The Blood of Seven

by Claire L. Fishback

  Ann felt like she was intruding on an important and private moment, so she stepped into the small kitchenette. She looked at her reflection in the window over the sink and wondered how she got here, to this place, to right here right now. How did she get here without knowing anything?

  Raghib touched her elbow. “She’s asking for you.”

  Ann went to Maggie’s side. Pinky allowed her to sit on the edge of the couch.

  Maggie relaxed against the pillows. “Will you stay here until I fall asleep?”

  Ann nodded and pushed a stray lock of hair from Maggie’s forehead. Though she liked kids, Ann had never wanted any ankle biters of her own. She didn’t think she had motherly instinct. But this was different. Maggie was hers to protect. And part of protecting a child was making sure they were comforted, too. Right?

  Maggie closed her eyes, and before long, her breathing grew deeper. Her hand slid off of Pinky’s head, and the dog pushed closer to Maggie with a groan. Ann joined Raghib in the little kitchen area.

  “I know I’m her Protector,” Ann said. “And I know I’m the one to watch over her.” She struggled to explain.

  Raghib touched her shoulder. “I will take care of her,” he said. “Besides, you’ll know.” He pointed at the mark.

  “Right. Call me if you need anything. I’m sure she’ll be hungry later since . . . you know.” She motioned to the porch. “Do you have food?” Ann reached for the fridge to check out the grocery situation. Raghib stopped her.

  “Yes. I am prepared.”

  Ann looked over at Maggie, then back at Raghib. “Thank you.” She paused in the doorway. “Keep an eye on the dog, would you?”

  Raghib smiled. “I think the dog is going to keep an eye on me.”

  As Ann drove away, a chill worked its way through her core. She felt weird. Like she was leaving her own child with a stranger. Her dad said she could trust Raghib. That small ounce of assurance was enough. Wasn’t it? It had to be.

  Ann pulled into her driveway and went inside, where Teresa’s sordid past sat on her coffee table waiting to be reviewed.

  Chapter 53

  Teresa retrieved a flashlight from home and set out on foot to the site of the accident. The night brought a cold wind. The trees lashed the air. She pulled her coat tighter.

  When she found the swerve marks, she climbed down the hill, aiming the flashlight’s beam at the car.

  The driver’s side door hung wide open. From a few yards away, she shined the light inside.

  Derrick was gone.

  Fear boiled up to her throat, and she let out a whimper. He could be anywhere waiting for her to grab the hypo.

  Would he chase her like Ruthie and the sheriff?

  “Tiffany, where are you? I need you now. I need your strength.”

  “Here I am, Mommy.” Tiffany stepped out from behind the tree the car had crashed into. “I’m sorry I disappeared. I was frightened.”

  Teresa knelt and opened her arms. Tiffany entered the embrace. A sob burst from Teresa’s mouth.

  “It’s okay.” Tiffany stroked her hair. “We don’t need him to be happy, do we?” Tiffany leaned back and met Teresa’s eyes.

  Teresa shook her head. No. They would be happier without him and his constant desire to make pancakes for dinner.

  Tiffany nodded. She stepped out of Teresa’s arms and led her to the hypo.

  Teresa hesitated.

  “Pick it up, Mommy.”

  “I’m afraid,” Teresa said. She shined the light around the clearing, shooing away the shadows among the trees, but the light only reached so far.

  “Ruthie will chase us,” Teresa said.

  “She hasn’t caught us yet.”

  Teresa took a deep breath and picked up the hypo.

  Ruthie’s shriek sounded in the distance. Teresa took Tiffany’s hand, and they jogged up the hill.

  Someone stood in the middle of the road, a black smudge against the darkness. Teresa shined the light toward it.

  Derrick’s milky-white eyes stared at her. He sniffed the air, then reached toward her with charred fingers. Skin sloughed off of him and hit the ground with a pattering-plop as he took a step in her direction.

  Teresa shifted in front of Tiffany.

  “He’s not very fast, Mommy. But Ruthie is.” Tiffany’s little hand pointed beyond Derrick, where Ruthie lurched down the street in their direction.

