by Ninie Hammon
Here it comes.
Some calm voice inside her informed Gabriella that she was about to be raped. Apparently, she was already disassociating because the voice wasn’t even her own. But she recognized it. It was the laboriously cheery voice at the airport that warned: “Do not leave baggage unattended at any time while in the terminal as it may be removed in accordance with TSA regulations.”
When he reached out his hand, she shrank back from him. That actually seemed to please him.
“My seed in your womb will produce … perfection.” He was breathing hard now. She could smell garlic and mint mouthwash. His voice was thick. “Our union will be a mating like none other the world has ever known.” She could feel heat pulse off his body. Every other time she’d been near him he’d felt as cold as death. “I will take you as no man—”
He stopped abruptly, as if he had literally grabbed hold of his own arm. Then she watched him drag himself back from the edge. “But not yet.” His voice was breathy. “Not until we have performed all the rituals.”
Then he touched her cheek, tenderly caressed the thick expanse of twisted scar tissue that covered the right side of her face that puckered the skin from below the corner of her eye to the bottom of her jaw.
“Beautiful, my dear,” he crooned, as if he was talking about the scar and not her face. And maybe he was. He leaned toward her, as if to kiss the scar. She felt his cheek next to hers, his breath on her neck. She cringed away. He began to nibble on her ear—
A lightning bolt of pain stabbed into the side of Gabriella’s head and she shrieked. She lurched back and saw blood on Yesheb’s mouth and he was chewing …
She reached up, confused, and grabbed her ear, on fire with agony. It was wet—she was bleeding—and there was a ragged …
He had bitten off her ear lobe! That’s what he’d been chew …
The room began to whirl around and around. The pain dimmed. The light grayed out. The world went black.
When Gabriella came to, she was lying on her bed. The pain in her ear fired her instantly alert. Blood had soaked the top right side of her nightgown and was smeared on the sheets around her. But when she reached up she found a bandage on her ear—crude, made with gauze and some surgical tape Yesheb must have found in the cabinet in the bathroom. She sat up and saw that her gown was hiked up above her knees, twisted around her. She grabbed it, yanked it down, scooted back against the headboard and pulled the covers up around her the best she could.
Yesheb stood rigid in the doorway staring at her. The fire of hunger in his eyes was so fierce she could feel the heat all the way across the room.
“Your skin is soft,” he purred. “Smooth beneath my hand.” He stopped, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But … I did not, I would not dishonor you, my precious Zara.”
She stared at him, unblinking, didn’t move. Maybe she was going into shock. No, she was already in shock. Reality was wrapped in cotton; everything felt muted, muffled.
“We will be joined together,” he rasped through clenched teeth, “only when it is time.”
Apparently unaccustomed to reigning in his passions, he turned abruptly, stepped out into the hallway and began to close her door behind him. “I will wait for that time here.”
It was obvious he could barely hold his need in check. Maybe he couldn’t manage it in the same room with her.
Gabriella burst into tears and didn’t know why. Perhaps the menace of his passion was unbearable. But that didn’t make her feel like crying. Running, yes, but not crying. Sobs wracked her whole body anyway, without the advice and consent of her mind. If this intensity kept up, she’d soon be hysterical. But maybe this was hysteria.
Yesheb seemed to approve of the tears.
Her sobbing ramped up a notch, and still she felt like a spectator to it.
Then he said something that would have been tender from a normal man. “I will be right outside your door, my precious Zara. When you have cried yourself to sleep, I will come in and sit with you in the darkness and watch over you.” His next words were spoken in a voice deep and booming, the sound bouncing off the insides of an oil drum. “When the boy comes, we will perform the sacrifice and then we shall be one!”
She stopped crying in mid-sob, sucked in a ragged gasp as understanding dawned.
The sacrifice? Ty!
Yesheb closed the door behind him as Gabriella fell over in the bed sobbing. But this time her horrified mind had joined her body in hysteria.
