The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  But his grandmother’s words had sounded literal to his child’s ears, and Lucas, in a short time, had come to think that the thing under the bed had infected his life somehow. In truth, as far as he was concerned, he even had evidence of this.

  Grandmama, who’d never before been sick, died that same summer of heatstroke. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer only two short years after that. She lost both breasts and a painful chunk of her breastbone to a botched surgery that never healed properly because the surgeon had carved too deeply into her nerves. On top of that, the cancer was always resurfacing in odd, cruel places, playing a game with their family. “It’s gonna take more than that to knock me down,” she rasped when it reached her throat.

  Then, the cancer found her lungs. She died when Lucas was thirteen. His father spent the next fourteen years trying to shorten his own life with cigarettes, vodka, and anger, and he finally succeeded, dying from a massive coronary at the grand old age of fifty.

  Then it was Rachel’s turn, thirty-six years old and dead of brain cancer. No reason. No sense. No reprieve.

  Bump-bump

  This time, the plane’s pitching brought tears to Lucas’s eyes. He found himself stroking his armrest as if Jared were beside him and could feel his touch. As if Jared were sleeping like the other passengers on this plane, untroubled and oblivious.

  It didn’t make any sense, none at all, but Lucas felt a renewal of his childhood certainty that all of his personal misfortunes, all that wretched illness that had demolished his life time and again, had stemmed from whatever had been under Boog’s bed. It wasn’t the healing magic he’d spent so many years trying to teach people to recognize; it was its cousin, the Bad Magic he himself did not like to think about. He knew healing magic existed, so it stood to reason the other kind did, too.

  Yes, he believed in evil. Evil thrived in cancer cells and viruses. Evil liked to be felt and not seen. Evil had reached through its invisible wall and tried its damnedest to touch Lucas that night at Boog’s and had probably succeeded, but it had also taught Lucas he needed to fight back. It had taught him he must never stop fighting.

  “Fuck you,” Lucas said half aloud. “I’m coming after you.”

  Then, Lucas felt a grave certainty so keen that his veil of grief lifted slightly, releasing him for an instant: This airplane, at last, was taking him to the answers he’d been seeking. The blood was real, and he would find it.

  Bump-bump

  Just that quickly, the plane’s bouncing stole Lucas’s sense of rejoicing and replaced it with an empty dread even worse than he’d felt when he’d climbed into the taxicab that had taken him away from his son. The tingling in back of his neck returned, a burning.

  As his breath froze in his lungs, Lucas realized that the thing under Boog’s bed might well have been the shadow Three Ravens Perez had seen hunting Rachel and Jared in his visions, the same stinking shadow he’d met in his sleep. It was the evil that hated to let little boys sleep and forced them to grow up without their mothers or didn’t allow them to grow up at all.

  Evil was stalking him, as always. Evil, most likely, would not be far behind.

  journey

  Zion me wan go home,

  Zion me wan go home,

  Oh, oh,

  Zion me wan go home.

  —Rastafarian chant

  12

  Khaldun could feel the child’s presence. Had felt it, actually, for what he had perceived as only an inconsequential moment, but would have been measured on the Gregorian calendar as more than four years. Twenty-five million breaths, 200 million heartbeats. He had felt her being pulsing even in her mother’s womb, nudging the edges of his awareness. He had met her in his visions. He had chosen her name and whispered it to her. He knew her.

  And so he had been waiting.

  At that instant, the realization that he was waiting, and why, began to shake the world’s oldest living man from the slumber of his Rising. The child was coming to him.

  Khaldun’s two minds began to merge, again, into one—one always quietly monitoring, comprehending, analyzing; the other only reveling in, and hungering for, its ecstatic Sleep. The two minds began to lock into consciousness, and Khaldun once again became familiar with the constant weight of his flesh, the prickly sensitivity of the cells of his skin, the sensation of oxygen pouring from his nostrils to his lungs. He also felt the gentle muscle machinery of his heart, and the nearly imperceptible pulsing stream of blood in his veins. The Rising cleansed and awakened his mind, but the Blood cleansed and awakened his two-thousand-year-old relic of a human body, renewing it each day with youth, with life. With stolen blood.

