Forbidden

by Ted Dekker

  Portia did not miss the way he watched the woman bleed out on the bed, the way the muscles twitched along his jaw.

  The cold shaft of fear surged up her spine again.

  But all she said was, “Now you’ve ruined the sheets.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rom’s eyes opened. For a moment he was aware only of the peeling plaster on the ceiling above. He could not place its location, could not remember falling asleep under it, had no idea where he was.

  He realized he was breathing hard, that his fingers and face were prickling as though they had just regained circulation. That his head was throbbing.

  He blinked, following a crack in the ceiling plaster with an unfocused gaze. Was he drugged?

  The events of the night crashed into memory like the falling shards of a broken window.

  He wasn’t drugged.

  He’d ingested the blood.

  Other details slammed into place. The old man. His father. Avra.

  He sat up—too quickly—and the room tipped around him. His heart crashed against the cage of his ribs, hard enough to make him wonder again if the blood had indeed been a poison. One even now about to burst his arteries.

  Something wasn’t right. He felt as if he dangled on a narrow precipice between life and death, buoyant and terrified at once. The space was darker than he remembered; only one of the seven candles still burned on the candelabra. Shadows crept from the room’s edges, sliding with the flicker of the candle along the coffin against the wall.

  Coffin. Basilica. For a moment he wondered if he was dying. If the oddities attacking his mind were the onset of Bliss or something horrific.

  He stood, managed to get one foot under himself, then lurched to one side and planted his face in the ground. Pain flashed out from his chin, the impact having jarred his brains.

  He pushed himself up to his knees and unsteadily looked around. This was the storeroom he’d escaped to, with its stacks of chairs and candelabras-in-waiting. He was not dead, but painfully alive.

  Still, he couldn’t pretend something wasn’t wrong with his head. Not merely off kilter, but terribly misaligned. He couldn’t seem to make complete sense of his surroundings.

  It had to be the darkness. The horrid shadows.

  Rom staggered to his feet, arms out for balance.

  The gloom struck his senses like hot tar. It crowded his nostrils and filled his lungs, forcing him to pull hard for breath. But when he did, he sucked in not air but terror—terror and darkness.

  For several seconds, Rom stood with his feet planted and his knees bent, trying to breathe. Dear Maker, help me. I’m dying, help me! But his dread only swelled.

  He jerked his head around, seeking escape. There, to his left, burned the sole source of light: a candle with a low, flickering flame.

  Fire. A feline eye winking on the head of a taper.

  He blinked, and the finger of flame crooked and beckoned. His fear immediately abated, tempered by a new sensation that stroked at the back of his mind.

  He lowered his arms and breathed more easily, captivated by the sight. Had he ever seen such a wondrous thing? How did that effusive glow work? How could something so small and so devoid of substance banish all that was evil?

  Around him the darkness breathed as though alive, and yet before him a single flame no more than half the length of his smallest finger called him to wonder.

  Tears filled his eyes. Warmth spread down his arms and back. It was beautiful! He stumbled forward and stopped in front of the candle, unable to tear his gaze away.

  “Maker,” he whispered, his tongue dry inside his mouth. Emotion choked him. “So beautiful.”

  From the corner of his eye he saw the shadows coiling behind the coffin. Was that possible? The blood worked its power like a drug.

  He returned his gaze to the flame. The world had changed before his eyes, and this tongue of light was a work of magic. Rom drew his finger through its lithe body and marveled at its heat against his skin. How had he ever taken such a thing for granted?

  He didn’t know how long he stayed like that. By the time he straightened, the candle was hardly more than a pool of wax. In another few minutes, it would swallow the flame whole and darkness would smother him.

  He followed the dying glow toward a stack of chairs and the wall, to the ebbing ring of light on the floor…

  And the form curled in the corner.

  There lay Avra, sleeping on her side. Her tiny body peaceful, rising and falling with each breath. Her head rested on her arm, turned toward him with eyes closed, oblivious to his crazed behavior.

  Avra.

  He couldn’t move. The sight of her lying there overwhelmed him.

  She was an angel. An angel in his poison-induced dream. His heart filled with strange sensation. He longed for her. For her to be with him.

  Rom moved toward her, stilling his breath, daring not to make a sound. He stood over her, stunned. She was beautiful. He spoke her name softly, afraid to disturb her.

  “Avra.”

  The name brought a quiver to his lips. This was Avra, but not Avra. The poison had stolen the former Avra away and replaced her with another woman.

  He sank to one knee and touched a strand of her hair. The two women looked identical, but this one was far more beautiful. No, magical. An angel, a goddess, the wildest figment of his soaring imagination.

  Desire lapped at his heart. Not a simple wish to have her, but a craving to envelop her, to absorb her completely. A yearning to serve her, if she would only allow him, because such a creature deserved nothing less. She was magnificent.

  He wanted to hold her and to kiss her, but he dared not! His fingers trembled, and the strand of her hair with them. And yet this was no angel, but a woman fashioned of flesh and blood.

  Avra.

