Prophecy of Blood

by John R. Monteith

  “For real, this time. Here I come.” Closing his eyes, he squeezed through the doorframe and sealed the chamber behind him. Feeling the flat wooden panels for reference, he faced the room and opened his eyes.

  Dianne stood over a table and aimed her phone at the moving dagger. Beside the GPS compass, the blade rotated clockwise. “It moves so slow.”

  “It’s not that slow. Remember how slow it was before you healed it?”

  “I guess it’s all relative.”

  “Look, it’s already slowing… and it’s stopped.”

  “Should I line the compass up with it?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” As she shifted the electronic device about the table, he knew it would reveal a northwesterly number based upon his observation of the room’s position.

  “It says three hundred and forty-one.”

  “That’s three-four-one when speaking it, but yes, that sounds about right.” He stepped to the bed and withdrew a laptop computer from its bag. Tapping in the new bearing using the hotel’s coordinates as the line’s origin, he saw a locus of diverging lines.

  “Did you find the spot?”

  “Not quite. The lines of bearing from far away are spread apart too much.”

  “Huh?”

  “The lines from home, Paris, and Athens were good enough to get us to Istanbul, but they’re too far away to be meaningful within several miles.”

  “Got it. So, what’s next?”

  “We move around the city and get more bearings.”

  “I thought you liked having room to move and think.”

  She was right, but he saw few options. “True, but we’ll have to make do. I’ve got an idea.”

  In his best Turkish, Liam ordered dinner for himself and Dianne. Pointing at the menu spared him from a communications breakdown, and as the waiter departed, he looked across the table at his companion. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem. I know the cuisine, sort of. It’s a lot like Nana’s.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be good since you picked it.” He glanced around the restaurant and noticed patrons spread over the floor at three other booths. Judging his secrecy sufficient, he lifted the plastic case and pushed it across the table.

  She pulled the case beside her glass of water. “Close your eyes.”

  He complied and heard the weapon’s weight clunk against the dining surface. “Is anyone looking?”

  “Nope. Open your eyes.”

  When he saw the dagger, it rotated towards his stomach and stopped. He withdrew his GPS compass from his pocket and aligned it next to the blade. After he memorized the bearing, he shut his eyes again. “Got it. Put it away, quick.”

  “Done.”

  He opened his eyes, stowed the weapons case on the seat, and lifted his laptop from its bag by his hip. The new line from the restaurant crossed the one from the hotel in an industrial district outside the city’s limits. The information was good enough to place him within a few hundred meters, and the next step would require renting a car to give them secrecy in their final measurements.

  “Where’s it pointing?”

  “Real close. We’ll finish this with a drive around the area tomorrow. We’ll need a car and daylight.”

  “So, we can chill and enjoy dinner?”

  “Maybe. I need to call my father so that he can plan.”

  “Why do you have to be intense all the time?”

  What she considered intense, he considered normal. “I hadn’t thought about it. Probably because I’m always at war, at least in my head. My purpose in this world is hunting, killing, and protecting.”

  “Well, you need to relax.”

  “I don’t think I can. There’s always something else I need to be doing. Even when I do succeed in my life’s calling, they give me another burden that’s even harder.” The words sounded like an exposed vulnerability as he said them, but sharing with her felt okay.

  She appeared understanding. “Share the load. Let me call your father.”

  The offer was an invasion of his routine, but he welcomed her intrusions into his habits. “I guess so. Do you know what to say?”

  “I can’t be that hard. Come to Istanbul and don’t forget Josh and Nana.”

  Something seemed incomplete. “I don’t know how close the wraith is to Istanbul now. I get the sense that he won’t travel as far as your victim did.”

  “Me too.”

  He doubted her intuition but trusted hers. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I think he’s going to kill all his tributes in this city and will also do his final sacrifice here.”

  “It’s a big city. He could get away with it. And God only knows how in tune a young wraith like him is with the concept of how he’s hunted.”

  The waiter brought crispy disks of hot bread and a plate of raw vegetables as an appetizer. She rolled pickled cabbage into a small wrap, bit into her creation, and swallowed. “That makes sense. He’s already nearby. I sense him.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Dianne dreamt of a young woman burning on a cross, blood pouring from her heart’s puncture wound.

  Time stopped, accelerated, and slowed again as the surreal nightmarish scene unfolded. The victim seemed distant, and then Diane was the victim. One moment, she was a sacrifice, then the next she was the savior.

  A familiar ghost appeared, an unseen wind flapping a milky gown over a female frame as she called out in Hebrew. “Avenge me.”

  Dianne responded in English. “Are you the Maiden of Beit She’an?”

  “I am your sister in the line of Nineveh.”

  “You all look the same. Seriously. So, is that a ‘yes’?”

  The black pools of the maiden’s eyes narrowed as her misty brow furrowed. “Why must you know me?”

  Dianne reversed the cryptic inquisition. “You’re the ghost. Don’t you know?”

  “Yours is not to question.”

  “Why not? Aren’t we a team?”

  The apparition’s face darkened, and her mouth widened as she screamed with the anger of a dozen victims. “You will help us, or you will suffer!”

