Daughter of Gods and Shadows (9 page)

“I want you to make me more of these, little mystic.”

Sakarabru had taken Kifo in and cared for him when no one else would. In exchange for a home, Kifo gave Sakarabru his loyalty. The opportunity to prove his devotion came at a time when Sakarabru was wounded after a particularly difficult battle. His healers were all around him, suturing his wounds. Sakarabru had summoned Kifo to his room.

“The Shifter, Khale, would have my head if she could, little mystic,” he said, cringing when he attempted to laugh. “Today, she nearly did. Fortunately, her aim was off.”

“Would you have her head if you could, Sakarabru?” Kifo asked.

Sakarabru stared intently at him. “Yes. Yes, I would.”

Had Sakarabru really just called him into his room for small talk? Kifo suspected that that wasn't the case. “Why did you summon me, Lord Sakarabru?”

He grimaced and glared at one of his healers. “Because I thought I was dying,” he admitted.

“And you would want me to bring you back?”

The Demon studied him. “Would you bring me back, Kifo?”

He realized right then and there that he was not just Kifo, the little lost Djinn who had been found and thought of as a pet. He was Kifo, the mystic and the maker of soldiers for the Brood Army. He stuck out his chest a little more, drew back his shoulders, and raised his chin. “If I should ever have the opportunity, Lord Sakarabru, yes. I will bring you back.”

He had brought Sakarabru back and was rebuilding his army because he was loyal to the Demon, and his loyalty was everything. Sakarabru had saved his life. He had been there for Kifo at a time when he was absolutely alone and afraid. Sakarabru had been like a father to him, and for that, Kifo owed him life, for as long as it was in his power to give it to him.

 

THIS OLD MAN

“One for three. Bring me. Redeem me. Or die the lamb,” he repeated in a singsong melody. “I found a trinket! A pretty trinket! But it's not a trinket! Is it?”

Dave Jensen was an archaeologist, or he
had been
an archeologist—a decent one. He shuffled through the streets of Norfolk, stumbling, talking out loud to himself and working hard to keep his balance on the swollen and bloodied stumps that used to be feet. He'd walked them down to nothing.

“Nothing,” he grunted to himself.

People crossed the street when they saw him coming, turning up their noses at him or looking down their noses, mumbling things about the way he smelled or complaining about how he looked. But none of them had ever met him. And none of them knew that Dave Jensen had been a decent archaeologist. But that was a long time ago.

“Too long,” he wheezed, disappointed, weighted down by regret and disappointment. If only he hadn't picked it up. If only he hadn't closed it up in his hand.
If only he hadn't wrapped his fingers around it.

Besh-Ba-Gowah. In Apache, it meant “place of metal,” and it was a pueblo, a ruin in a small town just north of Tucson, east of Phoenix, called Globe, Arizona.

“So damn hot,” he muttered, shaking his head miserably at the memory.

Dave had been one of the first. Excavation had started in '35—1935. He would never forget that year, even though he'd forgotten most of the others since then. It was his first dig. Four hundred rooms, maybe more. He'd been assigned a room on the ground level.

“Dave,” he said the same way it had been told to him, “this is your quadrant. Yours.” He nodded in agreement, like he did back then.

It was a proud moment for him. Dave had his own quadrant. The excavation was slow, but it had to be, as they turned up old and rustic tools like stone axes and hoes, obsidian points, minerals, shell jewelry and beads, and wares painted with pictures of birds, animals, and insects.

It looked like it could've belonged there, he supposed. Dave was crouched low in one corner of his room, his quadrant, alone, while everyone else slept. He should've been asleep, too, but he just couldn't …

“Sleep,” he said, regrettably.

She wouldn't let him sleep. He had heard her calling him for days. But when he looked around at everyone else, they didn't seem to notice. At first he thought he was just crazy. He thought he was dehydrated and needed to drink more water. The heat was getting to him. And so he ignored her. And he dug. The longer he ignored her, though, the louder her calls became. And the more he dug.

