The envoys from Rome had assured Vicente that carbon dating performed at the Vatican labs confirmed the dagger to be nearly two thousand years old. A wandering knight who brought it from the Holy Land claimed to have fashioned it from an old Roman spear.
Vicente felt a surge of destiny, holding the blade in his trembling hand. From the instant he touched it, he realized that as simple as it was, it would change the future. It was the most powerful weapon in history. And when it was used, the fallout would be a rain of souls.
“Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut & nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris...”
At that moment in the hallway, Molinari looked in on them and froze, seeing the dagger in Vicente’s hand. Melissa saw him over Vicente’s shoulder, but his muddy clothes and rain-matted hair didn’t register on her. For some reason he was staring at the two of them, so she stared back. Vicente noticed that her eyes were focused on something behind him, and turned...
“Vicente! No!”
Molinari rushed into the room, horrified. Despite his predicament, Vicente smiled, seeing the look on Molinari’s face. It was the same horrified reaction that he himself had just three days earlier, before he understood what the truth was.
Vicente knew he had to act at once. He quickly stood, grabbing Melissa by the hair to stretch her neck. She was still in the throes of labor and thrashed about on the bed, squealing in alarm, but the sound was choked off and she stared at Molinari, her eyes begging for help.
Vicente pressed the dagger against her throat, glaring a warning at Molinari, and it worked. Molinari stopped short, still several feet away from them.
That was all Vicente needed. He turned to Melissa and lifted the dagger high. She fought back and tried to twist herself free, but his grip was too strong. Molinari launched himself at the mad priest as Vicente stabbed downward.
The blade plunged deep into her abdomen. Melissa gave a strangled cry of pain as Vicente yanked it out with a spurt of blood, lifting the weapon high for another strike.
Molinari slammed into him before he could bring the blade down again. The needle-sharp dagger clattered to the floor as they crashed against the nightstand, and spun away.
Molinari pinned him for a moment against the wall, but only for a moment. His feet were tangled in the bedsheet and Vicente wrested himself free.
Melissa writhed on the bed, gasping for air as she desperately clutched at her wound. Standing beside her bed, Vicente was frantically searching for the dagger, but he had no idea where it was.
It was in Molinari’s hand.
They faced each other across the room. Vicente was cornered by the larger, stronger man. With nowhere to go, he simply sat down on the bed.
Behind him, Melissa was struggling to breathe, her hand pressed against her stab wound. A dark stain of blood was spreading over her gown and the bedsheet.
“My baby!” she managed to gasp. “My baby...”
Vicente just looked at Molinari, waiting.
“You have nowhere to run, Vicente,” Molinari said.
Vicente sadly shook his head, and picked his Bible up from the floor. He opened it, looking inside.
“There is one place,” he said with a smile, and took a stiletto out of the hollowed-out Bible, snicking it open.
He stood erect, facing Molinari, and used both hands to clasp the stiletto before him, the blade pointing to heaven.
“Adios.” Go with God.
With one purposeful thrust, Father Raimundo Olberto Vicente rammed the gleaming steel shaft up under his chin and deep into his skull.
His body dropped to the floor and shuddered in death spasms, leaving Molinari and Melissa face-to-face in utter astonishment. The young woman was whimpering now, petrified, and she was bleeding out quickly. Molinari stared in anguish at the bloody disaster before him.
“No!” he whispered. “Not like this!”
He realized that the woman was dying, and that her baby might already be gone. The stab wound to her abdomen had struck dead center in her womb. He couldn’t imagine how any infant might survive such an attack, but he had to try to save it. They both did. Whether she knew it or not, it was the only thing that mattered.
Molinari hastily wrapped her in the bedsheet and helped her to her feet, and then gave her a towel from the rack by the sink to staunch her wound. He looked around, wondering what to do next. He knew he had to move her to someplace safe, but he had no idea where that might be.
Several sick people of the parish were waiting their turn to see a doctor, fidgeting in the overstuffed Naugahyde chairs in the clinic lobby. The old furnace rustled the Christmas decorations, but it failed to chase the dank chill from the air. The sick huddled with their families, flipping through a collection of dog-eared Life magazines or idly watching a rerun of President Ford’s second Christmas wish to the nation. An orderly finally came by and changed the channel on the big Sylvania console. Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon were walking through a bawdy skit wearing oversized Santa hats, and that seemed to lighten the mood.
An old man sat alone, gazing out the smudged glass doors and ignoring the TV. He was brooding as he watched the rain streak past the lights outside in the parking lot. It galled him to think that after all he had been through, from the Dust Bowl to Guadalcanal and beyond, that he was destined to drop dead in a noisy, mildewed waiting room, watching a rainstorm ruin another Christmas morning.
