Reborn (3 page)

It was only after the scarf was in my hand that she peered at me from between two fingers.

I looked at the silky offering draped over my fingers, then back at her.

She did an eye-roll thing, snatched the scarf back, then wound it around my waist, tying the loose ends at my hip, all the while her head tilted upward.

When she finished covering me, she turned toward the path and said, “This way.”

My companion and I followed.

Although Melba was tiny, she walked with confidence, her back straight, and her stride strong. She wore her trousers and shirt loose, covering any curves she might have had, and her black silky curls bounced on her shoulders. Her appearance seemed strange to me, but how would I know what was or wasn’t strange, since I did not know otherwise. Yet, although she acted tough, she seemed refined, educated—out of place for… for a woman of color.

She never once looked back to see if I still followed, or if I was about to hit her over the head with something—I still held the gun.

A few minutes later, a familiar and welcome scent wafted past me in a teasing manner as we left the trees behind and walked into a yard. The perfume of peach and magnolia blossoms, swaying on a light breeze, greeted me, welcomed me, and somehow, foretold of spring. I could almost taste their sweet nectar on my tongue. A vision of hot peach pie, cooling on a sill, tugged at my memories. An image of a tiny, older woman of mixed race, similar to Melba, and wearing a flour-dusted apron, appeared in a haze in front of me. I tried with all my might to look past her, to see her surroundings, but like a snap, a sharp noise dissolved the haze, and the vision ended.

The siren blared again, growing louder by the second.

“They’re back,” I whispered, stopping in my tracks, halfway across the yard.

Melba turned, suspicion evident on her features. With her honey brown-eyed glare and matching skin tone, I realized she was indeed a mixture of races, not black or white, but somewhere in between, just like the woman in my vision.

The siren grew louder.

“You mean…” Her gaze widened. “Are you in trouble with the law?”

“No. Maybe… I don’t know.” I gave an honest answer.

Anxiety rushed through me. I was in trouble with the law. I had to be. Were those strangely-uniformed people the law?

After shaking her head and saying, “Why me?” while looking at the sky, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward one of the two small buildings that sat this side of a white bungalow.

Just as the blaring vehicle pulled into the driveway out front, Melba opened the wide door of what appeared to be a shed and shoved me inside. “You and,” she gave the horse a look of unease, “your friend can hide here. I’ll get rid of the cops.”

She shut the door on us. Through a crack in a board, I watched as Melba picked up a basket filled with peach blossoms, fussed with her hair, then headed at a fast pace toward the people she called “cops.”

With the distance between us and the breeze hissing through the gaps in the boarded walls, I couldn’t make out what they spoke of. But the cops got back inside their vehicle and left.

Melba came back in a flash.

“They were looking for a drunk, naked man in his mid-twenties, riding a horse.” She raised her thin eyebrows in question.

So I wasn’t very old, about half the age Melba looked. “What did you tell them?”

“I gave them a laugh, and then said I would be on the look-out.”

She wasn’t laughing now.

“I-I’m not drunk.”

“I can see that. But you
are
naked.” Her gaze fell to the bulging scarf I wore. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were the product of some college prank. But somehow, frat boy doesn’t fit your mannerisms. Are you sure you didn’t jump off the cover of a romance novel?” She gave an airy laugh, and then waved her hand in the air. “Forget I said that.”

“Forgotten.”

Melba spoke strangely. But she seemed trustworthy. She hid me from my pursuers. I had to believe she would help me… remember.

“I suspect you’re hungry?”

I gave her a nod. “Food would be appreciated, ma’am.”

With a laugh, Melba said, “Ma’am?” Then she looked at the ceiling and said, “Lord, what have you got in store for me?”

She stepped outside into the sunlight. “I’ll be back later. I have some things to take care of first.”

Excalibur ventured outside with Melba. He stopped to dine on the uncut clover growing alongside the shed.

“And you,” Melba held a pointed finger to him. “Don’t you touch a blossom on those trees! And stay hidden!”

Excalibur nickered in answer, and then resumed munching clover.

“That’s a fine looking Arabian.”

“Arabian?” I had no clue as to what she meant.

“Your horse. He’s an Arabian, isn’t he?” When I didn’t answer, she continued. “When I was young, there was a farm twenty miles from here that bred Arabian stallions. I always liked their regal look, compared to the old mare we had.”

I took her word for it, since she seemed to know more about everything than I did.

Inside the shed, I found something that looked like a large, green canvas, folded into a square. I opened the stiff object and spread it out on the dirt floor, then looked around for a pillow-type object. A large, shiny bag with the words
potting soil
printed on the side looked like a fair choice. When I had everything in place, I looked down on the make-shift bed, wondering where I’d slept the previous night. Then I glanced over my torn, damaged body and hauled in a deep breath… at least the searing pain in my throat had lessened. I didn’t want to take advantage of my hostess’s hospitality, but I needed rest.

