Juma

by Madhuri Pavamani

  I thought how foolish he would think me to chase his kind come after them hunt them as they hunt me and I wondered if he would care that I lost another life would it matter would he pause in his daily doings and think how once upon a time he loved me something fierce and I filled with a sadness like no other because I missed him even though I shouldn’t. I did.

  Horribly.

  His hands that touched me in places no one ever reached and his smile that he shared with few and his voice so low and gruff and filled with desire . . .

  “Juma.” The mountain moved and in its place appeared Paola, covered in blood, holding my blade. “Juma, are you okay? Here, sit up for a second,” and she pulled me to a seated position, leaning me against a house as she scanned the street for signs of danger. “You are insane, you know that? What the hell has gotten into . . .”

  And then silence.

  And cold.

  And death.

  Paola’s final death to be exact, as a Keeper swept from the shadows and caught her unaware, severing her head from her body with one slash of his sword. And my second death as that same blade from that same bloody Keeper slid across the delicate skin of my throat, unleashing a river of blood and gore upon those pretty Italian cobbled streets in the quiet of the early morning.

  I fell back onto the stones and watched a bird circle overhead in the bluest of blue skies and dreamed of it calling to me—Juma, Juma, Juma—and I wondered whether this bird knew the other bird who had been singing her song when I died in my five-year-old’s body and I smiled and cried and everything hurt my head my arms my legs just like when that bullet tore open my throat and I thought about closing my eyes and letting go and I thought about fighting and I couldn’t figure out which I wanted to do and then I saw Dutch and I cried harder because I knew he wasn’t there because he no longer loved me he left me he told me not to touch him and I became so frustrated with myself and my inability to move past him and his darkness and I realized there was never a moment when I had felt more wretched than that one right then.

  And I heaved

  . . . and cried

  . . . and sighed

  . . . and succumbed.

  17: DUTCH

  Ten Things About Me

  It’s difficult to sleep without Juma

  It’s damn near impossible to focus without her

  Every minute apart from her is like hell

  I told myself I would not come because I want to keep her safe but I cannot stay away

  Spending another second with her believing I don’t love her is incomprehensible

  Frist was right—my plan is a load of shit

  Fuck Death and her machinations—she will not keep me from Juma

  I will do anything to see her smile again

  I will do anything to beg her forgiveness

  I don’t deserve Juma, but I want her, I need her

  I saw her lying in a pool of her own blood, alone, no one in sight, on that quiet street, and started making lists right then and there. I don’t know why or how or when, they just formed in my head. Lists of me and all my fuckery and my intense need for her and all of her light and love and laughter. Lists of my stupidity for ever thinking I could function without her. Lists of what I would do to earn her love again. Lists, lists, and more motherfucking lists. Anything to keep my mind from focusing on the specter of another one of her deaths. Anything to keep from counting down her lives.

  Avery was right. Kash was good at tracking Juma, because all the information he’d gathered on her—the Poochas she knew, the cities she visited, the sites of her kills—led him to this sleepy street in the middle of Florence. I don’t know how he did it, I don’t even know if I wanted to know how he did it, I was just glad he did. Seeing her lying in the street, unmoving and lifeless, brought home the very clear fact there was nowhere else I needed to be but by her side.

  She never mentioned working with others, but Juma lay near another dead Poocha—apparently once upon a time a blonde from the looks of her head lying several feet away—who’d suffered her final death. The woman’s skin was ashen in tone and almost powdery in texture, a sure sign of the finality of life for her kind. I had no idea who she was or why she was with Juma or what either of them were doing on some desolate and forgotten Italian street, but she wasn’t coming back. Ever.

  Juma, on the other hand, was brown and freckled and stunning, none of her beauty stolen by death because she was coming back to this world, of that I was certain. I kneeled down next to her and pushed her hair out of her eyes, leaning close enough to catch a whiff of peppermint from her lips, then finding myself suddenly awash in a wave of memories of her all over me, kissing me, touching me, fucking me. And I could have stayed there for hours lost in images of her, but the streets were stretching and yawning and coming back to life, espresso was brewing, people were moving about in the morning sunlight, and I needed to get Juma out of there.

  First I hid the body of the dead blonde around the corner in a locked trash can, knowing she would eventually disintegrate into ash and be carried away by the wind, thinking it better she did so alone. I picked up Juma with care, wildly cognizant of the gaping wound in her throat, then headed for the safest place I knew in Florence.

  “You goddamned bastard.” Avery answered the door as soon as I buzzed, opening the gates for me so I could enter the front garden of the villa. I walked up a small flight of stairs, past several yapping dogs, and into the main foyer of Kash’s home.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” I replied, as I passed him in the doorway.

  “Holy shit.” He ignored me and focused on Juma. “It’s the beautiful brown woman you claim not to love, yet have all of us watching over. And she’s got a huge fucking hole in her neck.”

