My Soul to Take

  A contact in Lalibela, Ermias, had reported what Michel would have considered unthinkable after his last encounter with Fana: She had given her Blood’s eternal gift to the Wright boy. Could she have thought he wouldn’t learn of it? He had nearly announced another Cleansing ceremony—and this time, he would not have contained the killing.

  Perhaps Miami was due for an outbreak. Or the mortal village of Lalibela itself.

  But Teka, Fana’s teacher, had sent him a mental pulse to let him know they would arrive today! The party would land before nightfall: Fana, her parents, and her retinue. His constant headache eased when he imagined her arrival.

  “She’s bringing her parents,” Michel said. “That demonstrates trust, no?”

  “Trust! Her father should be barred at the door. He’s a barbarian.”

  Stefan and Dawit had met twice before—once at Adwa more than a hundred years ago, and again only last year, after Stefan had tracked the Glow network to Fana’s doorstep. Both times, Dawit had stopped Stefan’s heart and believed he was dead, unaware of his Blood. Stefan complained incessantly about Dawit’s cruelty with his knife, an irony that amused Michel. Stefan, who trafficked in cruelty, would complain about the sport in another?

  “I should meet her at her plane,” Michel said.

  “Michel, ludicrous! And look like an enchanted schoolboy? She’s a heretic, and each day she tempts you to weakness and makes a mockery of the Prophecy. Your sacred purpose!”

  Stefan was not Most High, and yet he never wavered from his purpose. Stefan would have begun the Cleansing in earnest by now.

  The wedding party lost its allure. Michel turned away.

  “You know why she has come,” Stefan said.

  I know, Michel said.

  He spurred his horse, racing faster down the mountainside’s horse trail. Michel wished Fana were coming to him because she had accepted her role in the Cleansing, or because she could not resist her Blood bond to him. But she had shown herself in her mental visit, laying herself bare. She meant to stop the Cleansing.

  “And you talk about meeting her plane? Will you carry her bags too? Rallenta! Slow down!” Stefan called as he sped after him. He sounded breathless, as if he were the one running, not his mare. “She wants to impose her will on you. She expects to mold and shape you, Michel. Or kill you, of course. That’s the root of this entire farce!”

  After his bloody clash with Fana the year before, Michel had forced her to promise that she would never try to kill him again. But she had also promised not to defile her Blood, and what had come of that? When she had opened herself to him, he had seen no plans to harm him, and he had none to harm her. But they both held convictions that made plans and desires irrelevant.

  “I’ll never forget the sight of you in those bloodied clothes!” Stefan shouted. He was falling too far behind Michel’s horse, so he abandoned his voice.

  YOU ALMOST LET HER KILL YOU, MICHEL.

  She could only have killed me by killing us both, Michel said.

  AND DON’T THINK SHE WOULDN’T.

  She will not have the opportunity, Michel said.

  THEN TAKE HER! YOUR HESITATION CONFOUNDS ME, Stefan said.

  Does it?

  Michel reined his horse, suddenly bored with his ride as well as his company. Nogales was spread beneath his perch, crowded and energized. In time, this city would belong to his most faithful, the others swept away. Poverty would be gone. Suffering would be gone.

  Stefan rode beside him. “Michel … if I made mistakes with Teru …”

  Don’t speak of my mother, today of all days.

  “Let’s discuss it like men!”

  Papa, you ignore my wishes at your own risk.

  “Yes, I took her from her family. Stole her. You know what I am. We have no secrets. I didn’t have your advantages, Michel, so my methods were uncivilized. I butchered her mind, I admit it. But I gave her the Blood! Don’t shy from sacred duty because of my weaknesses. Don’t you see that I was trying to make Teru hap—”

  Stefan stopped in midsentence, clutching his throat with his palm. His face turned bright red as iron fingers tightened across his windpipe. In his surprise, he fumbled and fell from his horse. The Shadows celebrated within Michel, tasting Stefan’s pain as a stone cracked his upper arm. But he did not release his neck. Stefan had no breath with which to cry out from the fracture.

  If you were sincere, I might almost be moved, Michel told him.

