Last Safe Place, The (11 page)

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Bernie scowl. He doesn’t like her humor. It makes her human and real and neither characteristic appeals to him personally nor satisfies his purposes. Bernie doesn’t like for her to break character. That’s the main reason she does it.

But the man before her never blinks. There is something chilling about his astonishing good looks. His features are too well-defined, as sharp as a hatchet, poster boy for the Hitler Youth.

“Sweet Zara, you’re even more lively than I pictured, with even more sparkle. A bit untamed to be sure, but that spirit can be bridled.” He manages to make “bridled” sound menacing. “I’ve been looking for you for millennia. Now, our time has come.”

Okay, this guy is definitely certifiable. Gorgeous, but crackers.

Gabriella picks up a copy of
The Bride of the Beast
and opens it to the cover page in the front. She reaches for a pen and says formally, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re holding up the line. Do you want me to write something in particular or just sign it?”

He leans down close and she smells a hint of garlic his breath mint can’t disguise, a fresh lime aftershave and some other scent that eludes her. It is an earthy smell, like fresh plowed sod or damp leaves, but unpleasant. Moldy leaves, perhaps. And dirt from an open—

“Write: ‘To my Master and Lord. I will honor you, serve you, obey you and bear you a son. We will reign together, the Beast and his Bride.’”

His voice is thick and clotted with urgency; his breathing labored. The cold he emanates chills Gabriella to the bone and she begins to tremble. She drops her pen, yanks her hand away from the book and looks up into his face. That’s a mistake. His eyes seize hers and lock on. She falls into their frigid depths, deeper and deeper into the blue that darkens through purple to black.

His eyes hold her captive. She is only set free when he drops his gaze—like she’d seized an electric cable and couldn’t let go until the juice was turned off. She slumps back in her chair gasping.

“I will see you soon, my Love,” he says. “I will come for you when it is time.” He straightens up, turns and walks away—leaving the un-autographed book lying beneath her trembling hands.

Gabriella feels tears well in her eyes and spill soundlessly down her cheeks as she watches him go. She has never been so frightened in her life. Needlessly frightened. The man did absolutely nothing menacing, yet everything was menacing. An image blooms of the hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, crouching against the embankment as the Black Rider sniffs for them on the road above. Sick, mindless fear. How could anything human possibly be so innocently terrifying?

To Bernie’s vast dismay, she lurches to her feet and retreats to the ladies room and refuses to come out until he clears the bookstore. Then she sneaks furtively out the back door and into a waiting limousine to go home.

The day after the book signing, three dozen black roses were delivered to her house. That’s when she learned his name. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft. From that moment forward, his unrelenting attention became the canvas on which every day was painted. Over the course of the next eight months, he sent her flowers, presents, cards and letters—she refused delivery on all of them. Then he began to show up wherever she was. How did he know she was taking Ty to the museum, that she was going to the dentist or to the grocery store? She finally went to court and got a restraining order from a reluctant, unbelieving judge. That didn’t make Yesheb leave her alone, it only moved his attentions back a few yards. When she saw him on the sidewalk in front of her house or inside the fence, standing in the trees watching, she
called the police. Time and time again. But he was never there when the police arrived and she quickly became the little boy who cried wolf.

After he showed up at the intersection in Orlando, where she had sneaked away to take Ty to Disneyland, she employed a private detective who documented his family’s fabulous wealth—and the tragic deaths that befell one family member after another until Yesheb was the only man standing. After Good Friday, she’d lived in constant terror. No one knew better than she the timetable for the Beast to collect his bride. If he failed to seduce her by the full moon in July, he would lose forever his right to rule Babylon.

And Gabriella suspected that never in his life had Yesheb Al Tobbanoft failed to get exactly what he wanted.

* * * *

Yesheb holds the heavy damask drapes back from the window and stares with unseeing eyes into a world colored the cheerless shade of gray peculiar to the south of England in the springtime. The sullen masses of clouds harried by a chill wind have worn thin, but aren’t threadbare enough to allow a single shard of sunlight to slice down out of the evening sky.

