“Show him the photograph,” Teka said.
A color photo appeared on the table in front of him; Justin was so dazed that he didn’t see who had given it to him. An autopsy photo. Justin saw a nude, dark-haired woman, visible to midchest, her mouth hanging open in a face streaked with blood. Her chest was a collection of dark bruises and punctures that looked like knife wounds. Too many to count. The poor woman looked like a speared fish, her wounds gaping and fresh.
Then Justin recognized her face.
His stomach flew into his mouth, and he vomited a stream of warm water to the floor. His shaking limbs nearly threw him from his chair. Justin tried to straighten again, but he couldn’t move. His muscles were locked.
The girl in the photograph was Maritza, Caitlin’s girlfriend. Maritza, who’d called him Papi and had promised him a grandchild one day. Caitlin hadn’t even told him Maritza was dead until the memorial service had been over. Maritza had been a baby herself.
“Maritza Colón,” Dawit said. “She was selling Glow on South Beach. She received blood from Caitlin. She’s a very dead girl now, as you can see.”
“Jesus God, please help us…,” Justin whispered, still bent over the floor. His tears spilled freely as the room spun above him and beneath him. He killed Father Arturo right in front of me, Dad. He’s a monster. That was the first thing Caitlin had said when they’d had a minute alone, when his daughter had been desperate to prepare him for what he would face.
“We didn’t kill Maritza, Mr. O’Neal.” Teka’s voice cut through the fog threatening to make him faint. Justin sat up slowly in his chair, wiping spittle from his lips. He wanted to believe Teka. He did believe, somehow. Justin’s tears softened from grief to gratitude.
“But her death raises a question about you,” Dawit said. He stood up, standing over Justin. “What would you do to save your daughter’s life?”
“Anything.”
“Anything?” Too gently, Dawit cupped Justin’s chin in his hand. “Yes, you would do anything. That was the fate of beautiful, dead Maritza here. She betrayed her beloved to try to save her life, and now Caitlin is being hunted. If someone took Caitlin, how long would it take you to tell them everything you know about us? A day? An hour? Five minutes?”
Justin couldn’t think, much less answer. Dawit’s presence over him felt like a death sentence. Dawit was impossibly quick with a knife; Justin had seen that the day they’d met. The mercenary whom Dawit had killed hadn’t even seen his knife coming.
“You’ve made your point, Dawit,” Teka said.
Dawit took his seat after a last glare, and Justin exhaled with force.
“Kill me, then,” Justin said. “But not my family. They don’t know anything, except for Caitlin. You know I’m not lying. Fana told Caitlin, so let Caitlin live here with her. Let them all live here, or anywhere you say. Please.” He had convinced Holly to move to Johannesburg to keep his family as far from the colony as possible. For their protection.
The room’s silence was broken by a chuckle from one of the Africans, a harrowing sound. Justin’s family meant nothing to them.
“Be silent, please,” Dawit said. “Just go.”
Go? Justin sat frozen, confused. Will they let us go free?
Dawit waved him away. “To your room, you fool.”
“Go be with your daughter,” Teka said gently.
Justin leaped to his feet, seeking balance on weak knees. He was surprised he wasn’t given an escort, until he remembered that escape from this hall was probably impossible. Caitlin had told him that even the forest was booby-trapped.
Desperation gave Justin courage. As he passed Dawit, he leaned down for a private plea: “I’m begging you, one father to another. Caitlin wasn’t in this alone—Fana gave her the blood. Don’t destroy my family. Our children are friends. Don’t do this to your daughter.”
Dawit’s dark eyes didn’t soften. He gazed at Justin with an indifference that was worse than anger, as if Justin already didn’t exist.
Six
Jessica found her sister sitting on a low stool beyond rows of storage supply cabinets, computers, blood screen racks and tubes lighted by bright fluorescent bulbs overhead. She was shoving papers, magazines and computer files into boxes so quickly that she looked like she was late for an appointment with a moving van.