  “I know that, Ave.” I continued walking down the long hallway, headed for the back staircase and the bedroom Kash always left at my disposal. “She’s on death number two, this one at the hands of another Keeper.”

  “What do you mean ‘another Keeper’?” Avery stood in the doorway and watched me as I situated Juma on the bed. “Dutch, she’s still bleeding,” he said with a nod of his head as he tossed me a washcloth from the bathroom.

  “Exactly what I said,” I replied as I cleaned her wound, then wrapped her throat in gauze. “Her first death was because of me and her second death was because of whoever was working an assignment with Lars. Who, by the way, is very much dead. As is Lucy. Most likely both killed by Juma.”

  “Fuuuuuuck,” was all Avery could muster.

  “Tell me about it,” I agreed.

  “Fuuuuuuck,” he repeated as he stood in the doorway watching us.

  I smiled despite myself and herself and our very horrible circumstance. “She tends to have that effect on people.”

  “Since when do Poochas kill Keepers?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, not sure how to answer his question, mostly because I wasn’t certain myself. Had Juma been in the wrong place at the wrong time? I doubted it. She was a perfectionist, she hardly struck me as the sort who stumbled upon murder scenes. It seemed more likely she very purposely found herself on that quaint street at that early morning hour, determined to kill however many Keepers she could.

  I got the sense she was hunting.

  “Fuuuuuuck, Dutch. Fuck. And now you brought her here. Who the fuck knows why.” Avery took one more look at Juma then turned on his heel and headed down the hallway without finishing his thoughts, muttering to himself about Death and Poochas and things that probably amounted to curses of The Gate, but he was too far away and speaking too low for me to discern.

  “Dutch.” Kash stood in the doorway, a worried look furrowing his brow, his brown face full of care and concern. “My god, what happened to her?”

  He stepped into the room and alongside the bed, touching Juma’s arm and holding her hand, the gesture so intimate and warm. And so Kash. He didn’t know Juma but thanks to Avery I knew he kind of loved her—she had that effect
on people.

  “I’m sorry, Kash, but I needed to get her somewhere safe, I couldn’t just leave her lying in the street like that,” I explained in defense of my impulsive act.

  “Shhhh.” Kash waved off my words as if they offended his ears. “Don’t listen to a word coming out of that Chinese bastard’s mouth. Of course you bring her here, I don’t expect anything less. Nor does Avery, he’s just been worried sick about you.”

  “I know, I know.” I ran my hands over my face and through my hair then searched my pockets for a smoke. “I’m a rotten fuck.”

  Kash tossed me a Gold Flake, one of his Indian cancer sticks, and a lighter.

  “I hate these things,” I groused, lighting it anyway.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he replied, his words cutting more ways than one.

  I grimaced and he saw it and smiled. That was all the reproach I would get from Kash. It was his way, had always been his way. Never one to dole out harsh words and buckets of abuse, instead Kash devised subtle, almost gentle, methods to get his message across to me when I needed to hear it most.

  “And you’re not a rotten fuck, Dutch,” he continued, his voice quiet as he checked Juma’s body for hidden injuries and hurts, “but you are sometimes a horrible friend, especially to those who love you. Especially to Avery.”

  I watched as he cleaned the more superficial wounds on Juma’s body, taking time and care with each one.

  “I remember the day you entered The Gate. I was on an assignment in Wyoming of all places—can you see me trying to fit in a crowd in Wyoming?—and Avery called that night to get an update but also to let me know you had arrived. We’d been hearing for weeks Khan’s son is coming, the future leader of The Gate, and James was in a fit about it. He liked being Khan’s favorite and did not want any competition.”

  Kash smiled as he spoke. “I didn’t even need to say a word—Avery had already decided he was going to protect you, not only from James but also from Khan. Even then, there was already a small group of us who knew Khan was a terror and was running The Gate as his personal dictatorship. He told me he could tell there wasn’t an ounce of Khan running through your blood and he intended to keep it that way.”

  “He’s worried about you every day since”—Kash paused and caught my eye—“because he loves you like a brother. Any time he complains or grumbles or acts like an ass, it’s not because he’s mad at you, Dutch. He is upset with himself and his inability to protect you from all the hurt this life has caused. It’s that simple.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but Kash held up a finger and I stopped.

  “Do not argue this fact with me, Dutch. Accept it and move on.”

  Kash then turned his attention back to Juma, cleaned her last wound, and stepped away as if to admire his work.

  “What happens now?” Kash asked as he lit a smoke and a hush fell over the room as we both studied her for a moment.

  She was devoid of life, all the energy that made her Juma sapped and stored, hidden on whatever plane of existence her kind traversed. And even though I knew she was coming back, I fucking hated this part. This was the shit that made me start devising those lists, frantically grasping for anything to take my mind off her and her lifeless body.

  “You don’t like seeing her like this,” Kash stated, his voice interrupting my frantic thoughts.

  “Brilliant fucking observation,” I snapped. And smoked, and wished I had some Scout.

