A FLEA WITH A PET ELEPHANT. THAT WAS BUENA VISTA, COLORADO. The mammoth, hulking presence of Mount Princeton towered more than six thousand feet above the little town, dwarfed everything to insignificance, cast a gigantic shadow across the valley floor that grew bigger as the sun progressed down the western sky.
Bueny was a typical Colorado small town with wide streets, neat houses, crisp, clean air and lots of pickup trucks. What had changed since Gabriella last saw it was the artsy, touristy flavor of the place. It seemed there were galleries, RV parks and an outdoor outfitting store every five feet.
When she drove slowly down the town’s main street, taking it all in, the juxtaposition of cultures was jarring. A leather-faced man wearing scuffed cowboy boots and a sweat-ringed Stetson … next to a yuppie in the latest trendy hiking gear, featuring pants with a dozen zippered pockets and a jacket with a hole for the cord of her iPod ear-phones … beside a shaggy college kid who carried everything he owned in a gigantic backpack and very likely smelled of campfire smoke and marijuana.
Theo, of course, kept up a running commentary of disparaging remarks: “Check out that bowlegged cowboy. Stand him up next to a knock-kneed woman and they’d spell OX. They start dancing, it look like a egg-beater.”
Gabriella stopped at the BP station on US Route 285 so Theo could do his business. The car motor had begun to knock sometime late yesterday afternoon and the sound had gotten so much louder today that turning off the ignition felt uncomfortably like a mercy killing.
As she stood beside the ailing Honda waiting for Theo, she allowed the feel of this hauntingly familiar place to settle over her again. She had gotten an odd sunburn the first few days of the summer she’d spent in the mountains years ago. Dressed in jeans and a jacket—it was cold at 11,000 feet!—the Pittsburgh-white skin of her hands and face had gotten fried. Cool air, hot sun—like being in two different climates at the same time.
She’d repeatedly warned Theo and Ty—mostly Theo with his bare-as-a-baby’s-butt head—about the sun. And that they might have headaches in the higher elevation, usually a result of dehydration.
“You need to drink lots of liquid. And it’ll take a week, maybe longer, to get used to the air with less oxygen. Don’t overexert yourselves.”
“So you sayin’ if a bear come running out the woods after me, I’s supposed to walk away slowly?”
“Are there bears?” Ty’s eyes were huge.
“Yep, black bears. You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone—just don’t get between a mama bear and her cub.”
“Are there mountain lions?” the boy asked.
“Probably. They keep to themselves, won’t come anywhere near the cabin. You didn’t ask about fish—the finest mountain trout in the whole world! And an ice-cold stream where you can fish for them.”
Ty was ready to jump out of his skin with excitement. She could barely get him to eat his enchiladas at the Coyote Cantina even by bribing him with honey-filled sapodillas for dessert. Theo didn’t eat but a bite or two of his tacos, scowled at the waitress when his complaint about the heat in Colorado was greeted with the standard response: “Oh, it’s not so bad—it’s a dry heat.”
But his poor appetite might have been more than his dismay over their geography. Gabriella had noticed he didn’t look right, couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was, though. It appeared he’d lost some weight, too, got around slower. She supposed that was to be expected when your age was pushing three quarters of a century. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to bring him here. Maybe …
Then it banged into her mind why they’d come. For a moment, she’d forgotten about the specter that stalked them. They weren’t here on vacation. They’d come to a refuge; they were running for their lives.
Sticking to her cross-country strategy of staying, shopping in small, out-of-the-way places, she found a small jeep rental dealership in the shadow of a big one. Twenty minutes later, she walked out with a set of keys. For an additional fee, the owner had agreed to allow her to leave her car parked out back until the end of the summer. It took half an hour to pare their few belongings down to what they could jam into the jeep and still have room for passengers and supplies. The rest they stored in the trunk of the Honda.
Ty called shotgun. Theo sat like a puddleglum in the back with P.D. and the luggage. Gabriella tried to look a whole lot more self-assured than she actually felt when she slid in behind the wheel. Oh, she could drive the thing. The whole time she was at Carnegie Mellon she’d dated a guy whose hobby was four-wheeling and she’d piloted many an excursion in the mountains of West Virginia to explore the surface-of-the-moon terrain of strip mines. Still, the mountain they were about to tackle was another thing altogether.
“Buckle up,” she said.
“And make sure yo seats and tray tables is in they upright and locked position,” Theo said.