  Khaldun was awake. And suddenly, his flesh was full of complaints: his stomach screamed for solid food, his insides felt bloated with waste, his head whirled in confusion. Khaldun was accustomed to all of these things, the price of the transition between sleep and waking. The passage between the Rising and the world of the senses.

  Too weak to stand—and this would be so for some time—Khaldun closed his eyes and willed the bell posted outside his chamber doorway to ring. The masters in the House of Music had created the bell for him as a gift, a blending of five tones so close in pitch that their fragile, jarring harmony was mellifluously hypnotic to Khaldun’s ear. The bell was so pure in sound that it was transcendent, and Khaldun often used it to help his pupils induce a deep meditative state, as a path to their Rising—though the lesser-schooled Life Brothers had confided that the sound was only immensely annoying to them.

  Ignore the noise, Khaldun advised them. Hear only the music.

  Loudly, the bell rang.

  Immediately, Teka’s wiry form, nearly feline, slipped past Khaldun’s heavy curtain into the bare chamber. Khaldun was surprised to see him, until he remembered that his attendant had changed at the end of the last century. Now Teka had become his fifth attendant since the creation of the Life Colony. Teka, despite the passage of hundreds of years since their meeting, had the cherubic, nearly hairless, face of a man barely on the cusp of manhood. He had been twenty when he’d met Khaldun, and he would look so forever.

  You are awake, Father.

  Teka was sure and practiced in his thought projection, intruding only gently in a coherent sentence, not with the untamed jumble of ideas Khaldun could have mined from Teka’s thoughts whether Teka willed it or not. Disciplined thoughts were so much more pleasant, free of trifles and distractions. Teka must have prepared himself well for his duties, Khaldun realized. The precise manipulation of one’s thoughts was one of the most difficult skills to master. Teka’s abilities were much improved since he had last seen him.

  Khaldun nodded in response. His head felt heavy, resisting movement.

  Then you must have food, Father. Your empty stomach will no longer be satisfied by vapors. What shall I bring you?

  Khaldun parted his dried lips to speak. There were times, he knew, when spoken words were more powerful than those unspoken.

  “Dawit,” Khaldun said, a single name. “Where is he?”

  “I’m not certain, but he is usually in his chamber, or the rock garden. I see him now and then in the House of Music. But he does not remain.” Teka had answered vocally, looking slightly relieved. Perhaps his projection skills were not so effortless after all, Khaldun mused.

  “Has he meditated?”

  “Not as you have prescribed, Father. Dawit is still lost.”

  The hunger weakness finally stilled Khaldun’s tongue. Another spoken word might make him sick, so he had to eat. He had not eaten solid food in nearly four tolls of the bell. But first, he had to begin his preparations. The child was on her way.

  Tell Dawit I am coming to him. I must, Khaldun said silently.

  And if he asks me your reasons, Father?

  Khaldun sighed with a breath that sounded eternal. He will know my reasons soon enough.

  • • •

  Dawit fought to clear his mind for meditation, but he was losing the battle as he
sat on the floor of his quarters, his legs folded beneath him, palms pressed to his kneecaps, eyes closed. He was still so shaken by Khaldun’s visage that he had not yet slowed his shallow breaths. His heart tossed in his chest like a stone bouncing down the face of a mountain.

  He still could not believe what he had seen and heard, much less begin to make sense of it. What would Khaldun’s tidings mean for him? For his brethren? The Covenant was in shambles! And surely his brothers would blame him for Khaldun’s decision. This could not be.

  Had he dreamed it all, then? If only he could believe that! Then, his heart could rest. And his mind could rest as well.

  But Dawit was too poor a meditation student to have such control over his thoughts. The more he tried to wash his mind free, the worse the flurry in his head. On his rare visits, Mahmoud had encouraged him to spend more time in the House of Meditation, as Mahmoud himself did for days at a time now. But Dawit had not heeded his friend.

