My Soul to Take (33 page)

The plane began its slow taxi, building up speed on the runway. Jessica’s stomach rattled. She leaned against Dawit, resting her head on his shoulder. “What are we doing?”

Dawit stroked her hair. “Believing,” he said.

The door from the bedroom opened, and Fana came out with Adam on her shoulder, his long tail wrapped around her neck. Gently, she closed the door behind her.

“Phoenix is resting.” Fana glanced at the television news. A blond white woman identified as Phoenix’s cousin and manager was a tearful wreck on the screen, begging viewers for information about Phoenix.
GLOW CONNECTION
? the headline above her read.

Fana quickly looked away from the TV.

I DIDN’T CONTROL PHOENIX’S DECISION, MOM. SHE MADE THE CHOICE
.

Jessica spoke quietly. “Of course you controlled her, honey. Put yourself in her place—you blew her mind. She didn’t have a real choice.”

Fana looked to Dawit for his opinion. He shrugged his agreement. “You led her, Fana.”

I NEED HER
, Fana said.
WITH MICHEL, I NEED EVERYONE I HAVE
.

“What you think is best isn’t always what’s right.” Jessica’s voice was hushed. “Own your decisions, especially the ones you’re not proud of. We might as well be kidnapping her.”

Fana inclined her head, a bow.
I KNOW SHE’S IN SHOCK, BUT I NEED HER
.

The speeding plane rocked, and Fana stumbled. As she tried to step forward, the plane pitched her back. Adam squealed and leaped, swinging away by the curtain rod.

Dawit was suddenly on his feet, catching Fana’s arm. “You see we’re taking off, Fana,” Dawit said sternly, at the same time Jessica said, “Girl, sit down.”

Sometimes Fana seemed as awkward in her body as she had been when she was three, as if her limbs were in her way. What was it Fana had said when they flew to Lalibela that first time and she stared out her window?
See, Mommy, I can touch it! I can reach out and touch the sky!
Jessica heard the pealing echo of her little girl’s voice.

Fana sat between them on the sofa, burrowing between their hips the way she had when she was young. For that golden instant, Fana was just her daughter, and she and Dawit were exactly where they belonged. Sweeter than any dream. Jessica breathed in deeply, the way Fana and Teka had taught her, filling her lungs with the moment.

Jessica wrapped her arm around Fana and offered her daughter a place to rest her head.

“Y
ou must take her quickly,” Stefan said. “You understand this,
sí
?”

Their horses were walking so slowly that they barely moved along the rocky path above the valley. Below, Michel spotted a wedding party snapping photographs in a clearing between tall Mexican fan palms and jojoba shrubs.

The wedding party was courageous to come so close to the church palace, with so many of his soldiers nearby, but word was spreading quickly throughout Sonora State and northwestern Mexico: because of Sanctus Cruor, there were blessings in Nogales. No more cartels in Nogales. Peace in Nogales. Healing in Nogales. An oasis in the vast Sonoran Desert.

Michel could not abide street shootouts and disorder so close to the place where the Cleansing would be born. The repetitive sirens and sporadic gunfire had been intolerable. Narcos and kidnappers had been the first to visit his Cleansing Pool.

A table full of narcos was plotting against him even now, Michel realized, twenty kilometers southwest, in a cantina near the beach. They had called his name, so their blustery voices were as loud to Michel as they would have been if they were standing in front of him. Three of them: one from Tijuana, another from Mexico City, a corrupt city official from Ciudad Juarez, all of them incensed because of the interference of El Diablo, who lived in the grand new church in the mountains outside Nogales. They spoke of storming the church with an army, tearing down its walls with grenades.

Michel sent a mental message to Bocelli and Romero:
Bring them all to me
.

They would be his next offerings to the Cleansing Pool, with Fana at his side.

In the valley below, the wedding party had no thoughts of war. The couple stood between two massive, wide-trunked palm trees. Michel admired the young bride in her vintage cream-colored wedding dress, her sun-browned skin peeking through eyelets in the crocheted lace. Perhaps Fana would wear a dress like hers soon.

BE STRONG, MICHEL
, his father said, intruding in his thoughts.

“Leave it to you to spoil my good day, Papa,” Michel said.

“Am I the one spoiling your day?”