The jeep lurched forward a little awkwardly and then they were off toward the cabin that Theo had launched a last-ditch argument against while he moved his uneaten tacos around on his plate at lunch.
“Why we goin’ to a place Mr. Gestapo Wannabe might be able to connect to you? Don’t it make more sense to throw a dart at a map, pick somewhere you ain’t never been, rent a house and lock ourselves inside? How he gone find us if we done that?”
Gabriella explained yet again that there was no possible way for Yesheb to connect her to the house in the mountains, but she had to grant that it certainly wasn’t as anonymous as picking a random house in some arbitrary city. What she was doing didn’t make as much logical sense as Theo’s suggestion, but for reasons she couldn’t explain she was certain that her family’s safety rested in something more than mere anonymity.
They headed south out of Buena Vista on US 285. When they passed a collection of buildings encircled by a tall fence on the outskirts of town, Gabriella answered Theo’s unasked question.
“Uh huh, that’s a prison. The Buena Vista Correctional Facility—houses about nine hundred medium security inmates.”
She shouted because the crisp, fresh air that whipped through the topless vehicle on the open road carried her words away. She wasn’t sure Theo heard her.
“The wind’s blowing your hair, Mom,” Ty didn’t quite have deadpan down but he was close to pulling it off. “Maybe you should roll up the window.”
The freshly scrubbed breeze on her face and the laughter of her son in her ears vanished. That’s what Yesheb had said—exactly what Yesheb had said—that day when he appeared out of nowhere on a street corner in Orlando and leaned into her rented convertible while she sat helpless at a stop light.
The remark had been the tipping point. The moment when she saw with chilling clarity that under the trappings of intelligence and good manners resided a being that was neither rational nor civil. That simple attempt at humor had exposed him.
Because he couldn’t pull it off! It was so clearly a rehearsed behavior, like a windup toy. He couldn’t do humor because humor is the exclusive domain of human beings and Yesheb didn’t believe he was human. And maybe he was right.
Gabriella is cold and uncomfortable, seated in a high-backed wooden chair with no cushion in a room that with only minor alterations could function as a meat locker. But Bernie is in charge and concern for Gabriella’s comfort never makes it to the higher centers of his brain. All his calculations are focused on the most efficient way to shuttle readers past Gabriella in a freight-train rush.
“Just sign and move them through,” he tells her. “No small talk. It spoils the image and the image sells books. All your readers think you’re some kind of mythical creature—and a being from the Endless Black Beyond wouldn’t exchange recipes for bean dip with a fan. Keep your mouth shut and the line moving.”
The signing is in a little store called Twice Told Tales on Atwood Street in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. It’s a lovely bookstore, smells of old paper and stale pipe tobacco, a nurturing environment where patrons can browse, sit in overstuffed chairs, read poetry, discuss universal themes or existentialism or Stephen King’s latest best seller over a cup of Earl Grey that has tiny flakes of tea in the bottom.
Gabriella is “in costume”—witch-black dress, long straight hair, pointed bangs, claw-like fingernails and cherry red lips on deathly pale skin. And the scar, of course, revealed in all its glory—no makeup. The combined effect of the author and the atmosphere is conducive to fantasy, so it’s easy for the fans to suspend disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s all real.
Cult fanatics have been camped outside the bookstore since early the evening before because the cramped space will limit the number of people who can get their books autographed, though Bernie does everything short of using a cattle prod to keep the crowd moving past Gabriella so their signed copies can be rung up at the old-fashioned cash register in the corner, the kind with buttons that really does ring out “cha-ching” with every purchase.
Gabriella’s back hurts, her hand is cramped and her butt is numb. She glances at the grandfather clock in the corner and groans. Two more hours before she can go home and get out of this Halloween get-up, make SpaghettiOs for Ty and help him with his homework before bed.
“… was so scared I had to sleep with the lights on for a month,” says a small, white-haired woman who resembles Tweety Bird’s grandmother. Gabriella merely nods, does not connect or respond. She has gone mercifully brain dead, has vanished into a kind of eyes-open coma where she’s only vaguely aware of the herd of readers passing in front of her.
Then she spots him. He is tall, six three or four, and stands ramrod straight, dressed in black—turtleneck, sports coat and pants—with a small silver pentagram on a chain around his neck. His hair is pale blonde, his features patrician perfect, his eyes a shade of blue that seems to shift as she looks into them, from light ice blue to the turgid gray-blue of a stormy sea.