  “It’s okay to love her and feel crazed by this part of her,” Kash continued as if I had not just jumped down his throat for no reason. “It’s okay for you to love someone again. She’s not Kajal.”

  I shot Kash a look full of murder and quiet rage.

  None of us ever discussed Kajal, my childhood love, that girl of mischievous perfection. The same girl who was killed by an auto-rickshaw, only to become one of Death’s Poochas and my first assignment for The Gate, my most fucked-up test, my greatest failure. She haunted every inch of my being, her deaths inhabiting the darkest parts of my soul, refusing to release me from their horrific grasp. And never before had her name been whispered or spoken or even hinted at in my presence.

  “Kajal was young and new,” he continued as he moved from Juma’s side to stand across from me. I swore if I could, I would reach across the bed and wring his skinny brown neck, snap it right in half and make Kash shut the fuck up. “Juma—”

  “Do not speak her name,” I hissed through my clenched jaw.

  “Juma,” Kash emphasized, “is hardly new at any of this—the living, the loving, the killing, the deaths.”

  “You don’t know shit about Kajal or Juma, old man.”

  “I know they both loved you,” he replied, “and I know you somehow believe that love led to their deaths, and with Kajal perhaps that is correct. Your love did result in her brutal murders, but it was a two-way street, Dutch. Kajal came back every time to that house of horrors because she loved you as much as you loved her.”

  He paused and let his words sink in before continuing in a near whisper. “And the same goes for Juma.”

  “You don’t know a goddamned thing about Juma,” I replied as I moved around the bed in Kash’s direction, my gait so menacing he stepped away from Juma and toward the doorway as if to put some space between us.

  But he wouldn’t stop speaking.

  “Juma is going to keep killing. And you can either work with her and take down your father, The Black Copse, and the rest of those bastards at The Gate, or you can continue this bullshit of ‘protecting’ her, as if she needs any such thing from the likes of you.” Kash glanced at Juma lying on the bed and he smiled. “Stop idealizing her, Dutch, putting her up on a pedestal like she’s a delicate flower. Look at her, really see her, and understand, son, this woman is a killing machine and she’s not going to stop. She is on a mission of death and destruction, regardless of your plan to save her from herself.”

  “What are you talking about, Kash?” I asked, trying to make sense of the words coming out of his mouth and connect them to the woman I loved, the giver of life, the lover, that wondrous being of light and laughter and beauty. And I knew he was right, I was idealizing her, but it could not be helped. She was perfection and every detail of her was ideal. I also knew she was hunting and killing and exploring her inner darkness, she was maybe even reveling in it a bit—at least I suspected it—but I just wanted her safe. I had no problem with her bringing some murder and mayhem into the lives of those fucks at The Gate, I simply preferred when none of that murder and mayhem circled back on her.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about, Dutch,” Kash replied, nodding in Juma’s direction. “While you disappeared and left all of us hanging, I’ve been doing what you asked and following her, learning her, moving with her, watching her kill Keeper after Keeper after Keeper. At first I thought it was a matter of wrong place–wrong time, but very quickly I realized she was hunting—is hunting. Her moves are purposeful and planned, and she is a thing of beauty, a weapon of pure destruction.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and listened as Kash described someone dark and black and full of fuckery, someone quite like me, not someone like Juma.

  Not my Juma.

  “Did you not listen to any of the gossip when you went underground after killing James?” Kash asked, his tone somewhat irritated and amazed. “Did you talk to any of the Dosha? Frist?”

  I lit a smoke, never taking my eyes off him, and shook my head, suddenly feeling like a complete asshole. It was one thing to disappear, it was another to engage in all kinds of stupidity.

  “Jesus fuck, Dutch,” he sighed, lighting his own smoke, “sometimes you make it really goddamned difficult to love you.”

  I sat in silence and let Kash’s words wash over me, knowing he regretted them as soon as they left his lips, also knowing they were spot on.

  “Don’t look like that, Kash,” I said as I sought his gaze, made him meet my stare. “I totally deserve whatever words you have
for me. I didn’t have a choice but to go ghost after the shit with James, but I should have kept in contact with someone. Anyone. At least then I would know what the fuck is going on right now. Because from what you’re telling me, over the last several months, Juma has very obviously turned to the dark side.”

  “How very Jedi of you.” He smirked, thrilled by any opportunity to mention his beloved Star Wars, then turned somewhat serious as he studied me long and hard before speaking again. “She’s up to something, that much I know. I followed her more than anyone because we wanted Frist to stay out of sight for a while after her attack and Avery was tangled up with Khan and Veda. And you know your goddamned father never gives me a second thought, so I could come and go as I pleased, and what pleased me was watching her.

  “Your girl,” Kash continued, “if I dare call her that, because trust me, she seems to belong to no one but herself, is a killing machine.”

  I glanced at Juma, touched her fingers and cheek for any signs of life, and shook my head. What happened while I was gone? What was she doing? And for fuck’s sake, why? “How many?” I asked.