“Where is she?” Dawit said, rage shaking his jaw. He returned Mahmoud’s Arabic, since their conversation was unfit for the ears of strangers. Mahmoud had cost him one daughter, in Miami. “If you have touched—”
“I will kill you in pieces and see you buried forever,” Teferi finished, also in Arabic.
“Salam, Teferi,” Mahmoud said, not hiding his amusement. Peace. “You’ve grown brittle since last I saw you. Be careful you don’t shoot yourself in the balls, Brother.”
“There’s only one pair of balls in his sights…Brother,” Dawit said. “Where are they?”
“How crass you’ve become here,” Mahmoud said. “No invitation to join you?”
Suddenly, the long-absent waitress swooped to their table, stabbing Mahmoud with an openly wary look. She held her Bic pen toward him the way she might a weapon. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said to Dawit. “Is this man bothering you?”
Her lips curled over the words “this man.” Between Mahmoud’s olive skin, dark beard and white skullcap, he must have looked like a Wanted poster in her terrorist-addled eyes. The woman’s western twang reminded Dawit of different times. This nation’s fear of the Arab had replaced fear of American blacks indeed.
Dawit grinned at her. “This man is my best and oldest friend.” He wished it had been a lie.
The waitress didn’t seem comforted, but she was happy to let it rest, her duty done. “Y’all ready to order?”
“One patty melt, one grilled cheese,” Dawit said quickly. “And…American apple pie for my dear friend here. Not too hot. I’d hate to see him get hurt.”
Mahmoud’s eyes churned. He might kill the woman for her impudence, or to spite Dawit. Not to mention at least fifteen other diners. Dawit could not sanction endangering so many.
“Please,” Dawit said to Mahmoud with a dolphin’s friendly smile. “Sit with us.”
YOU ARE MAD! Teferi said, squirming.
Dawit softly nudged Teferi under the table. Be still, he tried to say.
Mahmoud glared down at Teferi, waiting for him to make room in the narrow booth across from Dawit. Teferi finally slid aside, lips pursed, sitting far against the diner wall, where rows of absurd, elaborately carved cuckoo clocks hung above his head.
Mahmoud had been Dawit’s brother long before they had imagined a future spanning centuries. Dawit had known Mahmoud before he’d met Khaldun, when they’d been traders between Abyssinia and India. Dawit had married Mahmoud’s sister, Rana, only to watch both his new wife and his first son die during the rigors of childbirth. When he and Mahmoud had met in the 1500s, a man had lived a long life if he’d survived to thirty-five. For a soldier, life was often snuffed out by eighteen. At thirty, he and Mahmoud had been old men when they’d accepted the Living Blood.
“I feel unwelcome still,” Mahmoud told Dawit. “Tell Teferi to drop his gun to the floor.”
“You’ll not take mine,” Dawit vowed.
“I didn’t ask for yours,” Mahmoud said. “But Teferi might maim me with a sneeze.”
Teferi didn’t move.
Drop your gun, Teferi, Dawit strained to tell him. Don’t make him wait.
Teferi made a soft growling noise at the base of his throat. Then his gun fell to the floor with a ping against the iron table leg. His breathing sped out of frustration and anger.
CAITLIN IS SURELY DEAD. AND WHAT OF FANA? came Teferi’s anguished thought.
Be calm, Dawit answered. I know Mahmoud’s ways. I will finish this.
Mahmoud leaned forward until his face was only inches from Dawit’s. He smelled of home, too; incense of myrrh, frankincense and a blend of other oils from the Lalibela Colony. “I’m lazy in my mind arts, Dawit, but I’m not deaf,” Mahmoud said. “I’ve been practicing, too. If you know me, you know not to antagonize me.”
Dawit did not know Mahmoud. His very presence meant Dawit had misjudged him. After the negotiations with the Lalibela Council, Dawit had thought he and his Brothers had reached an accord. He and Mahmoud were not friends, certainly. No more. But not this.
There would be bloodshed, Dawit realized. There was no avoiding it.
But he must try. “She’s the kindest child you will ever meet, Mahmoud,” Dawit said.
“She did not seem so kind to Kaleb as he died in a pool of his own blood.”
Such amnesia! Dawit might have laughed, except that laughing would inflame Mahmoud. “Kaleb burned me alive and tried to kill Fana and her mother,” he said. “Would you have her sacrifice herself on Kaleb’s wishes?”