A smile that reveals perfect teeth appears on his face as soon as she makes eye contact. It is a crooked smile, though, odd looking, like he’s taken lessons, worked really hard to learn all the muscle groups he must employ to pull his lips back in a particular fashion that’s defined as “smiling.” But he hasn’t got it quite right so one side of his mouth draws back farther than the other. There is no warmth in that smile. No warmth in him, either. In fact, as he steps up to her table he seems to bring cold with him, as a door left open on a blustery day allows a chill wind to blow through.
And darkness, too, only that’s crazy. How can a man give off darkness like a candle gives off light? She senses something predatory, too, a subtle new pressure, the way the air feels before a violent thunderstorm.
“Good day, my dear Zara,” he says, totally deadpan. That surprises her. He doesn’t strike her as the kind of man who indulges in illusion.
“I’m not Zara.” For some reason, it is important to her to make the distinction between reality and fiction. “I’m Rebecca Nightshade.” Which, of course, isn’t really true, either. “Zara is a character I made up.” She tries to make light of it. “Me Rebecca …” She taps the top book on the stack. “Her Zara. Me real, her fantasy.”
He stands perfectly still, in quiet confidence—only for some reason it feels like the poised stillness before a pounce, the breathlessness of a coiled snake.
“Your name isn’t Rebecca Nightshade.” His voice sounds like it comes from the bottom of an oil drum or some other deep, dark, echoing place. And there is a certainty in his tone that is unnerving. She had worked hard to keep the shield of the pseudonym between her and the prying public. “And Zara is no fantasy. She is as real as the beauty of my beloved Babylon and as old as the Endless Black Beyond, a kingdom she will rule with her mate by her side.”
Gabriella catches sight of Bernie at the edge of her vision. He is grinning.
“You got that right,” she says to the man standing before her, but she looks pointedly and defiantly at Bernie. “Zara is as real as Babylon and we both know how real that is.” She turns back to the tall, blonde stranger. “We’ve already opened the twenty-first century, taken the tag off and everything. Don’t you think it’s a little late to send it back?”
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Bernie scowl. He doesn’t like her humor. It makes her human and real and neither characteristic appeals to him personally nor satisfies his purposes. Bernie doesn’t like for her to break character. That’s the main reason she does it.
But the man before her never blinks. There is something chilling about his astonishing good looks. His features are too well-defined, as sharp as a hatchet, poster boy for the Hitler Youth.
“Sweet Zara, you’re even more lively than I pictured, with even more sparkle. A bit untamed to be sure, but that spirit can be bridled.” He manages to make “bridled” sound menacing. “I’ve been looking for you for millennia. Now, our time has come.”
Okay, this guy is definitely certifiable. Gorgeous, but crackers.
Gabriella picks up a copy of The Bride of the Beast and opens it to the cover page in the front. She reaches for a pen and says formally, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re holding up the line. Do you want me to write something in particular or just sign it?”
He leans down close and she smells a hint of garlic his breath mint can’t disguise, a fresh lime aftershave and some other scent that eludes her. It is an earthy smell, like fresh plowed sod or damp leaves, but unpleasant. Moldy leaves, perhaps. And dirt from an open—
“Write: ‘To my Master and Lord. I will honor you, serve you, obey you and bear you a son. We will reign together, the Beast and his Bride.’”
His voice is thick and clotted with urgency; his breathing labored. The cold he emanates chills Gabriella to the bone and she begins to tremble. She drops her pen, yanks her hand away from the book and looks up into his face. That’s a mistake. His eyes seize hers and lock on. She falls into their frigid depths, deeper and deeper into the blue that darkens through purple to black.
His eyes hold her captive. She is only set free when he drops his gaze—like she’d seized an electric cable and couldn’t let go until the juice was turned off. She slumps back in her chair gasping.
“I will see you soon, my Love,” he says. “I will come for you when it is time.” He straightens up, turns and walks away—leaving the un-autographed book lying beneath her trembling hands.
Gabriella feels tears well in her eyes and spill soundlessly down her cheeks as she watches him go. She has never been so frightened in her life. Needlessly frightened. The man did absolutely nothing menacing, yet everything was menacing. An image blooms of the hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, crouching against the embankment as the Black Rider sniffs for them on the road above. Sick, mindless fear. How could anything human possibly be so innocently terrifying?