  MICHEL, YOU’LL BREAK MY NECK—

  Stefan’s thought was snuffed as oxygen fled his body, diminishing his brain function. Michel watched his father’s mouth falling open like a fish’s as he tried to draw air. Michel considered snapping Stefan’s neck entirely, or sweeping him over the ravine. That would teach him to pollute his ears with false remorse over Teru. Let him wake bleeding on the rocks.

  But there was no time. Fana was on her way, and Stefan had to be there to greet her. Perhaps Dawit might entertain him by cutting his father’s throat. Michel released his mental hold on his father’s windpipe. Then he yanked his reins to ride back.

  Behind him, Stefan gasped and choked from the ground. “You’ve broken my arm!” he coughed. “Has she driven you insane already?”

  Michel would have been happy to let his father suffer his injury for a few hours, but he didn’t want his arm broken when Fana arrived. She would know he had done it, and he didn’t want her first impression to be a display of the violence he wanted to avoid.

  As Michel rode away, he fused the shattered bone in his father’s arm with half a thought. An hour’s walk wouldn’t hurt Stefan, so Michel bade his father’s horse to follow without its rider. The beast trotted obediently behind him.

  The solution could be that easy with Fana, too, he reminded himself. All his distress could be stilled by a simple mental exercise, and Fana would be his in mind, body, and soul.

  I’M NOT THE ONE YOU SHOULD BE ANGRY WITH! Stefan called after him. YOU KNOW IT AS WELL AS I DO! BE STRONG ENOUGH TO DO WHAT YOUR DESTINY DEMANDS OF YOU BOTH!

  Michel was glad his father could not see his tears.

  The cathedral was his classroom.

  In the silence of his private cathedral, Michel studied the Letter of the Witness. If his heart was weak, the Letter would prepare him for Fana.

  Michel imagined himself as a boy when he visited the Witness’s classroom, about twelve, dressed in the short blue cotton jacket he had envied so much on the afternoons he watched the mortal boys streaming home from school when he was at the apartment in Tuscany, his happiest times. Papa had never permitted him to attend school with other children; Stefan had not wanted Michel to grow overly fond of the mortali.

  His father had discovered the Letter while he was running guns in Ethiopia in 1894, and his first act had been to slay the houseboy who translated it from Ge’ez. The Witnesses had told his remarkable story of Blood stolen from the cross at a momentous time in Jerusalem, leaving the last page damp with a drop that never dried.

  Michel sat in the front row of wooden pews. Michel was the Letter’s student, and the Witness himself was his teacher. Passages from the Letter were written in gold paint covering the walls, twinkling in candlelight, and his eyes traveled the words he had memorized as a child.

  Michel created the visage, a man who appeared as flesh and blood, embodying all the knowledge from the Letter. The Witness stood before him at the altar, in his teacher’s robe with the crest of Sanctus Cruor. After meeting Fana, he had incorporated her memories of Khaldun, whom he was certain must have written the Letter: skin as dark as midnight, a long black beard.

  “Wickedness is cunning, and hides in the hearts of men,” the Witness said.

  “Yes, and we must wrest the Blood from the hands of the wicked,” Michel said.

  “And who are the wicked, Michel?” the Witness said, a merry glimmer in his eye. Stefan was stern enough for ten men, so Michel created the Witness’s persona as jovial.

  “There is wickedness everywhere
,” Michel said. “Children are wicked to each other. Parents are wicked to their children. Lovers carry out small acts of wickedness toward each other every day. Wickedness roams unspoken in everyone’s thoughts.”

  “If all have the capacity for wickedness, then who shall be Chosen?”

  “The Chosen are merely those I choose,” Michel said. “Those we choose. And the Blood shall cleanse them of wickedness.”

  “As it cleansed your father?” the Witness said.

  “Certainly not.” Michel almost laughed.

  “Then … who are the wicked?”

  The Witness gave a mysterious smile. The Letter did not specify how to identify the wicked, and the visage would not answer questions that were not found in the text. Instead, he offered a question: “Would an act of kindness make a wicked man kind?”

  Michel sighed, washed in the painful memories of Fana’s last visit and her loathing for him. “Fana believes I am wicked,” Michel said.

