by Jamel Cato
After reading the file, I had decided to never share it with Eve. The things she had done were quite literally part of her past life and, like Alonzo Perry, I’m the type of brother who judges people based on how they treat me. But apparently, someone with a different worldview and a flawless impersonation spell had their own inside connections at the DSO.
“What did the file say?” I asked.
She exhaled deeply before speaking. “It said that I—”
“Never mind,” I said, cutting her off. “I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t?”
“I know everything I need to know about Eve. The file can only tell me about someone else.”
“But what if I was a bad person?”
“Then that would be between you and God.”
She started to weep. “I’m so sorry, Preston. I totally understand if you don’t want to work with me anymore. I left a secure file on the PC with a list of the passwords for all your accounts. You can change them and then have Marianna block me from ever accessing any of your information again. I know it doesn’t justify what I did, but I made Jasmine—or whoever it really was—give me an oath not to hurt you or Darlene.”
I went rigid. “You told them about Darlene?”
“Yes. I thought it was Jasmine, who already knew about your divorce.”
I sprinted out the door.
I used my key to enter Darlene’s house because she wasn’t answering the doorbell.
As soon as I stepped in, I found a handwritten note on the floor. It said that Darlene would be returned to me after I delivered the urn and the lamp to their rightful owner. The crest of the House of Blackshire was burned into the parchment.
CHAPTER 34
Stanella’s gate instantly delivered me to California. I transmuted to the Astral Plane for the five minutes it took the Secret Service to do its perfunctory check of Serenity’s hotel suite.
After the agents departed and she’d kicked off her shoes, Serenity said, “You can come out now. They’re gone.”
I emerged from the bathroom carrying the dress I had taken from Maryellen.
The Djinn visually inspected the garment. “That doesn’t look like my size or my style, but if you just want to see me do a wardrobe change, I’ll play along.”
“I’ll never turn down a chance to see you do a wardrobe change, especially if I’m the one doing the changing.”
She quickly crossed the room and gave me a deep, passionate kiss. Then she began enthusiastically stripping off her clothing.
“Wait,” I said, touching her forearm.
“Is this about Ken? I told you he believes—”
“It’s not about Ken. There’s something I need to tell you.”
“It can’t wait until you stretch the limits of how far I thought my body could go?”
Even though lives were at stake, I almost decided it could.
“No,” I said.
She pulled her blouse back on. “Okay. What is it?”
I held up the dress. “Jira’s urn is integrated into this. It’s where Garrison has been hiding it.”
She looked at the dress, and me, warily. “Why do you have it?”
I told her everything.
Even though the drapes were drawn to foil snipers, she walked over to the window anyway. “Why did you come here? You have the urn and you know where to find my lamp.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“No, really. Why did you come here first?”
I let out a breath. “How many wishes can you manage inside your head without violating causality?”
“About four million.”
“Wow! How is that possible?”
“My species of Djinn can process information in multiple dimensions at once. It’s why I’m so good at debates. It’s one of the first things my mother taught me.”
I suddenly understood why the urn was so important to so many people.
“How many wishes are you willing to grant me?”
She turned to face me. “As many as you want, as long as none of them are to never see you again.”
I looked down at my feet.
She sighed. “I knew what would happen after I showed you that other reality. I could have satisfied your wish by showing you something else—something that would have had less of an impact on you, or that pushed you into my arms. But after I saw the way you reacted to that one, I realized it was your natural truth. I couldn’t keep it from you any more than I could hide the sky from the Sun. And Queen Caroline taught us it would be unjust to do so.”
“What are the realities like where you and I end up together?”
“Utterly amazing.”
“Tell me about them.”
She did.
After about two hours had passed and we’d ended up curled together in an armchair intended for one, I said, “Serenity, I need to go.”
“I know. I felt Stanella’s gate arriving a few minutes ago. I’ll grant your wishes.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, but you have my word I’ll grant them anyway.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you want to know how your plan turns out?”
“I want you to change the world the way you always change me.”
“Do you think it’s wrong of me to tell you about your other lives?”
I thought about it. “Some people smarter than me say that if the future is fixed, then we have no free will. I say that if every life I live brings me to you, a woman who’s the very embodiment of perfection, then that’s proof of the existence of God.”
“You always say that, and it always makes me fall in love with you.”
I didn’t mean to keep Stanella waiting, but I lingered in Serenity’s arms a while longer. I did that because it was comforting, but also because I knew it was my last respite before all Hell broke loose.
CHAPTER 35
An armed U.S. Black Ops soldier kicked in the door to my office. Finding only me sitting placidly behind my desk with both my hands visible, he pointed his weapon in my direction and yelled, “Clear!”
Garrison Peakes stomped in with another armed soldier on his heels. He looked angry.
