My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

  Teacake sat on the opposite bed, grooming himself with one dainty paw raised. Yes, Dawit reminded himself as he glanced at the cat, he had done this before. He could do it again.

  Jessica’s pulse was low, only sixty, the monitor said.

  “… The blood flows without end …”

  He did not have time for hesitation. Already, the proprietor had investigated the room once, probably because of Jessica’s screams. He must finish this and check out at the first morning light, when Jessica and Kira would be forever awake.

  His hand still unsteady, Dawit grasped the readied syringe. He raised his other palm to Jessica’s cheek and touched it. Already, her skin felt clammy. He rubbed his hand across her face, her jaw, her chin, until it rested on her throat, which he touched with loving gentleness.

  “A short sleep, my love. My life,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her lips.

  Then, as if electrocuted, he seized the appropriate spots on Jessica’s throat and squeezed with all his might.

  His own heartbeat was a roar in his ears. He stared hard at the pulse monitor, waiting for the number to begin to drop.

  Even an unconscious body fought, he learned to his horror. Jessica’s entire frame tensed, and her mouth dropped open to gasp for air. He expected to see her eyes open next; if that happened, he would be forced to let her go. Mercifully, her eyes remained closed and she slept still. Her body itself, deprived of oxygen, was acting upon instinct.

  And her heart was quickening, not slowing.

  Dawit felt a cramp in his hand, but he pressed on, making certain no air could pass through her throat. Perspiration dripped into his eyes, momentarily blinding him. One minute passed. More.

  At long last, Dawit saw between blinks, the monitor indicated that her heartbeat was slowing. He lowered the hypodermic to Jessica’s exposed forearm, ready to plunge.

  Forty beats per minute, the monitor said. Thirty-five.

  She was dying. She was truly dying. Jessica’s face was changing colors, literally beginning to glow a purple shade. Beneath her brown skin, her face was bright red.

  Thirty beats. Twenty-six.

  Dawit gasped, longing to release her. How much time had passed? Why was death so slow? How had he subjected himself to this utterly inhuman torture?

  Twenty beats. Eighteen.

  “You are fighting, Jessica … For God’s sake, don’t …”

  It was an eternity before the monitor dropped to twelve beats per minute. Then, ten. Then, at last, five.

  Dawit could not wait for the monitor to show a zero. Her heart would stop a few seconds before the crude device could record it. Still holding her throat in his death grip, Dawit jabbed the needle into his wife’s arm and pushed the plunger, exactly as he’d done with Teacake. His voice shook.

  “The blood is the vessel for Life. The blood flows without end, as a river through the Valley of Death.”

  When Dawit released Jessica, the monitor at last read zero.

  He stared at it, forgetting to breathe.

  Zero.

  “What have I done?” he wondered aloud, collapsing against the bed as his legs folded beneath him. He could not bear to look at her face. He had killed her. And now, he must wait. How long? Two hours? Three? Even more? From person to person, it varied. He could not attempt the Ritual on Kira until he knew Jessica’s own passage was safe.

  Dawit sobbed. He stared at his own hands as if they were covered in blood. “What have I done?” he asked again, and there was no answer except the squeal of a saxophone from the radio.

  Teacake jumped from the bed. He rubbed against Dawit, purring. Dawit clung to the cat and stroked his fur, holding the animal as if for dear life.

  57

  There were a host of reasons Alexis Jacobs was dying in Miami as a team of surgeons barked orders over her and injected her with life-saving drugs she would have been intimately familiar with if she’d been conscious to see the procedure.

  She was hemorrhaging badly. That was the first thing. Her heart was distressed. Her body, still traumatized from the fall, was too weak to withstand the shock of surgery.

  But the deeper reasons had nothing to do with physiology.

  Alexis knew that Bea had been keeping things from her, but it was only a few hours before surgery, when she was semiconscious and most people assumed she couldn’t understand what was going on around her, that she lost her will to live.