“Nor, I imagine, did she seem kind to six hundred souls in the Caribbean on the night of a certain storm,” Mahmoud said. “Did you think Khaldun said nothing of it?”
Dawit had never understood how Teka could believe that Fana had somehow been responsible for Hurricane Beatrice, the deadly storm that had killed so many in the West Indies. How could a child summon a hurricane? But if Khaldun himself had said so, he had to reconsider. Jessica had always insisted that Fana had made it rain a week before the hurricane, in the midst of Botswana’s dry season. Perhaps nothing to do with Fana was impossible, and everyone knew it except him.
To him, Fana was still the girl who had sat on his knee for hours at a time, smiling at him.
Angry talk about Fana had subsided in Lalibela, according to Kelile, who had moved to the Washington colony within the past year. Kelile reported that there had been long debates about Fana in the chaos after Khaldun’s departure, but most of the Life Brothers were scattering and mating with mortals themselves. As if waking from a long nap.
But Mahmoud had tried to kill Fana twice before—once when she’d still been in Jessica’s womb, and once when she was three. If Mahmoud had been as zealous this time as he had been the last time Dawit had seen him, God only knew what horrors might have befallen Fana.
“What have you done to her, Mahmoud?” Dawit whispered.
“You think too highly of me, Dawit,” Mahmoud said. “I’ve abandoned most of my principles, and the rest are a nuisance. I would prefer to be attending my own affairs rather than counseling a Brother who has grown bafflingly incapable of protecting his own. What happened to the practical friend I knew?”
“He has a gun trained to your belly,” Dawit said. “Where is Fana? I won’t ask again.”
“Ask Sanctus Cruor,” Mahmoud said.
Teferi’s breath caught—a gasp—or Dawit would have thought he’d heard Mahmoud wrong.
“We killed them in Adwa,” Dawit said. “And in Rome. To their last man.”
Mahmoud raised an eyebrow. “Did we?”
The waitress returned. A plate of apple pie landed before Mahmoud. None of them moved as she delivered their food. No one answered when she asked if she could get them anything else. All Dawit could manage was a small shake of his head. He had never expected to hear the words Sanctus Cruor bound to Fana’s name.
But in Seattle, he had seen the raised image on the medallion! A cross with a large teardrop of blood at its center. He had seen it in the priest’s mind, not just in his own memories.
During his last call home, Teka and Jessica had told him about the vanished corpse in Seattle. If Mahmoud was telling the truth, Fana was in greater peril than he had known. And with so many Brothers away searching for Fana, the colony was exposed. Jessica and the others needed to move to the shelters or leave the colony altogether. Not tomorrow. Tonight.
AND I MOCKED YOU, Teferi’s thought came, sorrowful.
“Apparently, they have found the Blood they seek,” Mahmoud said. “Some of them wake as we do. Look at that priest! We do not know how they obtained Blood and learned the Ceremony, and we do not know how many of their sect remain. Are they a few, or are they an army? Do they still hold sway with the Vatican? We are, you see, quite ignorant, or have been made to be. But Sanctus Cruor still lives. It never died.”
The priests who had created Sanctus Cruor believed themselves to be the only true guardians of Christ’s blood, and no act was too heinous in
their mission to collect what remained of their Savior on Earth. They burned villages alive in search of immortals who might wake, to have the Blood. Their influence among Vatican officials had steered Italy toward war with Ethiopia, their search carried out in the guise of conquest.
The decisive victory in Adwa and the expulsion of the Italians had been the first time an African nation had repelled a European army, a feat unto itself. But that had not been the end.
After the war had been won on Ethiopian soil, Dawit, Mahmoud and Berhanu had traveled abroad: Istanbul. Gdansk. And Rome, of course. Dawit had been assigned to slay a Vatican official the Searchers had identified as a Sanctus Cruor collaborator hoping for power and immortality. Two others had died in Rome that day, at Mahmoud’s hand.
Sanctus Cruor was supposed to have been finished. To a man, Khaldun had said when he’d finally emerged from his meditations two years later.
Now Dawit understood the torture. The murders. It was Sanctus Cruor’s way.
“How did you learn this?” Dawit said.
