More smudges of blood on the examination table. Dawit’s insides went cold.
Fana might have exposed herself, sharing her blood!
This examination room would have to be carefully cleaned, he realized. Even if Fana hadn’t been bleeding, traces of her blood might lie in this room. Dawit reached into his leather hip pouch for the bottle of clear, acidic blood-cleaning solvent he and his Brothers had created to mask the presence of their Blood’s living cells. He would have to clean the car, too. But could they risk the delay?
“I’ll wipe this room down,” Dawit said. “Try to learn where they went.”
As soon as he said it, he knew: Nogales was a border town. This clinic might have once been a safe house on the Underground Railroad, along the route to Mexico.
“A tunnel!” they realized in unison.
A careful study of the floor and empty storage cabinet in the examination room found no sign of a tunnel entrance, so Teferi and Mahmoud searched the rest of the clinic. Dawit pulled out his lighter and set the bandages in the sink afire. Armed with his solvent and clean bandages for wiping, he sprayed the sink and counters. Next, the floor.
Perspiration dripped into Dawit’s eyes as he rushed to complete his work in the room’s hot, stale air. If a tunnel was found, he would have no time to clean the car and the hall. He could only hope that Fana hadn’t bled anywhere else.
And wasn’t it fruitless to try to erase their traces from the world? They would be known, just as they had feared. Just as the Lalibela Council had always warned.
“Here!” Teferi’s muffled voice shouted from the hall, excited. “I’ve found it!”
Still on his knees, Dawit looked through the doorway to see Teferi crouching in the bathroom. Teferi’s fingers pried at the floor, and suddenly a block of tiles lifted in his hands. Teferi looked up toward Dawit, grinning wide.
Dawit leaped to his feet and ran into the hall. “There may still be time—”
Dawit never finished his sentence. A stranger’s voice bellowed from the direction of the storeroom. “Police! Drop your weapon! Do it NOW!”
The room reeled. A thousand curses flew through Dawit’s mind. Teferi, his face framed in the doorway, looked crushed.
I AM SORRY, DAWIT.
A shaft of sunlight signaled that someone else had entered through the rear door behind them. Static and chatter from a police radio.
At least Mahmoud was not in sight. Dawit raised his hands. His gun fell to the floor.
Dawit turned slowly and saw the intruder, another deputy in a cowboy hat. The deputy was middle-aged and overweight, with a paunch that threatened to rock him from his feet. Unless Teferi could influence him quickly, Dawit realized that this man would not live long.
The deputy seemed to know it, too. Even with a two-handed gun stance, his barrel was unsteady. He might never have drawn his weapon before today. His thoughts bubbled faintly to Dawit’s hearing: OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT
“Leave us,” Dawit told him quietly. “We are too many. You cannot subdue us.”
For an instant, the deputy’s eyes widened, as if he was willing to consider Dawit’s advice. Then his face flushed from sunburned brown to bright red. “SHUT UP!” he shouted, gesturing toward Teferi. “You too! Both of you on the ground—facedown! DO IT!”
Releasing the gun with one hand, he fumbled for his lapel radio. He never reached it.
The familiar Pfffffft marked his final words. A compact hole appeared in his chest. The deputy didn’t make a sound; he only fell like a tree, face-first, to the floor. Mahmoud.
Dawit dove for his gun an instant before he saw a motion from a hidden corner of the storeroom behind the fallen deputy. Dawit squeezed his silent trigger three times. The wall chipped away as a dispatcher’s voice clamored, “Repeat. What’s your 20?”
A deputy’s cowboy hat skittered across the storeroom floor. The second deputy’s leg twitched wildly in the doorway, and Dawit heard panicked gasping for breath. A death rattle.
“How many?” Mahmoud called to Teferi, charging forward.
Teferi shook his head. “I th-think…only two. I didn’t hear them. I…I’m s-sorry.”
There was silence except for the radios. With Mahmoud flanking him, Dawit crept over the first deputy’s splayed corpse toward the storeroom.
There, his heart fell.
A girl in a deputy’s uniform lay on her back atop a crushed cardboard box, clasping her throat with both hands while blood spurted between her fingers. Two other holes passed straight through her Kevlar vest. Air pistols never missed except if the shooter was out of range; the guns tracked heartbeats. The girl’s inferior weapon lay forgotten at her side, never fired.