  Bea’s friend Randall Gaines, talking to a nurse, had finally explained why Jessica had not come to visit in at least two days. Jessica was missing.

  But it was worse than that, even. As it turned out, the police thought David was the one who had pushed Alex off her balcony. They thought David had killed Jessica’s friend Peter. And David was missing, too, presumably chasing Jessica.

  The most unbelievable news had been uttered in a low tone: Jessica’s empty van had been found, the windows shot out. Her baby sister and little niece might be dead.

  She would have shaken off the tidings as fantasies conjured up in her semiconsciousness except for the simple fact of her mother’s absence. Bea, who had been at her side for days, had been gone for several hours. Even when Alex’s eyes were closed and she couldn’t see, she knew it. Her mother wasn’t there. And only a firestorm of tragedy could be keeping her away.

  Alexis had told herself she would try to hang on for her mother, because God only knew what she must be going through. But when a body is ready to die, it’s hard to will it not to. It takes a kind of energy some people don’t possess, and even people who can muster it have to focus, sometimes for hours on end. For two hours, Alexis had been focused.

  But now, her focus and her energy were slipping fast.

  Because, the truth was, the world that was waiting for her after all her fighting wasn’t a world she wanted any more to do with. It was a world without her sister and Kira. It was a world filled with uncertainty at best, and heartbreak at most. So, even thinking of poor Bea, escape was a welcome blessing.

  “We’re losing her,” Alexis heard a voice say. She knew the voice. Victor Dunn. Victor Dunn, who barely passed anatomy, the one everyone had nicknamed The Resident from Hell, was on the surgical team operating on her? Lord help her now.

  “Adrenaline,” another voice, an unfamiliar voice, said.

  Adrenaline. They must be desperate. This was really going to be it, this time. There would be no going back. And if Jessica and Kira were gone, she’d see them on the other side.

  That was when something happened that Alexis would forever describe as a vision. Not a dream. It was a place she visited, something she witnessed for herself from a shelter in her psyche. She was standing beside Jessica, but they weren’t dead. They were in bright sunlight. There was a little girl with Jessica. She was sure of it. And Bea, standing behind them. Alexis and Jessica were wearing white. And they were standing before a throng of people, the most black people Alexis had ever seen gathered in one place. And the people were smiling. It was a sea of smiles against dark, beautiful skin.

  And she could hear music, the most lyrical harmony of human voices she had ever heard, a praise sung in a lovely language that wasn’t English. Zulu, she knew somehow. A sound full of hope. And Alexis was healing people. She didn’t know how she knew. She just did.

  What she didn’t know was that, hundreds of miles away in a motel room outside New Orleans, her sister was having the exact same vision and gathering the same resolve to live, but under very different circumstances. The sisters’ souls touched.

  A great peace settled over Alexis, because she’d seen herself somewhere she’d always wanted to be, doing something she’d always wanted to do, and she realized it was all within her grasp. All she had to do was fight. Just a while longer. Life was something worth having, after all.

  “Sinus rhythm. We got her back,” Alex heard a voice say.

  But Alex didn’t need to hear that to know her heart was beating fine.

  58

  “Here’s an obsc
ure one that goes way back for you real aficionados,” the announcer on the radio said. “The Jazz Brigade, a group out of Chicago, with a song recorded in nineteen twenty-six that George Gershwin credited as the most influential of its day: ‘Forever Man.’”

  Then, Dawit heard the sound of his own aged clarinet. Lester’s piano. Al’s banjo. Cleve’s trumpet. A seventy-year-old memory, music played by an ensemble of dead musicians, and he was hearing it here, of all places. And now, of all times.

  Dawit looked at the clock glowing lime green from the television set. It was midnight. Though it was relatively early, Dawit interpreted the song as a sign that he could peek over the edge of the bed at Jessica’s pulse monitor. Before he had a chance to read the tiny digital display, his heart melted inside him.

  Jessica’s chest was gently rising and falling as she slept.

