Dark Time: Mortal Path (5 page)

Taken as a package, the skills Rabishu gave her and the ones she’d acquired resulted in a tremendous

—
okay, unfair
—advantage over human opponents. Her assassination targets never stood a chance. In the early days, that had made it easy for her to objectify her targets. But Ledger hadn’t been an object.

Neither had a target—
victim
—of an earlier assignment who remained vivid in her mind.

She let herself sink into the memories of Loon Lake, the place that had broken the bands imprisoning her heart.

A long time ago now, over thirty-five years…

S
usannah had been in the town of Loon Lake in upstate New York for two weeks, scouting the area as a young woman devoted to bird-watching and solitude, spending long hours rowing on the lake in a rented boat.

Target: John Henry Sawyer, known as J. H., prominent scion of a New York old-money family. J. H.

had leveraged his progressive Woodrow Wilson-style viewpoints, including strong support for the League of Nations, into political wins, and his run for the presidential candidacy was catching fire. If J. H. was knocked out of the running for the 1920 election, the United States would probably not join the League, a situation that would please Rabishu. Even a tenuous prospect of world peace drew the demon’s ire.

Crossing the porch of the politician’s summer home, she tested each wooden board for squeaks before putting her full weight on it. Inside, the door to his den was about fifteen feet away, open to the entry hall. She drew her throwing knives from their sheaths, their familiar weight resting in her palms as she moved forward.

A sound came from upstairs, moaning followed by retching. It was so clear and miserable that her gut twisted in sympathy. There was a pause, another moan, then “Johnny…”

Susannah froze in the hallway. She’d watched J. H. arrive alone, leaving his heavily pregnant wife in their New York City home. Unaccountably, the wife was here now. A relative or servant must have brought the woman, probably over J. H.’s objections.

A light snapped on in the hallway upstairs and the cry took on urgency. “Johnny!”

She heard papers rustling inside the den, then the sound of a chair scraping back from the desk. J. H.

appeared in the doorway of the den.

“Lucy? Is everything all right?”

Susannah reacted automatically and launched her throwing knives. The instant they left her hands, regret stabbed at her.

Death was in the air.

She lunged forward to grab the knives, to retract her decision to kill. A spinning knife nicked her finger, but even with her speed, she was too late. If J. H. had been ten more feet away, she could have caught the deadly blades.

J. H. fell, a knife in his throat, another in his heart. He made no sound, but there was a scream from upstairs at the moment of his death, as if he were a ventriloquist.

She heard shuffling and groaning from the stairway, as though each stair descended was a victory over pain that threatened to engulf.

Susannah dashed to the body. Bending over, she pulled her knives out, wiped them quickly on the dark cotton of her sleeve, and replaced them in their sheaths. She retreated quickly to the shadows near the front door.

There was another scream—much closer.

A woman stood at the foot of the stairs, clutching her very pregnant belly, nearly doubled over in pain. The lower part of her nightgown was soaked. Her water had broken on her trip downstairs. She started to straighten up, but immediately bent over and vomited. Wiping her mouth, she squinted at the shape in the hallway and saw that her husband was on the floor.

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2009-08-25 02:50

“Johnny, oh my God, the baby’s coming early, Johnny, get up I need help, oh my God what’s the matter with you?”

It came out as one long string of pitiful sounds. Then the woman spotted her husband’s blood inching forward on the polished wood floor.

Susannah, flattened against the wall, breathed so shallowly her chest barely stirred. She was the Black Ghost, in her killing outfit that left only her eyes exposed. She could make it out without being seen, and her assignment would be over.

Leave! This isn’t my business.

Susannah had her hand on the doorknob when she heard a shriek that packed in every emotion from horror to desperate love to grief. In spite of her strong desire to get away, the scream compelled her to turn and view the scene.

Lucy had collapsed on the floor next to her husband. A powerful contraction gripped her and she wailed. The hairs on Susannah’s arms rose and she felt something squeezing her chest, as though Lucy’s hand had slipped inside her ribs to clutch her heart.

