GABRIELLA SAT ON THE BIG OVERSTUFFED CHAIR IN THE MOTEL room waiting for Ty to finish brushing his teeth so she could put him to bed and outline her plan for Theo. She’d moved them into adjoining rooms in a motel after leaving Bernie’s. Even though Yesheb was injured, in the hospital, she couldn’t face going home yet so she’d purchased three sets of clothes to replace the pajamas they’d been wearing when they escaped, along with a few necessary toiletries at Walmart. She’d made quite a stir pushing a cart up and down the aisles dressed like the Wicked Witch of the West.
If she understood Yesheb’s mindset and motivation as well as she thought she did—and she should; she’d personally designed his depravity in excruciating detail—she was safe now, relatively speaking. But that was only true until the earth rotated through another lunar cycle.
“I’ve got a surprise for you, Champ,” she said to Ty as she tucked him in bed. “We’re going to New York.” They often did that to see Broadway shows. It was a special treat that Ty loved. “I bought show tickets online, but we’re not really—”
“Whatever.” He rolled over to face the wall. She stood for a moment staring at his back, then leaned over and kissed his cheek, left the bathroom light on because he hated the dark and closed the door between the rooms behind her.
“I’ve made a decision,” she told Theo as she settled herself back down into the big chair. “If I can figure out a way to shake Yesheb’s bloodhounds, Ty and I are going into hiding until he stops looking for us.”
“What you gone run for?” Theo asked.
“Because the fight-or-flight reflex doesn’t offer a wide variety of options!”
“You could stand up to that crazy man, hire a bodyguard and—”
“I called the agency. Nobody has seen or heard from Thomas Ridley.” She was sure nobody would ever hear from him again.
“Then hire a whole herd of bodyguards, make yo house into a fortress and then dare that fool to come and get you!”
The old man’s blustering was maddening. “We’ll go home and collect our things tomorrow. Now’s our chance. Yesheb can’t try anything for a while, not with a broken foot. And the full moon has passed.”
“What the moon got to do with it?”
All the air whooshed out of Gabriella. She was so tired of all this.
“It’s about what happens in the book, The Bride of the Beast. I wrote it in first person, from the point of view of the character Zara, and Yesheb thinks he ...” She stopped. She’d never said it out loud before and it sounded so absurd. “He thinks he’s a character in the book—the main character, The Beast of Babylon. I’ve been terrified for months that he might … and after last night, I know he …” She stopped again, gathered herself and spit it out. “Yesheb Al Tobbanoft intends to do exactly what the Beast does in the book.”
“And that is?”
“Marry Zara—me.” She whispered the rest because she didn’t have the air to say it out loud. “And … sacrifice Ty. Kill him.”
If a black man could turn pale, Theo did.
“You telling me that fool is play-acting some story!”
“He’s not acting. To him, it’s absolutely real.”
Gabriella laid out for Theo the script that was the roadmap for Yesheb’s behavior.
The Bride of the Beast was a bleak horror story about a lost kingdom of demons. According to the novel’s plot, Yesheb would be crowned ruler of the Endless Black Beyond when he found the missing Princess Zara and took her as his bride. Smokey had called it Cinderella meets Darth Vader. The Beast must offer a sacrifice of “innocent blood” and mate with Princess Zara to produce a son and heir—all during the twenty-four-hour cycle of a full moon. Oh, and it had to be after “searing light rips open the canopy of heaven,” too. In other words, after a thunderstorm.
Gabriella shook her head.
“Now do you see why nobody will believe me?”
That, boys and girls, is certifiably nuts!
If she hadn’t seen it last night she wouldn’t have believed it herself! Blood sacrifice … full moon … violent storm. Geeze Louise!
Gabriella shook her head again. Things like this didn’t happen to real people and she was so ordinary. She bought food processor gadgets advertised on television at 3 a.m., for crying out loud! She’d been on a diet to lose five pounds her whole adult life. She watched Monday Night Football—go Steelers!—shopped with her Giant Eagle Discount Card and drooled over Mark Harmon on NCIS. (The white hair only made him sexier.) This was crazy!
