by Toby Tate
But instead, death had visited and extinguished the tiny spark of life that never even had a chance to ignite.
Once they left the hospital, things quickly turned to shit. They didn’t speak for days, and when they did, it was only out of necessity.
“Did you pay the bills?”
“Yes.”
“What do you need at the store?”
“Get me some milk, please.”
They had even stopped sleeping in the same bed together.
Soon, they were officially separated and Lisa moved out and into her own apartment in another city a few miles away. A couple of days later, Hunter received divorce papers in the mail.
That had been the hardest time of his life, even worse than being bullied as a child. Lisa had always been his place of solace and refuge, his strong tower, the love of his life—and now she was gone. He began to brood, to drink too much, missing days of work, not giving a fuck about anything. But he held out on signing the divorce papers and after few months of hell decided that he wasn’t going to give up. He was ready to concede that maybe the whole thing was his fault, that maybe he had put work before his marriage and he probably should have bought a damned cell phone. That had been a step in the right direction.
Then, he was assigned to a story that required him to interview a park ranger at the Dismal Swamp State Park—Lisa’s place of employment. It was a murder investigation and Lisa was the lead park ranger, so he was forced to put away his manly pride and replace it with humility, something with which Hunter had been unaccustomed. He ended up chasing her through the swamp in a pair of wading boots as she and the state police searched for the missing head of a recently murdered man.
Eventually, they made up and Lisa moved back in.
Now, here they were thousands of miles away in a place nearly as old as human history. Who would have thought fate, or circumstance, or whatever you wanted to call it, would have brought them to where they are now? Certainly not him.
Hunter found himself feeling sorry that he had brought Lisa with him, but she had insisted. There were plenty of park rangers that could fill in while she was on maternity leave, so she figured this would be a good time to take a vacation to the Mediterranean. But instead, it was turning out to be more like a nightmare. Lisa’s cousin was missing, and now a dangerous man they thought to be dead was alive, maybe even involved with Jade’s disappearance.
And what about those map coordinates? Could they be fakes? Jensen hadn’t thought so. They had come directly from the translation of the symbols on that container. Six rows of three and three, Mac had said. But hadn’t Jensen said there were seven symbols? He would have to ask about that other symbol.
But something about those coordinates, the way they were all spaced apart…
Hunter decided he couldn’t sleep and slid quietly out of bed, went into the kitchen, found a glass and got some water from the tap. He shuffled over to the window and marveled at the view of the city as he downed the water, points of light dotting the landscape like fireflies. Points of light…like points on a map…
He lowered the glass and stood staring out the window. The points had all been spaced evenly apart, exactly the same distance one from another.
He walked out to the living room, set the glass on the coffee table and opened his laptop. He sat in front of the computer and Googled a map of the Mediterranean, then saved it as a jpg file. Next, he found the program Mac had used to plug in the map coordinates, then found each one on the map and noted its location:
Turkey — 37.09.40 / 35.36.04
Egypt — 28.0.53 / 30.47.21
Libya — 28.14.54 / 18.24.07
Sicily — 37.41.36 / 14.37.41
Romania — 44.12.16 / 25.14.08
Crete — 35.13.07 / 25.05.53
He opened the jpg map file in Adobe Photoshop, and made a dot at each coordinate using the pen tool. He then used the drawing tool to make a line between five of the points, joining them together.
When he was done, Hunter sat gazing at his computer screen.
He had just drawn a perfect pentagram, with Crete right smack in the middle.
Sixteen
Lisa is in a room, but not in their hotel. It’s a windowless room lit only by harsh fluorescent lights. Everything is white, antiseptic. It reeks of iodine and alcohol. There are voices echoing in from beyond the door.
She’s in a hospital.
The knob on the door turns and a woman enters, dressed in green scrubs. A nurse. She comes to the bedside, takes Lisa’s hand, tells her everything will be alright, that her baby will be born soon, and she’ll be holding it in her arms.
Another person enters, a man in green scrubs. A doctor. He stands at the foot of the bed and smiles, tells her that it’s time; time to take her into the delivery room. Lisa can feel the contractions coming fast now.
Then, the doorway splinters apart.
There in the opening stands a beast, huge and snowy white, eyes as silver as two pools of mercury, and pupils as red as blood. Glistening teeth protrude from a mouth big enough to bite the head off of a horse.
Lilith.
The man and the woman turn to see the beast and they both scream. The thing raises a clawed hand the size of a dinner plate and takes off both of their heads with a single swipe. Blood sprays the room as their limp bodies hit the floor and their heads roll away, coming to rest against the wall.
