The Living Blood
Fana cried harder, trying to reach up toward her legs to see what was holding her. Whatever clutched so tightly at her ankles was warm and sticky and felt like rough bark. She felt large insects crawling on her legs. Bees?
“Fana, I’m so disappointed with you,” the Bee Lady’s voice said from above her, and her hot breath floated down. The smell began to grow so thick at Fana’s nose that she felt like choking. It was almost as if the smell were made of water, as if she were drowning in it. Yes, drowning—like the day in the bathtub when she went to sleep. She’d thought she was talking to The Man that day, and she had talked to him, for a while, but she hadn’t been talking to him when she drowned in the water. The Bee Lady had made her drown. The Bee Lady had wanted her to go to sleep and wake up, because she would be stronger when she woke up, and then she could do things to make people afraid, like calling the storm—
“Why do you waste time with playmates when there’s so much work to be done? You’ve almost let it die, Fana. You worked so hard to build it, and now it’s almost gone.”
“No!” Fana screamed. “It’s not mine!”
“Of course it’s yours. It’s even named after you,” the Bee Lady said, and Fana felt herself swinging gently back and forth. The Bee Lady was the one holding her by her ankles, she realized; knowing that made her wriggle even harder. “You made it. Don’t you remember? You wanted to show Moses how powerful you were. How powerful we are. Wasn’t that a nice feeling? And you’ve done so well. But I want you to stay here with me. Stay here and make it strong again.”
“Let me go!” Fana begged.
“Go back to what? You don’t belong there, Fana. Don’t you know what they want to do to you? They want to hang you upside down, just like this. They want to put you on hooks. They want to slaughter you like a goat, and slice your throat open and take your blood. They want you to bleed day and night.”
Fana sobbed, terrified. That was the same thing Teferi had said. That was what Shannon O’Neal wanted to do to her and her mommy. Mor-tal people, the people who got sick and died, could never love her, he said. They would try to steal her blood.
But didn’t Moses love her? And Aunt Alex? And Jay-Red, too?
“Even the others with your blood hate you, Fana. Remember how they tried to hurt you? But not me. I want you to make them sorry,” the Bee Lady said. “Make them afraid. Don’t you understand yet? It’s good when they’re afraid. I hate to have to keep repeating myself.”
When the Bee Lady said those last words, her voice turned into a howl that wasn’t like a human voice anymore. Fana felt herself swinging harder, because suddenly wind was all around her. The wind blew her hair so hard that it slapped at her face, hurting her. She could smell dampness in the wind. Rain.
Getting stronger, just as the Bee Lady wanted.
• • •
Dawit’s eyes glazed over as he watched the television screen from the bed across from the one where Fana, at last, was sleeping. With his daughter asleep, he hoped it was safe to allow his mind to roam free, without any efforts, however unsuccessful, to censor his thoughts before they surfaced. Without Fana listening, he could stew in his annoyance.
After his recent seclusion from mortals, Dawit felt nearly overwhelmed by his travels with Jessica, where he was forced to wait in lines and smile politely even when he felt no politeness. After the silence of the colony, he was tired of mortals’ restless drone of chatter, as if the fate of the world lay in their trivial thoughts on politics, celebrities, and minor social encounters. (“Do you believe how rude he is?” a woman had whispered behind him at the airport, and he’d had no awareness of any infraction against her. Mortals were so easily offended!) As bad as it was for him, he thought it must be worse for Fana, who could not shield herself from strangers’ thoughts.
Why were they in this city instead of somewhere Fana could have peace?
Jessica had never been easy to control in the ways Dawit had grown accustomed to asserting his will over women in years past, but she had developed an even more stubborn brand of independent-mindedness in their time apart. Mahmoud would certainly have enjoyed a laugh if he had heard their last telephone conversation, when Dawit had been forced to practically plead with her to return to the room. Pleading! Mahmoud’s temper with females had been notoriously short before his vow of chastity as a Searcher, and Dawit didn’t think his own had been much milder.