HE STANDS IN the hallway outside her room and listens to her cry. It is a haunting sound, lost and lonely and lovely, one he yearns to hear often. It rises and falls in something like a melody, a song of fear and horror that goes on and on.
Yesheb hears it while his mind processes dozens of other sensations at the same time. He read once that autistic children are unable to differentiate among all the stimuli assaulting their senses, unable to tune anything out, so for them, life is a cacophonous cauldron of unintelligible sounds and smells, sights and feelings.
Yesheb’s mind is more like an autistic mind than a normal one. But rather than being unable to differentiate among the stimuli around him, he is able to attend to all of it at once. He stands in the maelstrom of it now, tastes the salty flavor of blood and tissue, hears the sobbing as part of a symphony of his own breathing whishing in and out and his heart’s rhythmic thump-whoosh, thump-whoosh. He smells fear sweat—hers—and arousal sweat—his—and feels the compression of his feet into shoes, his body into clothing and sees …
All the color is gone.
He balls his hands into fists so tight his fingernails dig into his palms. No blue sky, green grass, red lips. No color in anything. Black, white and shades of gray.
He can’t think about that now! Will not think about it! He maintains absolute control over his mind and body and can remove thoughts from—
Why is the color gone? Where did it go? Is it a punishment?
What have I done to anger The Voice?
The thump-whoosh, thump-whoosh of his heart kicks into a gallop. Horrid little doubts roar around in his head. Ugly bikers on custom Harleys, they race faster and faster as something like panic rises up with a taste of vomit in his throat.
And for a long time he stands as if in a trance while huge battles are waged in his soul. Emotions attack in swarms but he fights them off, grapples to regain control. All the upheaval is painted on the background of sobbing. His bride, crying behind the closed door. The princess he has found against all odds, among all the women in the world.
After a while, the image of her begins to steady him. Once she is his, the planets will align properly. Yes. And he will see color again then. Yes!
But if something goes wrong and he cannot have her, will his other senses go away too, stop functioning? Leave him deaf or totally blind, unable to smell or feel?
An ice pick of dread stabs into his belly so powerfully he actually grunts from the pain of it.
“No!” he whispers aloud. “My bride and I will be one!”
When his essence is again totally present in the hallway—bloody and battered from contests unseen on the human plane, but triumphant—he listens to the music of Gabriella’s tears. How he loves that sound. He could listen to it for—
She has been crying a long time. It’s amazing she hasn’t exhausted herself by now, sobbing that hard. Yet she continues to cry with the same abandon as when he left her.
A cold fist grabs his guts and squeezes. It is not fear! Yesheb has mastered fear!
Even so, he turns with the speed of a striking black mamba, flings the door open and switches on the light. The bed is empty. The window is open; rain has soaked the curtains and drips off the sill into a puddle on the shiny wood floor. On the nightstand, Gabriella’s iPhone rests in a slot on a black speaker box. The microphone icon of the Voice Memo app shines on the screen and the sound of her sobbing issues through the speakers.
Gabriella is gone.
Yesheb lets out a cr
y, a wailing howl of rage and frustration, then turns and bolts down the stairs after her.
“TY, WAKE UP!”
Gabriella shook her son roughly. He was usually hard to awaken but his hazel eyes popped open instantly and he looked up confused.
“Mom, wha—?”
“Get up, we’re leaving.”
She threw back the covers and yanked the boy to a sitting position. She’d carry him if she could, but he was too big for that now. The golden retriever at the foot of Ty’s bed had gotten to his feet as soon as she lurched into the room, panting and dripping, and stood beside her now, wagging his tail.
“Where are we go—?”
“Just come on!”
The boy picked up his glasses from the bedside table and fumbled them onto his face, then looked at the floor in a daze, searching for his slippers. She grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet. “No time for shoes. Let’s go!”
She heard movement behind her and the overhead light flicked on, momentarily blinding her. She turned in slow motion to face the man standing in the doorway, then grunted in relief, took two steps and slapped the light switch back off.
“What in the world—?” Theo began.
