Devlin was tall and lean, an aristocratic gentleman who moved with the fluid assurance of absolute authority. He was dressed in crimson and black, with a flowing black greatcoat that matched his dark, hooded eyes. His nails were perfectly manicured, and he wore them a bit longer than other men.
He smiled hello to Zamba and looked around. There was an air of triumph about him, as if he had just won something. Zamba bowed his head in respect, and the iron links of his necklace gently clattered in response.
“Where is He?” Devlin wanted to know.
“Aaaahhh!!” Lisa cried out once again, and Devlin had his answer. Room Three was across the hall from where they stood. Devlin flicked a piercing glance at the room, then looked at Zamba and smiled like an angel.
Devlin had always been confident of winning the bet, but he never thought it would be this easy. He had expected some sort of subterfuge, some misdirection or sleight of hand. But this was far too easy...
And then it occurred to him – he had met no resistance because there was no way he could lose. This, he now knew, was complete capitulation. The argument was already over; the battle was already won. His real triumph was that the entire world would know as well. And they would know it very soon indeed.
The New Time had arrived.
He approached the open door, a beatific smile on his lips and his eyes aglow. Zamba was a faithful step behind him.
The storm had whipped itself into a fury. Molinari propped Melissa against a concrete pillar by the parking structure stairwell. The emergency light over the nearby exit door provided the only illumination.
He quickly went down a row of cars in the gloom, tugging on door handles as he searched for an unlocked car. The ’65 Bonneville had seen better days, but the burgundy interior was clean and the back seat was enormous. He elbowed the driver’s window, busting out the safety glass, and reached inside to unlock it. He opened the door and the dome light came on, surprisingly bright in the surrounding darkness. He reached in back, unlocked the passenger door, and swung it open.
He rushed back to Melissa and half-carried her to the car, gently laying her down in back, then got inside with her, kneeling behind the driver’s seat. He quietly closed the door and the dome light went out. They were invisible now. For the moment, they were safe.
Devlin and Zamba entered Room Three, quiet as ghosts, and Zamba silently closed the door behind them. Evelyn had her hands full tending to Lisa, and wasn’t aware of their presence until they were right behind her, looming over the bed. Lisa’s wide-eyed stare told Evelyn that something was amiss, and she turned to look.
Evelyn nearly jumped out of her skin, seeing Zamba towering over her. Devlin was mostly obscured from her view, standing on the far side of the hulking voodoo priest.
“Excuse me, but you two can’t be in here right now.”
Zamba slipped a ceremonial dagger from under his tunic and plunged it upwards into her heart, completely lifting her off her feet.
He grasped her hair with his other hand and carried her that way across the room, sitting her down in a chair. As he slid his blade out, her last startled breath left her body.
Lisa’s mind and vision were blurry from drugs, and she hadn’t seen a thing. At the moment, she was consumed with the blinding pain of a strong contraction in her belly. Devlin was standing beside her bed, gazing down at her with a mesmerizing look that she had never seen from anyone before. It frightened her, and yet at the same time she suddenly felt an overwhelming hunger for him. But as she gazed back at him, her blurry vision suddenly increased.
“My eyes,” she whispered, puzzled and suddenly terrified. Then her abdomen violently contracted again, and she gritted her teeth in pain.
Zamba stepped up close beside Devlin and gazed down at her as well. It was as if they had just discovered a priceless treasure, as if they finally found what they had been searching for.
Devlin flicked a glance at Zamba, and Zamba leaned down like he was about to kiss her lips. As he came closer, his iron necklace gently rattled.
“Who...?” Lisa wondered groggily, but when she felt something soft and slimy drop onto her breastbone, she instinctively tried to lurch away from whatever it was, pressing back in her pillow, utterly terrified. Another contraction seized her, this time triggered by fear.
“Aaaaaaarrgh!” she wailed, and the world slammed into focus as an invisible something formed undulating depressions on her skin. Her voice was soon cut off as it slid around her neck and smoothly constricted, relentlessly choking the breath out of her. In a matter of moments, Lisa Johnson was dead.