  Rising to his knees, he clasped her hand and kissed it. Then, her neck. Then, both of her covered breasts, burying his face in the fledgling warmth of her bosom. He had done it. She was still his. He had preserved the first half of his family.

  Sixty-five beats per minute, her pulse monitor said.

  Dawit stood, stretching his legs, and leaned over the bed to examine the second monitor he had attached to Kira. His daughter’s pulse was slower, only fifty beats per minute, and felt weak to his touch. Her breathing sounded harsh, and her poor chest was fluttering. The medicine might be complicating her asthma. He must work on her now, or she would die from the Dalmane alone.

  Now, the most difficult part of his task.

  The telephone in the motel office was ringing. Lou Reed was still there, packing up his magazines and paperwork to go home to his wife in the two-bedroom house they’d built only a few yards behind the motel. His hours were noon to midnight, and he didn’t like to work a moment before or past.

  Lou picked up his telephone, hoping it wasn’t some Johnny-come-lately calling for directions. He wanted to hit the sack.

  “I-Ten Inn,” he answered.

  Lou barely recognized his brother-in-law’s voice. When he’d talked to Craig at least three hours ago, he’d sounded half asleep. Now, he sounded like someone had set him on fire.

  “Holy Jesus, Lou, you and Glo be careful,” Craig wheezed.

  Must be news about the license tag on the Plymouth. Lou’s skin pricked. “What’s going on? We onto something?”

  “Hell, yeah. He’s wanted for murder, and they say the woman and kid have been kidnapped. He’s armed, Lou. Don’t go near that room again. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you in the ass.”

  “Well…” For a second, Lou was speechless. This was like something out of America’s Most Wanted. “Is anybody coming?”

  “Only the fucking cavalry,” Craig said. “Five minutes. You get home to Glo. I just called over there. Make sure she’s okay.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Lou said, still stunned. He remembered the black guy’s eyes, the way he’d smiled as cordial as could be. “You just never know about people, do you?”

  “Cut the philosophizing, man, and get home to my sister.”

  Kira’s throat was so delicate, strangling her with his oversized adult’s hand felt like a crime against all nature. Dawit had steeled himself, remembering his ordeal with Jessica, but this was something else again. When Kira’s body stiffened beneath his grip, Dawit’s layers of self-preservation peeled away and he felt himself shaking all over. The syringe in his hand trembled so violently that he could barely clasp it between his fingers. A droplet of blood spilled from the raised needle, too soon, and rolled a path of crimson across his daughter’s forearm.

  This was too, too familiar. Like Rosalie.

  Goodbye, Daddy.

  Kira’s pulse monitor, unlike Jessica’s, plunged steadily. It didn’t linger as her heart fought for life. Her child’s heart lacked either the strength or the will to resist him.

  Sixteen beats, the monitor read. Twelve beats.

  “I love you, Duchess …” Dawit whispered through tears.

  He waited for his daughter to die.

  59

  Jessica’s new life began unexpectedly, and very badly.

  She awoke with a paralyzing headache, one that hurt her crown and temples so much that she almost made a sound. Her mouth was dry. And her arms and legs were tingling beneath her skin, as if she could feel the delicate streams of her own blood tickling through her veins. She was fully aware of the texture of every article of clothing she wore, from her soft cotton blouse to the clinging nylon of her knee-highs wrapped around her toes. Her back was sore against the mattress from lying still too long.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw a dizzying reflection in the mirror from the light on the nightstand. Then, the room around the light crept into focus.

  There, in the mirror, she saw a frozen image from a bad dream. David was leaning over Kira, strangling her with one hand, his arm locked rigidly above her. She closed her eyes, believing she must be hallucinating. But then she looked again, and the awful visage was still there. And, strangest of all, she saw her own aghast face beside them.

  It wasn’t until Jessica felt a movement and heard David’s grunt that she realized he and Kira were on the bed next to her. It took all her strength to turn her head to watch her husband murdering her child.