Dawit gazed at her, aghast.
The girl wore her hair in thin, short-cropped braids, like a Hamar maiden in Ethiopia. She might be in her twenties, but she had the round, unblemished face of a child. When he stood over her, the girl’s wide, petrified eyes flooded with tears.
“P-p-puh…,” she sputtered, unable to find language to beg for her life.
Dawit’s mouth fell numb. He raised his gun and shot her in the heart, ending her pain with one last body spasm. What choice did he have? He might have given his Blood to this stranger and even tried to invoke the Ceremony, but at what consequence?
He could not save them all. He had told Jessica as much when she’d first begun her mission.
Mahmoud crept past Dawit to the rear door, peeking outside. “Just one car!” Mahmoud said. “They must have arrived right behind us. So far, it’s only these two.”
Hot moisture on Dawit’s cheeks told him that he had shed tears. In the hundreds of mortals he had slain, he could not remember ever killing a woman. Not in this way. He had smothered Rosalie, his dear child, to release her from the prison of her infirm, aged body, and he had killed poor Kira accidentally, hoping to share his Blood with her. But he had never killed a female adversary, a stranger embarking upon adulthood. She was hardly older than Fana.
JACKSON, IMANI, her name tag read. She wore a wedding ring. Was she a mother?
Dawit expected Mahmoud to mock his tears, but his Brother squeezed his shoulder. “So comely, and now she is wasted,” Mahmoud said quietly. “You see? This is what comes of it. We cannot live in harmony with mortals. Khaldun was wise to tell us so.”
COME, Teferi’s voice pleaded. WE MUST FOLLOW FANA IN THE TUNNEL BEFORE OTHERS COME. ENOUGH INNOCENTS HAVE DIED ON OUR BEHALF TODAY.
In the bathroom, Teferi had already climbed midway down the tunnel; he was visible only from the waist up. Teferi inclined his head, an apology. “I am to blame,” he said. “I should have sensed their arrival. I was too eager to find the girls.”
“No,” Dawit said. “The blame does not rest with you, Teferi. Sanctus Cruor killed these two as surely as the others.”
If Sanctus Cruor was indeed a sect of immortals, no matter. Any men could die, even men with the Living Blood. Incineration. Exsanguination. If he must, he would invent a method. No matter what it cost him, Dawit vowed, Sanctus Cruor would be destroyed.
This time, for eternity.
THE NEW DAYS
“…And so a man and woman, mates immortal born, will create an eternal union at the advent of the New Days. And all of mankind shall know them as the bringers of the Blood…”
—Letter of the Witness
Chapter 4, verse 6
The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Twenty-eight
The Colony
2:30 p.m.
Mom?
If not for Fana’s voice, so vivid that she could be sitting next to her, Jessica never would have realized she was sleeping.
Jessica hadn’t wanted to sit down—her mother’s condition worried her, and she was waiting for confirmation that the Duharts had reached SeaTac safely—but she hadn’t been able to keep standing. Her blood gave her as much energy as a twenty-year-old, but she still hadn�
��t slept in two and a half days. To keep herself awake, she focused on the beeping cardiac monitor Lucas had attached to her mother’s wrist, like an oversized watch. And the dripping water in the sink.
Somehow, through it all, she was sleeping anyway.
“MOM?” Fana’s voice said again, a thunderclap. “RUN.”
Jessica gasped, her eyes flying open. She leaped to her feet and looked around the room, bleary-eyed. Her mother was sitting across the table from her with a startled expression, and Alex lay in the bed. No Fana.
Then Jessica realized that Bea’s heart monitor was beeping in a frenzy. A heart attack? Jessica clutched her mother’s arm, her own heartbeat racing the monitor’s flurry.
“Mom?” she said. “Just relax. I’ll c-call for Lucas—”
“Baby…didn’t you hear that?” Bea whispered with the breath her lungs hoarded from the oxygen tubes. Bea pulled her arm away from Jessica.
“Hear what?”
“That voice, Jessica.”
Jessica’s head cleared. She was almost afraid to say her daughter’s name, but the alertness in her mother’s eyes gave her hope. “Fana?”