Lisa screams too, but not for her own life—for the life of her unborn son.
But she can’t move—she is frozen in place, whether from fear or some other reason, she can’t tell. As she watches in helpless horror, she sees that the beast is carrying something, something small and wrapped in a blanket. The beast approaches her bed, and she can feel its hot breath on her, smell a putrid odor, like rotten meat.
The monster, balanced on its haunches, suddenly lifts its free claw and plunges it into Lisa’s womb. She is numb to the pain, but feels as if her lungs might burst as she gasps each breath of air as fast as she can suck it in.
How can this be happening? What was this thing doing to her baby?
Then, it is out. The beast holds her child aloft, as if it were a prize won at a carnival game. The umbilical cord tears away, the baby takes its first breath, and screams in protest.
The monster gazes into Lisa’s eyes, its animal ferocity sending chills through her body. It looks down at what lies beneath the small blanket. The blanket falls open.
What Lisa sees there makes her fill her lungs with air to scream, but nothing will come.
It’s a baby. But not human. Something far from it.
Then, the beast holds it aloft, too, but only momentarily, before it plunges the monstrosity into her open womb.
* * *
Lisa sprang up in bed, the dream still hot in her mind like coals burning through her skull.
Oh God, oh God…please don’t let it take my baby…
She propped herself up on her hands, her protruding stomach trying to force her backwards. She looked down at it.
Still there…my baby is still there.
She looked around the room. The sun was beginning to shine through a crack in the curtains. She was in her hotel, not in a hospital.
Thank God. It was just a dream…
She glanced over at Hunter’s pillow. He wasn’t in bed, but she didn’t have the strength to call to him. Lisa was exhausted, as if she had been fighting for her life, for her baby’s life. She fell back against her pillow, and her head sank down into its softness, letting it envelope her like a cloud.
Once again, she slept.
* * *
Hunter had tried several times to call Jensen on his cell, but so far, no answer. He had to find out what that missing symbol was, and Jensen was the only person who had a copy of the pencil and paper impressions he made from the relic.
He stared at the screen of his laptop for half an hour, trying to figure out why and how someone could have dreamed up map coordinates that three thous
and years later would form a perfect pentagram. It made his brain hurt just thinking about it. Hunter finally decided to write a story about the dig for his editor, leaving out the details about the kidnapping. He could get to that later, after they found Jade. He didn’t want to put her in jeopardy by drawing any attention to her captors.
Hunter glanced into the bedroom and saw the outline of his wife’s body on the bed, her swollen belly resembling a small mountain underneath the blanket, rising and falling with each breath. In a matter of weeks, that belly would be flat again and they would be proud parents of a bouncing baby boy. He just hoped it would wait until they got back to the States. But Lisa was a stubborn woman, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not that he minded—it was always better when she was along, because otherwise, he spent most of his time wishing he was home instead of thinking about his assignment.
He turned back to his laptop, checked over the story, and sent it as an email attachment to his editor at the wire service. He also sent the pictures that Lisa had taken of the dig site, which turned out to be quite professional. He wouldn’t be surprised if she wound up getting a job offer herself.
As he finished sending the story, Hunter’s cell phone vibrated on the coffee table in front of him. He grabbed it and saw the number flash on the screen—he was expecting Jensen, but the number said it was Gabe. What did she want?
He stuck the phone up to his ear. “Hey Gabe, what’s going on?”
“Hunter, I’m afraid it’s bad news.”
“Seriously? Haven’t we had enough of that already?”
“It’s Jensen.”
“What’s going on? I’ve been trying to call him all morning.” Long pause. “Hello—you still there?”
There was a deep sigh from the other end.
“I just got a call from the police. Sam Jensen has been murdered.”
Seventeen
When Lilith’s father died, her brother had returned home for the funeral. There weren’t many tears. John was an officer in the navy and she was a teenager still living at home. She and John had drifted apart over the years, but she could tell that the brotherly affection was still there.
“How have you been?” he asked her at home after the wake.
Lilith shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I guess.”
“Everything going okay at school?”
“I’m on the cheerleading squad. My grades are pretty good. But…there was an incident.”
“An incident?”
“Some boys from the football team cornered me in the locker room. I…I didn’t know what to do.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“I think they were going to.”
“So, weren’t there any coaches around?”
Lilith shook her head. “I think they were somewhere pretending not to know what was going on.”
“Assholes. What did you do?”
“I put all the boys in the hospital.”
John couldn’t help but smile. “Wow. Getting your ass kicked by a girl. That hurts in more ways than one.”
“Then their parents threatened to take us to court.”
“So, did they?”