  No moment in her life had foreshadowed what she felt as she watched. Horror was too small a word. Rage was only the beginning. And she was far beyond helplessness.

  The parts of Jessica’s mind that weren’t stunned made frantic plans. Grab the gun from David’s pants and shoot him. Knock him over. Push him away. Close your eyes and scream to the Heavens until someone comes to rescue Kira. Someone help Kira.

  Her weakened body would not obey; parts of her were literally still dead, only numb flesh. All she could do was watch, blinking with disbelief.

  Kira, she thought. My baby.

  And then, right on time, there were three solid knocks on the door. Jessica heard a man calling David’s name. And then hers. The loud knocks came again.

  David looked up at the door, startled. His eyes, for the briefest moment, met Jessica’s. His face flooded with guilt, remorse. But his straining hand never once left Kira’s throat.

  Jessica tried to open her mouth to beg him, and could not.

  The door, on its own, flew open with a slam so loud that the sound rattled in Jessica’s aching skull. From nowhere, white men in dark uniforms flooded into the room. One, with a beard, had a gun pointed the way she’d seen Mahmoud pointing his the night the van stalled. Were these the Searchers, come to kill them at last?

  She was so amazed at the sight of the armed men that she hardly realized David was screaming at them. His voice sounded half human. “Leave me!” David was shouting. “You don’t know what you’re doing! You’ll kill her!”

  “Get away from the little girl. Now,” the bearded man with the gun said, looking as frightened and enraged as Jessica felt.

  David looked away from the men, his head bowed over Kira’s chest. He still choked her with one hand, but was doing something to Kira’s arm with the other, movements Jessica couldn’t see.

  But she heard. David was whispering. Jessica could just make out his voice, uttering words in a language she didn’t know. And yet she did. “The blood is the vessel for Life …”

  With his free hand, he fumbled for his waistband.

  Instantly, Jessica saw something red explode against the wall behind David, like a splatter of color in a kaleidoscope. Then she remembered hearing gunshots. And she saw David’s mouth contort without making any sound as he stumbled backward from the mattress. He was wearing a white shirt; three dark-red stains, like large ink spots, made a perfect triangle across his chest.

  David fell against the wall, gasping. His pupils had rolled upward, and all Jessica could see was whiteness where his eyes should be. “… The blood … flows … without end …”

  Jessica saw something on the bed beside her, something she knew had flown from David?
??s hand. A syringe of blood.

  Only then did she really know, and she nearly swooned where she lay. David had killed Kira so he could save her. And his Ritual had been interrupted. With that realization, to Jessica, nothing else existed in the room except Kira and the syringe.

  Suddenly, Jessica screamed. She summoned even her still-sleeping parts. She found the syringe with her fingers and held it. David, very probably, had not had time to inject Kira. She must do it herself. And when she did, Kira would not die now, or ever.

  She would never die.

  But Jessica did not move, and this time it had nothing to do with her sluggish muscles. The clarity of this moment, this one moment, made her feel wide awake for the first time in days. She understood, her mind strangely naked of barriers. Hold tight to Kira for me.

  She could not give Kira this blood. The blood was a temporary respite with an everlasting curse: exile from wherever all children’s souls go. Hold tight to Kira for me. Could God be so cruel? Holding on to Kira only meant letting go.

  Jessica heard wounded sobs, and of course they were her own.

  David’s voice was faint as he lay crumpled against the wall, seeing nothing, breathing the last breath of a corpse. “… The blood flows … without end … as a river … through the Valley …”

  Of Death, Jessica thought, half insane, already mourning. When she tried to speak, this time her mouth refused.

  Of Death.

  The men—police officers, Jessica realized now, sitting up in the bed with a blanket wrapped around her because she was shaking uncontrollably and one of the officers had decided she must be cold—fussed and worked over Kira on the dingy carpeting for what seemed like hours. They were afraid to try to put her in the waiting ambulance until her heart started beating again. And for some reason, it would not.