But those were long-ago days, and Jessica had no room in her life for tyranny. Besides, no tyrant lived in him. What tyrant’s heart had ever quailed so at the thought that his wife might tire of him and turn him away? His recollection of their lovemaking came to Dawit in dreamlike fragments during quiet moments, but he wondered if Jessica thought of it at all. Her sister’s disappearance had cast a pall on Jessica’s life and clouded her common sense, it seemed. He could survive her lack of attention, but how could Jessica overlook the effects of this search on Fana?
“She is not the mother I remember,” he muttered aloud, and the words grieved him.
The television was maddening, a deluge of repetitive images and useless information. Dawit was tired of the weather forecaster’s pompous baritone as he theorized exhaustively on the tropical storm, so he flipped through the channels until, luckily, he found a vintage movie. Not Casablanca, which had once been his favorite, but Wuthering Heights, which would suffice. Immediately, he felt himself drawn to the actors’ faces, which looked pale and sharp-featured in the black-and-white film, infused with fevered emotion. He felt at home in their company. Love had always captivated him, and he felt no differently tonight.
It was so simple, so pure . . .
That thought was interrupted by a whimper from Fana’s bed. Dawit was about to turn his head to check on her when the television screen began to glow so brightly that it lit up the room in a harsh white glare. Dawit raised his arm to shield his face from the blinding light, puzzled. Then, with the sound of shattering glass, the television screen blew outward in shards that rained in front of him with a dazzling display of glitter, making him cry out with surprise. Dawit heard wind howling from the television’s smoking shell, and loose papers flew around the room in a manic dance. The wind blew against his face, and he was shocked at its strength.
How could an electronic box produce such winds?
But of course, the wind was not really the work of the television set at all, he realized, at the precise moment Fana began to whimper.
44
National Hurricane Center
Miami, Florida
10 A.M.
There was a hush in the room, the kind of hush Rick Echeverria suspected might not fall on this room again for a long time. The meteorologists who had been sent home for the night were back at work, and they stood in a sleepy-eyed huddle by the coffee machine, waiting for a new pot to brew. Everyone was here, all fifteen employees, including people Echeverria had rarely met because they worked different shifts.
When he’d arrived at seven that morning, the sun had been shining outside the storm-proof NHC building in West Dade, reflecting brilliantly off the white exterior paint. There hadn’t been a single cloud visible, since hurricanes chased clouds away in the bands around them, creating their own form of deception. Yesterday, too, had brought perfect weather. Sun worshipers had been making plans to tan on Miami Beach this very morning, he thought, before they heard the special bulletins and had any idea of what was coming. Echeverria had spent his morning on the telephone trying to see to it that the cruise lines would reroute their ships. Miami International Airport, he guessed, would be closed to all traffic in the next couple of hours. The tourists flying in would want to turn right around and fly back out if they could, he imagined. If they were smart.
The center’s towheaded director, Mitchell Hunt, stood before them in his sharpest meet-the-media gray suit, which would become rumpled over the next two or three days. Echeverria knew Mitchell’s wife was at home recovering from ovarian cancer surgery, and the timing couldn’t
be worse. But he was needed now, so there was no way around it.
All of southern Florida was under a hurricane warning, from Palm Beach to the Keys. Last night, the center had maintained only a tropical storm watch—the sort of precaution few native South Floridians took seriously. All the evening newscasters, likewise, had claimed there was nothing to worry about, that Beatrice was no more. But they’d all been dead wrong. Overnight, Beatrice had resurrected herself. Every time Echeverria thought about the storm charging across the Bahamas toward Miami, he felt a lump in his throat that made it hard to swallow.
The phones were ringing incessantly; the wide-eyed interns and assistants had been asked to put callers on hold until Mitchell finished his short meeting. Five minutes was all they could spare.
“This is a lot like what happened in ’92, with Andrew,” Mitchell said wearily, his broad chest lifting and then falling with a sigh as he addressed the assembled group. “The wind cut off its top, the storm just about died. We all saw it then, and we’ve just seen it again. And like Andrew, this one’s come back big. We’re already up to category five, wind speed about one-eighty, and she hasn’t lost much strength since landfall, so I’m expecting her to keep on growing when she hits the water again. That’s an area of concern, but that’s not what concerns me the most, as I’m sure most of you know. There’s a key way she differs from Andrew.”