  Something stirred in his mind, rousing itself from a gust into a full-blown gale. A door within him blew wide to a new reality. One in which he adored Avra. It was a worship beyond the currency of loyalty he had once called love—the same love he had claimed to have for his mother.

  The memory of his mother lying in a pool of her own blood crashed into his mind and he dropped the strand of hair. The force of the sensation that struck him shoved him back on his heels.

  His mother was dead?

  Rom leaped to his feet, spun toward the door, and tore out of the storage room. One thought alone pushed him up the stairs, three at a time. One fear, one concern, one horrible, debilitating thought.

  His mother was dead.

  Not until he reached the street did he pull up, and then only because he realized that he’d left Avra.

  Avra, whom he worshipped.

  He stood under the dim streetlights, lost, torn, but then he reasoned that Avra was asleep and at peace. And he…he had to find out if his mother was truly dead or if there was even the slightest possibility of saving her. He would go and return to Avra before she awoke.

  Rom bent over and sprinted into the gray drizzle.

  It took him less than thirty minutes to reach his house by way of the underground and a direct route through night-emptied streets. He knew that he ran the risk of being caught, especially if they had posted a guard at his house. But the new emotions churning inside him pushed aside all reason and demanded he throw his own safety to the gutter. He had to see his mother. He had to be sure that there was no way he could save her. Nothing else mattered.

  He could not understand the overpowering impulse and the pain that had captured him, but it didn’t matter. He was its slave. It was all he could do to hide his tears from the few late-night passengers riding on the underground.

  When he arrived, his heart stuttered. The back door to his house gaped ajar in the moonlight.

  But that was good, right? If the authorities had completed their work here, they would have buttoned down the house. Sealed it off.

  On the other hand, if his mother were alive and able to move around, she would have closed the door. But he alr
eady knew the notion of her survival to be the desperate fantasy of a despairing son.

  He’d known it as he stood on the train, watching the banks of lights blink by. He’d known with every step that his mission to save what was lost would only crush him. But what was possible or practical had been replaced by a far baser impulse.

  Hope.

  Glancing around for any sign that the house was being watched, he hurried up to the door. No sound from the inside. The lamp in the kitchen was still lit.

  He pushed the door gently open and peered through its widening gap. The kitchen came into view. The entrance to the dining room was empty.

  His heart surged. He nudged the door wider and stepped quietly in. Black and white kitchen tiles…

  Blood.

  There was his mother.

  Rom stared at her crumpled form, robbed of life. He saw it all again: the guard slicing her throat, the way her eyes rolled back in her head, her body collapsing.

  Staring at her, he relived those brutal moments as if they were happening in front of him again with ruthless precision. Death had always occupied the same space as fear, but now something far uglier than fear uncoiled its serpentine shape from a pit deep inside him, rising through his throat like a dragon, eyes red and fangs bared.

  The emotion was so foreign to him that his stomach convulsed at its full acquaintance. He could not move. He could only stand there trembling from head to foot, dry heaving but unable even to bend over to retch.

  His first thought was that he’d been cut down with his mother and was even now bleeding to death on the kitchen floor.

  His second thought was that a blade had not brought his death. The poison in the vial was killing him.

  That dragon that reared its head began to bleed, filling his lungs and throat with suffocating terror.

  He stumbled forward under the weight of a pain so great he couldn’t bear up. He fell to the ground over her body, dug his fingers into her shoulders and sobbed, haltingly at first, and then with great gasps and groans.

  He knew then that he had found his way into Hades. Chaos was swallowing him. He’d ingested the forbidden blood and awakened all that was unholy to devour him. In long, unrelenting groans, Rom mourned his mother’s death.

  What had he done? He’d brought death to her! Her skin was cold and lifeless because of him! He’d made a crack in the ground and freed evil. His mother had died, but it was now he who felt that death in a way that she, loyal to the Order, never could have.

  Her peaceful face filled his mind, so stoic and reserved, so slow to alarm and fright. How many times had she hovered over him when he’d skinned his knees or awoken with tremors in fear of death? She was there in his memory, preparing meals every morning and evening so that he would grow strong. Tucking him into a warm bed at night and chasing his fears away with calm and wise words.

  Now she lay in a pool of her own blood. Waves of despair gurgled up from that black pit and washed him with revulsion. The fear he’d felt as a boy under her loving care paled next to the dark pain sucking him down.

  He could still taste the acidic curse of the blood he’d ingested, and with each sob he cursed his impulse to place that foul poison to his lips. He would embrace his mother’s fate over his own horror now.

  For a moment he considered ending his own life. If this plague had once afflicted mankind, then humanity had survived only by eradicating its traces. And now he had reversed that Order and invited a living death to consume him.

  What have I done? What madness has tempted me to subvert the truth that held all things in perfect peace?

  The last moorings tethering his mind to any semblance of reason fell away. The dragon’s jaws snapped wide, thrust its head forward, and roared with rage.

  Rom jerked his head up from his mother’s body and screamed in a full-throated panic, eyes clenched. But the terror only intensified.

  His mind blackened. He surged to his feet and lurched forward. Tripped over his mother’s body. Slammed into the table, grabbed a chair to keep himself upright and, snarling, shattered it on the floor.

