A Cruel Season for Dying (56 page)

The two empty vials were not yet filled with the potassium chloride. He closed his eyes, imagining the pinch of the needle
into spongy flesh, its jellyfish sting. The end of breath, the end of the
thump, thump, thumping
of the four-chambered heart. Then the flat-lining of the brain.

The edge of his thumb caressed the dark green velvet that lined the case where the two syringes rested snugly between small
collars. How many months ago had he purchased the instruments? Relics from the past, they recalled a time when family doctors
made house calls, their pills and potions, their devices and implements tucked like small jewels inside peeling black bags.

He snapped the case shut and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a freak. An unearthly thing trapped inside human flesh.
A prisoner of desire. He reached for the straight-edge razor. Would that he could sever away the skin with the hair.

He ran his hand over the stubble of new growth. Each time less and less hair grew back. In some ways he was more than ever
conscious of his humanness; in others, he had become more and more detached. The endless contradictions were damnable.

He smoothed the warm-scented oil over his body, though the ripeness of his own flesh could not be subdued. The straight-edge,
like the syringes, was a throwback to the days before safety blades and electric razors. He flicked the side of the blade
with his thumb. A fine line of blood erupted. Reflexively he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked. He gagged on the
rich metallic flavor.

Over the mounds of his pectorals, across the planes of thigh and calf, over the slopes of his arms, inside his groin, he drew
the straight-edge. His naked flesh shone like polished marble under the light. He had lost weight the last couple of weeks,
and the tips of his fingers
pressed through to the frame of ribs just beneath the muscles of abdomen.

He turned. In the mirror his shoulders and back were hairless. But there was the slightest trace of growth on his buttocks.
He shaved across and between the shadowy crevice of his glutes. Then turning back, he observed the last vestiges of his primate
nature. The hair on his face and head.

Oiling his scalp, he made even slices across his skull, then neatly shaved the taut angles of his face. Now he arched his
brows, carefully manipulating the blade to follow the sparse growth pattern. He widened his eyes. Nothing left but the eyelashes.
He reached for the tweezers. He flinched as he pulled the first lashes. They came out in small clumps, his eyes tearing as
he yanked. Slowly plucking at first, then quickly, until he was finally as naked as an embryo.

“Kelly,” Sakura spoke into his cell phone. “I got a location. Where are you?”

“A few miles north of West Point.”

“Good, this is what you do.” He gave the directions from the access road to the gravel road that led to the house. “First
driveway after the road turns back toward the lake.”

“Gotcha. Stay put, Sakura. Wait for us.”

Sakura turned off the phone and placed it on the seat.

The moon had yet to appear when he stopped midway on the narrow drive and got out of his car. A downy fall of snow had begun
to loosen itself from a surprisingly clear sky, and somewhere another owl hooted. A plaintive call to its mate. In the distance
the river flowed on, unknowing, in a bed carved from ancient soil. Beyond, the dark trees rose in impartial witness. He alone
stood in dread.

He listened to the sound of his feet in the soft-forming drifts.
Memory does not so easily pass….
He was nine the year his grandparents had brought him to Kyoto to celebrate New Year with cousins. The last day of the old
year dawning unbelievably bright and blue. Now evening wrapped itself around the shoulders of the ancient city like a dark
fur. In the chill, crisp air, the great bronze bell of Chion-in tolled.
He had run ahead, catching dancing flakes of snow on his tongue, his younger cousins, a parade of ducks waddling behind. Lights
from overhead lanterns made warm smears on the blue ice, and the street in that moment seemed as still as a photograph. He
remembered thinking that he had felt as new as the year.

He stopped. Somewhere between the time he’d arrived home from Baltimore and now, he’d laid down his overcoat and forgotten
it. Yet the cold, as on that long-ago night in Kyoto, didn’t register. Through the overhang of trees, he could make out the
outline of the structure he’d seen in the Lovett photographs. The house was much larger than he had expected.