“A Brother sent them to you, Dawit,” Mahmoud said. “He never agreed with the Lalibela Council’s vote to allow you to distribute the Blood. The priest who died in Seattle is surely Sanctus Cruor. I wager your little colony is not far from where he was found.”
“Who would betray his own?” Dawit said. “Who would be coward enough to sell us to our enemy rather than take us himself?”
Mahmoud hesitated, his face pained. He was silent.
Dawit’s throat locked. Jessica already believed Mahmoud was a monster because of the horrors he had committed against their children and her sister, but those actions had been in service to the Covenant, not out of malice or cruelty. Dawit would not know what to think if Mahmoud had sent Sanctus Cruor to him.
Dawit’s hand holding his gun went rigid. “If it is you, Brother, our talking ends now.”
Mahmoud shook his head. “Salam, Dawit. Not me. Negash.”
Grief overwhelmed anger, but it was tinged with relief. Dawit believed Mahmoud; he thought he could feel the truth of his words in the gentle murmuring of his thoughts, not unsettled with lies. Negash! He had been one of Khaldun’s most diligent pupils in meditation. What had Sanctus Curor offered Negash?
“Did you think there would be no consequences, Dawit?” Mahmoud said, almost gently.
“Of course I knew,” Dawit said. He stared at his plate of cooling food.
“Then you shouldn’t look so surprised, Brother. And I come bearing congratulations: According to Negash, your daughter is to be married.”
Dawit’s heart froze. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t toy with him about Fana,” Teferi said. “Have decency, Mahmoud.”
Mahmoud shrugged, discovering the dessert before him. He plunged his finger into the heart of the pie and tasted. “Scalding,” he said. “And you gave specific instructions.”
Dawit jabbed Mahmoud with his foot. “Tell me about Fana.”
Even if Mahmoud had come as a counselor, a kick was a taunt to him. “Tread gently, Dawit,” Mahmoud said.
Dawit didn’t blink. “My patience has been epic. I must be kindred to Christ after all.”
If they must shed each other’s blood tonight, so be it.
AND WHO ELSE IN THIS PLACE WILL SUFFER FOR YOUR MUTUAL VANITY? Teferi’s voice said. I PREFER NOT TO SPEND THE NIGHT IN JAIL OR A MORGUE. IF MAHMOUD COMES AS A FRIEND, GIVE HIM A BERTH TO PROVE HIS FRIENDSHIP.
Mahmoud half-smiled. “I was too slow to catch some of that, Teferi, but the gist tells me you’re a wiser man than when I knew you.”
“We have all changed,” Teferi said. “New times compelled it.”
Dawit softened his voice. “Tell me about Fana, Mahmoud.”
“Sanctus Cruor is on a holy mission to find her,” Mahmoud said, avoiding his eyes. “Teka and the Brothers who followed you here aren’t the only ones who consider the girl divine. But Khaldun misled us.”
“Misled us how?” Dawit said.
“Fana was not the only one born with the Blood,” Mahmoud said. “There is another.”
“How?” Teferi said, sagging in the booth. His face was mystified. Crestfallen.
“Sanctus Cruor,” Mahmoud said. “They manipulated their Blood in ways Khaldun would not have sanctioned. A child was created—the child of a woman they passed the Blood to while pregnant. She gave birth to a boy who came into the world much as your child did.”
Dawit never would have passed Jessica his blood if he had known she was pregnant, for fear of the Ceremony’s unknown effects on a fetus. Fetuses did not share blood with their mothers, so when Jessica’s heart had stopped during the Ceremony, a fetus might simply have died in the womb even after he’d injected Jessica with blood. Instead, Fana’s tiny unborn body had been rejuvenated as a part of her mother, her dead limbs brought back to life before she was born.
Mahmoud went on. “Sanctus Cruor considers Fana to be his rightful mate, according to writings they adhere to, something about ‘mates immortal born.’ It has the ring of Greek myth: Hera and Zeus, or the Yorubas’ Obatala and Odudua. I’m no student of Christianity, but their text is some sort of Apocrypha. It is not from any of the eighty-one books in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, and it certainly was never approved at Nicea. I have never seen it, but Negash believes the Sanctus Cruor document. Negash sends his apologies for any pain he has brought to you. He is a true believer, I think.”
An apology did nothing for Dawit now, but he was glad his Brother retained that much honor, at least. “We were all true believers once,” Dawit said. “We believed in Khaldun.”