  For a timeless moment in an ageless world, Dianne locked her so-called sister to a stalemate in the battle of wills. Her growing powers giving her special insights, she held her ground. “If I don’t help you, you’ll suffer, too.”

  The maiden’s expression softened. “We need your help.”

  “So, you need my help, and there’s a bunch of you? I’ve been through this before, and I bet I have some sort of choice in the matter about doing this again. So, if you need me, you might want to back off with the scare tactics.”

  The maiden closed her eyes to tap some distant source of knowledge. “I am the Maiden of Beit She’an. I agree that you have a choice in helping me and the other sisters.”

  “You’re awful testy for a ghost.”

  “I retain my human frailties until I pass.”

  “Pass where?”

  “You are an empath. You know.”

  She had a few good guesses, but she had more pressing avenues of questioning. “And you want my help to pass?”

  “Yes.”

  “By killing the wraith that killed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You already told me that I need to kill him. Why are you telling me again?”

  “You must uphold virtue while defeating him.”

  That was a new wrinkle to Dianne. “I thought this guy was horrible and needed to die by any means possible. Are there rules I need to know about?”

  “You’re an empath. You know.”

  “Ugh! Again with that. What are you trying to tell me that I don’t already know?”

  “You love the young hunter.”

  The accusation resonated as a possible insight. “You warned me about infatuation last time.”

  “When you kissed him, you discerned the difference.”

  The truth hit hard, but Dianne fought it. “I have lots of love for many people. It’s the way I am. I sup
pose it’s part of being an empath.”

  “You love him as a desired mate.”

  Dianne found this ghost far more annoying than the French maiden. Any suspicion about the Israeli maiden being a paranormal rehash of her francophone twin evaporated. Though she found the ghost testy, she appreciated her directness while parrying the apparition’s latest statement. “He’s sworn to a life of chastity. That’s one of his life’s rules.”

  “Love ignores rules.”

  “Ugh. You’re right. This is going to be hopeless. Am I giving myself a guaranteed heartbreak?”

  “You are an empath. You know.”

  “Not that again!”

  “You were wise to advise him to challenge the rules.”

  “My God, do you spy on me twenty-four-seven?”

  “You are an empath. You know.”

  She knew, and her nonverbal dreamlike tone was cynical. “Sorry I asked, but he didn’t budge when I suggested he’d earned the right to break the rules.”

  Again, the maiden closed her eyes and fell silent. “Remember what love is.”

  “I know, I know. It’s a bunch of emotions I need to conjure when I link with the wraith. It’s the tool of the empath.”

  “It’s a more powerful tool than you know.”

  “Of course, its. Can you be less cryptic without telling me that I should know what you mean because I’m an empath?”

  The apparition smiled. “The greatest power of love is surrendering oneself.”

  Dianne’s memory with her paranormal sisters amazed her with its accurate vividness. “Your French twin sister already told me it includes selflessness.”

  The maiden gave a slow, reverent nod. “Our sister is correct.”

  “Right. Our sister. What’s the difference between selflessness and surrender?”

  “One causes the other.”

  Dianne mulled it over. “Are we talking about Liam, the women I’m trying to save, our victimized sisters, or the wraith I’m trying to kill?”

  “You’re selfless surrender is required to resolve all these challenges before you.”

  Liam was a challenge? She liked that. It was better than seeing him as a lost cause and another one of her life’s stillborn romances. “What are you talking about? How selfless? Am I going to die?”

  “You are an empath. You know.”

  Lacking any intuition of the answer, Dianne disagreed. “Do you say that to protect me, to piss me off, or to hide the fact that you have no idea yourself?”

  “I gain nothing by angering you. I gain everything by helping you.”

  “Sounds cliché.”

  “I am limited in what I can tell you.”

  “Sounds cliché again.”

  “But true.”

  “Okay, let’s say I believe you want to help me, but you’re limited in what you can tell me. Are you limited because you don’t know or because some godlike power is holding you back? I just want to know who my teammate is.”

  “The future is never certain. Free will keeps multiple possibilities alive.”

  Dianne found the answer incomplete and evasive. “Now you sound like Liam and his double-slit experiment.” Her memory continued to impress her.

  “The young hunter is correct. The daggers react to their observers.”

  “Mine, too?”

  “All enchanted daggers.”

  “Was Liam right to make me throw it? And what about when he noticed it was almost invisible? Should I use that knowledge to defeat the wraith?”

  “You are an empath. You know.”

  Dianne cursed in Aramaic. “Babus ganug, dewaneetha.”

  “I understand all languages.”

  “Right. Shit. Sorry about that.”

  “You will wake soon. Ask the right question.”

  “Is this some sort of game to you? No, wait! Don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear it again. Let me think it over.”

  The translucent lids slid over the maiden’s black pools, but as she became quiet, she emanated an edgy vibration. Her eyes opened again. “I am being driven away. Please hurry.”

  The time pressure kicked Dianne’s ethereal mind into overdrive. “You said I’m facing a selfless surrender by helping pretty much everyone connected to hunting the wraith. But you also said I would suffer if I didn’t help you and our sisters the wraith killed. Doesn’t this mean that I just have to kill him, and everyone wins?”