With a groan, I eased onto my back, my head falling into the dent in the bag my fist created, and waited for Melba to return.

eariness from the day’s events took its toll, and my eyelids grew heavy. As I stared at a shovel and a rake spanned across two rafters, and the cobwebs dangling from them, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. A large spider scurried upside-down across the ceiling, stopping at a substantial web in one corner. I watched the arachnid make its way toward a captured fly until my eyes blurred and fell into slits.

The musty scent of earth hovered around me, creating bits of memories to play at the fringes of my mind. The smell of the ground eased into the smell of sweat and blood. Swollen, red lines appeared, crisscrossed, on dark skin. Thick, rusty-scented liquid spilled from bodies like sap from a wounded tree. A feeling of power filled me…

My eyes flew open. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Daylight had turned to dusk sometime during my nightmare. I tried playing the gruesome scene back in my head, but the day’s events quickly took over all other thoughts. My first memory was of sitting on Excalibur in the middle of a broken street, chunks of earth and rock everywhere, everything coated in layers of dust and dirt. Water spewed from the ground to my right—something I hadn’t really focused on before; no wonder, with the angry mob’s verbal attack. Had I caused the destruction? Had the destruction caused the damage to my body?

As I lay there willing myself to remember, my eyes grew heavy again. Staying awake became an effort. I tied focusing on the spider but could barely see the creature in the darkened corner. A throbbing pain, or a sting from a wound, kept me on the alert, enough to keep me from falling asleep again. Outside, swaying tree branches brushed against the side of the shed, keeping a steady beat, giving me something to focus on.

My thoughts wandered to Excalibur. He hadn’t come in when Melba left, and she’d closed the door behind her. A sudden craving to see the stallion bloomed inside me. Wincing, I sat up. My body had grown stiff in the hour or so I lay there. A shadow passed over the glow of sunset that came through the little window, casting me for a moment, in total darkness. I waited for Excalibur to pop his big white head inside. But when he didn’t, a bone-chilling prickle crept under my skin.

The shadow transformed into a dark mist, accumulating at the window, thickening on the sill. Like a nightmarish waterfall, it cascaded down the wall, pooling into a black froth on the ground of the shed. Dusk peeped in above it, enough to see the contrast of the gray sky against the invasion of darkness. My wounds stung, and with the pain came the stark realization that I wasn’t dreaming. An evil presence seeped from the entity and traveled through the shed, creeping across the dirt floor toward me, backing me against a wall.

“Excalibur,” I whispered, but he didn’t answer.

The gloom came nearer. I pushed against the studs in the wall, but I had nowhere to go. The darkness swallowed my feet first, and then my legs, as the creepiness traveled up my body faster than I could move away.

I tried grabbing it, swatting at it as if it was a nest of ants crawling up my legs, but it continued advancing. Standing now, I reached overhead, until my hand came in contact with the shovel. I pulled it down, and with a tight grip on the handle, I swung the makeshift weapon out in an arc in front of me, as if I could swat the emptiness away. When the shadow reached my neck, icy fingers closed around my throat, tightening, twisting my skin in opposite directions until the breath ceased expelling from my lungs. When I thought the veins in my face would burst, a rectangular beam of dusk shot across the floor. A woman screamed. The shadow retreated faster than I’d ever seen anything move.

I drew in a long raspy breath, as my widened gaze met Melba’s—equally as wide. One hand gripped something that hung around her neck. In the other, she carried a load.

“Spirits help me,” she said while tracing invisible signs in the air with her fingers.

After a couple deep breaths, I realized I still held the shovel above my head. I lowered the tool, searching the room as I did. The shadow had retreated the way it came in, the moment Melba opened the door to the shed. Had she seen it?

Exhaustion took its toll. The shovel fell from my trembling hands, and I fell to my knees with such force, a roar of pain escaped me.

Melba fell to the floor beside me. She laid her hand on my shoulder, then immediately retracted it, as if something had bitten her. She fell backward, landing on her behind. With my head fallen forward and sharp pains shooting down my back, I turned my head to the side, enough to see her through my hair.

Her brown skin had paled. The load she’d been carrying scattered on the floor around her. She even seemed to have stopped breathing. Then she sucked in a gust of air and closed her mouth.

“Did you see it?” I asked with a rasp, my shoulders heaving.

Melba snapped out of her contortion of fear.

“A strange, naked man trying to kill me? Yes, I saw it.” Her chest rose and fell with her heavy breathing.

I shook my head. “No. I… you saw it, didn’t you?”

She cradled the hand that touched me in her other, rubbing it gingerly. Then she narrowed her hazel eyes on me. “Only evil has the energy to pass from one soul into another. You’re crossed with it.”

“Evil? What kind of evil?”

“A dark aura surrounds you, Solomon” Her expression softened. “Yet, I feel it has not taken your soul. But something sinister wants it… wants your soul.”