“They did. But it’s amazing what people will believe if you just turn on the tears. Dad did a pretty good job of getting the judge to drop the charges after that.”
“I’ll bet you haven’t had any more trouble with them.”
“Not really.”
“So, do you think you and mom will be okay?”
“We’ll get by. Dad left us plenty of money. But he also left something else.”
“Something else like what?”
Lilith reached over and grabbed a small, tattered leather book off the coffee table, then untied its leather string and opened it. The pages were worn and yellowed with age, covered with John Senior’s writing.
“Dad left a diary.”
“He had a diary?”
“There’s some amazing stuff in here, John. Things he never told us.”
“About what?”
“About him. About you and me and where we came from. It says that he traveled to Scotland while researching our family history. He uncovered church documents that prove we came from…something else.”
“Something else?”
“We’re not really human, John.”
He furrowed his brow. “What are you talking about?”
“According to him, we come from a race of beings called Lilitu.”
“Lilitu? What the hell’s that?”
She looked down and began to read from the page. “Lilitu are the descendents of a woman named Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was created at the same time as Adam. She refused to obey her husband, to be subservient to him, and left the garden. She was supposedly cursed by God. But according to the Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, which predates the Jewish legend, she was the mother of demons—a succubus. According to myth, female Lilitu have sexual relations with men while they sleep and steel their semen so they can give birth to their demon children. God sent three angels to go and try to bring Lilith back, but she refused. The angels then retaliated by killing a hundred of her children every day until she returned, but instead of giving in, she continued to give birth to even more demons.”
“So that’s why you have all those crazy powers?”
She glanced up at her brother. “And so do you, John. You just need to tap into them.”
John shook his head. “Lilith, I’m human, and so are you, in spite of what that diary says. We have souls, we love, we laugh, cry, feel pain, and we die, just like humans. I don’t want to be anything more than what God meant me to be.”
“What has God ever done for me?”
“Lilith, you’re my sister and I love you, but my suggestion is to just leave it alone. You don’t know what you’re getting into. It may be something you can’t get out of.”
Instead of fighting, Lilith decided to change the subject. She closed the diary and laid it down.
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too. But I’ll be back to visit as often as I can. And I’ll call you.”
They hugged for what seemed like an hour, and she cried; only this time the tears were real. Then, he left.
But he didn’t call, at least not often. Lilith began to retreat more and more into her own shell. When she was sixteen, her mother, who was not a passionate woman but was quite well endowed in the looks department, married a Virginia senator named James Clayburn. They immediately moved again, this time to Fairfax, Virginia—a new town, a new school, but the same old problems. They seemed to follow wherever she went.
Though he didn’t think she noticed, Lilith had caught her stepfather eyeing her more than once. Luckily for him, he never tried to make a move on her. But soon, it was Lilith’s turn to go off to college, and she headed back to Indiana and the university in Bloomington to major in biology. She loved animals and everything about them, so it seemed like the perfect fit.
Her first year at school, Lilith talked the biology department into letting her use the lab equipment on her own time, and it was there that she studied her own DNA and discovered something quite remarkable.
Human cells contain forty-six chromosomes. A female has twenty-two pairs of autosomes, plus two X chromosomes. But Lilith found she actually had a forty-seventh chromosome. Not a copy, but a new chromosome unlike any of the others.
She called it the Lilith chromosome.
Eighteen
Captain Damon Matthias listened with patience to the voice on the phone. The man’s arrogance was overbearing, yet he could do nothing. He knew he had only himself to blame, and should never have put himself in this situation, but money was a strong persuader, especially with the Greek economy about to go bankrupt.
Matthias waited for his chance to speak, and then jumped in.
“Mr. Lawrence, I know I agreed to look the other way in your various dealings, but how do you expect me to cover up murder? This will eventually lead to
you, and when that happens, there will be nothing I can do to protect you.”
“Just do what I pay you for, captain. Throw the police off my trail and let me worry about the rest. Besides, in a few more days, none of this will matter.”
What exactly did he mean by that?
“I don’t like this. Interpol may come snooping around and start asking questions.”
“Don’t worry about Interpol—I’ll handle them. In the meantime, I’m sure you can find someone else to pin this on.”
“You want me to frame an innocent person for murder? What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re a well-paid, corrupt cop who should make good on his agreement, otherwise he could find himself trying to explain to Interpol how a modestly-paid police captain managed to open a rather lucrative Swiss bank account.”
At that, the line went dead.
As Matthias stood there, he clicked off his cell and slowly slid it into his pocket. What had he done? What would happen to his wife and son if his treachery was discovered?
