well. If Sidana had asked if Lucius loved her…To reveal his love would show his betrayal of his demon. At the least, things would have become much more complicated. At the most, it would have meant death and eternal torment for each of them in their own hell, and Lucius’s greatest torment would be that she suffered because of him.
Chapter Sixteen
On board the high-speed train to Washington, D.C., Maliha thought about what plan she’d use for the Tellman Global Economic Foundation. She tossed out various plans and finally settled on one. It was a stretch, but the least stretchy of the actions she’d come up with.
She called Amaro and asked him to check on Hound by satellite phone. Ten minutes later, she got a return call from Amaro.
“Well, Hound’s damn hot, as in sweaty. Peeved that you aren’t there being sweaty with him, and that you got to go to places where there’s air-conditioning and no blowing sand penetrating every crevice of the body. Once we got past all that, he’s okay.”
“Has he reached the oasis yet?”
“Nope. GPS says he’s about sixty miles out.”
She could hear him furiously typing while talking to her. Amaro was a computer security consultant in his day job. Earlier in his life, he’d been a hacker, one of the best in the world. Now “domesticated,” as his sister Rosie called him, he worked to protect systems from attack by people just like him. Corporations from all over the world hired him to test their secure systems. He was usually able to hack in past their defenses and show the weaknesses in their systems. Amazingly, even though he’d gone over to the “dark” side, Amaro was able to maintain his connections in the hacker underworld. It was merely a coincidence that most of his clients had recently suffered attacks from one of Amaro’s loose c
adre of friends.
She hung up, but still couldn’t get rid of her feeling that something was about to go wrong. Maliha called Yanmeng and asked him to track Hound.
“I’m at the airport, on my way to Chicago,” Yanmeng said. “I’ll look after Hound. You’re worried?”
“I can’t tell you anything specific.”
After they hung up, she pictured Yanmeng relaxing in his chair in the airport’s gate area, closing his eyes, and looking like he was just an old man taking a quick nap before his flight departed. Instead, he was searching for and then finding Hound, thousands of miles away in the Nigerian desert. The way Maliha understood it, he could only find those with whom he had a strong relationship, and when he did it was like looking down on them from a few feet above. With effort, he was able to extend his presence and touch a shoulder or cheek lightly, just enough to let a person know he was there. He was working on being able to do more than that, such as reach down and grab a bullet or turn aside a knife. It was a long process.
When Yanmeng was remote viewing, he shifted from the plane of the physical to the astral one, separated from the physical by a short distance that wasn’t traversable by bones and muscle, only the mind. It is what Maliha did when she read auras or the imprints at death scenes. It was part of the journey Yanmeng was undergoing that would carry him closer and closer, as he passed through higher and higher planes that were grouped into spheres of existence, to being a pure spirit—a god.
He was already in his seventies, and there was nothing that extended his life beyond the norm except, as he would say, good health, clean living, and the love of a good woman. His wife Eliu would dispute the clean living part, no doubt.
Yanmeng didn’t talk about it, because it was something that couldn’t be put adequately into words, but she suspected that he had made progress and had reached the second sphere, or close to it.