“It doesn’t give me pleasure to think of hurting her.”

“Taking pleasure is your choice, Michel. It’s not the point.”

A contact in Lalibela, Ermias, had reported what Michel would have considered unthinkable after his last encounter with Fana: She had given her Blood’s eternal gift to the Wright boy. Could she have thought he wouldn’t learn of it? He had nearly announced another Cleansing ceremony—and this time, he would not have contained the killing.

Perhaps Miami was due for an outbreak. Or the mortal village of Lalibela itself.

But Teka, Fana’s teacher, had sent him a mental pulse to let him know they would arrive
today
! The party would land before nightfall: Fana, her parents, and her retinue. His constant headache eased when he imagined her arrival.

“She’s bringing her parents,” Michel said. “That demonstrates trust, no?”

“Trust! Her father should be barred at the door. He’s a barbarian.”

Stefan and Dawit had met twice before—once at Adwa more than a hundred years ago, and again only last year, after Stefan had tracked the Glow network to Fana’s doorstep. Both times, Dawit had stopped Stefan’s heart and believed he was dead, unaware of his Blood. Stefan complained incessantly about Dawit’s cruelty with his knife, an irony that amused Michel. Stefan, who trafficked in cruelty, would complain about the sport in another?

“I should meet her at her plane,” Michel said.

“Michel, ludicrous! And look like an enchanted schoolboy? She’s a heretic, and each day she tempts you to weakness and makes a mockery of the Prophecy. Your sacred purpose!”

Stefan was not Most High, and yet he never wavered from his purpose. Stefan would have begun the Cleansing in earnest by now.

The wedding party lost its allure. Michel turned away.

“You know why she has come,” Stefan said.

I know
, Michel said.

He spurred his horse, racing faster down the mountainside’s horse trail. Michel wished Fana were coming to him because she had accepted her role in the Cleansing, or because she could not resist her Blood bond to him. But she had shown herself in her mental visit, laying herself bare. She meant to stop the Cleansing.

“And you talk about meeting her plane? Will you carry her bags too?
Rallenta!
Slow down!” Stefan called as he sped after him. He sounded breathless, as if he were the one running, not his mare. “She wants to impose
her
will on
you
. She expects to mold and shape you, Michel. Or kill you, of course. That’s the root of this entire farce!”

After his bloody clash with Fana the year before, Michel had forced her to promise that she would never try to kill him again. But she had also promised not to defile her Blood, and what had come of that? When she had opened herself to him, he had seen no plans to harm him, and he had none to harm her. But they both held convictions that made plans and desires irrelevant.

“I’ll never forget the sight of you in those bloodied clothes!” Stefan shouted. He was falling too far behind
Michel’s horse, so he abandoned his voice.

YOU ALMOST LET HER KILL YOU, MICHEL
.

She could only have killed me by killing us both
, Michel said.

AND DON’T THINK SHE WOULDN’T
.

She will not have the opportunity
, Michel said.

THEN TAKE HER! YOUR HESITATION CONFOUNDS ME
, Stefan said.

Does it?

Michel reined his horse, suddenly bored with his ride as well as
his company. Nogales was spread beneath his perch, crowded and energized. In time, this city would belong to his most faithful, the others swept away. Poverty would be gone. Suffering would be gone.

Stefan rode beside him. “Michel … if I made mistakes with Teru …”

Don’t speak of my mother, today of all days
.

“Let’s discuss it like men!”

Papa, you ignore my wishes at your own risk
.

“Yes, I took her from her family.
Stole
her. You know what I am. We have no secrets. I didn’t have your advantages, Michel, so my methods were uncivilized. I butchered her mind, I admit it. But I gave her the Blood! Don’t shy from sacred duty because of my weaknesses. Don’t you see that I was trying to make Teru hap—”

Stefan stopped in midsentence, clutching his throat with his palm. His face turned bright red as iron fingers tightened across his windpipe. In his surprise, he fumbled and fell from his horse. The Shadows celebrated within Michel, tasting Stefan’s pain as a stone cracked his upper arm. But he did not release his neck. Stefan had no breath with which to cry out from the fracture.

If you were sincere, I might almost be moved
, Michel told him.