“Yes, some of us more than others,” Mahmoud said. He pushed the apple pie away from him, toward Dawit. “You see what came of that.”
No one must know. No one must join. No women in the colony. No race of immortals to multiply ungoverned, ruling over mankind. Khaldun’s wisdom was clearer each day.
“When was the other child supposedly born?” Teferi said.
“Fifty years ago,” Mahmoud said. “In Italy. Perhaps Khaldun knew, perhaps he did not. In any case, your idolization of Fana would seem misplaced, Teferi. The boy came first.”
“Born into monstrosity,” Teferi scoffed.
Mahmoud glanced at Dawit over his paper napkin. “And what does that make Fana?”
Dawit blinked. “My child. My only one.”
Teferi’s thoughts crashed through Dawit: POLICE ARE COMING. THREE.
Teferi’s eyes motioned left, and Dawit turned around to gaze through the picture window. He saw a parking lot lighted only by the diner windows. Two sheriff’s cruisers had pulled up in the darkness. A trucker spoke to three deputies animatedly, gesturing inside. The deputies wore cowboy hats, a scene out of a movie western.
Almost simultaneously, the trucker and three police officers met Dawit’s eyes through the glass. The deputies were young, no doubt overzealous and easily frightened. The worst luck.
Mahmoud followed Dawit’s eyes. “A nest of pests,” he muttered.
Dawit slid his gun back inside his jeans. “We must leave.”
TOO LATE, Teferi said. LET ME WORK ON THEM, I BEG YOU.
The door jangled, and the three deputies were inside in a carefully spaced procession, only yards from the table. Trying to flee would be futile. Two of them, the ones hanging back a few steps, already had their hands floating comfortably close to their weapons, holsters unlatched. Dawit kept his hand on the butt of his gun. If they couldn’t flee, he should draw. Mahmoud would follow his lead, and their problem would be solved.
“Work on them how?” Dawit asked Teferi aloud, in Arabic. “To influence them?”
Teferi nodded, looking uncertain, and Dawit’s spirits fell. Was faith in Teferi their only hope of avoiding arrest, or worse?
EASE YOUR FACE. SMILE. I’LL WORK ON THEM. KEEP MAHMOUD CALM. Teferi’s smile was congenial, but not enough to compensate for Mahmoud’s hostile scowl.
With his best grin, Dawit released his gun. He s
lowly moved both of his hands to the tabletop and folded them in a docile pose.
Mahmoud’s eyes mooned as if he thought Dawit mad. Then, slowly, Mahmoud’s hand retreated from his pocket and drummed on the tabletop. Mahmoud smirked.
“Help you, Officers?” Dawit said in his easygoing American accent, second nature by now.
EASY WORK
Mahmoud’s projection was clumsy and full of noise, but Dawit heard his meaning.
We will try another way, Dawit tried to tell him with his eyes.
Dawit held his smile steady for the deputy standing over their table, whose tag identified him as Sgt. Hayes. His face was Nordic and square-jawed. He was only about twenty-six, but he was the eldest of the three and carried himself with confidence and experience. This one had seen combat, Dawit realized. A military reservist. He wore a wedding ring.
It would be a shame if he died over nothing.
“Everything all right at this table?” Sgt. Hayes said. He scanned each of their eyes, but his gaze fell on Mahmoud. To Sgt. Hayes, Mahmoud looked like a bad memory from Baghdad.
Mahmoud returned his gaze, not blinking.
“Can I see your identification?” Sgt. Hayes said. He spoke to Mahmoud and no one else.
Dawit’s heart caught. If Mahmoud reached into his jacket, he would bring out his gun.
“I don’t understand,” Dawit said, his tone steady. “We’re just sitting here talking, Officer. Is this some kind of profiling?” The word made Sgt. Hayes’s lips twitch.
Sgt. Hayes and Mahmoud grappled with their eyes. Sgt. Hayes’s fingers fanned out across his hip, looking for his holster. Was Teferi’s mental work entirely useless?
Remembering his white-haired disguise, Dawit engaged the deputy as an elder. “Son, excuse my friend,” Dawit went on, his tone almost jovial. “You think he’s looking at you in a disrespectful way, and I understand that. He has an attitude. He’s a first-class asshole, in fact. He was my student at Yale, and he was an asshole then, too.”