  “As others believe she is,” the Witness said. “Would not the thousands left homeless and hundreds left widowed or orphaned by her typhoon call her wicked?”

  “Fana is not wicked. Misguided, yes. Naïve. But not wicked.”

  “When the two Bloodborn unite, their Blood shall cleanse the world,” the Witness said.

  “And if we fail?” Michel said. “If there is no Cleansing?”

  The Witness paced, pointing out the gold lettering on the wall above his head. “You know very well, Michel. Wars shall flourish. The air will be choked with smoke. The sun will scorch the earth like fire. The oceans will turn to poison. The very world itself will die.”

  Michel mouthed the two-thousand-year-old words as the Witness spoke. Michel could already see it unfolding! He had wasted too much time. New tears stung Michel.

  “And if she will not unite with me?” Michel said.

  “She will,” the Witness said. “It is in the Prophecy. Her name means Light. Your union signals the advent of the New Days. You are the Bringers of the Blood.”

  Michel did not want to utter his true question aloud: Am I destined to become like him? Instead, he whispered. “Will she choose to unite with me … or must I force her?”

  Perhaps there was an interpretation of a passage he had overlooked or misremembered, hiding the truth from himself. Somewhere in this chapel, was his answer plain?

  But the Witness was silent, offering only his empty, imaginary smile.

  Twenty-six

  Phoenix had stepped back in time: the private jet, solicitous handlers waiting at the gate in suits and ties, the caravan of shiny white vintage Rolls-Royces racing through anonymous, foreign streets. She could be back on tour, chasing magic she had never found.

  Was she bringing magic this time? Or only witnessing it?

  Their party split up between three cars donning small white flags with crests Phoenix had never seen before, with a crimson teardrop in the center. SANCTUS CRUOR, the letters read. Before she climbed into the lead car with Fana and her parents, Phoenix saw the same crest on a large white flag flying above the red, white, and green Mexican flag on an official administration building. She could be riding in a presidential motorcade.

  Nogales was a modern border city of busy storefronts; the Mexican kitsch of touristy bars and craft shops alongside professional pharmacies and dental offices. Pedestrians, minibuses, bicyclists, and cars competed for space on the freshly paved roads lined with rows of tall, decorative palm trees. The hillsides were crowded with a frenzy of new housing developments. And churches! There was a church on every corner, it seemed, although they were missing their crucifixes. Nogales’s churches flew the Sanctus Cruor flag where a cross might have stood.

  Phoenix noticed children everywhere: a husky boy being led by his mother’s hand in front of a massive Coca-Cola mural, twins being pushed in a stroller, a thirteen-year-old girl riding a bicycle. They all stopped to return her stare.

  Phoenix missed Marcus the same way she’d missed him when she’d been locked in her cell. Her tongue curled, ready to ask the driver to take her back to the airport. She felt claustrophobic in her seat against the window, with Jessica beside her, in the middle, and Fana on the other end. Phoenix’s neck tingled.

  A panic attack. She’d had them often in detention. Phoenix thought about asking Fana to hypnotize the despair out of her, but Fana had her own problems. As much as missing Marcus and Carlos hurt, her pain reminded Phoenix of why she was here. Her reason to stay.

  Every streetlamp was adorned with a Sanctus Cruor banner in alternating colors: white, crimson, white. At a courtyard near the freeway, the car passed a giant bronze statue of a man spearing a winged beast that looked like a cross between an eagle and a giant bat. Beneath the massive statue, an impossibly old woman was holding up a hand-written placard: ¡LA SANGRE ES AQUÍ! The Blood is here.

  Phoenix gasped when a man in black tuxedo pants whose white dress shirt was soaked with—blood?—ran up to their car, just shy of her passenger-seat window. The man was trembling, but Phoenix saw rapture on his upturned lips. The stain on his shirt was only paint, she saw as they passed; too pink to be blood.

  “The first who come are saved!” he screamed after their car, in English.

  The driver spoke up. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “The faithful sometimes lose decorum.”

  Dawit muttered in the front seat, “One can hardly blame them, with so much pomp.”

  “The faithful?” Phoenix said, embarrassed by her ignorance.