Jasmine and Maryellen had each told me The Scale had provisionally voted to oust Peakes, and by extension President Davidson, if he didn’t reacquire the urn within twenty-four hours. I’d had them tell Peakes where he could find me and the dress.
He marched around my desk and grabbed me by the shirt collar. “Give me the dress or I’ll have them splatter your brains on these walls like a cup of wooder ice.”
“Can we work out a deal?”
Peakes turned to one of the soldiers. “Shoot him in the knee.”
“Wait!” I shouted with my hands in the air. “It’s in the closet to your left. The passcode for the lock is four-six-eight-two.”
“Go,” Peakes commanded to the same soldier.
After entering the code and opening the door, the soldier backed away from the closet with his weapon in a firing position.
My cousin Jason stepped out of the closet wearing his Police uniform and bulletproof riot gear. His gun was pointed at the soldier.
Carmen, armed and dressed in a similar fashion, came through my office doorway and covered the other soldier.
“Stand down!” Jason said. “That’s a lawful order.”
“You stand down,” the soldier countered. “This is a military operation. You’re trumped.”
“Kill them,” Peakes ordered.
Both soldiers pulled the triggers of their weapons without hesitation, but their guns jammed. With smooth and practiced skill, they each retrieved a sidearm and pulled different triggers. Those guns jammed too.
One wish down.
The soldiers put their hands in the air in apparent surrender, which, to me, also appeared smooth and practiced. To a novice observer, it might look like my side had the advantage. But these weren’t mall cops.
On an imperceptible signal, th
e soldier in front of Carmen dropped to the carpet and swept her feet from under her. When she toppled to the ground, he wrestled her gun from her hand and shouted, “Right!”
The soldier in front of Jason bounced left.
The other soldier fired Carmen’s weapon at Jason’s center of mass, striking him in his bulletproof vest.
Jason tumbled backward, flailing his arms like a windmill.
Garrison and I dove behind my desk for cover.
I pressed a button on the CPTG device in my pocket.
The ghosts of Holly Nash and Aida DiBento materialized behind the soldiers and pressed tasers to their exposed necks just like we had rehearsed a dozen times.
When Garrison heard the bodies of his goons hit the floor, he stuck his head from behind my desk to see what was happening.
That’s when I tasered him too.
I pulled out my smartphone and sent a text message with a prearranged code. Then I stood to my feet.
Carmen was crossing herself and staring wide-eyed at Holly and Aida. Both ghosts disappeared a few seconds later when the CPTG bubble collapsed.
I went over and helped Jason to his feet. “You okay, Cuz?”
“I’m good. Where’s Carmen?”
“I’m here,” his partner said, still staring at the empty space where the ghosts had appeared. I’d told her to be prepared to see ghosts, but she’d laughed in response. She’d come in her riot gear anyway because she thought her lover and I were in some kind of trouble that we weren’t being on the level about.
“Are you hurt?” Jason asked her.
“Not in the body,” she replied.
He approached her with concern. “Carm, are you hurt?”
“No. I’m fine. Let’s do this.”
Viola Crescent came through the doorway right on cue. She was wearing a new pair of custom V Shades and was a bit winded from taking the fire escape in the alley behind our building. She and I had buried the hatchet and become BFFs after I’d visited Silvia Dunbar and exercised my second wish.
The parking attendant gazed at the bodies on the ground and said, “We’re ready.”
That let me know a van from the Parking Authority’s boot division was waiting in the alley with its cargo doors open. The van was being driven by my friend and ghost-hunting apprentice Marcus “Two G” Burrows.
Carmen would give the van a Police escort to a motel in Kensington, where Garrison would later awaken to find a folder containing documents that would be delivered to Daniel Weintraub at the New York Times if he interfered with the Presidential election or attempted to carry out retribution against any of us. The documents included evidence of his rape of Gillian Kersetter, his extortion of the Ozark Institute, his corruption of a Secret Service agent, his misuse of the Pentagon’s Black Ops assets for personal matters and a court motion requesting retroactive child support for Ashley Gilbride. That last one would be a doozy since he didn’t know he had a daughter. There would also be a video recording from my office’s security system showing Peakes giving an illegal assassination order in response to a lawful order from a Police officer.
The compilation of much of that evidence had been made possible by Shayla Butler’s cooperation and the fake nude photos of Jasmine which Peakes had uploaded to his phone. The naked woman in those photos was a porn actress with Jasmine’s head Photoshopped in to disguise the Dark Water computer virus they really were. As expected, Peakes had shared the photos with his closest allies, which in turn helped us identify the full membership of The Scale.
After binding their hands and feet with zip ties, Jason and I carried the bodies to the van.
Carmen led the van away in her Police cruiser.
My cousin and I headed back up to my office to deal with the next threat.
By the time we walked through the doorway, Eve had disabled the ward that would keep out a demon. My broken office door flew up from the carpet of its own accord and reset itself in the frame. The locks snapped shut.