In the brief splash of light Gabriella had seen the shock on the old black man’s face. She must look a fright. Her hair plastered to her skull, her nightgown soaked and ripped—she’d caught it on something as she climbed off the sun porch roof—with blood dripping from her ear. The bandage had slipped off during her nightmare flight across the yard, her white gown glowing like the tail of a comet in the flashes of lightning, so bright she feared the light would shine in the upstairs windows and Yesheb would see.
“Ty and I have to get out of here.” She moved to drag the still sleepy child around him, but the old man stood firm, blocking the door.
“You not gone run outta here in the middle of the night ’less you tell me what—”
“There’s a man in the house,” she said. “A … stalker.”
“A what?”
“A stalker!”
“How’d he get past that guard, that rent-a-cop Ridley?”
Gabriella had hired Thomas Ridley after the police refused to listen to any more of her complaints that she was being watched. She didn’t have time now to tell Theo about the bloody dagger.
“Just believe me,” she said. “A dangerous man is after …” She cut her eyes meaningfully to the boy, “… us.”
The old man’s protest broke off as clean as a dry stick. “Then let’s git!” He pulled his robe around him and started his peculiar hobble down the hallway leading to the door between the guest house and the garage.
“You’re not going—” Gabriella began.
“So you gone leave me behind to make nice with Mr. Personality when he find out you not here?” he said over his shoulder without turning around.
Theo was right, of course. He wouldn’t be safe here either.
They all hurried barefoot down the hall with P.D. close on their heels. They had just stepped into the garage when Gabriella heard it. The wind bore it into the guest house through the back door she had left open. It was a cry—savage, guttural, more feral than human. The cry of a beast.
Gabriella was weak with relief when she leapt in behind the steering wheel of her Lincoln Town Car and found the keys dangling in the ignition. The keys to the other two cars in the garage—the Mercedes and the Porsche—were in her purse on the dressing table in her bedroom. She’d been almost certain she’d left the keys in the Lincoln, but what if …?
As Theo slammed the back door behind P.D. and Ty and jumped into the passenger seat, she cranked the engine, flipped on the headlights and hit the button for the automatic garage door opener. Yesheb would be able to see the garage door opening from the house. The driveway curved around so the doors faced the back yard. He’d know where she was.
The door seemed to take a hundred years to crank up. Gabriella didn’t wait until it was fully raised. As soon as it was high enough so the top of the car would clear it, Gabriella slammed the transmission into reverse and the big car charged backwards into the driveway. Thunder clattered like heavy boots on wooden stairs; sudden raindrops rattled like volleys of buckshot against the windshield. They were out in the open now, completely exposed. And she could feel his eyes on them, feel his rage. The most dangerous point was now, when she had to stop and put the car in drive, turn around in the oval and head for the street. If he came now …
Yesheb appeared in the rain-freckled glow of headlights. An apparition, a black ghost. She hadn’t seen him coming, he was just there, his face frozen in a mighty contortion of rage, his handsome features so distorted he was hardly recognizable.
She screamed. The hood ornament was centered on his chest like the crosshairs of a rifle and she shoved the gearshift into drive and hit the accelerator, mashed it all the way to the floorboard. The car leaped at Yesheb.
Gabriella tensed for the impact, the horrible thumping sound he would make as the front grill hit him and threw him backward or under the wheels, or up over the hood and the top of the car.
But the car flew forward into empty air. Yesheb was gone. Had she only imagined he was there? Nobody could move that fast! She felt only a little bump, as if the back wheel had run over something small.
As the speeding car careened onto the street, Gabriella glanced in the rearview mirror. For only a moment, she saw him. A hulking shape of deeper darkness in the shadow cast by the garage as lightning torched the night sky. He was hunkered down low, like a lion preparing to spring forward, and she had the irrational fear that he could jump that far, that he could leap off the ground and land on the top of the car or crash through the back window.