  “The Most High,” the driver said. “He does so much for Nogales, the people cannot contain their gratitude. These new roads, the new schools, the hospital annex—all at the beneficence of the Most High. He has cleaned out the cartels, stopped the violence on the streets. The city has just elected a new mayor representing our movement. These are very exciting days. New days!”

  The back of Phoenix’s throat went sour. The city belonged to Fana’s fiancé.

  Phoenix stared back at the paint-spattered man to see him subdued by four police officers, two on either side. They had brought him to his knees, his hands behind his head. One officer pulled out his baton and raised it to swing at the man with both hands. Phoenix had to look away, her insides turning to stone as she imagined the blow.

  “He hasn’t changed,” Fana’s mother murmured.

  Ahead, a festively colored banner waved high across the road, strung between palm trees: BIENVENIDO, FANA—LA REINA.

  In this city, Fana was a queen. Fana didn’t glance at the banner as it flapped above the car. Her face looked frozen.

  The car slowed, turning. CALLE DE SANCTUS CRUOR, a decorative street sign on a post said.

  Spectators lined the streets, and excitement stirred as the cars pressed on. Two thousand, maybe three thousand, people stood on either side, their faces hungry for a glimpse through the darkly tinted windows. Children, young women, and grown men ran through alleys and side streets to see the cars. The crowd was restricted from the road by velvet ropes strung to poles adorned with bunches of white gardenias. A mariachi band dressed entirely in white and gold, down to their gold-tasseled sombreros, played on a raised stage. The trumpets rang of love.

  Phoenix experienced the crowd’s wonder—She’s sitting so close to me—melting into worship, until she remembered the crowd in Tokyo that had choked the street, and a young American serviceman who had danced on top of her car, shouting, I can’t believe you’re here! All Phoenix had brought was a sore throat and the same old songs, but they worshipped her.

  Fana sat with her eyes closed, either steeling herself or taking herself away.

  “You never get used to it,” Phoenix said. “I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

  I HAVE A HARD TIME WITH CROWDS, Fana told her. BUT I’M GETTING BETTER.

  “It’s like my dad used to tell me—they all have to go home to whatever’s wrong with their lives,” Phoenix said. “You help them take away their pain. Open your window. Wave.”

  Fana opened her e
yes, realization relaxing her face.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Jessica said.

  “No … I’d like to do that for them,” Fana said. “Will you sing, Phoenix?”

  “Just for you,” Phoenix said.

  The backseat windows whirred down, and the cool air blew through the car, with the smells of car exhaust and fresh paint. Fana leaned to her window, showing her face. The crowd erupted, waving handkerchiefs and newspapers and anything their hands could hold. The sound of joy. Women thrust their babies above their heads to see her, or for Fana to see them. “Por favor, Fana, look at us …” came their calls, asking for her eyes’ validation.

  Softly, just loudly enough for those in the car, Phoenix sang the lyrics that had first come to her on her way to the concert, in a melody she pulled from the air: “… Waking up is easy if you never go to sleep. Have you seen the soul you promised you would keep?”

  When Fana waved, the crowd’s roar engulfed the car.

  Nogales had changed in the past year. So many people!

  Frenzied noise from their thoughts came in a blast, so much like the first time Michel had touched his thoughts with hers; when he first showed her what she’d shut away.

  Riding on Phoenix’s song, Fana discovered so many others behind walls, cooking at their stoves, typing on computers at their desks at work, sick in their beds. More still were crowded in half-finished apartment buildings, tents, or alleyways after trekking from Juárez and Chihuahua and Oaxaca, or Tucson and Yuma and Corpus Christi, because they had heard stories of Sanctus Cruor and the Most High and the Sangre de Vida. Blood of Life.

  The people around her prayed for the souls of those who would die in the plagues, but they welcomed the Cleansing because they and their families might be saved. They dutifully attended sermons at Michel’s churches, where they learned how they could serve the Most High. Their children sang folk songs about the Most High at their schools, with the lyrics written carefully, painstakingly, by their teachers’ hands on chalkboards. The most popular song, “Las Flores,” called on the Most High to pull up the weeds so that flowers might grow.