  Ruthie lined up next to Derrick and stopped.

  Behind them, Sheriff McMichael waddled on bloated feet. He stood on Derrick’s other side.

  They’d come from the direction of town. How did they get there so fast?

  There was no way Teresa could get past Ruthie. The others, yes, but Ruthie’s vengeance fueled her need to stop Teresa from delivering the zoe.

  “What do I do?” She looked down at Tiffany. Tiffany looked up at her with frightened eyes and shook her head. Of course a seven-year-old wouldn’t know what to do. Teresa looked at the hypo in her hand.

  It gave Yaldabaoth his power back. Would it make her powerful, too? Powerful enough to run all the way back to town? To outrun Ruthie?

  She turned it needle-side up and looked down at Tiffany again, but her daughter was watching the living dead.

  “They aren’t moving,” Tiffany said.

  Teresa looked up and frowned. “Why are they just standing there like zombies?”

  Tiffany giggled. “Or Like zoe-bies.” Her laugh raised in pitch and hysteria.

  Ruthie shrieked. Tiffany, suddenly silent, huddled closer to Teresa.

  Teresa considered the needle again. Would the zoe kill her? Did she care? The last question surprised her.

  Ruthie took a step toward her, then another. Teresa jammed the giant needle into her thigh and pushed the plunger.

  At first the only thing she felt was a gouging, stinging pain where the thick needle stabbed into her skin. Then heat. Immense heat.

  It coursed down into her calf and foot, and upward, spreading across her pelvis. When it tingled across her womanhood, she cried out and dropped to one knee. She tore off her coat. Her veins glowed red through her skin. The glow slid through her nervous system, and a peace overwhelmed her. Feelings of happiness and sadness all at once. She yearned to laugh, yearned to cry.

  And then the feeling left her, frightened away by a hard beating in all of her pulse points. Her ears rushed with the sound of her own heart. She curled into herself. Each beat felt like a lash from a whip, a wallop from a baseball bat. Her head felt like it would explode. Even though it was painful, it was also pleasurable.

  This was the pulse of power. Raw and unleashed. Wild. Uncontained.

  It boiled in her loins and finally erupted.

  She threw her head back and let out a sound so animalistic she couldn’t tell if it was a wild cat’s growl, a woman’s scream, or both.

  She crouched without thought, moved by instinct to adopt the attack pose of a predator.

  Her breath mixed with the cold night air and formed clouds with each panting exhale.

  Tiffany was gone, but no matter. She couldn’t contain the power ripping through her. It was better her baby didn’t see her like this.

  With keen night vision lent by the zoe, she stared at Derrick, then Sheriff McMichael.

  Finally, her eyes landed on Ruthie. Ruthie let out a shriek, frail in comparison to the roar that had ripped from Teresa’s vocal cords.

  In less than a second, Teresa’s muscles coiled and released. She sprang forward into a full sprint, charging straight for Ruthie.

  The mummified woman jolted toward her with an enraged shriek. They crashed into each other. Teresa grabbed Ruthie’s shrunken head, forced her fingers into the woman’s mouth, and ripped her jaw off the rest of the way. She tossed it aside.

  Ruthie stumbled backward, lost her footing, and fell.

  Sheriff McMichael lumbered forward, bulging eyes intent on Teresa. He stepped on Ruthie’s head and crushed it into the ground. The crunching sound distracted him. He
looked down and lifted his foot as if to see what he’d stepped in.

  Teresa sprinted past him and Derrick before they even knew what had happened to their scrawny leader.

  She arrived at the abandoned funeral home in less than five minutes.

  The lost souls crowded around her, as if they sensed the zoe inside her. Where they touched her, they left tiny burn marks she couldn’t feel. Her skin was numb from the cold, or from the zoe, she didn’t know. She didn’t care.

  She needed to find Yaldabaoth. She bounded up the stairs and through the front door. The house melted. Yaldabaoth stood at his pool, gazing into it.