At that, Mitchell fell silent, and the expression that passed across his face mirrored perfectly the somber, bewildered mood throughout the room.
“She’s motoring fast, ladies and gentlemen, and if she keeps on her present trajectory, she’s going to be knocking on our door by late this afternoon. I’ve got a mob in the pressroom ready to ask me to explain how that could happen so quickly, and I’m open for suggestions.”
“How fast, Mitchell?” asked Andrea, one of the night crew by the coffee machine. She wasn’t wearing the makeup she usually prided herself on, and in her unflattering threadbare sweats and Florida International University T-shirt, she might have been pulled straight from bed.
“Thirty miles per hour. Maybe up to thirty-five.”
“Impossible,” Echeverria said aloud, the word that had been turning over in his mind since he’d first arrived that morning. The other forecasters murmured in stunned agreement. Storms in tropical waters simply didn’t move that fast, period—easterly winds didn’t have the same strength as the high-latitude jet streams that had scooted other hurricanes up the U.S. coastline as fast as sixty miles per hour. A storm in the tropics might move at a clip of twenty or twenty-five miles per hour, but that was at absolute maximum.
“Yes, you heard me right,” Mitchell said, nodding as he studied their faces. “This is one for the record books. Obviously, there are factors at work here we don’t yet understand, and I’d like to discuss theories with you a little while later. Myself, I’m fresh out. In the meantime, we have to try to avoid breaking some other records. With the size, strength, and speed of this storm, combined with the lack of preparation time, we have a very serious problem. Beatrice might have winds of two hundred miles per hour by the time it reaches the Florida shore, and there’s been no storm of that size in south Florida in modern memory. We’re looking at the kind of storm surge that would put Key Biscayne and Miami Beach under twenty feet of water. We got lucky with Andrew’s flooding being as far south as it was, but I’m not betting we’ll get that lucky again. That’s why I’ve already asked the mayor to give the evacuation order for Miami Beach, the Keys, and areas east of I-95. We’ll decide which other areas to evacuate as the storm approaches. I just hope we have the time. We don’t want people stuck in traffic when she hits, either. That would be catastrophic.”
For the first time, Echeverria noticed that his armpits were soaking wet. Nerves. He hadn’t even put up his own hurricane shutters, and he had two cats in his West Kendall home. His mother and sister wouldn’t have time to retrieve the cats, most likely, because they were in a frenzy trying to buy food, batteries, and candles along with the rest of the mobs at the grocery stores. He felt guilty, wishing he’d followed his hunch and helped his mom with her shutters yesterday. Mierda. The storm had looked to be dead. He should have listened to his instincts, not his intellect.
Now he’d probably have to get new cats.
As the gravity of the predicament settled across Echeverria’s shoulders, he felt a growing sense of helplessness. No matter what any of them did, if Hurricane Beatrice hit Miami, there were going to be casualties all around them. Already, there had been reports of at least a hundred deaths in Nassau, hardly two hundred miles from them.
The storm wasn’t playing by the rules. It wasn’t playing fair.
And Beatrice wasn’t finished yet, he knew. Beatrice was only getting started.
45
Star Island
10:15 A.M.
More than he wanted to, Lucas was beginning to understand how Stephen Shabalala had spent the last few hours of his life.
At first, he’d thought the waiting was the worst of it: lying in that dark basement on the mattress with Alexis, his imagination flitting nonsensically between fantasies about more pleasant circumstances under which he might have met her and then horrible images of Sarah Shabalala’s head being blown apart by gunfire, and her brother’s blood-coated teeth, which had probably been bloodied long before he brought the armed men to his sister’s door. What had that poor man been thinking in the end? That everything would work out? That he and his sister would be treated with mercy?