Alex didn’t look up when Jessica came in. In Alex’s lab, the world disappeared. The lab was her shrine to medicine and music, plastered with crooked posters: Bob Marley. Phoenix. Los Van Van from Cuba. African salsa played from the CD player on the counter closest to her; Alex and their mother refused to give up CDs, just as they had clung to vinyl long ago. Alex’s bad leg was splayed out to the side for comfort while she worked. Alex liked to pretend the leg didn’t bother her, but Jessica knew it did. Her sister’s limp grew worse with time.
A metal lockbox landed in Alex’s plastic crate with a thump.
“I see you heard,” Jessica said.
Alex jumped, startled. She gave Jessica a long gaze over her shoulder. “I’ve heard Caitlin crying. Saying your husband is going to kill her. Saying…he already killed someone.”
“I don’t have the facts yet.” There was no point in answering to a rumor.
“Why are they being held here, Jess?”
“The Brothers consider that their right. The O’Neals haven’t been hurt.”
“Not yet. What’s our position? Do we have one?”
Sometimes the balance between Jessica’s family and the Life Brothers felt just right, miraculously so. Not this time. Their mission needed constant tending. Was this how Esther felt in the Old Testament, married to the king?
“Dawit and I will talk after dinner,” Jessica said. “We’ll resolve it. Caitlin can probably sleep at the house with Fana. That should help.”
“We haven’t used our guest room yet,” Alex said wryly. “Her dad can sleep with us.”
Considering that Justin O’Neal had once stood and watched while a mercenary had burned Alex’s face and arms with cigarettes to try to force her to tell where the blood came from, Jessica was surprised Alex could even joke about it. But Alex wasn’t joking; she was offering the man sanctuary. Age must have mellowed her. At fifty-three, Alex’s lifelong Afro was mostly silver, with only a few stray strands of black.
“I’m not sure what we can do for him,” Jessica said. “He stole from them, Alex. With Caitlin, they would see it as naivete. It’s different with Justin.”
“Naivete that’s spreading all over the country. And Canada. Getting into the news.” Alex sighed. She suddenly cupped her palm to her ear. “Do you hear that sound, Jess? That’s the sound of the shit hitting the fan,” Alex said. “They found a security breach with Justin, and then Caitlin’s picked up with Glow in Seattle—two hours from here. This is the end of the mission. Me, I’m packing some research I’d rather keep closer to home. Not that it’ll do any good, if someone wants to come take it.”
“Nobody’s taking anything from anybody,” Jessica said. “I have the blood, too. And so does Fana. Not to mention your own husband, Alex. And Dawit could change yours any time. It’s not just theirs anymore.”
As usual Alex, as stubborn as their mother, didn’t address the offer for the blood. At least Alex had finally started using herself as a test subject, injecting drops of blood even if she would not agree to Dawit’s Life ceremony. So far, ironically, the blood had not helped heal Alex’s leg.
“If we have to, Lucas and I can go out on our own,” Alex said. “We’ll find our own way to work with the blood. That’s what we’ve always planned, one day. You have a bigger fish to fry, Jessica. Her name is Fana, and she’s plenty pissed off.”
Before Jessica could say anything, a voice surprised them from the rear doorway. “I knew I’d find you in here talking foolishness,” their mother said.
Bea’s cane clack-clacked across the floor. Perspiration shone on her forehead.
“Mom, for God’s sake…why did you walk all the way
over here?” Jessica said.
It was a long walk from the Big House to the lab, over a knoll without a paved path, and Beatrice Jacobs Gaines had relied on a cane since breaking her hip on her back porch steps five years ago. A heart attack last year had sapped the last of her spryness, despite Alex’s care. Bea had enough trouble navigating the kitchen nowadays, much less outdoors.
Her mother’s deterioration pained Jessica. This frail old woman had once been the belle of Gadsden County, Florida, with knockout legs and a face Jessica only saw glimpses of beneath its canopy of wrinkles. Bea was eighty-four now, taking daily pills for everything from arthritis to high blood pressure, and she wouldn’t accept a drop of her own daughter’s blood.
Sometimes Jessica wondered if her mother had dementia, too. Couldn’t she see she was dying, day by day? Why choose man-made medications above a gift from God?
“Alex, don’t you even think about going off by yourself,” Bea said.