It was Susannah’s memory that was doing the squeezing.

It wasn’t her time, she wasn’t due until the harvest, but her baby was coming now. When she could
breathe after each contraction, she screamed for pity, for a midwife to help her give birth, for someone
to save the life of her baby.

The woman on the floor behind her was crying alone in the dark for someone to help her give birth, and to undo her husband’s death. Susannah could help with only one of those things.

Walk away. Run away. This is just an assignment, like other times.

Her feet seemed to be out of her control. Susannah walked over and knelt by the woman, who was in mid-contraction. When the contraction eased, Lucy looked up at her. Her eyes boiled with hatred.

“You did it, didn’t you? You killed Johnny. Get away from me!”

What am I doing? She doesn’t want me here. I’m not the healer I used to be.

Susannah stood up to leave, when another contraction came and Lucy pushed hard. Susannah could see the crown of the baby’s head emerging, and with it, something that made her heart sink: a glimpse of umbilical cord. The cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. Vivid memories flooded back of the times she helped deliver such babies. Many of them culminated in a funeral with a tiny coffin, sometimes accompanied by a larger one.

If I leave, Rabishu gets two lives for the price of one. Damn him, and me.

“Your baby may die if I leave. The cord’s wrapped around his neck. He’ll be strangled.”

“Get out!” It was a snarl, a feral order from a female protecting herself and her young at their most vulnerable time.

A contraction rippled through Lucy’s body. The tendons in her neck stuck out, every muscle of her body shook with the effort, and sweat poured into her eyes. She screamed. When it was over, she let out her breath explosively. Lucy was panting, her chest rising and falling like the breast of a captured bird whose heart beat wildly. Then her breathing slowed and she focused on Susannah.

“Damn you to hell,” she growled. Then, in a defeated whisper: “Don’t let my baby die.”

Afterward, Susannah wouldn’t acknowledge the feeling of holding Lucy’s baby, flush with life, in her arms. For her, there were only memories of Constanta, and dealing in death.

A
fter 263 years of killing in servitude to the demon Rabishu, Susannah’s work was lying heavily on her heart. She marveled at the Louvre visitors who walked by her as she sat on the bench and didn’t gasp in alarm at the foul stench that surely exuded from her. It was the same way that Rabishu announced his presence, with the odor of the Underworld clinging to him. Lately she’d had that smell caught in her nostrils, even while strolling in a garden, even while swimming in the warm, azure waters of the Mediterranean, even while making love.

My mind is trying to tell me something. My heart is rotting.

She touched her dress above the circular wound between her breasts, the place where Rabishu had placed his claw and drawn blood to sign her contract. It was warm under her finger, even through the cloth. When no one was around, she peeked down the front of her dress. That spot writhed with a whirl of black and green, and her skin pulsed in an irregular way.

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Like some nasty little creature pushing to burrow in deeper, or even worse, break through from the
inside.

Yet no one else saw things that way. Her current lover would surely have noticed such a flaw on her body, and the smell, too.

And what about my eyes?

Lately she’d seen in the mirror that there was an unfamiliar darkness in her green eyes. The irises were barely lighter than her black pupils.

Will I continue to grow wretched in my own view, yet remain attractive to others?

A thought struck her that left her breathless and stunned by the horrid uncertainty of it.

What if my senses are telling the truth, and the beauty that others see in me is just a deception cast
by Rabishu? After all this time, I’m beginning to see the real me.

A seed of doubt was planted, joining the others in the garden of regret she’d been working on.

Susannah sat on the bench until a polite guard informed her that the Louvre was closing. Turned out on the street, she couldn’t shake her gloomy thoughts.

After Loon Lake, she had begun learning more about her situation. Researching intensively, she’d thrown herself into a study of ancient Sumer, wondering why she had never been curious before.