Bea nodded at Jessica, her eyes wider, spilling tears.
Jessica felt gooseflesh across her arms. “I thought—”
“I heard her…too…clear as day,” Bea said. Her fingers trembled as she raised her hand, pointing. “From there.”
Alex’s bed.
Jessica’s heart tumbled as she gazed at Alex’s stock-still lump under the blanket. It didn’t make sense, but rationality was irrelevant when it came to Fana. Long ago, when Jessica had battled the faceless thing that had stolen her child’s mind for a time, an invisible force had made her hallucinate that poor Kira had come back to life to taunt her. Was that happening again? Had the force Khaldun called the Shadows followed her, parroting Fana’s voice?
That nameless thing was the closest she had ever walked to Satan. Jessica was sure of it.
Jessica stepped toward Alex’s bed. Bea pulled herself up from the table and held Jessica’s arm, leaning on her for support. Bea’s shallow, hurried breaths fluttered in Jessica’s ear.
Alex’s eyes were open for the first time since Fana had disappeared. Staring at the ceiling.
Bea gasped. “Alexis?” she said, overjoyed. It had been Alex’s voice all along!
Jessica clasped Alex’s hand and pulled it beneath her chin. “Alex? We’re here!”
But Alex didn’t blink. Her lips had fallen slightly apart, but Alex didn’t move now, except to breathe. Gently, Jessica shook her shoulder. Alex was still in a trance; Jessica could see that even without Teka’s guidance.
“She’s not back with us, Mom,” Jessica said gently.
“She is.” Bea sat at the edge of Alex’s bed and stroked her daughter’s forehead the way she had when they’d been children. “She sounded…like Fana. She called out…and she said to run. You…heard her.”
Jessica blinked, staring into her sister’s unseeing eyes. She moved closer, until there was only an inch between them. Did she see Alex in those eyes, or was it Fana? With everything her daughter was capable of, why should it surprise her that Fana could speak through Alex’s mouth?
“Fana?” Jessica whispered to Alex’s ear. “Is that you? We heard you. Talk to us, sweetheart. Please tell us where you are. Tell us if you’re all right.”
Alex’s lips trembled suddenly, and air forced its way from her throat. “Run…”
The voice was weaker, but it was Fana. As if she’d been trapped inside Alex’s body.
“Stay with her, Mom. Teka needs to hear this.”
Jessica ran to the intercoms built into her corner desk—a row of lighted buttons linked to individual underground quarters, as well as the Council House, Big House and other buildings aboveground. The buttons were assigned numbers, not names, so Jessica had to try to remember which was Teka’s. For maddening seconds, she drew a blank. Sleep deprivation, she realized.
The wild beeping of Bea’s cardiac monitor was a distraction; not only was it racing but it was also erratic. Even good excitement was bad for her mother’s heart today. And Bea’s labored breathing terrified Jessica; her mother sounded almost as if she was drowning.
Teka’s is Three. Jessica pressed the white-lighted button but didn’t hear the gentle bell tone that preceded responses. She heard only the speaker’s empty static, unanswered.
Jessica pushed the button again, leaning close to the pin-sized microphone. “Teka? I need you right away. Fana is communicating through Alex! We hear her voice.”
Bea fought to speak. “Call that…boy…outside the door. He’ll…get him.”
“Mom, please don’t talk. Save your breath,” Jessica said. Bea’s suggestion to send her guardian, Fasilidas, for Teka was a good one, but first she hit the button to reach Lucas. Bea was her new priority, even above the miracle from Alex’s lips.
Silence again. The buttons weren’t working. A technical breakdown now?
“Dammit,” Jessica said, running to her door. Her wrist snapped painfully when she tried to turn the doorknob. Her door was locked, from the outside. She hadn’t realized that someone else could lock her door—or that anyone would dare.
Jessica pounded on the metallic door, angry. “Fasilidas! Open this door right now!” The doors were heavy and flame-proof, meant for protection, but now her quarters were a cage.
When there was no sound, Jessica felt afraid in her own home for the first time since she and Dawit had established their colony. The full depth of the drastic measure the Duharts had taken to escape washed over her in a flood, and Jessica’s knees wavered as she remembered Fana’s message: Run. Something had happened. Had Sanctus Cruor found them? Or government agents tipped off by Garrick Wright?