Correction: Yesheb Al Tobbanoft was crazy. The rest of them were just along for the ride.
When Theo finally realized there was no way he could talk her out of running, he grudgingly agreed to help her. She hoped she’d light a fire in Ty’s eyes when she told him where they were really going. When she told Theo, he looked like he’d been gut-shot.
THEO LAY ON his back on the big queen-sized bed with sheets that smelled like bleach and had been ironed so stiff you could cut yourself on them if you rolled over wrong.
He didn’t waste no time trying to make sense out of the past twentyfour hours because he already knew how he’d got his self tangled up in all of it. You had to be real careful what you prayed for.
Lord, I asked you for a gentle little breeze and you done give me Katrina!
When I said I wanted a chance to spend a little time with the boy, be a better grandfather than I was a father, I had in mind something like playing catch! Okay, maybe not throwin’ a ball at him, but talking to him. Listening to him. Teaching him some jokes or how to make a saxophone sing. I didn’t plan on gettin’ chased out of my bed in the middle of the night by the poster boy for Nuts R Us. Now, Gabriella’s sayin’ they gone run off and crawl into some hidey hole—did you hear where she say they was goin’! For two months!
Now, what am I gone do? I don’t have no more idea than a spook how I’s supposed to fit into all this. You gone have to make it so clear a old man like me can’t miss it. Like … write it in the sky.
In purple.
In Hebrew!
Amen.
Theo did know two things for certain, though. One was that the hearing was completely gone in his left ear. He’d had to concentrate real hard to understand what Gabriella’d been saying earlier. And he suspected that this time the hearing loss wasn’t temporary, figured he’d ought to kiss that one goodbye. And the second thing he knew for sure was that something was eating at Ty that didn’t have nothing to do with that crazy fool who wasn’t no more The Beast of Babylon than he was the Tooth Fairy. He looked over at the boy in the next bed. Ty was sleeping soundly, not like last night.
Theo had been awake, in his robe and house shoes, when Gabriella came for Ty because he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after the boy woke him up screaming. Ty was fighting the covers, crying out how he was sorry and he didn’t mean for it to happen, saying crazy stuff about killing his father. Stoney’d died in prison! When Theo shook Ty awake, the boy had curled up in a ball in the bed and told Theo to leave him alone. And all that was before the Ghost of Christmas Past showed up. Theo was planning to talk to Gabriella about it, but that conversation got hijacked—and might never happen now that they was leaving.
This wasn’t what I had planned, Lord. Just so you know.
TY STARED AT the puke green motel room wall as he listened to the rise and fall of voices in the next room. He couldn’t understand what they were saying but figured it had something to do with their trip to New York to see a Broadway show.
Who cared about some dumb play! The only thing Ty wanted was to vanish quickly and quietly so the Boogie Man wouldn’t come looking for him again and hurt his mother. Now, he’d have to wait until they got back home from—
Wait a minute. New York City. Millions of people. He could run away there! Just get up to go to the bathroom during the show and never come back. New York City was full of homeless people; nobody’d notice one more stray kid.
And after he ran away he would … what? Get a job washing dishes or sweeping floors, he supposed. That’s what he’d seen orphans do in the movies. He didn’t know how long the $300 he had saved would last, but he didn’t think it would be long enough. When it was gone … well, he’d figure that out when the time came.
* * * *
Gabriella, Theo and Ty sat dawdling over dessert in the TGI Friday’s in the Pittsburgh International Airport, killing time before their flight to JFK in New York.
“This coffee tastes like rat puke,” Theo said.
“There’s a Starbucks in the food court, Grandpa Slappy,” Ty said. “I could get you a—”
“I’m a gone get me some coffee from that Starbucks I seen in the food court!”
“I just said I’d—” Ty started but Theo ignored him again and started to rise. Gabriella touched his arm and cut her eyes to P.D., lying peacefully on the floor at his feet. “Take Puppy Dog with you. You’re supposed to be visually impaired, remember.”