MICHEL, YOU’LL BREAK MY NECK—

Stefan’s thought was snuffed as oxygen fled his body, diminishing his brain function. Michel watched his father’s mouth falling open like a fish’s as he tried to draw air. Michel considered snapping Stefan’s neck entirely, or sweeping him over the ravine. That would teach him to pollute his ears with false remorse over Teru. Let him wake bleeding on the rocks.

But there was no time. Fana was on her way, and Stefan had to be there to greet her. Perhaps Dawit might entertain him by cutting his father’s throat. Michel released his mental hold on his father’s windpipe. Then he yanked his reins to ride back.

Behind him, Stefan gasped and choked from the ground. “You’ve broken my arm!” he coughed. “Has she driven you insane already?”

Michel would have been happy to let his father suffer his injury for a few hours, but he didn’t want his arm broken when Fana
arrived. She would know he had done it, and he didn’t want her first impression to be a display of the violence he wanted to avoid.

As Michel rode away, he fused the shattered bone in his father’s arm with half a thought. An hour’s walk wouldn’t hurt Stefan, so Michel bade his father’s horse to follow without its rider. The beast trotted obediently behind him.

The solution could be that easy with Fana, too, he reminded himself. All his distress could be stilled by a simple mental exercise, and Fana would be his in mind, body, and soul.

I’M NOT THE ONE YOU SHOULD BE ANGRY WITH!
Stefan called after him.
YOU KNOW IT AS WELL AS I DO! BE STRONG ENOUGH TO DO WHAT YOUR DESTINY DEMANDS OF YOU BOTH!

Michel was glad his father could not see his tears.

The cathedral was his classroom.

In the silence of his private cathedral, Michel studied the Letter of the Witness. If his heart was weak, the Letter would prepare him for Fana.

Michel imagined himself as a boy when he visited the Witness’s classroom, about twelve, dressed in the short blue cotton jacket he had envied so much on the afternoons he watched the mortal boys streaming home from school when he was at the apartment in Tuscany, his happiest times. Papa had never permitted him to attend school with other children; Stefan had not wanted Michel to grow overly fond of the
mortali
.

His father had discovered the Letter while he was running guns in Ethiopia in 1894, and his first act had been to slay the houseboy who translated it from Ge’ez. The Witnesses had told his remarkable story of Blood stolen from the cross at a momentous time in Jerusalem, leaving the last page damp with a drop that never dried.

Michel sat in the front row of wooden pews. Michel was the Letter’s student, and the Witness himself was his teacher. Passages from the Letter were written in gold paint covering the walls, twinkling in candlelight, and his eyes traveled the words he had memorized as a child.

Michel created the visage, a man who appeared as flesh and blood, embodying all the knowledge from the Letter. The Witness stood before him at the altar, in his teacher’s robe with the crest of Sanctus Cruor. After meeting Fana, he had incorporated her memories of Khaldun, whom he was certain must have written the Letter: skin as dark as midnight, a long black beard.

“Wickedness is cunning, and hides in the hearts of men,” the Witness said.

“Yes, and we must wrest the Blood from the hands of the wicked,” Michel said.

“And who are the wicked, Michel?” the Witness said, a merry glimmer in his eye. Stefan was stern enough for ten men, so Michel created the Witness’s persona as jovial.

“There is wickedness everywhere,” Michel said. “Children are wicked to each other. Parents are wicked to their children. Lovers carry out small acts of wickedness toward each other every day. Wickedness roams unspoken in everyone’s thoughts.”

“If all have the capacity for wickedness, then who shall be Chosen?”

“The Chosen are merely those I choose,” Michel said. “Those
we
choose. And the Blood shall cleanse them of wickedness.”

“As it cleansed your father?” the Witness said.

“Certainly not.” Michel almost laughed.

“Then … who are the wicked?”

The Witness gave a mysterious smile. The Letter did not specify how to identify the wicked, and the visage would not answer questions that were not found in the text. Instead, he offered a question: “Would an act of kindness make a wicked man kind?”

Michel sighed, washed in the painful memories of Fana’s last visit and her loathing for him. “Fana believes I am wicked,” Michel said.

“As others believe
she
is,” the Witness said. “Would not the thousands left homeless and hundreds left widowed or orphaned by her typhoon call her wicked?”

“Fana is not wicked. Misguided, yes. Naïve. But not wicked.”