And then the driveway with its shadowy figure vanished as they sped down the street. Gabriella thought it odd that all the street lights had double halos around them until she realized she was looking at them through both the water on the windshield and the pools of unshed tears in her eyes. She heard a strange, whining cry, but until Theo patted her leg comfortingly she didn’t realize she was the one making the sound. She ground her teeth together and swallowed the cry and pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator.
Yesheb hadn’t walked to her house. He had a vehicle hidden somewhere. Within minutes, he would cleave the night with his rage in mad pursuit.
The hunt was on.
CHAPTER 2
THEO REACHED OVER AND PATTED GABRIELLA’S LEG WHEN SHE started to make a whining sound in her throat that sounded like a cat got its tail caught in a lawn mower. The woman was driving through the rain like a bat outta hell and if she got the hysterics she’d ram the car into a tree.
“You doin’ jes fine,” he told her, but he didn’t think she heard him. She was concentrating so hard on watching the road ahead through the windshield and looking in the rearview mirror at the same time that he didn’t say nothing else for fear he’d distract her and then she’d ram the car into a tree for sure.
The odds of the three of them making it to wherever it was Gabriella was high-tailing it to wasn’t looking real good right now, so he best keep his hands to himself and his mouth shut. And pray.
God, could you please keep this poor, scared white woman from killing us all? I’m a old man, gone be standin’ at them pearly gates before long, but the boy here—he got a lot of living to do yet. And Gabriella—she deserve a chance to have a better life than that good-for-nothing son of mine give her. I know you see us and what a fix we in. Any help you got, send it our way. Amen.
Theo shot a glance into the backseat where he could see Ty’s eyes magnified by his glasses, open so wide the whites was glowing like dice that come up snake eyes.
“You got your seatbelt buckled?” he asked.
“Yes sir.” Theo barely caught his whisper.
Gabriella careened around a corner, hydroplaned for a moment then regained control. P.D. clawed at the seat and would have pitched over onto the floorboard if Ty hadn’t grabbed hold
of him.
“You hang onto Puppy Dog good and tight, hear.”
Theo didn’t care about the furball on legs, but that boy needed something to hold onto. “We gone be there real soon now.”
Theo had no idea where there might be or how far away it was, but if ever was a boy needed reassuring, it was the one with a stranglehold on a golden retriever in the backseat of this car.
Theo was the only one of the three of them who wasn’t afraid. Once you’d done your living, played the parts you’s assigned, wasn’t no reason to be afraid. And scared would wear you out! Life didn’t have nothing to hold over your head when it had done took everything that mattered. Well, except the boy. He was another thing altogether. Much as Theo didn’t want to admit it, Ty was the source of a ball of cold lard that had settled down deep in the pit of Theo’s stomach. If some crazy fool done something to that little boy …
Gabriella made another sliding turn, this time onto Washington Road. They were in Upper St. Clair now, which was a couple of pegs down the pretentiousness ladder from where she and Ty lived in Mt. Lebanon. Now Theo knew where they were going. He’d been to a schmooze-with-the-celebrities party at Bernie Phelps’s house once with Smokey and the band.
Smokey. Theo waited for a stab of pain at the thought of his dead son. He felt absolutely nothing at all.
Only thing Theo remembered about Bernie Phelps was that his squeaky little voice sounded like Joe Pesci and his round, bald head sat on his long skinny neck like a golf ball on a tee. Smokey’d said the man’d been married like eight times and Theo couldn’t figure out how he got even one woman to say yes. Had to be the money. Even though he had gambling debts all over town, Bernie lived like a king at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street lined with huge oak trees. Gabriella screeched to a halt in the driveway that curved in front of the house.
“I’ll go,” Theo told her. “You stay here, leave the engine running in case he not home and we got to keep goin’.”
Theo hobbled fast as he could up the steps to the porch with huge, white pillars and rang the doorbell, holding the button in so it would keep ringing. He wanted to pound on the door with his fists and holler, “Let us in, quick! They’s a crazy man after us!” But he didn’t. Wouldn’t do nobody no good to wake the whole neighborhood.