To Bernie’s vast dismay, she lurches to her feet and retreats to the ladies room and refuses to come out until he clears the bookstore. Then she sneaks furtively out the back door and into a waiting limousine to go home.
The day after the book signing, three dozen black roses were delivered to her house. That’s when she learned his name. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft. From that moment forward, his unrelenting attention became the canvas on which every day was painted. Over the course of the next eight months, he sent her flowers, presents, cards and letters—she refused delivery on all of them. Then he began to show up wherever she was. How did he know she was taking Ty to the museum, that she was going to the dentist or to the grocery store? She finally went to court and got a restraining order from a reluctant, unbelieving judge. That didn’t make Yesheb leave her alone, it only moved his attentions back a few yards. When she saw him on the sidewalk in front of her house or inside the fence, standing in the trees watching, she called the police. Time and time again. But he was never there when the police arrived and she quickly became the little boy who cried wolf.
After he showed up at the intersection in Orlando, where she had sneaked away to take Ty to Disneyland, she employed a private detective who documented his family’s fabulous wealth—and the tragic deaths that befell one family member after another until Yesheb was the only man standing. After Good Friday, she’d lived in constant terror. No one knew better than she the timetable for the Beast to collect his bride. If he failed to seduce her by the full moon in July, he would lose forever his right to rule Babylon.
And Gabriella suspected that never in his life had Yesheb Al Tobbanoft failed to get exactly what he wanted.
* * * *
Yesheb holds the heavy damask drapes back from the window and stares with unseeing eyes into a world colored the cheerless shade of gray peculiar to the south of England in the springtime. The sullen masses of clouds harried by a chill wind have worn thin, but aren’t threadbare enough to allow a single shard of sunlight to slice down out of the evening sky.
Though no mist or fog or drizzle is actually visible in the air, it is nonetheless wet. So is every surface in the stone courtyard and the perfectly manicured rose gardens—the blood-red blooms rust-colored in the gray light—that stretch out beneath the high window on the north side of the manor house. Yesheb can just make out the blanket of flowers on the floor of the bluebell wood beyond the stone fence in the rolling hills of Hertfordshire where his sisters played when they were children.
Perhaps an hour of daylight remains before the wet air scrubs away all color and washes darkness down the day, and Yesheb wonders as he has wondered countless times over the years why his Iranian father chose to purchase a sprawling estate here in the unrelenting drear.
He smiles a joyless smile. Ah, but Anwar Al Tobbanoft did not choose. Perhaps he thought he did, in his ignorance, but his father was mistaken. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was chosen. It was his honor, and the privilege of his submissive cow of a wife, to bring royalty into the world, and the revelation of Yesheb’s regal lineage had occurred here in England.
Yesheb drops the curtain and turns back to the ornate desk. He hobbles on his walking cast the few steps to the big leather chair. As he settles his long frame into it, his mind snaps back to his obsession with the force of a stretched-too-tight rubber band.
The Bride. Where is she?
His herd of private investigators have scurried around with insectile frenzy searching for her, but have not turned up so much as a hint of her whereabouts. They searched her house but found nothing that suggested her destination. They accessed the contacts list in her computer and were systematically investigating every person named in it. They were checking out every school she ever attended, every classmate, roommate, bunkmate, old friend, old flame and every neighbor every place she ever lived.
They were investigating the old man just as thoroughly, though his history is longer, not as well documented and harder to track.
Zara’s sniveling little literary agent—clearly the progeny of a rat bred with a pit viper—had been drawn to Yesheb’s power and sucked up to him unashamedly. The man gave Yesheb’s investigators every speck of information he had about Zara, which quickly made it clear Phelps hardly knew her at all.
The agent collects her mail and gives it to Yesheb’s men. Nothing. The investigators watch for activity on her ISP address. Nothing. She and the old man left their cell phones behind and there is no way to trace a burner—a pre-paid cheapie phone. There has been no activity on her credit cards and her ATM card, but they learned she had withdrawn more than $75,000 in cash from the bank that day in New York two weeks ago. Unless the three of them have forged passports—and why would they?—they have not fled the country. Still, you could go a long way on $75,000.
She and the others—the boy, the old man and the dog—have vanished in a puff of smoke.
Yesheb picks up off the desk one of his father’s most prized possessions. The jeweled, enameled Easter egg, the Royal Danish Egg, is one of the eight missing Faberge eggs. Its value is incalculable. He turns it over in his hand, looks at it without really seeing it. Then, in a sudden flash of rage, he hurls it across the room to smash against the bookcase and growls a string of profanities under his breath.