The Sumerians had a complicated relationship with the gods they believed ran their world. The gods of Sumer were the
Annunaki
, a race of beings who had traveled to an Earth devoid of humans, from a place in the heavens called
Nibiru
. Anu was their leader, ruling over three hundred major gods and three hundred minor ones. Once on Earth, the minor gods refused to do the labor of maintaining the world, so they created humans to take over that work.

Anu and his consort Antu had seven demon offspring, the
Utukki
. When Anu left Earth to travel again among the stars, he left the
Utukki
in the service of Nergal, Lord of the Underworld. The demons were given great powers to do Nergal’s work, powers that approached those of the gods, and they were fractious and hard to control. When Lord Nergal at last left for the stars, he charged the seven demons with continuing his works of evil in the Great Above, the realm of the humans—basically, he left them on autopilot. In the modern world, the demons were all that remained on Earth of the gods of Sumer.

Anu, in his travels, heard that his demon offspring now worked with no one to oversee them, and he worried that they would take on too much control of the Great Above. So he placed rules on them, restricting the ways they could interact with humans and giving them each a fatal weakness. Anu wrote all of the demons’ vulnerabilities on an indestructible Tablet of the Overlord, in a language he created to be impossible for the demons to read.

The location of the tablet was no secret, but the only way to read it was by using a translating lens created by Anu. He shattered the lens into seven shards and hid them in the Great Above, out of reach of his offspring. Each demon hoped to possess both the Tablet and the Lens, because then he would dominate the other six demons, literally holding their existence in his claws. Since they could only enter the Great Above under narrowly defined circumstances, the demons enlisted their surrogates, the Ageless humans, to search for the tablet and shards. Rabishu had instructed Susannah about the search, but hadn’t given her the reasons behind it.

The demon who dominated Susannah was a child of an absent father. Like any misbehaving son in those circumstances, Rabishu pushed the limits of his power. While she now had a better understanding of Rabishu’s role in history, and the collective evil caused by the demon brothers, the knowledge of what she was up against drove her to tears.

O
utside the Louvre, Susannah kicked her shoes off and began running, a blur of motion easily missed in a blink of an eye. Racing out into the lush countryside, she tried to leave her dark thoughts behind. Restless, she spent the summer traveling on foot.

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2009-08-25 02:50

M
onths after her quick exit from Paris, Susannah was perched on a ledge overlooking a remote glacial lake in Switzerland. Her determination to end her slavery had settled over her like dust coating every surface of body and brain.

“Rabishu,” she whispered to the wind. “Talk to me.”

She repeated it for hours, waiting through the frigid night. Nothing happened. She tried again, day after day, varying her appeal, eventually ordering the demon into her presence. The store of food she’d brought with her ran out, but she stubbornly waited, expecting to be yanked into the Midworld, somewhere between the Underground that was Rabishu’s realm and the Great Above, the domain of humans.

On the seventh night of her fast, she saw a hellish vision.

Far down the mountain, a humanlike figure moved across the deep snow. He didn’t trudge through it, he floated above it. The figure was bathed in fire, flames licking several feet over his head. He was surrounded by a swirling ball of heat that distorted everything within. The wind stilled, and outside his glowing sphere, the darkness was unnaturally powerful. The stars blinked out of existence. Snow melted in a wide swath around him as he advanced. Rivers of water coursed down the hill in his wake, and the exposed ground, long buried in snow, was scorched under his feet. Susannah, jerked to a standing position and unable to flee, felt as though her feet were mired in the rock underneath her, and from there, to the center of the Earth.

Susannah’s eyes were pinned on the progress of the figure toward her. Her heart pounded, her lungs drew in hot, fetid air despite the frigid mountaintop cold. It was the air of corruption of body and soul.

Adrenaline flooded her body, making her muscles scream in agony against the force that made her unable to move. Her mind retreated to the time that she was burning, surrounded by flames at the stake, her flesh catching fire. Rational thought fled, though her body could not.