The Orphans (Orphans Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Charlie hid behind
the family-room curtains, fighting to reclaim the breath that had been scared clean out of him. After what had seemed like the longest thirty seconds of his life, Cain had finally left Charlie and rejoined his boss and partner. But Charlie was certain that Terry and his men weren’t through with him just yet, they were merely deciding what to do with him. They had to do something. As hard as he tried to hide it, he had tipped them off to the fact that he knew something. He knew that made him a liability.

Charlie took a deep breath, counted to three, and then slowly peeked his head out from behind the cloth curtain. He had expected to find Terry and his men gritting their teeth and pounding their fists into their hands as they stormed back toward the front door. Instead, Charlie barely caught sight of the bumper of Terry’s Bentley before it disappeared down the road.

Charlie let out a long sigh. He was safe from Terry and his men, if only for the time being. Charlie didn’t know how long that time might last, but he knew that he had to make the most of it. He still had work to do. He still had a contract to translate. He waited a couple minutes before hopping on his bike and heading in the opposite direction of the Bentley.

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Temple Beth Israel was only a short ride from his house, but it took Charlie much longer than any mapping service might have predicted, on account of his head being on a swivel and all of the detours he made in attempt to drop any unwanted followers. He was also slowed by thoughts of the blue sparks he’d seen shoot across Cain’s sunglass lens. Each time he recalled the bizarre flashes and Cain’s icy stare, he felt an equally icy chill course through every vein in his body.

Night had fallen by the time Charlie finally arrived at the reform temple, and the service for Simchat Torah, the end of the annual Torah cycle, was still in session. Not wanting to be out in the open, he hid with his bike in some nearby bushes.

Charlie scanned the surrounding area for anyone or anything suspicious. He saw nothing. He didn’t hear anything, either. In fact, it was so quiet that his own breathing was the only sound he picked up. Against the dead silence, it seemed impossibly loud, like something that could—or would—give him away.

Charlie was in the process of trying to quiet his breaths when he spotted a man in an all-black sweatsuit approaching from the nearby sidewalk with the biggest Rottweiler Charlie had ever seen. The man had a build identical to that of Terry’s younger bodyguard, and had his sweatshirt hood pulled over his head.

The man continued towards Charlie before stopping abruptly, no more than forty feet away. His dog let loose a ferocious snarl.

Charlie couldn’t help but release a nervous yelp in return.

The hooded man shot a glance in Charlie’s direction. The light of a streetlamp reflected off of his face. His eyes were hidden by the same sunglasses that Terry’s men wore.

Charlie covered his mouth with his hand as the man reached into his pocket. He was going for his gun, Charlie was sure of it. Charlie closed his eyes and waited for the bang and whatever pain might follow.

After a couple seconds and no sound other than a little crinkling, Charlie lifted his eyelids. He found the man hunched over, in the process of retrieving the mess his dog had made in the grass with a small plastic baggie. The man’s sweatshirt hood had fallen off and revealed his glasses were actually prescription lenses. Charlie exhaled softly as the man continued on his way.

Shortly after the man and his dog disappeared, the service ended and the attendees started to spill out of the temple. As soon as the last person had exited, Charlie crawled out of the bushes and slipped inside the synagogue.

Rabbi Samuel Klein, an older man with more gray hair than brown, was working on his next sermon when Charlie stepped through the office threshold. The rabbi looked up from his work. “Come in, my child,” he said, his voice still carrying hints of a faded New York accent.

Charlie hesitated for a second. “Um. Just so you know, I’m not actually Jewish. If that matters.”

“It does for some things, and not as much for others. But I assume you’re here for good reason. So come in, have a seat.” He motioned for Charlie to do just that.

Charlie made his way into the office and took a seat in the chair across from the rabbi. “I don’t know if this is even something you can do, but I need your help translating this,” Charlie said as he retrieved the printed
pdf
from his pocket and handed it to the rabbi.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rabbi Klein said. He grabbed his reading glasses from the desk, adjusted them on his face, and then started to peruse the paper.

Charlie watched anxiously. “I was told that it might be Hebrew, but none of the web translators recognized—” He stopped when he noted the troubled look on the rabbi’s face.

Rabbi Klein skimmed a couple more lines before putting the paper down and removing his spectacles. “Where did you get this?”

Charlie didn’t want to lie to the rabbi, but he also didn’t want to divulge any more information than he needed to. “I found it on someone’s computer.”

“If I was you, I would steer clear of that person.”

“So you can read it?”