They will find her. No one can hide forever from a manhunt as thorough as the one he has launched. She will surface, do something stupid and he will snatch her up like a frog grabs a fly. He has time, he tells himself firmly, trying to calm his frayed nerves. He still has twelve days until the next full moon. And another full moon after that one. He will find her, sacrifice her son, mate with her and plant the seed of his own son in her womb. They will rule together. And he will make her pay for running from him. Oh, my yes. He will make her pay as his father made his mother pay.
Even as a boy, Yesheb knew his father believed his mother had been unfaithful and he couldn’t figure out why his father hadn’t killed his wife and her newborn baby on the spot. Why had he let them live?
When he grew older he understood: Anwar Al Tobbanoft kept them alive to make them pay!
Other boys were borne away into slumber to the tune of lullabies; Yesheb went to sleep every night to the sound of his mother’s screams. His father beat her regularly, broke her nose so many times it was as flat as a prize fighter’s, shattered countless other bones over the years, knocked out most of her teeth and blinded her left eye. No one outside the household ever knew, of course. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was an important, respected and rich man. He was also a Muslim man, not in belief but for convenience. And it was certainly convenient that he could cover his wife’s battered body from head to toe whenever she went out in public with a full burka—the kind that featured only a mesh slit for the eyes.
When Yesheb was about twelve, he found out that shortly after he was born his father had commissioned DNA testing on the blonde, blue-eyed baby boy and discovered that Yesheb had, indeed, come from his seed. So why had his father continued to punish his mother for a crime he knew she did not commit? And why did he visit unspeakable cruelties on his only son as well? It took years for Yesheb to understand it wasn’t about making anybody pay. It never had been. It was about the screams, the delicious delight of screams.
Yesheb shivers in anticipation of the sound of Zara’s screams and feels power surge through him. There is power in fear and even greater power in domination. But the greatest power of all lies in living while others die at your hands. Power feeds on the screeching cries of their anguish, grows in the fertile soil of death like entangling, choking vines.
Yesheb killed for the first time when he was eight years old. It was the day he first heard The Voice. When the growling whisper spoke words into his ear that first time, he had not been frightened. It was almost like he had expected to hear it, like he had been waiting for it, holding his breath in anticipation of it his whole life.
Yesheb. Make an altar and offer a sacrifice to me—your sister’s puppy.
“Who are you?” Yesheb had asked out loud. Though he knew. Yesheb had always known. What he learned that he did not know, however, was that The Voice tolerated nothing less than instant, complete, mindless obedience. He learned that lesson as all children learn best—by suffering the consequences of their misdeeds. The Voice rewarded Yesheb’s question with agony, detonated a bomb of searing pain inside his head so excruciating he instantly dropped to his knees gasping. He writhed in delirious agony for seven days and seven nights. The finest medical care money could buy offered no relief. Doctors could find no cause for pain so torturous that the boy was literally blinded by it and could only barely hear above the buzz of a million locusts in his ears. The pain left him as abruptly as it had come. He awoke in a hospital. To the astonishment of the medical personnel hovering over him, he sat up, ripped the IV tubes out of his arms and demanded to go home.
Even weak from seven days of lying motionless, he got out of his bed as soon as the rest of the family slept and slipped into his little sister Pasha’s room. The German Shepherd puppy she had gotten for her seventh birthday slept in a pillowed bed at the foot of hers. Yesheb picked it up silently. The dog licked his hand and Yesheb felt an ache in his heart for the helpless beast but he did not hesitate or falter.
Years later, he read that crack units of Nazi SS officers had been given puppies to raise and train, and on the day they graduated, they were ordered to slit the dogs’ throats. Any officer who failed to respond instantly to the command was dismissed from the unit.
Yesheb would have passed the test. He sneaked into the kitchen for the sharpest knife he could find and then out the back door to do as The Voice had commanded.
He never questioned The Voice again.
Sometimes, there are other voices in his head. Some speak Arabic, others speak English, French or Italian. One is a sultry woman’s voice; another is a child. The voices tell him things he could not possibly know, warn him of impending danger, soothe him sometimes and inflame his anger at other times. Those voices often tell him what to do, but the ultimate authority always rests with The Voice.