The big golden retriever—almost 85 pounds of him—was a trained assistance and service dog. When Ty was five years old, their busybody neighbor had convinced Smokey the boy needed a puppy. Since Smokey hated dogs, he’d been a soft sell when the lady proposed they volunteer to raise a puppy and then give the dog to an agency when he was 18 months old for training and placement with a handicapped person. It had sounded good on paper—no dog, just a puppy. It didn’t occur to anyone—Smokey included—how attached they’d all become to the animal in a year and a half. When they had to give him up, the whole family went into a meltdown. Smokey held out for six months before he tracked the animal down through the agency and paid the owner $20,000—double the cost of a service dog—to get him back.
But P.D.’s training carried a bonus they hadn’t considered at the time. Being a service dog meant he could go along with them wherever they went. Put his harness and sign on him and he was welcome anywhere.
“I don’t want that animal nowhere near me,” Theo said. He pointed down at the blond glaze of dog hair on the leg of his black trousers. “If I’s to collect all the hair that fur factory has left on my clothes I’d have enough for a whole new dog.”
Theo hobbled away and Ty stuck his ear buds in and cranked up his iPod while Gabriella called to confirm their reservations at the Warwick New York Hotel. Gabriella could hear the earphone music, a small, distant sound. It was Withered Soul, of course. His father’s band. And Garrett’s.
A sudden lump in her throat made it hard to swallow and her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t mourn Smokey, who’d been the bass player in her brother’s grunge metal band. But Garrett … the pain of her twin brother’s death still took her breath away.
The melody and pounding rhythm was all she could catch from Ty’s ear buds. But she knew the lyrics of Night Screams, the song that had propelled the Vast Abyss album to gold, because she had written them. And all the other lyrics for the band’s music. She and Garrett had been a team, different sides of the same coin.
Gabriella could look back now and see how dark their collaboration eventually became, that together the two of them tapped into a great well of despair and hopelessness that neither one of them could have found alone. But there was a difference between them she didn’t understand now any better than she ever had. Gabriella could walk away and leave it; Garrett’s whole life existed on the barren plains his wailing laments sang about.
Some critics hailed the loneliness, desperation and anger of Withered Soul. Others deplored it. But none ever found fault with the quality of the music, the complexity of the chord structure, the haunting melody, Garrett’s piercing tenor voice and amazing keyboard performance. It was genius. He was genius. Beginning the moment he walked into Trombinos Music Store in the Galleria Mall in the South Hills of Pittsburgh two days after his eighth birthday, climbed up on a bench in front of the first piano he’d ever seen and started to play, his incredible talent was a fiery meteor that burned exquisitely bright. Then flamed out.
Gabriella squeezed her eyes shut and tears slid down her cheeks. All the horror and fear of the past few days had ripped the scabs off so many childhood wounds. But not everything that bubbled up out of her childhood was horrible. The sweet, cleansing aroma of pine swirled around her. She could feel a damp mist on her face and a warm, golden glow shone through her closed eyelids. If she opened her eyes, she’d see Garrett’s gap-toothed grin. She’d hear his silly giggle and a rumble like—
“Mom?” Ty’s voice. “Are you crying?”
She reached up hurriedly and wiped her wet cheeks.
“No, Honey. Not crying, just …” Ty’s face swam in the wash of tears, his features pinched, his brow wrinkled with concern. “I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night and my eyes are tired, watery.”
She knew he didn’t believe her. What was it doing to the boy’s trust that she constantly lied to him and he knew it?
“You know how much they charged me for this piddly little cup of Joe?” Theo eased himself into the chair facing her. “Three bucks! You b’lieve that? Just cause you in a airport and can’t go no place else, they allowed to mug you. Might as well club you brains out with a roll of quarters in a tube sock!”