Devlin felt her belly, and grinned at Zamba. “Alive and kicking,” he reported, and Zamba grinned back.
Devlin flicked her hospital gown away, exposing her naked body. Her legs were splayed open, and he smiled at the sight of her freshly-shaven vagina.
“How lovely!” Devlin observed. “Like the grand entrance of a cathedral.” Zamba nodded agreement.
“Let us pray,” Devlin whispered, and held out his hand, palm up. Zamba gave him the bloody ceremonial dagger.
The invisible presence slithered from around Lisa’s neck and climbed up Zamba’s arm, briefly materializing as it coiled around his neck. The asp took its own tail in its mouth, and transformed back into his voodoo necklace.
The windows of the Bonneville were fogged up and the storm outside was howling. Molinari was kneeling on the back seat now, between Melissa’s widespread knees. The illumination from the emergency stairwell light was just enough to make out what he was doing. The problem was, he didn’t really know what he was doing, but he was doing it anyway. There was no other choice. He did what he could in the scant seconds between Melissa’s waning contractions, and prayed for the best.
He dropped the bloody crucifix dagger on the floor, and gently reached into the Cesarean incision that he had made. Melissa had the towel clenched in her teeth, and she screamed into it as his fingers gently probed inside of her.
Devlin’s face was flecked with blood. He glared down at the fruit of his labor, Zamba’s ceremonial dagger clenched in his hand. Zamba was close beside him, blood on his tunic as well, staring down at the corpse. They were both infuriated.
In one fluid motion, Devlin hurled something against the wall. It fractured the plaster with a dense, wet thud, and dropped to the floor in a bloody heap. Blood seeped down the wall to meet it.
Zamba waited for him to speak. It took a while.
“This is bad for business,” Devlin finally hissed. He inhaled deeply, and let out a measured breath. He couldn’t fathom what might have gone wrong. The woman was supposed to be in Room Three. It had all been meticulously arranged. The envoy from Rome had assured him that Vicente would see to everything.
So where was the little bitch? Devlin fumed silently. And for that matter, where the hell was Vicente? He saw to everything, did he? Devlin looked forward to burning the man’s eyes out.
“They deceived us?” Zamba asked.
“No! What could they possibly gain?”
Zamba shrugged. “Their scriptures tell them –”
Devlin cut him off with a withering sneer. “They don’t believe that nonsense!”
He glanced at the dead newborn, now a lump of soft flesh on the floor below the blood-streaked wall.
“This changes everything,” Devlin told him.
Something caught his attention, and he sniffed at the air. Zamba joined him. They both glanced at the closet, and then at each other.
Devlin opened the closet door. Father Vicente’s body lay crumpled on the floor. He sneered at the odorous corpse. “Vicente!”
Devlin looked around the room, piecing things together, as if he could somehow sense what transpired. “Never send a priest to do the Devil’s work.”
Outside, the wind howled insanely. Zamba looked around, slowly nodding as he read the room, following Devlin’s lead.
“Herod had the right idea,” Devlin said to him.
They went to the door, Zamba a step ahead to open it for his master. Devlin was still clutching Zamba’s dagger in his fist. He was itching to get to work.
The last thing Melissa saw before she slipped away was her precious baby entering the world. Molinari gingerly examined the newborn. To his great relief the child was unharmed. Vicente’s dagger had somehow missed, plunging between the baby’s legs. The infant had come through completely unscathed. It was a miracle.
Molinari wept in exhaustion, sinking to the blood-soaked seat as he beheld the sticky, fussing newborn, sputtering and squalling in his weary hands.
He could only rest for a moment, though. The wind suddenly increased to a high-pitched roar, and Molinari sat bolt upright, turning to see. He rubbed the fog off the window with his sleeve and peered into the night.
A small, lightning-laced funnel cloud touched down on the bayou not a hundred yards away. It screamed as it came closer, bearing down on the parking structure. Molinari took a moment to straighten the lifeless body of the young woman who had brought a miracle into the world.
Devlin and Zamba were just about to step out of Room Three and into the hallway when the window behind them shattered, blown out by the approaching twister. Shards of glass shotgunned into the room, but they were unaffected.