  But none of this registered as more than the desperate flailing of a man in the jaws of death. He was vaguely aware that his cries would be heard by any passerby at this early hour, but he didn’t seem to be able to control either his pain or his reaction to it. Death was raking its claws along his bones without regard for such meaningless concerns as orderly quiet.

  He gripped his hair with both hands hard enough to bring pain to his scalp, then dropped his head against the wall and wept. It was all pointless. Hopeless. What was done, was done.

  And there…His mother’s form lay unmoved by his violent protests.

  Rom stepped to her, sank to his knees, and lowered his arms around her lifeless body, sobbing.

  He wasn’t sure how long he clutched her, but in the folds of that anguish he understood something new. There was Chaos in his veins. These awakened emotions could only be the worst of diseases. He had taken the blood and it had somehow reverted him to a state of ghoulish darkness. It was why the Order had gone to such lengths to protect humanity from the vial of blood.

  He loved his mother in his new and rending way. He wept, bereft, sure the human heart could not survive such brokenness for long.

  But even as he thought about the horror of life in this new hellish prison of sorrow, another thought edged into his mind.

  Avra.

  He’d left the vial in the same room with Avra. What if, finding him gone, she drank the blood?

  The thought propelled him off the floor. He had to get back to Avra! But he couldn’t leave his mother like this.

  In nightmarish stupor, Rom wiped the blood from his mother’s wounds and carried her body to her bed. He placed her under the covers and pulled the tangled strands of hair off her face so that she looked almost herself, asleep as on any night.

  What are you doing, Rom? You have to get back!

  He ran from her room, saw the mess of blood on the kitchen floor, and considered mopping it up, washing every trace of her death down the drain. Throwing open the windows to purge the stench of blood from their house. For a grisly moment he stood unmoving, trapped by his own pain.

  But Avra’s face hung in his mind, Avra, tipping the vial of poison to her mouth.

  With a grunt of horror, he leaped over the blood, flew through the back door without bothering to secure it, and headed for the station in a brisk walk.

  The sky had paled. The neighbors would discover her body and call the Authority of Passing. The thought of her in such a place terrified him, but he could think of no better way to honor her than to let her pass on to Bliss according to the Order that she had served.

  It was now his duty to save Avra. Dear, sweet Avra, whom he loved and would die for if only to save her from this unholy death that had found him.

  Avra…Avra, whom he loved more than life itself.

  Rom broke into a run as fresh tears blurred his sight.

  Chapter Ten

  Whatever the blood had done to him, Rom did not find a way to hide it before he reboarded the early-morning train. It was the extremes of emotion that plagued him most. He struggled one minute to suppress his terrible grief, then was overcome the next by a desperation to save Avra from anything similar. One moment he gripped his hands into fists in an effort to hold back tears; the next he murmured Avra’s name like a prayer as he willed the train to go faster.

  But he found new sense to his condition in his longing for Avra. He’d discovered a deep desire to protect her, yes, but now a profound love filled his heart with a warmth that felt less like pain and more like intoxication. Love, until now understood as nothing more than one’s duty to remain loyal, now raged with emotion.

  If Avra hadn’t taken the blood, and he desperately hoped she had not, she would still possess a brain that could reason for him.

  By the time he reached the basilica, his thoughts were torn. It was the swelling notions of benevolence and com
passion directed at Avra that confused him the most. This wasn’t the stuff of pain as much as desire and love. Surely, love. Was it possible that he was simply overreacting to his new state of mind? That he no longer possessed the ability to control such mad sentiments? That his heart was simply too weak to contain opposing emotions? Agony for his mother’s death…love for Avra.

  Perhaps, like a starving man, he would consume anything, anyone right now. And perhaps he would have wept at the passing of a sparrow.

  No. He could not accept that. These feelings were far too real. A fresh onslaught of tears came to his eyes when he rushed down the steps to the storeroom where he’d left her.

  He tried the door, found it unlocked, and peered inside.

  The first thing he noticed was the light. All of the candles had been relit. There was no sign of the vial—he couldn’t remember where he’d left it.

  He jerked his eyes to the floor. Avra lay there, curled up, shaking. But no vial. Thank the Maker, no vial.

  He quickly stepped in and closed the door. She made no move to indicate she’d heard him.

  “Avra, I’m here.”

  He crossed the room in three strides, fell to his knees beside her, and pulled her into his arms. Her arms wrapped around him and he held her tighter.

  “Shh, shh. I’m here.”

  She was tangled in her cloak and he could feel her shoulders shaking—not with tremors, but with sobs. Her hair fell over his arm, dangling toward the floor as he cradled her against his chest. Her mouth twisted with a soft cry. The sound of it, the sight of it, tore at his heart.

  He tried to straighten her cloak, to pull it around her and over her shoulders. He cursed himself for leaving her alone to face her fear.

  “Avra, don’t cry. I’m here! I’m well. See?”

  She had always been afraid, and with reason. But now the thought of her suffering roused in him something new and fierce, something so at home in his heart that he knew it belonged there—had perhaps always been there, waiting, slumbering, silent until now.