Gabriella opened her mouth to launch into her familiar refrain—that Starbucks coffee was always overpriced, no matter where you got it. That coffee was coffee. Adding a bunch of cheaper ingredients like milk and ice and sugar ought to make the brew cost less, not more. That you were paying for advertising and—
She didn’t say any of those things, however, because she caught sight of a young black man with a Pirates baseball cap turned sideways on his head and full sleeves of tattoos all the way up both arms making his way to their table. He was decked out in full bore hip-hop. Baggy shirt, pants belted tight ten inches below his waist so the crotch hung down between his knees and his plaid underwear was plainly visible. He had an earring in his left ear the size of the Hope Diamond, a teardrop tattooed on his right cheek and a silver stud in his tongue. And he held a copy of The Bride of the Beast in his hand, glancing down at the picture on the back cover as he approached.
Gabriella was surprised she’d been recognized with her black hair in a neat bun, her pointed bangs pulled back under a headband and her scar hidden beneath a thick layer of makeup. She sighed. In a few minutes, this fan would likely be very sorry he’d spotted her. The poor boy had no idea what getting that book autographed was about to cost him.
“This is you—right?” the young man asked.
“And who you think you be, fool?” Theo said before she could answer. He glared at the stranger through the steam rising out of his Starbucks cup.
Theo wasn’t a big man—five-eight maybe, with rounded shoulders and a paunch—but he had an intimidating presence Gabriella could only acknowledge, but not define or explain. Maybe it was all those years on stage playing to hostile crowds or fielding the jabs of hecklers. His thick mat of hair—slicked back in a mass of waves that resolved into curls at the back of his head—was the dark gray of a pipe wrench, his eyebrows and beard stubble as silver as a new quarter, and the fire in his yellowed, chocolatedrop eyes could burn a hole through boot leather.
“You think you Jay Z or Snoop Dogg? 50 Cent, maybe? Why don’t you ask one of yo pimp homies what it mean in the iron house to walk ’round with yo pants on the ground like that.”
The young man looked remarkably unruffled by Theo’s verbal assault.
Theo turned to Ty. “I ever catch you dressed like that, Tyrone, I rip yo arm off and beat you to death with the bloody stump.” He turned back to the young man. “Pull you pants up, boy!” He reached out and plucked the ball cap off the stranger’s head. “And take off yo hat when you talking to a lady.”
Gabriella stepped in quickly before Theo had a chance to launch into his tattoo speech or his body-piercing speech.
“Yes, that’s me,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
The young man’s smile went totally flatline. He reached into the hip pocket of his baggy pants and pulled out a sealed envelope.
“You can take this,” he said and handed Gabriella the envelope. “Gabriella Carmichael, aka Rebecca Nightshade, you’ve been served.”
“What? What is this?”
“What’s it look like—it’s a summons.” The young man turned to Theo. “You can keep the cap, Pops. Have a nice day.” He turned and strutted out of the restaurant. Theo threw the cap at him, but missed.
Gabriella stared unbelieving at the envelope in her hand.
“How that process server get in here?” Theo boomed. “You got to go through security, got to have a boarding pass. How …?” He noticed that Gabriella hadn’t moved. “Well, don’t just sit there sucking on a prune pit—open that thing up and let’s see what’s in it.”
She slid her finger under the flap and pulled out the single piece of paper inside.
Words leapt off the page and smacked her hard in the face.
Slander.
… made false and defamatory statements to the press ...
… damaged the reputation and good name of …
Yesheb Al Tobbanoft!
She couldn’t breathe. Theo snatched the paper out of her hand and scanned down it.
“He claiming you slandered him?” he said.
“What does slander mean?” Ty asked, looking from his mother to Theo and back to her.
Gabriella’s head was spinning. Why would he …?
“This summons gone put a hitch in your git-along,” Theo said and tossed the paper down on the table in front of him. “Says here you got to appear in court at 9 a.m. on June 26—here in Pittsburgh.”
That was why! June 26 was the date of the next full moon.
The waitress materialized at Gabriella’s elbow. She was absurdly basketball-player tall, six-feet-three and skinny as a shoe lace. The ingratiating, adoring look on her face told Gabriella the girl had recognized her, too.