  Now, the price. When Dawit needed peace, there was none.

  “Sweet Father,” Dawit whispered, “what will come of this?”

  He did not have to wait long for his answer.

  Dawit’s back was turned to his chamber’s entryway from where he sat on the floor, but he soon heard heavy breathing not far behind him. Only minutes ago, stunned by Khaldun’s decree, Mahmoud had warned Dawit to beware of his brothers now. Dawit did not have to open his eyes to glance at the vast mirror across his chamber wall to know that it was Kaleb who stood there. He knew the sound of Kaleb’s angry breathing. He also knew his brother’s smell, bitter and earthen. Kaleb, to Dawit’s mind, did not wash himself often enough. He smelled like a mortal.

  “You are aware that it is impolite to interrupt one in meditation,” Dawit said curtly, his eyes still closed. None of his confusion and fear had seeped into his voice. If Kaleb sensed that conflict in him, he was as good as lost. Kaleb was no doubt here to challenge him to a match, and Dawit prayed his brother would lose his nerve. Dawit was in no mood for swordplay; without his concentration at his disposal, he would surely taste the blade in the Circle today, and Kaleb would make his demise unnecessarily painful.

  “And you are aware,” Kaleb said, his voice low and uneven, “that you have betrayed us?”

  “Your quarrel is with Khaldun, not with me. Now leave me, Kaleb. Your anger at me will not make your blades swifter. Leave for your own sake.”

  At that, Dawit did open his eyes to glance at his mirror, because he thought he smelled smoke. In the reflection, he saw Kaleb’s head silhouetted against an orange-yellow glow burning in the hall, just beyond his entryway. A torch, or several of them. And five other brothers stood behind Kaleb, their faces covered, hidden behind fabric with holes cut for their eyes.

  “What is this?” Dawit said, not turning, still in his meditation pose. His heartbeat’s pounding tripled. “You look like medieval villagers in search of a witch.”

  Kaleb ignored his remark. “I won’t meet you in the Circle today, Dawit. Honor is dead between us. You know no honor, so you’ll have retribution instead. Now, stand and face us.”

  “You’re a pompous fool, Kaleb,” Dawit said, glaring into his brother’s eyes in the mirror. “You have no right to call me to stand. Whatever cowardly acts you intend for me, carry them out as I sit in the pose of our Father. And who are the rest of you, who will not show your faces? I thought all of us here were men as well as brothers. I am sad for you.”

  “Be sad only for yourself,” Kaleb said, and he flung liquid from a pouch across Dawit’s back. The powerful scent, to Dawit, was more unpleasant than the persistent sting that intensified across his bare back as the liquid was exposed to the air. He flinched. Acid, he guessed. Kaleb flung at him again, and Dawit felt the liquid drench the back of his head, itching immediately.

  Still, Dawit did not move, even as he felt the acid burning his earlobes. He might overpower Kaleb and one or two others through sheer strength, but they were sure to be armed. Only his brothers’ sense of fair play would save him from whatever horror Kaleb had planned.

  “This is an insult to Khaldun,” Dawit said calmly. “This is not our way.”

  “Our way?” Kaleb suddenly shouted at him. “You speak of our way, when you have destroyed it? This is our way now, Dawit.”

  Dawit saw a torch flying toward him in the reflection, but he could not escape its path even with a springlike leap. The fire seemed to follow him, igniting the acid although the torch had missed him by several centimeters—the acid was highly flammable, Dawit realized, too late—and suddenly the world was all flames.

  Fire took his back, his arms, his face, sweeping across his skin. Dawit marveled at the sheer volume of pain for a surreal instant, as if he had somehow detached from his body and was studying his ordeal. The Rising beyond the flesh, came the beginning of an awed thought as he seemed to float above himself. This is what Khaldun teaches—

  But his amazement was interrupted by the sound of his screams.

  13

  Fana did not know exactly why, but she and her mother were in Rome. They were supposed to be somewhere else, but their first plane had too many people, so they had been sent to a second plane, and that one had taken them to Rome. Fana didn’t know anything at all about Rome, but she had guessed from the look on her mother’s face that it was not in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia was where they wanted to be.