Though no mist or fog or drizzle is actually visible in the air, it is nonetheless wet. So is every surface in the stone courtyard and the perfectly manicured rose gardens—the blood-red blooms rust-colored in the gray light—that stretch out beneath the high window on the north side of the manor house. Yesheb can just make out the blanket of flowers on the floor of the bluebell wood beyond the stone fence in the rolling hills of Hertfordshire where his sisters played when they were children.

Perhaps an hour of daylight remains before the wet air scrubs away all color and washes darkness down the day, and Yesheb wonders as he has wondered countless times over the years why his Iranian father chose to purchase a sprawling estate here in the unrelenting drear.

He smiles a joyless smile. Ah, but Anwar Al Tobbanoft did not choose. Perhaps he thought he did, in his ignorance, but his father was mistaken. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was
chosen.
It was his honor, and the privilege of his submissive cow of a wife, to bring royalty into the world, and the revelation of Yesheb’s regal lineage had occurred here in England.

Yesheb drops the curtain and turns back to the ornate desk. He hobbles on his walking cast the few steps to the big leather chair. As he settles his long frame into it, his mind snaps back to his obsession with the force of a stretched-too-tight rubber band.

The Bride.
Where is she?

His herd of private investigators have scurried around with insectile frenzy searching for her, but have not turned up so much as a hint of her whereabouts. They searched her house but found nothing that suggested her destination. They accessed the contacts list in her computer and were systematically investigating every person named in it. They were checking out every school she ever attended, every classmate, roommate, bunkmate, old friend, old flame and every neighbor every place she ever lived.

They were investigating the old man just as thoroughly, though his history is longer, not as well documented and harder to track.

Zara’s sniveling little literary agent—clearly the progeny of a rat bred with a pit viper—had been drawn to Yesheb’s power and sucked up to him unashamedly. The man gave Yesheb’s investigators every speck of information he had about Zara, which quickly made it clear Phelps hardly knew her at all.

The agent collects her mail and gives it to Yesheb’s men. Nothing. The investigators watch for activity on her ISP address. Nothing. She and the old man left their cell phones behind and there is no way to trace a burner—a pre-paid cheapie phone. There has been no activity on her credit cards and her ATM card, but they learned she had withdrawn more than $75,000 in cash from the bank that day in New York two weeks ago. Unless the three of them have forged passports—and why would they?—they have not fled the country. Still, you could go a long way on $75,000.

She and the others—the boy, the old man and the dog—have vanished in a puff of smoke.

Yesheb picks up off the desk one of his father’s most prized possessions. The jeweled, enameled Easter egg, the Royal Danish Egg, is one of the eight missing Faberge eggs. Its value is incalculable. He turns it over in his hand, looks at it without really seeing it. Then, in a sudden flash of rage, he hurls it across the room to smash against the bookcase and growls a string of profanities under his breath.

They
will
find her. No one can hide forever from a manhunt as thorough as the one he has launched. She will surface, do something stupid and he will snatch her up like a frog grabs a fly. He has time, he tells himself firmly, trying to calm his frayed nerves. He still has twelve days until the next full moon. And another full moon after that one. He will find her, sacrifice her son, mate with her and plant the seed of his own son in her womb. They will rule together. And he will make her pay for running from him. Oh, my yes. He will make her pay as his father made his mother pay.

Even as a boy, Yesheb knew his father believed his mother had been unfaithful and he couldn’t figure out why his father hadn’t killed his wife and her newborn baby on the spot. Why had he let them live?

When he grew older he understood: Anwar Al Tobbanoft kept them alive to make them pay!

Other boys were borne away into slumber to the tune of lullabies; Yesheb went to sleep every night to the sound of his mother’s screams. His father beat her regularly, broke her nose so many times it was as flat as a prize fighter’s, shattered countless other bones over the years, knocked out most of her teeth and blinded her left eye. No one outside the household ever knew, of course. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was an important, respected and
rich
man. He was also a Muslim man, not in belief but for convenience. And it was certainly convenient that he could cover his wife’s battered body from head to toe whenever she went out in public with a full burka—the kind that featured only a mesh slit for the eyes.