“It's late, Dave,” one of his colleagues said to him. “You really should get some rest. Whatever's under there has been there a long time. Surely it can wait another night.”

She didn't call to him with words, but it was more of a feeling, an anxious, compelling emotion. It was a thought over and over in his head, a warning that he needed to do … something. And that he couldn't stop until he was finished. It wasn't until he found her that the feeling went away and that the words finally came to him in a whisper:

One for three

Bring me

Redeem me

Or die the lamb.

“What is that?” the man kneeling next to him asked, staring at the unusual object Dave had dug up from the ground in a corner of the room.

Dave didn't know. It was made of metal, one thick, continuous piece of metal, rust colored and heavy for something so small. It was as old as anything in that pueblo, and it looked like it could've belonged, but it didn't.

It wasn't even as long as his index finger, and it consisted of a star symbol with a small cut-out circle in the center. It was strange, and it was warm, too warm to have been buried nearly a foot underground for years.

“It looks Celtic,” his partner said. “But what would it be doing here?” He reached for it, but Dave jerked it away.

Dave looked at the man next to him. “Do you hear that?”

The man looked strangely at Dave. No. He hadn't heard anything. He hadn't heard her voice—the trinket's voice.

“It was clear,” he blurted out all of a sudden. “Loud and clear! I heard it! I know I did!”

Dave stopped walking abruptly in the middle of a Norfolk street, causing traffic to screech to a halt. Angry drivers honked their horns and yelled profanities at him. He closed his eyes and remembered. “Such a beautiful melody,” he said emotionally.

The man kneeling across from Dave the day he found her reached out to touch her. She wasn't meant for him.

“No!” he shouted, shoving his colleague so hard that he fell back onto the ground.

It whispered to him: “Take me to her. She will not come for me.”

“What are you?” he asked in disbelief. Was he losing his mind? “Are you … alive?”

No! No, Dave wasn't crazy. He was as sane as anybody, a stable and intelligent man, with a PhD. He'd never given in to whims.

“Why me?” And then he realized that he was talking to a piece of metal.

“You are strong and chosen,” he heard it say.

Agonizing screams erupted, and a look of sheer and utter shock bulged from his eyes as his fingers lit up like embers and quickly burned like overcooked meat. The man he'd pushed scrambled to his feet, while the others rushed in at the sounds of the commotion. The people around him tried to help him, but the curse leapt from him onto them. The others grabbed Dave by the shoulders.

She punished them for touching him, and he watched in horror as they burned, the whole team, and all that was left were pillars of ashes all around him. He meant to drop her back onto the ground, but she was a part of him, the flesh and bones of his hand protectively cocooned around her. 1935—that was the year he found her, and he had held her ever since
.

He wore layers of clothes—shirts, pants, several coats—but still he could never seem to get warm, even in summer. Dave hunched in a doorway at the back of an abandoned warehouse in an alley. She had led him here, Norfolk Virginia, but he still had a long way to go. He drew his old knees to his chest and pulled himself as tight into himself as he could. The dull ache of arthritis throbbed in his knees, but that was nothing. He held his left hand close to his chest. He'd wrapped it in old socks and a couple of T-shirts until it looked like he had a cast. Keeping it wrapped helped with the pain … some.

Dave had tried to cut it off. His hand. He'd tried a couple of times, but she would never let him. He had hacked and hacked until his arm was a bloody mess of flesh and tendons splayed out in front of him like a crimson piece of abstract art, and until his screams dulled in his own ears. But each time, she waited until he had sufficiently punished himself, and then she slowly began the equally painful process of weaving his flesh together again.