“Excuse me, but … could I have … would yinz sign dis?” The girl said, her accent decidedly Pittsburgh. She held out a napkin. “It’s all I could find, but it’s all right, heh? For an autograph, I mean.”
“Sure,” Gabriella said, and switched to autopilot. She fixed a smile on her face like putting on a surgeon’s mask and fished around in her purse until she found a pen.
“Could you make it ‘To Louise Yurkovich … from The Bride of the Beast?’” Gabriella took the paper napkin and the girl continued to gush. “I can’t believe I seen yinz here today—right here, in my very own restaurant. Your book is like my favorite book ever! The way you write, it’s … poetry—only it ain’t. I got to ask—how’d yinz ever come up with somethin’ that … real?”
Because the pain that spawned it was real. And poetry was the voice of Gabriella’s soul. She’d been a rising-star poet when she walked away from her blossoming career to put into words the feelings her twin brother could only express musically.
And suddenly, he was gone.
The way Garrett died and the reason he died had combined to rip Gabriella’s heart right out of her chest.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think or move or … be without him. Born three minutes before she was, he had always been there, every second of her life. They had their own language no one else spoke. How could there be life without him? Her husband and son faded into a background world where their voices were muted, like people shouting in a soundproofed room and what you hear through the closed door is muffled.
In the end, both her marriage and Garrett’s band disintegrated without him. The band fell apart because of the absence of his presence; her marriage fell apart because of the presence of his absence. The rest of her life crumbled while she mourned his death, poured out her anguish and anger the only way she knew how—by tacking words onto it. But her hurt was too ugly for the delicate sensibilities of lyric verse. To release that putridness onto the page required the sturdier genre of fiction.
Gabriella wrote what the girl had asked, handed the napkin back and said “We’d like our check, please.”
“Oh, yinz don’t owe me nothing. Your check’s already been paid.” The girl leaned closer. “The tip, too. A twenty-dollar bill!”
“Already paid?”
“Yes ma’am. That’s how I knew. But soon’s he said your name … The Bride of the Beast was the first book I read all the way through since I was—”
“As soon as who said my name?” Gabriella felt an empty, hollowness in her chest that made it hard to talk.
“The man who paid for your lunch.” The waitress turned and pointed to a man sitting alone at a table beside the door. He hadn’t been there when Gabriella came into the restaurant. Nobody had been sitting there when Theo left to go to the food court for coffee. She was sure of it. But he was there now. A man dressed in black—shirt, pants, tie and coat. With pale blonde hair, ice blue eyes and the perfect Germanic features of a Nazi SS officer. He faced them, smiling at her with a sneering, crooked smile. There were crutches leaned against the empty chair on the other side of the table and he had a splint of some kind from his left foot halfway up his leg.
Gabriella’s heart began to knock so hard in her chest her vision pulsed; the arteries in her neck thumped like jolts of electricity were firing through them. She got to her feet, though she did not will her body to rise, and walked slowly toward him, her eyes manacled to his, such a brilliant blue she could see the color from all the way across the restaurant.
The closer she got, the colder she felt, as if she were approaching a glacier. She stopped in front of him and expected to see her breath frost in the air.
“Going on a trip, I see,” he said. “The Warwick offers a great location but I consider the accommodations in such an old hotel lackluster at best. I can get you the presidential suite in any five-star hotel in the city with a single phone call. And about those show tickets. I—”
“Stop …” she whispered. As soon as she saw him, fear had expanded in her chest like an inflatable life raft and now it was so huge she could barely speak. “Stop following me.”
“I’m not following you,” he said pleasantly, his smile as thin as a filleting knife. “I’m not going anywhere.” He glanced down at his injured foot and a murderous look flashed across his features like a puff of wind scattering dry leaves. The leaves settled back into place as he lifted his eyes to lock into hers again. “As you can see, I’m not up to traveling right now. But it was certainly worth the price of two plane tickets to …” He pulled a boarding pass out of his pocket and noted the destination. “… ah yes, Cleveland, to watch my man hand-deliver your little invitation to court. And there’s more where that came from. I—”
“Can’t you … please … leave me and my family ...” Her words struck the hard surface of his demeanor—splat, a rotten tomato on a window pane—and slid off it to the floor.