“Yes, I can,” Rabbi Klein said. “This is written in Hebrew, but not modern Hebrew. It is written in the original Hebrew script, which is not commonly used these days. It has not been used much over the last twenty-six hundred years, for that matter.”

Charlie had no idea what to make of this information. There was no way the
pdf
was that old; it was a computer file, after all. Maybe someone used the dated language to make it harder to decipher. Charlie wasn’t sure, nor did he really care. In the end, he was less concerned with the age of the script or reasons for its use than he was with the actual content. “What does it say?”

“What you have here … is a contract.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what the file was named,” Charlie said. He hadn’t intended on coming off as rude as he had, he just wasn’t sure why the rabbi had avoided answering his question. It was as if Rabbi Klein were stalling. “What does it say?” Charlie repeated.

“It says a lot.” Rabbi Klein took a deep breath, clearly not comfortable with what he was about to reveal. “This is not just any old contract. It is a contract with the Devil.”

Charlie’s body stiffened upon hearing the rabbi’s words. He had never really contemplated the existence of God, which meant that he had put even less consideration into the existence of the Devil. Until the rabbi mentioned it, the prospect of the contract being between anything other than two people had never crossed Charlie’s mind. Now that it had, Charlie’s thoughts scattered like a pack of cockroaches scurrying for cover when the lights flash on, until there was just one little pest left in the open. “What kind of contract with the Devil?” he asked.

“I do not feel that it is appropriate to recite it word for word,” Rabbi Klein said, “but the general context is that the Devil agrees to grant the signee any assistance they require in their human life, as long as the signee pledges to serve the Devil, for eternity, in the afterlife.”

“Why the hell would anyone agree to that?” Charlie said, catching his tongue after the fact. “Sorry about the language.”

“It is nothing that I haven’t heard before,” Rabbi Klein said. “While the prospect of selling your soul might not sound appealing to you or me, the lure of fortune and power has corrupted many a man, and will no doubt continue to do so as long as man inhabits what God’s hands have made.”

Charlie knew that fortune and power were two things that Terry had in spades. Was it possible that Terry had signed this pledge to achieve those things, or was this was just for show? Charlie had no way of knowing for sure, other than prodding the knowledgeable rabbi for more info. “Do you think it’s real?”

“Is it real?” Rabbi Klein said, holding up the paper to examine it closer. “Certainly, it is a real sheet of paper. But as far as an actual contract with the Devil, I doubt that it is, or that such a thing exists. Of course, that does not mean it should be taken lightly. So, if you do not mind, I would prefer to get rid of this.”

“Sure,” Charlie said, half listening to the rabbi and half trying to determine what to make of it all.

“I do not think anyone should be fooling around with things of this nature,” Rabbi Klein said as he fed the contract into his shredder. “Genuine or not.”

The rabbi’s last words were lost in the cacophony of the shredder, which sounded like it was trying to take down a phone book instead of a single sheet of paper.

“What?” Charlie said, raising his voice over the clanging.

“I said, ‘Genuine or not,’” the rabbi repeated, raising his voice as well. He turned to the shredder to see what the fuss was about. “I am not sure what is wrong with this thing?” He tapped the machine, attempting to quiet it.

But if anything, the shredder only got louder.

Rabbi Klein turned back to Charlie and shook his head. “Sorry about that.” He waited for the paper to finish its journey through the metal teeth. “There,” Rabbi Klein said after the noise finally ceased. “Like I was saying, I do not think anyone should—” Rabbi Klein froze as he made what he had intended to be a quick double check of the shredder basket.

Seeing the worry on the rabbi’s face sent Charlie’s fragile body and mind into a physical and emotional tailspin. What could the holy man have seen that would make his body go stiff like it had?

Rabbi Klein reached into the shredder basket and retrieved the shredded contract. Only it wasn’t shredded at all—it was completely intact. The sheet of paper had traveled through the same blades Rabbi Klein had used to cut over thirty sheets at a time, not to mention countless expired credit cards, and had come out the other side without so much as a scratch. “I must have accidentally changed the settings,” Rabbi Klein said, refusing to attribute the problem to anything other than mechanical error. Rabbi Klein checked the shredder. “Everything looks perfect. Maybe I should try a test run.”

Trapped in his thoughts and searching for his own logical explanation—not counting the contract being authentic, which seemed entirely illogical—Charlie said nothing.

Rabbi Klein grabbed a fresh sheet of paper from his printer and fed it into the shredder. The shredder demolished the paper with ease. “Everything appears to be in order,” Rabbi Klein said, reassuring himself. He slipped the contract back into the shredder.