Jessica shared a secret glance with her sister. They could not talk freely in front of Bea. She held onto everything tighter since Daddy Gaines died, especially her ideas.
“Nobody’s going anywhere, Mom,” Jessica said. “We’re just talking.”
But it was too late to cover for Alex. Their mother had heard enough.
Leaning hard on her cane, Bea walked six painstaking steps to Alex and stared her eldest daughter earnestly in the eye. “Baby, let them tend to their house. They tend to their house, we tend to ours. That’s what keeps the peace. You’re not going anywhere on your own, you and Lucas. You wouldn’t last. That’s crazy talk.”
Alex’s face itched for a rebuttal, but Jessica gave her sister a gentle, appeasing smile. Leave it alone. Any arguments sent Bea into a frenzy, and there was enough arguing ahead.
Jessica still had to talk to Fana, after all, even if she couldn’t think of what to say. How could she condemn in her daughter what she would have done herself?
Fana was their colony’s only common ground—the meeting place. Compromises would be brokered. Hard choices would be made. And with the battle ahead, Jessica couldn’t spare any energy to referee between Alex and Bea. Not tonight.
Besides, she agreed with her mother this time: Their only safety was in numbers. That was the reason she had compromised so much already.
“Jessica?” Alex said to Jessica, ignoring Bea. Her eyes were solemn. “Look after Fana. She’s mad her friend is locked up. That situation needs to change. Soon.”
Jessica nodded. It was dangerous to upset Fana. They all knew that.
“Alexis Jacobs Shepard…,” Bea said, never one to allow a subject to be changed beneath her feet. “Don’t you come to my dinner table spreading worry. I don’t want you riling up that hothead redneck, Cal. Sometimes when people think the sky is falling, it’s really only rain.”
I hope so, Mom, Jessica thought, remembering the shame she had seen in Dawit’s eyes. But just ask Noah: Once the rain starts, sometimes it goes on for forty days and forty nights.
“Simpering fool,” Dawit Wolde muttered in Amharic, rubbing his temples. Justin O’Neal’s rambling had given him a rare headache. “He should have died with his father.”
His voice whispered against the walls of the Council Hall.
“Agreed,” Melaku said. “You know where I stand.”
“And me,” Berhanu said. “I’d never have allowed him among us.”
“Perhaps it was a mistake,” Teka said, forever placating. “But mistakes can be rectified.”
“Yes,” Dawit said. “Preferably with the point of a dagger.”
But Dawit did not enjoy killing, even if he wished he did. Caitlin O’Neal’s frightened eyes still haunted him. And how could they blame Justin O’Neal for his mortal nature? Mortals would choose any course but death. He and his Brothers would have been no different, once.
Dawit longed for the time he’d lived by the Covenant he and his Brothers had once sworn their lives to: No one must know. No one must join. We are the Last.
He and his Brothers had changed too much, too fast.
After five hundred years in Lalibela, ensconced within a brotherhood of fifty-nine men, only a fraction of his Life Brothers had reassembled themselves on the shores of the New World. No maze of caverns protected them from the eyes of others, as it had in their sacred home. No underground fortress walls proclaimed their history in murals and secured their kind from the world of curious mortals above. Dear Khaldun was not here to swear fealty to, nor Khaldun’s Covenant. All of it, gone. And what were they creating in its place?
Their tallest brother, Teferi, strode from the hallway into the meeting room, snuffing the last chuckles. “If this gathering represents hope for mankind’s sick and unfortunate, then God help them all,” Teferi said, taking a seat. “Justin is terrorized. And you reek of hypocrisy, Dawit. You should be ashamed for the way you’ve treated them both. As if you’re not guilty of worse.”
The colony had been created when Dawit had disobeyed Khaldun, refusing to leave his wife and first daughter behind two decades ago. He had done worse than share his Living Blood with Jessica—he had invoked the Ceremony to generate it in her veins, breaking their colony’s Covenant with Khaldun. In doing so, he had created a child in Jessica’s womb with gifts that went beyond his own. And he had fractured his Brotherhood in Lalibela, scattering them apart.
“The O’Neals are Teferi’s descendants,” Teka said. “Even Dawit would agree that one’s children cannot always be controlled.”