An armed TSA air marshal appeared in the concourse a few feet away and as he walked past them a tiny flame from the furnace of anger in Gabriella’s heart began to warm her. Hard to find a safer place than an airport. You couldn’t slip so much as a pair of fingernail clippers through security and the corridors were patrolled by guys carrying automatic weapons.
“Leave us alone!” She heard the words leap out of her mouth before she could grab hold of them. Emboldened by the environment, she went on. “It’s not real, none of it. Can’t you see that? You’re not The Beast of Babylon. I made him up! Go away—”
He struck like a pit viper, grabbed her wrist, twisted it and yanked her down toward him with such force she almost toppled into his lap. “You will not speak to me like that when I rule—”
The murderous growl of an angry wolf froze Yesheb like an ice sculpture. He released his hold on Gabriella in surprise and turned slowly to see P.D. poised to pounce, only inches from his face. Teeth bared, canines glistening, the ever-affable golden retriever had been transformed into eightyfive pounds of savage beast that would go for Yesheb’s throat if the man so much as blinked. Gabriella allowed herself a tiny smile. She’d managed to pack a weapon through security after all!
She straightened up, turned and motioned for Ty and Theo.
“You two go on to the gate,” she said, amazed that her voice was level. “I’ll be right there.”
Theo took a step toward Yesheb, his hands balled into fists at his sides.
“I need you to look after Ty. Please, get him away from here.”
Ty’s face was ashen, his eyes huge. He stared at Yesheb with the look of a rabbit caught in the talons of an eagle.
Theo scowled at Yesheb, but nodded and shoved Ty in front of him out toward the crowded concourse. The old man paused as he passed Yesheb, though, leaned close and said quietly, “Some days you the big dog and some days … you the hydrant.” Then he limped away.
Alone with Yesheb, Gabriella’s fear returned, rose up in her throat like vomit.
Yesheb spoke without moving, his eyes fastened on the growling, menacing P.D. “I will kill this dog. Give me time and I will devise an appropriately brutal way to dispatch him.” He remained rigid, but moved his eyes up to Gabriella’s face. “I will stomp the old man, crush his brittle bones, leave him to die slowly. And I will kill the boy, your son, rip his heart out of his chest while it is still beating and offer it as a sacrifice to join us together for all eternity.”
The ice in Yesheb’s eyes flowed out of them and into Gabriella’s heart. She reached down a trembling hand and took the handle of P.D.’s harness. He was still growling, the hackles standing up on the back of his neck. The dog had never done anything even remotely like this. Had he merely reacted to a threat to his master? Maybe. Or was it more than that? Could it be that his animal senses responded to the presence of evil?
“Heel, P.D.,” she said, and the dog immediately turned away from Yesheb and moved to a spot beside her right leg. Though no longer growling, P.D. never took his eyes off Yesheb.
“See you in court on June 26,” Yesheb purred. “I’ll pray for rain. And I wouldn’t plan any more little trips if I were you. I’ve convinced the prosecutor—he and several of the circuit judges were dear friends of my father’s—that you didn’t just assault me. You tried to kill me.”
She stepped around Yesheb out into the flow of human traffic in the concourse, didn’t turn when he called out to her.
“When that attempted murder charge is filed against you, my sweet Zara, you’ll be stuck right here until I come for you.”
YESHEB’S CALM IS only skin deep. Below it is a fury as finely tuned as an ice pick, a single, clear high note of rage that he could focus on her back and stab through sinew and tissue and bone right into her heart. He could kill her with his anger alone. He does not need the kind of weapon they look for here with their X-rays and scanners.
He can’t do that, of course. She is his bride, his beloved. He cannot kill her. But he can make her pay. He will extract a high price for all that she has done to him, a high price indeed.
He’d been fantasizing about it in the hospital, lying in bed in agony because he had refused pain killers. He could not allow his senses to be dulled even for a moment. He is accountable. He is being watched.