Just like the time before, the machine rattled and clanged as it labored to pull the lone piece of paper though. Also like the time before, the sheet passed through the shredder’s blades completely unaffected.

Rabbi Klein started to show signs of panic. He couldn’t stop his mind from considering that this contract might be real. But that had to be impossible. His gaze darted about the room. What to do next?

Charlie was thinking the same thing. He zeroed in on the lit candle in the windowsill. “Burn it!” he blurted out.

“Yes!” Rabbi Klein blurted out and just as quickly offered the sheet to the much more nimble Charlie.

Charlie leapt from his chair and snagged the contract from the rabbi’s outstretched hand. He rushed to the window and held the corner of the sheet over the candle’s flame.

Rabbi Klein lumbered to join Charlie’s side. “It is always better to burn something like that. Leave no trace,” Rabbi Klein said, attempting to sound confident but not quite concealing his underlying trepidation.

They both waited a second for the sheet to catch.

It didn’t.

They waited another couple seconds.

Still nothing.

“Try the center,” Rabbi Klein suggested.

Charlie obliged, hovering the sheet directly over the strongest part of the flame. Finally, the paper caught fire. “There we go,” Charlie said.

“I knew that would work,” Rabbi Klein said. He stared at the flames as they began to consume the contract.

But Charlie noticed there was something different about the way the fire was spreading. “I’m not so sure it is,” he said.

Rabbi Klein saw what Charlie had already observed. It wasn’t the paper that was ablaze—it was the ink, or more specifically, the words. They burned in bold black and red tones, keeping their shape as the radiant flames rose from the page.

Charlie removed the piece of paper from the candle. The words continued to smolder on their own for a few seconds before they extinguished. Plumes of smoke, the same color as the ones that had consumed his parents’ home office, floated away from the completely intact and unaffected contract.

Without saying a word, it was evident to both Charlie and Rabbi Klein that the sheet of paper in Charlie’s hand was not a fake. It was very much real.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Charlie’s feet pounded
the pedals of his bike as he tore down the residential streets faster than he had ever ridden before, faster than he knew he was capable of riding. He was fueled by the fear of everything he had just learned, and by the fact that the contract was still in his possession.

Rabbi Klein had wanted nothing to do with the seemingly indestructible sheet of paper. And since they both agreed that they couldn’t throw the contract away, thereby risking that someone might find it and unknowingly sign on the dotted line, Charlie just stuffed the contract in his pocket and took off for his house.

While the contract was on his person, more than just the piece of paper was on Charlie’s mind as he zipped past his old recreational league baseball field, his parents’ favorite coffee shop, and the home of his elementary school best friend, whom he’d outgrown. There was something even more chilling that kept him from daring to look over his shoulder and risk slowing down even the slightest. It was the same thing that kept his legs firing like pistons in a muscle car’s engine. That something was the story that Rabbi Klein had disclosed to Charlie after they were unable to destroy the contract. It was a story that involved similar dealings with the Devil. What Charlie had gleaned from the tale took all of his issues and multiplied them by infinity.

Charlie’s mind continued to spin like the tires on his bike as he raced to get home, neither of them easing up even as his house came into view. Charlie’s eyes were so focused on the front door that he didn’t notice the blacked-out
suv
parked across the street a couple houses down. He just flew past the truck and into his driveway.

Charlie hopped off of the back of his bike, sending it ghost-riding across the front lawn. The bike continued into the neighbor’s yard, where it crashed into their perfectly planted flower garden. Charlie didn’t see or hear the collision; he was busy sprinting for the front entrance.

Charlie threw open the door and leapt inside. He slammed the door shut and then flipped the locks on the doorknob and deadbolt as fast as humanly possible. The chain lock proved to be more of a problem. His twitching hands fumbled with the bolt before finally sliding it into place. Charlie gulped one massive breath and then took off up the stairs.

A befuddled Grandpa Kim waited in the second-floor hallway. He had stumbled out of his room to see what all the commotion was, and was mumbling to himself in Korean.

Charlie blew by the confused old man and continued his mad dash towards his bedroom. He flung the bedroom door shut behind him as he bounded the last flight of steps to his room with haste. So much so that he lost his footing and slipped, crashing chin-first onto the edge of the wooden staircase. A gash opened and started leaking blood. Charlie made no attempt to inspect the wound or stem the flow of tiny red droplets, nor did he even bother to return to his feet. He sprung himself up to his hands and knees and scurried on all fours for the farthest point from his bedroom door.