The Voice revealed Yesheb’s true identity two years after the boy killed his sister’s puppy. He was a day student at Haileybury, the prestigious British boarding school peopled by the children of the rich and famous from around the world. Located on Hertford Heath twenty miles north of central London, the school boasted a quad touted as the largest academic quadrangle in the world, and that spring the Kipling House, one of the boys’ dormitories, used soapstone to construct a scale model of Stonehenge in the center of it.
Although Yesheb’s striking good looks, his maturity and his air of authority had made him an instant leader when his father enrolled him, the boy disdained leadership, made no friends and kept to himself. After the other students fell victim to his caustic tongue, hair-trigger temper and vicious, mean streak, they cut a wide path around him. Left him alone, though none of the insipid fools realized he was never alone. The Voice and the minions of The Voice were always with him.
As Yesheb watched construction of the scale model of rocks one day after class, his mind was inexorably drawn to thoughts of destruction and desecration and it occurred to him that it would be entertaining to defile the stones like the graffiti-slathered walls in London’s tube stations and bus shelters.
His fellow students were intent on their work and paid no attention to his feigned interest as he sauntered around behind the largest carved stone. He sat down in the grass beside it and ran his hand over the smooth, almost greasy surface of the soapstone. As soon as he was certain no one was watching, he withdrew a felt-tip marker from his pocket and scrawled YESHEB AL TOBBANOFT on the base of the rock, down low where the tall grass would cover over his handiwork from the casual observer. Then he stood and stared up at the stone, wondering how long it would take his classmates to discover that he’d made their precious work of art as ordinary and mundane as a bridge abutment where some brainless lover had scrawled ShaMika Loves LaRon 4-Ever.
As he smiled at his desecration, The Voice displayed its power, came to Yesheb in a mighty vision and revealed to the still tender boy his identity, his royal place among the powers of the universe.
Yesheb’s ears began to ring with a thousand tiny bells and The Voice spoke rumbling, powerful words inside his head in a language the boy had never heard before and Yesheb has never heard since. The world all around him grew too bright and he had to squint to keep his eyes from watering. Then a searing light focused on the rock in front of him and left everything else in pale shadow. The light grew brighter and brighter until Yesheb could barely stand to look at it. Then, out of the light, burning gold letters began to appear one at a time on the stone, as if a giant invisible pen were inscribing each one. Yesheb stood transfixed as words began to appear slowly, one letter at a time, until the stone stood like a mighty doorpost with a name inscribed in burning gold letters upon it.
THE BEAST OF BABYLON.
Yesheb had no idea who or what The Beast of Babylon might be, but stared at the flaming letters in awe and wonder. Then the most amazing thing of all happened. The small, black marker-inscribed letters of Yesheb’s name lifted off the bottom of the rock one at a time, floated up into the air and grew larger and larger until they were the size of the flaming letters written by the invisible pen. Then each letter from his name was inserted into the words on the stone. When his black letter covered a flaming letter, it blocked out the light—like placing a lid over a candle—there was a sizzling sound and smoke rose up all around it.
The Y of YESHEB became the Y in BABYLON. The E in YESHEB became the E of BEAST. And so it went, one letter after another until all the letters of Yesheb’s name had been used and all the flaming letters had been capped in black. There on the stone, with smoke rising up around each letter, were the words THE BEAST OF BABYLON—spelled with the letters of Yesheb’s name. The Beast of Babylon and Yesheb Al Tobbanoft were one and the same. Yesheb had learned his true identity.
Of course, it was years before he understood the future laid out for The Beast of Babylon. He learned that in the pages of Zara’s book—her diary disguised as fiction, her prophesies set down in the form of fantasy.
Only Yesheb understands that it is neither fiction nor fantasy. After a millennium of searching, the identity of the Bride has been revealed. And the path they must travel to their destiny has been laid out. Follow that path and the throne of a mighty kingdom in The Endless Black Beyond will be his, ushering in a Dark Age of demonic rule on the heels of their apocalyptic victory over the forces of light.
But he must follow the path. He cannot stray from it. Everything has to happen as it has been prophesied. His world, his kingdom and his life depend upon it.
Yesheb gets to his feet and hobbles back to the window. He stares into the deepening gray shadows of evening, concentrates, wills his mind to reach out and connect with the mind of his beloved Zara. For an instant it seems he almost does, he imagines he smells something—a hint of pine or cedar—but it is gone in a heartbeat. Wherever Zara is at this moment, her mind is closed to him.