Yes, waiting had been hard. Lucas had found himself shivering. Upon waking, he and Alexis, unable to touch otherwise, finally resorted to the only comfort left to them; by contorting their bodies slightly, they had been able to wind their feet and shins together, instinctively seeking the other’s warmth. Lucas had plied the tight elastic band around the ankles of Alexis’s sweatpants, making the fabric ride up just enough for him to slip his toes against her calf, burrowing for something he could not even describe. And she had responded, twining her legs with his, their flesh touching in a way that felt necessary and quenching, beyond eroticism. Lucas had closed his eyes, savoring the pure joy of a woman’s skin. The feel of her softly grooved soles, and those fine, nearly indiscernible hairs growing unshaved on her legs. Magically, his shivering had stopped.
That might have been his last good memory.
Now, as much as he wished he weren’t, Lucas was shivering again. He was bare-chested, his feet immersed up to his ankles in a plastic bucket full of water. The water was cold, but his shaking and the cold were unrelated. The shaking went much deeper.
Lucas had been led to the small table in the basement where he and Alexis usually ate, bound to the chair by rope knotted tightly around his waist and wrists. The Brits were back. Like yesterday’s American interrogators, their faces were covered in hose, but Lucas recognized their voices right away. Alexis had whispered “Be strong” as they brought him out of bed. And Lucas had tried to—he had vowed to—until he saw the large black baton in the Englishman’s hands. He heard the baton’s electric sizzle when the Englishman pulled the trigger on its rubber handle.
“So, here’s how it is,” the Englishman said, standing in front of Lucas. He looked absurdly fresh and well-rested, wearing beige Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that read South Beach in the red, green, and gold reggae colors. The man’s bare legs were bright red and flaking, so Lucas guessed he’d been enjoying the beach the previous day, or maybe even that morning. Lucas had no idea what time it was.
“This is a stun gun, as you can see. Quite a beauty, isn’t it? Five hundred thousand volts. Now, I’ll do only the quick taps to start, nothing too barbaric. I don’t want to embarrass you in front of the lady, so I won’t bother with the genitals. No need for you to have to take off your trousers as well, not at present, anyway. When you’ve had enough, just give us the word, and I’ll go round up one of the gentlemen who’s been questioning you. It’ll do you no good to start blabbering to me, sinc
e I’m not concerned with details. I’m only here to make you more agreeable.”
“I’ve told them everything I know,” Lucas said emphatically. “I swear, there’s nothing else.”
Lucas had always taken for granted that he had a high pain threshold; his uncle Cookie had told him that when he was ten and didn’t shed a single tear when he broke his arm climbing his uncle’s peach tree. Lucas had never remembered a fear of pain until now, and the degree of his fright shocked him, as if pain would mean death. He was trembling head to foot. He tried to remember every detail he could of that summer day on Uncle Cookie’s farm—the scent of the rotten peaches in the grass, the red dirt road, his uncle’s well-worn boots—to keep his mind away from his fear.
“Aw, quit your lettin’ on,” the Irishman said. “You must think we’re thick.”
The Englishman shifted his head to the side. “Not being as cynical as my colleague, I’d love to believe you,” he said reasonably. “But I have orders, as I’m sure you understand. You’ve given someone I work for the impression that you don’t always tell the truth.”
“Stop it.” Alexis’s voice came suddenly, sounding so commanding that Lucas wondered, for a desperate moment, if she had somehow freed herself and was standing over them with a weapon. But, no. She was still lying on the bed fifteen yards in front of him, her hands chained above her. Her head was lifted so she could meet their eyes. “Please leave us alone!”
“Don’t worry, you’re next,” the Irishman told her in a leering voice, grinning. “You just sit quiet now and enjoy the show.”
Menacingly, the Englishman held the baton in front of Lucas’s face, close to his nose. The weapon was twenty inches long, with a curved tip. Instinctively, Lucas drew back. He understood the effects of stun guns well, because he had bought a much smaller one for Rachel years ago, in case she met a mugger; when it touched him, the gun would emit pulses that would hypercharge his muscles, depleting his blood sugar by turning it to lactic acid, and that would confuse his nervous system. His neurological impulses would be interrupted. The jolt wasn’t intended to cause pain, really, he told himself. Just a breakdown of the body’s ability to move. Paralysis. Confusion.