Charlie curled up in a seated fetal position in the corner of the room next to his dresser, his back flush against the wall. He wrapped his arms around his bent legs and pulled them into his body, squeezing so tightly that the joints in his knees cracked. He slammed his eyes shut with equal relative force. His body quivered as the story that Rabbi Klein had told him cycled through his head.

Rabbi Klein had been hesitant to tell the old legend when Charlie initially asked him if he’d ever heard of people selling their souls. The rabbi had written the tale off as fantasy so many years ago that at first, it hadn’t even registered as a legitimate response to Charlie’s question.

Charlie helped shed the rabbi of his reluctance, reminding him that the contract had also seemed like a fantasy at first but had since become a very harsh reality.

Rabbi Klein conceded. He recounted the story that his grandmother had told him as a child, one that she had heard while growing up in a small Romanian village just outside of Transylvania. It was the story of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler.

According to the village folklore, the often-cited history of Vlad the Impaler—the inspiration behind Count Dracula—was nothing more than a consciously crafted fabrication. All of the accounts of his brutality, from bloodsucking and vampirism to mass decapitations and the flaunting of fallen soldiers’ severed heads, were merely cover for his actual crimes, which, in reality, were much worse.

The true story of Vlad began with his rise to power. It was said that during his time as a hostage in the Ottoman court, a teenage Vlad made a covenant with the Devil, where he agreed to sell his soul. In return, the Devil committed to assisting the young Vlad in his rise to power. As part of their deal, Vlad was assigned a small collection of the Devil’s minions to serve as his protectors.

The villagers referred to these protectors as
fiară diavolul
ui
, Romanian for “Beasts of the Devil.” Human in appearance only, they were said to be much closer to dybbuks, malicious spirits that possess human bodies. However, instead of possessing their victim’s bodies, the Beasts fed off of their souls. It was this soul-sucking that would later be falsely reported as bloodsucking, and become the basis for all vampire lore.

The Beasts helped Vlad escape captivity and grow his forces. It took close to a decade, but eventually, Vlad seized the throne as Prince of Wallachia. Once in power, Vlad set out to fulfill part of his pact, helping wage the Devil’s war on mankind.

While Vlad undertook his unholy war, his Beasts devoured the souls of anyone who stood in their way. They terrorized the lands for years until Vlad was finally defeated. Though there was no shortage of stories for how Vlad finally met his bloody end, some more fantastical than others, his exact demise was unknown. However, what was known was that almost immediately after Vlad was slain, the Beasts completely disappeared, retreating to wherever they came.

Many years after Vlad’s death, the villagers claimed to have seen him from time to time, always at the side of someone else. They believed that he wasn’t a ghost, but that he had become one of the Beasts. They said they could tell by his eyes, which were the only way to identify a Beast. His eyes were just like the others. They glowed like the embers of a campfire and had blue sparks that blazed across his corneas like shooting stars.

Charlie froze when he had heard the last bit. He instantly thought of Cain’s eyes. Even though he hadn’t noticed anything that resembled a fire behind Cain’s dark sunglasses, the image of the blue sparks—three of them, to be exact—was permanently seared in his brain.

While the story, combined with the realization that Terry’s bodyguards were the same Beasts that the rabbi spoke of, had been enough to severely rattle Charlie, it was Rabbi Klein’s final disclosure, which came after Charlie had asked what became of the soulless bodies, that truly shook Charlie to his core.

Rabbi Klein replied that, from what his grandmother had told him, a body without a soul behaved much like a body that had lost a significant amount of blood. This fact assisted in the perpetuation of the vampire myths. The victims of the Beasts would wander mindlessly for a short time, usually a matter of minutes, before coming to a most sudden end; however, that was just the beginning. They faced a fate much worse than death. Their souls remained trapped inside the Beast that had stolen them for as long as the Beast walked the Earth. With the stolen souls went all the memories of their lives, fading each passing day from minds of those they had known until they were completely gone.

The revelation had caused the hair on Charlie’s neck to stand straight up and every square inch of his skin to goose. The heart attacks that had killed his parents and Walter were just like the sudden deaths the rabbi had mentioned. His dream from the night before, where he still couldn’t remember what his parents had said, seemed much like a memory that had faded away.

Charlie was certain that if both of those things were true, and he was woefully confident that they were, then his parents’ and Walter’s souls were the blue flashes that he had seen. He was certain that they would be trapped in Cain forever. And as Charlie sat on the floor of his bedroom, his head buried between his knees, he was certain that it was only a matter of time—minutes, or maybe even seconds—before he joined them.