As he lay sweating on the crisp, white sheets, gritting his teeth to keep from moaning, he had occupied his mind by considering what would be a fit punishment. Many came to mind—all of them involving tools like bolt cutters and tin snips. Disfigurement arouses him in ways beauty never can. Many more would surface, brought to mind by the heartbeat throbbing of his broken bones held in place by temporary splints. Though the fracture had not been displaced—the bones had not moved—his foot was so badly swollen the orthopedist said it would be a week before the splint applied in the emergency room could be replaced by a cast.
“I do a good job?”
Yesheb looks up into the face of the grinning hip-hop process server.
“Splendid.”
“When she saw what it was in her hand she ’bout had a cat.” The young man continues to babble, pumped about sneaking into an airport to deliver a summons. “That old man, his eyes was this big.” He pauses. “Say, he wasn’t that boy’s daddy was he? The kid was mixed, but surely …”
Mixed.
That’s what his family had thought Yesheb was. Among other things. When he was born—a blonde, blue-eyed child to Iranian parents—it seemed obvious that his mother had shamed his father by bearing a son who could not possibly have been his. A son about whom there were whispers and dark rumors even before he was born, a son who engendered terror—even as a tiny baby.
Yesheb’s whole family had been long dead before he understood it all. He learned the truth from an old servant who confessed to eavesdropping on a conversation between Anwar Al Tobbanoft and his wife’s doctor while Yesheb was still in his mother’s womb.
Serena Al Tobbanoft had been carrying twins—two distinct heartbeats. And then there was only one heartbeat. The doctor told his father that one of the twins was dead.
“How did my son die?” his father demanded—certain that his firstborn would be a son and heir.
“One of the twins … absorbed the other.”
“Absorbed the other? What does that mean?”
“It means,” the doctor told him quietly, “that one of your unborn sons has eaten his brother.”
Though the old servant feared retribution for eavesdropping, and even worse punishment for the awful news he had delivered to Yesheb, he’d been surprised when his master responded with uproarious laughter.
Yesheb’s cell phone rings and he dismisses the hip-hop moron with a wave of his hand.
“Mr. Al Tobbanoft, the surveillance team is in position to pick up the subjects at the baggage claim in JFK.”
“You understand the importance of continuous contact?”
“It’s a crack, four-man team, sir. The subjects will never even know they’re being watched. We’re also tracking them electronically, of course. They couldn’t possibly shake my men.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”
There is a heartbeat pause.
“Yes sir.”
Yesheb hangs up and acid-tasting bile rises in this throat. He has let her slip out of his grasp! He had been injured, hadn’t been thinking clearly. After he’d summoned help and a team to do cleanup at her residence, it had taken a few hours to find her again. She had left the monitoring chips planted in her wallet, the heel of her shoe and her cell phone case behind when she ran. He hadn’t moved fast enough with the summons and the criminal charges and she had slipped through his net. Oh, how he wished he could simply kidnap her and hold her hostage until it was time. But he couldn’t do that. It must take place precisely as it was foretold. He must go to her alone, unaided, crush her resistance and take her.
Yesheb feels a shiver of doubt run down his spine.
After a millennia of looking for her, he has finally found her. Now the clock that allows him three opportunities to become one with her is ticking. Their joining will grant him unfathomable power; it will usher in the reign of The Beast of Babylon as the sovereign ruler of the abyss. But ancient decrees require precise timing. The first full moon after Good Friday, the day of death, was for preparation. He’d fasted and precisely performed the prescribed rituals and self-flagellation—beat himself with a whip tipped with broken glass and pieces of metal until he was barely conscious. After that, there remained three lunar cycles. He must mate with her during one of them and she had gotten away from him this month! She must not escape again!
He rises slowly, in some ways relishing the agony in his foot because it keeps him hyper alert, on a razor’s edge. He picks up his crutches and hobbles on them out into the concourse. He briefly considers going to their gate and waiting there with them until their flight takes off. But there would be plenty of time for intimidation—and payback—later. Revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.