  Teresa took long steps, grabbed him by the arm, and spun him into her. Her lips locked on his. She pulled away for a second.

  “I can’t contain this,” she growled.

  Yaldabaoth gripped her upper arms and forced her back from him.

  “What have you done?”

  “I had no choice,” she said. She wanted him. Needed him. The energy inside of her begged for something—it could only be this. Lust seared her insides.

  Yaldabaoth pulled her against him and squeezed her so hard she thought her ribs would break. Her body writhed in his grip. He lowered his lips to hers. She hungrily kissed him.

  It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t loving or warm like their first time together when he’d tricked her into believing he was Derrick. It was feral, angry, lustful. It was every deadly sin rolled into one blissful moment.

  When he finished, his body glowed with the power, and Teresa lay back, drained. The zoe had left her. She was her simple, mortal shell, once again.

  Shame replaced the power. She quietly righted her shirt, pulled up her pants.

  How could she do such a thing after losing her husband?

  Yaldabaoth chuckled. Teresa glared at him. He held up his hands.

  “I did not fool you this time.” He grinned. Then his smile dropped. “Don’t steal what’s mine ever again.”

  He snapped his fingers, and Tiffany’s pained screams came from the dark passage as they had once before. He snapped again, and the cries stopped.

  Teresa said nothing. She walked to the police station to report the accident. Shame or no shame, the town needed to know their beloved doctor was gone.

  Chapter 54

  Ann sat on the couch. She opened the file and flipped through the pages. At the bottom of the stack were her dad’s phone records. The phone company must’ve responded to Sheriff McMichael’s subpoena and faxed them over. She scanned the list. Not a lot of activity. No outgoing calls for the past three months. Plenty of incoming calls from her number though.

  She pushed the fax to the side and turned her attention back to Teresa’s file. She had already read what the station had on her. Her interest lay in the documents Joey had sent her, hacked straight from the source.

  She started with the patient file from Teresa’s first admittance to a mental health institute.

  Included within that set of documentation were the transcripts for three hypnotherapy sessions. Ann’s eyes devoured the transcripts. When she reached the end, she set the papers down and wished she had more beer.

  Harmony’s Public Enemy #1: Teresa Hart.

  Ann picked up the phone, but she realized she didn’t need to bother Derrick about this. He knew who he was married to. He had to. Besides, he was probably still on his way home from Mountain View, assuming that was the reason he didn’t pick Maggie up from school.

  Teresa’s mother hadn’t committed suicide. She’d been murdered.

  In session number three, fifteen-year-old Teresa confessed to killing her mother. She’d fabricated a story to cover it up as a suicide. In a delusion brought on by overwhelming guilt, she had convinced herself the story was true.

  How the hell did she get out?

  Ann flipped to the back of the stack, but there were no discharge papers included in the file.

  She settled in with the documents from Mountain View. This time Teresa was admitted for manic-depressive behavior and as part of her sentence for neglecting her child. It corroborated the story Derrick told her the other night, except for one thing. Their baby was found under the giant teddy bear, not pressed against the crib bumper like Derrick said. Did he remember wrong?

  Ann got up to retrieve the spiced rum from the freezer, but halted. Something about the discharge papers didn’t sit right—something about one of the signatures at the bottom.

  She rushed back to the table and sorted through the papers again until she found it.

  The discharge papers were signed by the attending psychiatrist, Dr. Gail Park.

  Ann knew the name. She had seen it somewhere in the past few days. She closed her eyes and tried to envision where.

  She jumped to her feet, and a prickle went through her body. It was in the journal from the storage unit—and on the adoption certificate.

  Ann grabbed the certificate. The signature matched. She flipped open the journal to the pages toward the back. Gail Park was in the collection of signatures. She compared them. They matched. But what did it mean? Why was her signature in her dad’s journal? Who was she?

  She looked at the other page full of scribbled words. She ran her hand over them, feeling the texture from the pen’s pressure with her fingertips.

  “Summon the angel,” Ann whispered. She frowned. It didn’t sound right. Because it wasn’t. All her life he told her to summon your angel, not the angel.