  The sign at the counter spelled A-L-I-T-A-L-I-A. Her mother was standing in line, holding Fana on one arm so she could rest her head on her mother’s shoulder. Every once in a while, she heard her mother sigh from annoyance, but Fana knew she wasn’t annoyed with her; she was just mad at the people in charge of the airplanes and she was tired from standing so long. Fana was sleepy, too. They had been in an airplane part of yesterday and then all night, and now it was daytime and Fana wanted nothing more than to climb into her bed. But her bed was far away by now, along with Moses and Aunt Alex and Sarah. So going to bed was out of the question, she knew. Yeah, right, as her mommy would say.

  In the meantime, she had noticed a few things about Rome. Or at least the airport, which her mother had said was named Da Vinci after a great painter. First of all—and this fascinated Fana to no end—there were white people everywhere. Not just here and there like near her village in Botswana, but just as there had been last night at the airport after their plane had taken them from Francistown to the larger airport in Johannesburg. Nearly everyone was white. It was a peculiar sight, this parade of skin that looked as though it had rarely seen the sun.

  Most peculiar of all was this little boy with bright red hair standing across the aisle with his mother. The boy had rust-colored spots covering his entire face, his arms, and even his legs, which were bare up to his knees. The spots were like a leopard’s, except much smaller. Were the spots a disease? Fana wondered if maybe her blood, or her mother’s blood, could help this boy. The spotted boy’s mother was talking to the woman in a uniform behind the counter, and Fana tried to hear if she was maybe trying to find a doctor to cure her son’s spots.

  Even though she was close enough to overhear her, Fana couldn’t understand the spotted boy’s mother’s words. She was speaking too fast, and she wasn’t speaking either English or Setswana. It was . . . Deutsch. The word just popped into Fana’s head. That was another language, one she didn’t know. So, instead of trying to listen to the woman’s words, Fana let her mind open up so she could know if the boy was sick and needed a doctor.

  She imagined a flower blooming in her head, the petals opening slowly—the sensation felt no different to her from stretching her arms or legs out completely, except that it made her feel slightly light-headed—and the knowing came to her in an instant: The boy’s name was Dierck. He was ten. His mother was not taking him to a doctor. They had been in Rome for fun, and they were going back to a place called Düsseldorf, where they lived in a green house. A big green house with two stories. The boy didn’t care anything at all about his spots, and neither did his mot
her. They were just . . . freckles, a part of his skin.

  Still, Fana stared at him with absolute wonder. It took her some time to realize that the spotted boy was staring back at her with the exact same interest.

  Mommy gave her a gentle bounce. “You okay, princess?” she whispered close to her ear.

  “Mmm,” Fana mumbled. She was too sleepy to talk.

  “It’s our turn next. Lord, I just hope somebody up there speaks English.”

  Fana closed her eyes. She felt Mommy begin to walk, and the walk seemed to last a long time, then Fana heard a woman’s voice speaking another language she did not understand.

  “Uhm . . . English?” Mommy said.

  “Sí, madam. How can I help you?”

  “Our airline bumped us from a flight to Addis Ababa last night and sent us here instead. They told us the first flight is on Alitalia this morning . . .?”

  “Per favore, let me see your ticket.”

  Fana was not interested in what Mommy and the woman were talking about—it was one of those tedious conversations between grown-ups—so in no time at all, despite the loud announcements that tried to interrupt her, she began to fall asleep on her mother’s shoulder. She was sure she could sleep for a long time.

  And she began to dream, of all things, about a soldier. The soldier had a mustache, and he was dressed in a green uniform, wearing a beret, and he had a black gun slung across his shoulder that was bigger than Fana knew any gun could be, as long as his arm. He seemed almost too young to be a soldier, too thin. Like a boy trying hard to be a man. But something about him, shining in his eyes, was dangerous.

  “. . . Is this a boy or a girl?”

  “She’s a girl,” Fana heard Mommy say, as if she were far away.