When Yesheb was about twelve, he found out that shortly after he was born his father had commissioned DNA testing on the blonde, blue-eyed baby boy and discovered that Yesheb had, indeed, come from his seed. So why had his father continued to punish his mother for a crime he knew she did not commit? And why did he visit unspeakable cruelties on his only son as well? It took years for Yesheb to understand it wasn’t about making anybody pay. It never had been. It was about the screams, the delicious delight of screams.

Yesheb shivers in anticipation of the sound of Zara’s screams and feels power surge through him. There is power in fear and even greater power in domination. But the greatest power of all lies in living while others die at your hands. Power feeds on the screeching cries of their anguish, grows in the fertile soil of death like entangling, choking vines.

Yesheb killed for the first time when he was eight years old. It was the day he first heard The Voice. When the growling whisper spoke words into his ear that first time, he had not been frightened. It was almost like he had expected to hear it, like he had been waiting for it, holding his breath in anticipation of it his whole life.

Yesheb. Make an altar and offer a sacrifice to me—your sister’s puppy.

“Who are you?” Yesheb had asked out loud. Though he knew. Yesheb had always known. What he learned that he did not know, however, was that The Voice tolerated nothing less than instant, complete, mindless obedience. He learned that lesson as all children learn best—by suffering the consequences of their misdeeds. The Voice rewarded Yesheb’s question with agony, detonated a bomb of searing pain inside his head so excruciating he instantly dropped to his knees gasping. He writhed in delirious agony for seven days and seven nights. The finest medical care money could buy offered no relief. Doctors could find no cause for pain so torturous that the boy was literally blinded by it and could only barely hear above the buzz of a million locusts in his ears. The pain left him as abruptly as it had come. He awoke in a hospital. To the astonishment of the medical personnel hovering over him, he sat up, ripped the IV tubes out of his arms and demanded to go home.

Even weak from seven days of lying motionless, he got out of his bed as soon as the rest of the family slept and slipped into his little sister Pasha’s room. The German Shepherd puppy she had gotten for her seventh birthday slept in a pillowed bed at the foot of hers. Yesheb picked it up silently. The dog licked his hand and Yesheb felt an ache in his heart for the helpless beast but he did not hesitate or falter.

Years later, he read that crack units of Nazi SS officers had been given puppies to raise and train, and on the day they graduated, they were ordered to slit the dogs’ throats. Any officer who failed to respond instantly to the command was dismissed from the unit.

Yesheb would have passed the test. He sneaked into the kitchen for the sharpest knife he could find and then out the back door to do as The Voice had commanded.

He never questioned The Voice again.

Sometimes, there are other voices in his head. Some speak Arabic, others speak English, French or Italian. One is a sultry woman’s voice; another
is a child. The voices tell him things he could not possibly know, warn him of impending danger, soothe him sometimes and inflame his anger at other times. Those voices often tell him what to do, but the ultimate authority always rests with The Voice.

The Voice revealed Yesheb’s true identity two years after the boy killed his sister’s puppy. He was a day student at Haileybury, the prestigious British boarding school peopled by the children of the rich and famous from around the world. Located on Hertford Heath twenty miles north of central London, the school boasted a quad touted as the largest academic quadrangle in the world, and that spring the Kipling House, one of the boys’ dormitories, used soapstone to construct a scale model of Stonehenge in the center of it.

Although Yesheb’s striking good looks, his maturity and his air of authority had made him an instant leader when his father enrolled him, the boy disdained leadership, made no friends and kept to himself. After the other students fell victim to his caustic tongue, hair-trigger temper and vicious, mean streak, they cut a wide path around him. Left him alone, though none of the insipid fools realized he was never alone. The Voice and the minions of The Voice were always with him.