He carefully unwrapped his hand, realizing that he hadn't looked at it in months. Dave peeled back the filthy and foul-smelling material piece by piece until after several minutes his hand was free. He held it up in front of his face, marveling at its unnatural and misshapen form. It was three times the size of his good hand, swollen and infected from bones that had been too long broken and muscle and flesh that had never healed. She was no more than an inch round. And all those years ago, when he closed her in his fist, she claimed him. She burrowed mercilessly into his skin, digging and grinding until she planted herself deep in the palm of his hand, breaking and spreading his bones to make room for herself.

He had grown used to the pain. His mangled hand and the torture it gave him was as much a part of him now as his eyes, ears, and mouth. It had gotten to the point that he couldn't remember what it was like anymore, not to have it.

“What are you doing? What are you— No! No—please!”

Those people didn't see Dave where he was sitting. His nook was too dark. But he saw them. More and more people were changing, doing things that good people shouldn't do to each other.

The woman's cries became muffled as one of them, the man, covered her mouth with his hand. The other woman watched him suffocate the life out of the one he had in his arms. She didn't even try to stop him. Dave turned his head, disgusted and uncomfortable at what was happening. He wished he were young again. He wished he could help her, to fight them off and save her, but he couldn't. It was not his place to interfere.

“Go ahead!” the man commanded of the woman next to him. “Do it!”

“I … I don't think … I can't!” the woman sobbed. “You do it! I can't!”

He hit her with the back of his hand. “You're starving, Sasha! We both are! If you don't— I'll feed on both of you if you don't do this!”

She shook her head.

He bent down to the woman lying on the ground barely moving. Her legs shot out straight and stiff like logs. Her body convulsed, and a terrible gurgling sound escaped from her into the air.

He jerked up, slinging blood that spilled across the other woman's face. Dave saw her stick out her tongue and lick what she could from her lips, and then she moaned, raised the other woman's arm to her face, and bit into her, tearing meat from her the way one would tear meat from a drumstick.

Dave wasn't surprised by what they'd done. He'd seen it before. Dave was nearly a hundred years old. He'd traveled from one end of this country to the next and back again, so of course he'd seen change—cars, the way people dressed, the way they spoke, lived, and died. For a while, he truly believed he'd seen it all. But of course no man can see it all, because no man can truly fathom what another man is capable of.

The man watched the woman feed off of the one lying on the ground and then shifted his gaze over to the dark doorway where Dave huddled. He slowly stood up and stalked cautiously to where Dave was sitting. But Dave wasn't afraid. He knew better than to be afraid, because she wasn't finished with him yet. He hadn't found the one she'd sent him to find, but he was close. He could feel it.

The man knelt in front of Dave, grabbed Dave by his throat, and started to squeeze. Dave slowly raised his left hand toward the other man's face. The pain of her power shot down Dave's arm. Her heat glowed like a fire. The man stared, awed by her at first, but then his eyes bulged as he released his grip on Dave and shuffled away until his back pressed up against the wall of the building on the other side of the alley.

Dave struggled to get to his feet, and he walked over to the man standing paralyzed with fear and braced against that brick wall, trembling in terror.

The man shook his head in protest as Dave walked toward him. She made him walk over to that man, to punish him for threatening Dave. She was so powerful, and Dave felt sorry for this creature screaming for his life. He pressed his twisted hand against the side of the man's face. Dave didn't have to see inside the man to know what was happening to him. Bones snapped, some breaking through the skin; vital organs collapsed inside like drying fruit; and blood thickened and slowed like molasses.

“Oh my God!” Dave heard the woman behind him exclaim, and then the sounds of her footsteps running away from them until she disappeared out of the alley.

This trinket wasn't finished with Dave yet. Until she was, he was invincible.

 

HER KEEPER

“It's pure chaos here in Littleton, Colorado. Can you tell us what happened?” a female reporter asked the frightened mother standing next to her, clutching her young daughter.

“I came home from work. I don't know what's happening. My father—he … he tried to … Oh my God.”

Rose watched with tears in her eyes as the reporter tried to interview a young woman who came home and found her mother dead, killed by her father.