In the opposite corner, Parsenon appeared and said, “Bravo. That was almost like watching one of those Fast and The Furious movies. Too bad Vin Diesel’s not here to do something that’s highly improbable.”
“The urn is not here, but I can take you to it,” I said.
He smiled and flicked one of his foreclaws.
A section of drywall to my left that was almost invisibly lighter than the wall around it crumbled to the ground as a pile of dust.
Maryellen’s dress hung on a nail between two wall studs.
“I can explain,” I said as the dress flew across the room into Parsenon’s claw.
“Save your breath,” the demon advised. “You’ll need it to sing old negro spirituals at all the funerals you’re about to attend.”
“I was going to explain that I wanted Darlene to wear the dress to your funeral.”
Twenty of Persenon’s eyes scrutinized me.
A large baboon knocked my door off its hinges for the second time in one day. It ambled across the room and leapt onto my desk, where it screeched incoherently.
But it wasn’t incoherent to a Tryvodyn.
My friend Thul, the man who’d helped me solve the case of the Msakayeya Snatchers, strode into my office trailed by a short South African woman carrying a Bible.
“I wish for protection,” Parsenon said to the dress like it was a microphone.
Unfortunately for him, Jira was no longer bound to it. I had painstakingly removed all the ceramic chips from the dress and placed them on a napkin, which Jira then reconstituted into an urn.
Detecting no magical protection, Parsenon stared at the garment in fear. As a rule, demons avoid powerful Tryvodyns because the strongest of them can tame the bodies of the Fallen when they manifest in the physical world. To the quantum particles which compose Tryvodyn magic, a bipedal talking reptile is just another beast.
With my special sight, I saw a thick wave of electromagnetic energy leap from Thul’s head into Parsenon’s. All the demon’s eyes became glassy and its body went still.
Thul nodded down to his Bible-toting companion.
She stepped forward and said, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I cast thee out!”
Parsenon screamed as his consciousness was ripped from his physical body and pulled down into Hell.
I was beginning to think my plan would be a walk in the park when one of Parsenon’s eyes regained its pallor. It focused on the baboon.
The primate scratched at its ears, then lunged at me.
It sank its fangs deep into my right bicep and slashed at my throat with its claws.
I howled in pain as I tried to push the creature off me, making my blood spray like a fountain.
The baboon kept slashing.
Inside my head, Parsenon’s retreating voice said, “Join me in Hell, Cotton Picker.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Jason raise his gun.
“No!” Thul yelled.
Jason shot the baboon in the head, causing it and Thul to fall lifelessly to the ground.
My soul watched this happen while it was looking down on the scene from the Astral plane. That could only mean one thing.
Eve clasped my arm. Since we were both on the Astral Plane, her body was vibrant and corporeal. “Look at me,” she said.
I did.
“Stay here,” she instructed me. “Just tell yourself to stay here.” When my body continued floating toward the warm brightness I felt radiating behind me, she shouted, “Don’t you dare leave me!”
The unexpected tenacity of her sentiment shocked me into a pause I didn’t know how I had managed.
“We need you,” my friend said. “I need you. Don’t leave me to fall to Hell as Karla Hannum. Help me remain the Eve you know. The Eve who searched the whole Astral Plane until she found your chakras shinning bright like seven midday suns. Remember what you always tell me: There is no such thing as a coincidence. This happened here and now so I could tell you it’s not your time. Stay with
me, Preston.”
Dying would be easier if your life just flashed before your eyes. But the only thing flashing before my consciousness was a choice. I gazed down at Jason applying pressure to my wounds, his fingers slick with my blood. I saw the small woman kneeling next to my body in prayer. I watched Eve cry at my elbow.
I decided it wasn’t enough. I was tired of being the trouble magnet that the people I loved couldn’t peel off. They would be better off without me.
Then I saw a gleeful little girl sprint across my field of vision. Darlene chased behind her with a hairbrush. They vanished from sight after crossing some invisible demarcation line.
I turned in the direction from which they had come and saw Jira standing with both of her arms fully extended. She quivered as she struggled to maintain the vacuum that had allowed atoms from my natural truth to briefly enter the Astral Plane. The Djinn looked like an older, longer-haired version of Serenity. Her right foot was bound by a thick iron chain to a wispy, ethereal urn. Nature doesn’t tolerate a vacuum and she would soon be crushed to death by Astral gravity.
I couldn’t let that happen.
CHAPTER 36
When I came to, I saw Jason, Art, Stanella and Jasmine standing over me.
A Bantu healer was in the corner, wiping blood from his hands with a damp cloth. It was a blue-skinned male.
I reached up to my neck and felt only smooth skin.
“Try not to touch your wounds for a few hours,” the healer said in English. “It will take about that long for your body to disseminate the marker that causes your T-cells to view the new skin as native. Your fingers might introduce contaminants.”