They turned to look outside, through the raw opening where the window had been. Illumination from the adjoining rooms cast a weak yellow light on the howling vortex as it tore into the parking structure across the lawn, tossing the cars around. The emergency stairwell lights short-circuited and went out.
The walls of the old clinic began shaking violently. Shingles flew around outside and other windows could be heard shattering. All over the clinic, people were screaming in panic.
The air pressure in the building underwent a drastic change, and the door was suddenly yanked from Zamba’s hand, ripped from its hinges. It spun away down the hall.
In the records room behind the nurses’ station, thousands of neat paper files were sucked from the shelves and drawn through the shattered windows, lost forever.
Nurses scrambled for the stairs, cradling newborns, as orderlies and doctors assisted the female patients. All around them, a flurry of paper and linen was being pulled through broken windows, drawn into the twister that was churning a deep trench in the lawn outside.
Devlin and Zamba were untouched by the howling chaos, and as quickly as it came the tornado moved on, carving a path into the moonless bayou.
Devlin looked around at the abandoned maternity wing and sighed. “We’ll have to flush him out the hard way,” he grumbled to Zamba.
Zamba nodded, but said nothing.
The old house by the river was perched on stilts to keep it dry from the ebb and flow of the backwater swamp. The rain had finally stopped, leaving behind an enormous mud puddle before the front steps.
Molinari stumbled out of the woods, slogged through the mud, and trudged up the wide plank stairs. The newborn was in his arms, swaddled in the bloody bed sheet.
Molinari fumbled at the doorknob and nudged the door with his knee. It creaked open as he wiped his feet the best he could.
“Quickly!” Acadia urged him, standing just inside.
He entered the house and the midwife shut the door behind him, barring them inside with a heavy oak beam.
She had already lit the front room with dozens of votive candles in preparation for his arrival, but she was expecting the mother of the child to be with him as well.
As they settled onto the sofa, Molinari caught a glimpse of the back room – an exam table with stirrups, an old white metal cabinet with patent medicines, and a laminated obstetrics poster tacked on the wall.
They sat close together and Acadia smiled at the newborn in his arms. The infant gurgled, eyes already open to the world. The midwife glanced at Molinari, apprehensive.
“And the mother?” she asked.
He sadly shook his head. Acadia crossed herself and breathed a little prayer. The baby seemed to be watching her. Acadia smiled back, and Molinari offered the infant to her. “Would you like to...?”
“Yes!” she smiled.
He placed the newborn in her arms. The child didn’t fuss, but simply gazed up at her smiling, candlelit face as she softly cooed.
“Those eyes!” Acadia whispered. “Simply divine.” She looked away, toward a room behind the fireplace.
“Rabbi Simone! Come see the child!”
Simone rushed in from the kitchen. He was a handsome, smiling young man, wearing a skullcap and the peyot side curls of an Orthodox Jew.
Simone knelt before them, smiling joyously at the new arrival, his hands held open and giving thanks to heaven.
“God’s work! God’s work!” he said with a radiant smile.
Molinari nodded, and smiled back. Indeed it was, Molinari thought. Indeed it was...
Acadia turned so that Simone could get a better look, opening the sheet to show him the child. He smiled at the infant then glanced at Molinari, still smiling, but hesitant.
“Are you sure, Rabbi?” Simone asked him.
Rabbi Jacob Molinari simply nodded. Oh, yes...
His mother had taught him that the most important thing in Judaism was the saving of a life. And after what Father Vicente nearly achieved, Molinari realized that to keep the child safe he would have to operate from within the Church, not as an outsider and certainly not as a rabbi.
The enemy was close, and he had to be even closer. As close, he thought with an ironic smile, as the Muslims say that God is to each and every one of us.
Closer than the beating of your heart.
The crucifix dagger was tucked in his waistband and it dug uncomfortably into his skin. He shifted on the sofa to ease the irritation and gazed down at his hands, bloodstained and flecked with mud.
He should wash up, he thought. For the next thirty-three years, he was going to have his hands full.