“What’s…wrong?” Bea said.
“Nothing I can’t take care of,” Jessica said.
Jessica grabbed the sat phone from the table and dialed Dawit’s number, her fingers jittery on the keypad. Please pick up, David, she thought.
SYSTEM BUSY, the satellite’s message said in the black viewer.
Damn damn damn.
Jessica felt her mother’s eyes on her, so she kept her face as calm as she could. Jessica’s lessons from meditation came to her: Calm. Patience. Thankfully, panic receded. She looped the strap of the phone’s black carrying case over her shoulder, planning to try Dawit again when she had a chance. Even if she could reach him, what could he do for her from so far away?
Jessica noticed perspiration on Bea’s forehead, and how Bea’s fingers fanned across her breastbone, a sign that she was in pain. Were Bea’s lips slightly bluish? To try to relieve Bea’s breathing, Jessica carefully adjusted the oxygen machine’s output.
“Mom, are you having an angina attack?” she said.
Reluctantly, Bea nodded. She hated to admit to pain, thinking of it as weakness. She had suffered from painful chest pains for years, even before her heart attack. Grandpa’s side of the family was dogged by heart problems; most of them died by their sixties.
Jessica unfastened the top buttons of her mother’s blouse. Alex always tried to cool Bea’s skin during her attacks, so Jessica pulled off the kimono Bea was wearing over her clothes. Bea’s thin skin clung to her collarbone, as fragile as a bird’s bones. In the robe’s pocket, Jessica found the bottles of aspirin and nitroglycerine her mother always carried with her.
“Take an aspirin,” Jessica said, although she knew Bea wouldn’t want to.
Bea shook her head. “Bothers…my stomach,” she said. “Give me…nitro. I’m fine.”
Ignoring her, Jessica opened the aspirin bottle and pressed a tablet into Bea’s palm. “Chew this first,” she said. “Then nitro.”
Bea gave her an evil eye, but she slid the pill into her mouth. When she bit into it, she made a sour face. “Give me…water.”
“Chew the aspirin. The nitro goes under your tongue. You know they work faster that way. Then you’ll get water, Mom.” Jessica had no
time for her usual polite pleading.
Once Jessica was satisfied that Bea was taking her medications, she reached under the table and pulled out the gun case, unlatching it. Jessica dug out the gun her husband had taught her to shoot.
When Bea saw the gun, her face went sallow. She pursed her lips, hard.
“Mom, I don’t want to scare you, but you need to listen to me,” Jessica said slowly. “Our door is locked. I’m going to shoot it open, and then I have to see what’s going on. I need you to stay where you are and listen to every word Fana says. No matter how long I’m gone, do not move. I have to be able to find you again in a hurry. Please don’t argue with me.”
Bea’s bottom lip trembled. The pain in her eyes told Jessica that Bea wished she was the one on her feet, ready to defend her children. Bea opened her mouth, seeking more oxygen than the tubes could give her. Bea’s whisper was heartbroken. “I thought this was…the right thing.”
Somehow, Jessica smiled for her mother. She pressed her palm firmly to Bea’s clammy face. “It was the right thing, Mom. This is just a test. I’ll come back when I know something.”
Bea smiled back at her, trading assurances. “It’ll be…all right. You’re in…God’s hands.”
“Amen, Mom. You taught me and Alex that a long time ago. We’ll be fine.”
Jessica went to the door to bang again. Suddenly she was sweating too, swimming in nerves. “Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone out there?”
Silence again.
Jessica took a deep breath. “Stand clear!” she shouted. “I have a gun!”
There was no traditional safety on Dawit’s gun; the Life Brothers never drew these weapons unless they were ready to fire. But Jessica had to be careful not to engage the gun’s heartbeat targeting mode, which would seek out the first beating heart in range. She felt for the slider on the underside of the butt, making sure it was forward, in manual. OK, she thought. OK.
“Stand clear!” she yelled out again. After listening for scurrying feet but hearing only her heart’s throbbing, Jessica stepped back five yards. She pulled the trigger.
Blood Colony Page 33