  Summon the angel. It is the key. Her dad’s voice from the video came to her.

  Ann scrutinized the words on the journal page letter by letter until an odd letter stood out. About a third of the way down the page he’d written, “SUMMON THE ANGET.”

  She scanned the rest of it and found more instances in which a letter was replaced: SUMMON THE ANGLL and SUMMOM THE ANGEL. Heart pounding, Ann went back to the top and started circling the misplaced letters. She wrote them down and sat back with defeat. It was a bunch of nonsense.

  TLMYWFZHMLCGVV

  She checked again, just to make sure she didn’t miss anything, then tried to unscramble the words, but there were no vowels.

  “Think, Ann, think.” She counted the number of letters, fourteen. Then counted them in the catch phrase. Fourteen again. Goosebumps broke out on her arms.

  “Summon the angel. It is the key.” The small key to her dad’s lockbox had been taped to the opposite page. She grabbed the items from the box and shuffled through them and found the tabula recta.

  She held up the slip of paper she’d written the random letters on. “If summon the angel is the key, then this has to be the cipher.”

  A cold prickle ran over her. She set the tabula recta on the table, found the first letter of the key, S, and went down until she hit the first letter of the cipher. Then she followed the line to the left. The first letter in the solution was B. She kept going until she had: BRAM IS.

  Alive? Dead?

  There were too many letters left. She forced herself to slow down. Her hand shook when she trailed the pencil across the grid to find the next letters. She moved to the next one, and the next, until the message revealed itself.

  BRAM IS GAIL PARK.

  I took care of both records.

  Her father’s voice from the video replayed in her mind once again.

  Bram is Gail Park—her father had signed Teresa’s discharge papers.

  Chapter 55

  Ann stared at the decoded message, then the discharge papers, willing the signature on the latter to change, to morph into someone else’s handwriting, or a scribbled just kidding or something. Anything.

  She finally let the paper drop from her hand. It floated to the edge of the table and onto the floor. She sat up straight. What if he hadn’t signed it willingly?

  Scenarios flashed through her mind. None of them made sense. What pull did her father have in the psychological world, or in the adoption world? She put it aside for now. She needed to focus on Teresa, on the case, and the fact that, despite killing her
mother and baby, she had been freed.

  And Ann’s dad had freed her.

  Ann consulted the phone book and dialed the number for Mountain View. A receptionist answered.

  “This is Detective Ann Logan. May I speak with your privacy officer please?”

  The hold music blared in her ear. After a few seconds, a man answered. Ann introduced herself again.

  “I’m investigating a serial kidnapping and homicide case in Harmony. Will you or did you receive a patient by the name of Teresa Hart?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man on the phone said. “Under HIPAA, I’m not allowed to disclose that information.”

  Ann suppressed a growl. Instead, she said through her teeth, “Lives are at stake here, sir.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. Laws are laws.” She could hear the dismissive shrug in his voice.

  “I’m fairly certain you’re allowed to disclose information to a law enforcement officer. Can you check the protocol?”

  Humanity is at stake!

  After a brief silence and a sigh, he said, “Sure. Hold on.”

  The rambunctious hold music came back on. Ann bit her thumbnail and bounced her knee while she waited.

  “Hello?” a different voice said. “Are you the one holding regarding HIPAA protocol?”

  “Yes.” Ann gripped the phone harder.

  “This is Dr. Smith, chief administrator of the hospital,” he said. “I apologize for the delay. The privacy officer hasn’t yet learned the protocol for enforcing HIPAA laws. He frequently says no—almost like a knee jerk reaction—without considering extraneous circumstances.”

  Ann perked up and pinched her lip.

  He cleared his throat. “Now, we can disclose the information to you, provided you fax us the proper form. I believe you can find it on our website. It’s the one called Law Enforcement Official’s Request for Protected Health Information.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ann muttered.

  “I’m afraid not,” the administrator said. “Laws are laws. As you well know.”

  “I understand,” Ann said.