His view of the storm was suddenly obscured as a dark hulk approached the front doors. The doors were pushed open from the outside and Zamba Boukman stepped into the lobby.
The old man’s jaw dropped open; a giant was standing before him. New Orleans was just down the highway and the people of the parish were not unaccustomed to seeing strangers with peculiar looks pass through. But this man was something different, something altogether different.
Standing before him was a six-foot-two stranger, two hundred pounds of solid muscle, an enormous block of chiseled obsidian masquerading as human flesh. Zamba was dressed in an outfit better suited for Mardi Gras or a sun-splashed Caribbean isle. His necklace was a chain of thick black iron links.
He was born in Benin, in West Africa, and after growing up in Jamaica he was taken to the island of Saint-Dominque. His power as a voodoo priest soon became the stuff of legend, and the praise was entirely justified. Zamba Boukman was now over two hundred years old.
He smiled at the old man, but the old man didn’t return the gesture. He just stared back, and he wasn’t the only one. The entire lobby seemed to pause. For a moment, all that ailed them or caused them to fear for their lives was forgotten. Zamba had just brought them a different kind of fear, because although he was scrupulously clean, it seemed to everyone in the room that he smelled of evil.
He strode across the lobby to the reception desk, where the duty nurse sat at her typewriter, staring at him along with everyone else in the room.
“Perhaps you could help me,” he said to her.
Molinari and Melissa silently emerged from Room Three. She held the bedsheet wrapped about her, pressing the towel underneath it against her abdominal wound. Molinari held her close, helping her to walk and giving her what little comfort he could.
The hallway was thankfully empty at the moment. Behind them, Room Three had been hastily cleaned up, and Father Vicente’s body was nowhere to be seen.
An aluminum Christmas tree, lit by a slowly rotating color wheel, shimmered by the nurses’ station. The duty nurse had her nose in a magazine and her staff was busy elsewhere. She got up, rubbed her aching back, and stepped into the back office.
Molinari guided Melissa past the nurse’s station and the main staircase, toward the exit sign at the end of the hall, passing the open doors of several rooms. Patients were fast asleep in their beds, their lights down low.
He silently urged Melissa to hurry, guiding her through the exit door and down the stairwell. A scant moment later, Evelyn, the shift supervisor, and Jane, another nurse, jockeyed a gurney out of the elevator and wheeled it down the hall, searching for an empty room.
Lisa Johnson lay under the sweat-soaked sheet, pale and nervous, holding her swollen belly. She convulsed as another contraction wracked her body. Jane gripped her hand and offered a brave smile.
“This kid wants out, huh, Lisa?”
“Tell me about it!” the mother-to-be gasped. “Is my husband here?”
“He’ll be here,” Jane assured her.
Evelyn poked her head into Room Three and discovered it was empty. She caught Jane’s eye. “I guess they got that walk-in down in recovery by now.”
Jane shrugged. “Guess so.” She glanced at the bed inside. “Ain’t got no linen...”
Lisa convulsed from another strong contraction. Evelyn pointed at the storage closet across the hall, by the elevator. “Get some sheets. The sooner Mrs. Johnson’s prepped, the better.”
Jane went to the hall closet and rummaged around inside as Evelyn wheeled the gurney into Room Three. Jane followed her a moment later with a fresh set of linen, closing the door behind them.
Molinari and Melissa were huddled outside under a magnolia tree, near the exit door at the end of the maternity wing. The storm was still battering the surrounding bayou, and a fitful wind tugged at Melissa’s bedsheet. Rain-diluted blood streamed from her abdomen. She slumped against him, losing consciousness, and he slapped her cheeks to rouse her.
“Come on, Melissa! Fight!! ”
Her knees buckled in response. Suddenly, all the lights of the clinic flickered and went out. He held her up, scanning the darkness. A moment later, a low diesel rumble could be heard somewhere close by. The essential clinic lights came back on, but the main lights of the parking structure were still out.
It was just a silhouette now, set back in the trees under a cloudy, moonless sky. The emergency lights in the stairwells were the only ones that came back on. The cars were sitting in darkness; it was the perfect place to hide.
He drew the bedsheet around her, and guided her through the driving rain toward the blacked-out structure.
Jane rushed out of Room Three, leaving the door open. She was in a mad hurry to find the doctor. Lisa’s water had just broken, soaking the bed. Evelyn stayed with her, holding her hand and breathing along with her.
Jane dashed down the main staircase, past an enormous black man in Caribbean party clothes coming onto the floor. Well, that’s out of season, she thought in passing, but she had more pressing things on her mind.
Zamba reached the landing and looked up and down the hallway, debating which way to go.
“Aaaauughhhh!” Lisa cried out from Room Three.
He turned to the sound of her pain and smiled, taking a step closer, but paused as the elevator across from the main staircase quietly chimed.
The doors slid open and Devlin stepped out.