  “Yes, but that is not a true question. It is but the confirmation of a conclusion. Please, hurry. I cannot advise you again before the next full moon.”

  Dianne found the first scheduling information about her ghostly visits stressful. Selflessness. Surrender. Unknown life or death outcome.

  The misty white figure began to fade. “Please hurry.”

  “When you say I’m an empath and I know, you don’t mean I know everything. Instead, you mean I know what I don’t know.”

  “Your conclusion is confirmed. Please hurry.”

  “I have to be selfless, but I don’t know if I’m going to die by hunting the wraith.”

  “Your conclusion is confirmed. Please hurry.”

  “Does that mean that I need to be willing to die to save everyone else?”

  As she became a phantom of milky dots, the maiden sounded hopeful and relieved. “Yes. And now I can reveal what I wished.”

  “Yulla! Tell me.”

  “If you fail to risk everything, you will fail to redeem us all, and a dagger will pierce your soul.”

  “What? Metal can’t pierce spirit.”

  Disappearing, the ghost uttered her final phrase. “If you fail to risk everything, the young hunter will die.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The next afternoon, Liam scanned the rural road for signs of industry from the passenger seat of the rented Fiat 500X. In his lap, the dagger rested on a plastic cutting board next to his phone which had a navigation application running in its foreground.

  From the driver’s seat, Dianne aimed the wheel along the short dirt and gravel car path that cut through hills and paralleled a lifeless dammed lake as it connected Istanbul to its suburbs. “Anything yet?”

  His dagger pointed ahead. “No. Give it about another five hundred meters. That’s where it should be, if I trust the measurements.”

  “I don’t see anything out there, other than some sheep behind a rickety fence.”

  As the car rounded a curve, Liam expected the blade to move. “My coordinates say we’re coming up on it. It should be right near the road.”

  “If your measurements are accurate, right?”

  “Right. A lot of this has been rather blunt, so far. But we’ve got to be close.”

  “You said you were expecting a building, though.”

  With the compressed lunar cycle, the young hunter expected his new wraith to suffer from a tight geographical constraint. He expected his prey to remain local, which explained the lack of public burning of his victims and indicated he’d committed his murders in private. Although his laptop’s map and navigational program excluded signs of a nearby structure, he’d hoped to see an informal shed by the roadside. “Yeah. I did.”

  “We’ll know soon. I feel it.”

  On a straight section of road, the dagger whirled towards Dianne’s midriff, continued its rotations, and then steadied at his side. “Whoa! That’s it. Turn back.”

  “Turn back where? There was nothing there.”

  As he closed his eyes and wedged the knife between his back and the seat, he questioned the weapon’s health. “Right, but the dagger has spoken.”

  She whipped the sedan back towards the city’s center and drove at a crawl.

  “That’s good.” As the vehicle stopped on the roadside, Liam stepped onto the gravel and extended the dagger before him, like a divining rod. Ahead of him, a lush field of grass led to pine trees that covered the looming hill.

  The curious empath nestled herself beside him, creating discomfort. “Let me try it.” She grabbed the weapon.<
br />
  “Hey! Careful! This thing’s sharp. Magically sharp. And why you?”

  “Because I want to use every sense I can to get in tune with this… what do we call this situation?”

  Against her iron will, he relinquished the blade and kept pace beside her with his gaze upon the weapon. “I’d call it a tragedy, since you had to ask.”

  The enchanted weapon satiating her seemingly infinite inquisitiveness, she crept forward. “No, I mean what we’re doing about it.”

  “You mean our mission?”

  “Yeah. I want to get completely in tune with our mission.” The dagger led her two steps onto the grass, aimed her towards the road, and then reversed her direction towards their parked car.

  As a truck carrying sheep approached, Liam stepped between it and the dagger and pushed the weapon behind his back. “No need to expose ourselves.” When the vehicle showed him livestock tails, he recommenced his support of Dianne’s discovery.

  As he leered in visual support, she walked in a tight circle. “It happened right here. He stopped on the side of the road and killed them right here.”

  Liam considered the logistics. “At least we know he has or had a large passenger vehicle–or something bigger.”

  “That doesn’t help much, does it?”

  “Maybe. We need to try to make use of the clues when we find them.” His words of encouragement failed to motivate him. “Why don’t you take a video of this place, a full three-sixty in case we missed something?”

  Enthusiastically wiggling her dexterous thumbs over her phone’s touchscreen, she completed the task before he could connect with Ireland through his own device.

  Holding the speaker to his ear, he listened to the ringtone, followed by his father.

  “Liam? What news, lad?”

  “We’re at the site. It’s in the middle of nowhere, between unpopulated hills on the side of a dirt road.”

  “Oh, dear. That’s odd.”

  “Yeah, it is. Dianne’s taking a video so that you can see it, but there’s nothing normal about it.” As his words replayed in his head, he questioned what could be normal about a man stabbing three women in the heart.

  “You saw no publicized evidence of stabbing homicides in the area?”

  It was one of the first things he’d researched. “I checked the Internet archives for stories about heart stabbings. There weren’t any.”