The place appeared vacant. No lights shone from the interior. But a white curl of smoke spiraled from the chimney. A dark
recent-model car was parked to the side of a porch that ran from end to end of the house. The license plate glimmered like
a small sheet of ice. He reached into his jacket and unholstered his.38.

He crouched as he moved up the winding drive. The structure was constructed of some kind of bleached wood, fitted with a high-pitched
roof. A silver ghost in a sea of snow. Ceiling-to-floor windows broke up the exterior. A swing anchored to the gallery roof
caught a sudden gust of wind. The metal chains moaned from their anchors. He stopped at the front door, pressing his ear to
the wood, and listened. Silence.

The room smelled of myrrh and madness.

Hanae shivered, lying where Adrian had arranged her on the bed, bathed in the odor of incense and candles. Their buttery essence
surrounded her, flickering and stirring in the warmth of their flames, cutting through the deeper odor of myrrh—tiny little
tongues of scent, licking and retreating. She heard a match flare, another flame springing to existence.

It was the smell of the incense that seemed to frighten her most. She knew the place that it held in his murders, and she
wondered if the letters that spelled out Zavebe were already written on the wall. She wanted to scream, felt hysteria rising.
She had failed at last to keep him
talking. Somewhere in his recounting of what he had planned, he had retreated into ritual. His stripping of the bedclothes
from around her, his positioning of her on the bed, had been gentle. But she had no illusions of what resistance would bring.
Adrian … No,
Gadriel
was in control.

He loomed once more at the side of the bed, returning again to his chanting. She felt his touch on her breast. His finger
gritty with hot ash. The myrrh scent, overpowering, rose up from her skin.

His hand was moving. Making circles.

Sakura reached for the door. It opened noiselessly.

The front room ran the width of the house, with vaulted ceilings like a cathedral. A large fireplace took up a third of the
inside interior wall. Over the mantel was another portrait of the same woman, similar to the one he’d seen in Lovett’s apartment.
The glass covering the photograph absorbed a thin rivulet of light seeping in from one of the windows.

Then he smelled it. Drifting down from the stairs, ahead of a watery bubble of illumination. Incense. Sticking to the roof
of his mouth, burning into the cells of his brain. And between breaths, his ears registering the voice. Soft and guttural
all at once. Speaking now in English, now in some other language he didn’t understand.

He grasped the banister, gun still drawn, walking slowly up the stairs, moving toward the voice from Hell.

The singsong chanting ceased. Adrian slid in beside her.

“Zavebe,” he whispered near her ear.

She said nothing. Her silence cried for Jimmy.

Adrian’s hands were on her, his lips following. Kissing her. Everywhere. His breath moving on her skin like mist. She sought
to retreat inside herself but could not. The violation was too real. She breathed, relaxed into the pillows. Accepting his
touch. Forcing the lie that was the only hope for her and her child to live a minute, a second, longer.

He began speaking again. The words hypnotic. Slipping away from English.

Then his entry. Inside her. Sudden. A shock that stripped her senses. Eyes open, she fought for light.

A noise outside the bedroom. Footfalls like a cat’s on the stairs. The soft
swish-swoosh
of breath. The
tip-tap
of metal against wood. And impossibly, the clear insistent beating of
his
heart, here and now, filling her, like water filling a vessel.

The hungry weight of Adrian’s body easing in that blessed mixture of sound. In the pure realization that Jimmy had come to
save her. That her gift of time had not been wasted. Then as quickly as joy came pain. At the heel of her spine, a serpent
uncoiling.

She turned her head, her blind eyes finding him.

“Kitsune…”
She heard his scream. His voice and the sound of the single gunshot reverberating inside her as she released the blood and
water of their unfinished child from between her legs.

S
akura stepped off the mat, finished with his morning exercises. He had not practiced
Aikido
since his boyhood, but in the last few months, he had slipped easily back into performing the
aiki taiso.
The exercises, designed to restore a condition of harmony in the body’s energy flow, were apparently ingrained like memory
in his muscles. Still, he had progressed as far as he could without the commitment to a
dojo.
To go further, he needed a partner,
uke
to his
nage.
An assailant who was also a teacher.