Teferi nodded. “It’s not a decision for this table. I call for a colony-wide vote.”
Berhanu shook his head. “Why should we vote? We are the majority.”
“My vote certainly does not stand with yours, Berhanu,” Teferi said.
And mine is uncertain, Dawit thought, although he tried to hold the thought close. Despite how he felt about Justin O’Neal, Jessica and Fana must share his decision. Hell was waiting for him across the path, at home.
Berhanu’s jowls shook with anger. “I will not have our blood stolen. Never again. Why do we sit here awaiting disaster? Are we simply mad, or has it been too long since one of us was left in a cage to bleed for the pleasure of others?”
Dawit felt his heart surge in agreement. He and Berhanu had spoken many times about the blood mission’s risks not only to them but to Fana, as well. Dawit never doubted Teka’s wisdom, but he heeded Berhanu’s, too. Berhanu was a warrior, and a battle was on the horizon. There were more signs all the time.
In the past six months, there had been four abductions; the first in Vancouver, British Columbia, another in Ann Arbor, one in San Francisco, and the last in Miami. The first victim, who had turned up dead two weeks after being reported missing by his mother, had been an insignificant drug dealer with no connections to anyone in Dawit’s circle—hardly worth noticing. Dawit would not have noted his killing at all, except for the web that connected him to the rest.
A biology professor at the University of Michigan. An artist with a Haight-Ashbury studio. A social worker in South Beach. All of them abducted and then murdered. Each abduction higher in the chain, skillfully reaching closer to the supplies they risked their freedom for, to sell on the streets in the so-called Underground Railroad.
Somewhere, an enemy was too close for comfort. Much too close to home.
“Tell us what happened in Seattle, Dawit.” Teka sounded uncommonly weary.
In silence, his brothers turned to him, waiting. Now, it comes, Dawit thought.
“Aloud, please. Your thoughts are disordered,” Teferi said, crossing his arms. “A guilty conscience, I hope. Poor Caitlin tells a ghastly tale of a priest with a broken neck.”
Dawit’s headache amplified, ringing in his ears. With such sudden unison, his brothers’ mental probes were uncomfortable. “I regret his death,” Dawit said. “I bear the responsibility.”
Dawit felt a soothing mental hum; his brothers understood. Sometimes innocents died.
“What went wrong???
? Teka said.
“My mind art failed me.”
Teka nodded. “That was my biggest fear when you left. The art is too new to you.”
He might have succeeded if Teferi had been with him. Teferi was far more advanced, but the Brothers had decided that Teferi should be excluded from surveillance involving Caitlin. He was too attached to her, by blood.
ANOTHER TRAGIC BIT OF NONSENSE, Teferi’s voice niggled in Dawit’s head, purposely amplified for effect.
Dawit ignored Teferi and went on. “I knew someone was waiting for her…”
As soon as Dawit had stepped into the hallway of the shelter in Seattle, he had known that he and Caitlin O’Neal had not been alone. The sensation had been like slipping his head through an invisible film, a faint pulse between his ears. Someone had been hiding ahead of him, no farther than fifteen feet from where he’d stood. The stranger had a gun ready in his hand.
Dawit had known all of these things in the space of a single breath. The certainty had not been of his eyes, nor his ears, nor any sense he had relied upon until only a few short years ago. Dawit’s perceptions had invaded the other man’s, sluicing words and images that had nearly drowned his own thoughts. Myriad perceptions had made Dawit’s heart race.
A nickel-plated revolver. A bloodied white robe. A syringe.
But something had gone wrong.
Dawit finished: “All I knew for certain was that he had a gun, and he waited for Caitlin. Nothing more. I should not have gone alone. I was vain.”
If only he could have brought Teka! There was no one among them more masterful at thought translation, but Teka never ventured from the colony. His demanding meditation schedule alone made trips outside difficult. Teka had brought much-needed weaponry from Lalibela, but Dawit knew he would be reluctant to put the weapons to use.
“This priest had a gun?” Teka said. “I find that significant.”
“This nation is armed. Their children shoot each other at their schools,” Dawit said. “He said the gun was for protection. You would do well to model him.”