I was about to turn back and ask him what his deal was, since I’d just done some major magical heavy lifting for his kid totally pro bono, but electric current knocked the breath from my lungs.
Tasered. So much for gratitude.
My body stiffened like a board and I fell over, though I was completely cognizant. The smack of concrete against my cheek felt far away next to the sharp agony rolling through me. I cried out as every muscle simultaneously seized up in a giant charley horse.
Black shiny shoes stepped into my blurred field of vision.
Pastor Nephus snapped a pair of magic nulling cuffs on me. Through my haze of pain came a terrifying flatness. I was powerless. I shook my wrists, my brows drawn together in confusion.
“You asked about the youth shelter,” he said. “These came in handy for dealing with some of our more temperamental flock.”
He dragged me upright, propped me in a wooden chair, and tied me up with several thick ropes.
By the time I had control of my body again, all I could do was tug uselessly on the bindings. “I helped you with Eve.”
“Praise be to God. He sent you to cleanse my daughter, and now you shall offer your blood as the catalyst to make the Rapture a reality and reunite us with our Lord.”
I thrashed against the ropes. “You think you’ll be one of the Chosen after you murder me? Basic commandment, Pastor.” Plus, how about some non-homicidal gratitude for the person who’d saved your daughter, asshole?
I jumped to my feet, the chair stuck to me like a turtle’s shell, and knocked him to the ground. Thanks to the cuffs, my magic was still suppressed, but my legs worked. I ran towards the stairs as fast as I could, hit the first step and gasped.
The entire congregation stood at the top of the stairs.
They carried me into the church, still tied to the chair, like a Jewish bride at her wedding dance. I resisted the urge to hum Hava Nagila.
“Killing me won’t get you to heaven,” I said, hoping to appeal to some vestige of goodness in the congregants. “Just to prison.”
Doubt flashed over some of their faces. I’d swayed a solid sixty percent of them to my side. Fifty percent. High thirties for sure.
“You’re wrong,” Susan the pie lady said, conviction in her voice. “God brought you here because you are not one of His Chosen. You belong to the Devil. We shall wipe you from the earth, ushering in the End of Days to destroy your kind for good. Our reward shall be the Rapture.” She swayed, madness bright in her eyes.
Hysterical laughter stuck in my throat. The biggest irony here was that God hadn’t sent me, I’d brought myself in the name of one of those fascinating cases I was so gung ho about.
“You sent those Nefesh kids at the shelter to be tortured,” I said. “Some died.”
“We saved them,” Pastor Nephus said.
“Yeah? How come you didn’t send Eve to them?”
“It wasn’t God’s will,” he said.
Hypocrite. You knew what those people were doing and even you couldn’t put your child through that.
My heart stuttered. “Those people” were Chariot.
Reality fractured, connection upon connection folding over my life. My father working for Isaac when my magic appeared, Adam using a Van Gogh to ward me who was loyal to Chariot, Isaac being Levi’s dad, my first case with magic happening to involve Meryem and Chariot, Omar and the angel feather at the archeological site, and now Jackson Wu’s involvement on a seemingly unrelated case of money laundering tied to Isaac’s support of the Untainted Party.
My existence was a dot trapped in the center of outward-spiraling concentric circles. Was there any end to them? Was everything in my life destined to be connected to all of this? I fought to breathe.
“God tested me with Eve,” the Pastor said, his voice rising to the rafters.
Fucking narcissist. Eve hunched into herself and didn’t make eye contact.
“But we proved that our desire was pure and now we will do His work and be rewarded.”
“I’m not your ticket to eternal paradise.” I looked at each of the worshippers in turn. “You’re about to make a terrible mistake, but you can stop this before it’s too late.”
Pastor Nephus walked behind the island near the pulpit and opened a set of doors. He returned with a silver watering can contraption, and poured the contents over my head, praying about anointments.
I screwed my eyes shut against the sting of oil.
“Let this holy fire cleanse us,” he intoned.
My eyes snapped open. Susan was handing him one of those boxes of long matches. They were going to burn everything down, using me as a Presto log.
I thrashed against my bindings.
The worshippers formed a circle around me, singing about trumpets and God and life after the Rapture, their faces upturned like the Whos down in Whoville.
Pastor Nephus lit the match.
“If this is God’s will,” I said, “then release my magic. Prove that He truly desires this.”
“He does. We have faith and I’m not afraid to prove to you that in this we do His will.” The pastor nodded at Susan, who unlocked the cuffs.
Three things happened at once: the cuffs hit the ground with a clink, the lit match was flicked toward oil-slicked skin, and I popped the ropes holding me.
Oh wait, there was a fourth thing. My blood armor locked into place. The match bounced off it and fell to the ground where I stamped it out.
The parishioners’ voices grew louder, and at their crescendo, the pastor anointed me with more oil.
I grabbed his arm, forcing him to fling the cannister away, but Susan, that eager beaver, was on it.
She hit me with another lit match and this one took. I lit up like Fezzik imitating the Dread Pirate Roberts.
It stung, but that was about it. I slapped at the flames to douse them.
My body spasmed as someone hit me with the Taser again. The armor sputtered and I screamed as fire burned my exposed skin. I crashed to my knees, desperately batting at the flames. Gritting my teeth, I used that sage kindergarten advice to stop, drop, and roll, smothering the fire.
I fell into a dark void where there was no pain. Dimly, I remembered that third degree burns cauterized the nerve endings and the pain would come. My heartbeat was skipping and charred patches bloomed across my skin where the armor no longer held.
I smothered the flames as one of the parishioners reloaded the Taser. Still on my back, I fired a blood dagger at him, nailing him in the arm.
He dropped the weapon.
Miraculously, nothing other than me had burned.
Sweat and soot stung my eyes. I pushed to my feet, knives in both hands.
Everyone stared at me in horrified silence.
“It didn’t happen,” one man whispered.
There were murmurs and worried glances, some shuffling back to distance themselves from the fallout.
The pastor smacked Susan’s arm. “Again! The Rapture must—”
With a guttural cry, Eve barreled into her father, knocking him to the ground. “Leave her alone!”
I stood over her father and shot the daggers into the carpet on either side of his head.
He whimpered and flinched.
“Get your daughter some help, you son of a bitch.”
No one stopped me when I made my way to the exit on rubbery legs, lurching from pew to pew for support.
I shouldered out the front door, squinting against the sunlight that momentarily blinded me. Ripping off the cap, gloves, and those damn bobby pins, I lurched down the road toward Moriarty, taking deep breaths and focused on the mountains in the distance as a solid touchstone.
How many more times would I brush up against death because of a fanatical belief? How close had I come today? Would they have found my body? I fended off the memory of Gavriella dying in my arms. Would Levi have buried me up on that hill next to her?
If there was karma, it was a joke, because I’d tried to live my life ho
norably. All Jezebels did, and what did it get us?
Oh… I stumbled. Deepa’s pilgrimage involved cleansing her karma. What if she’d meant to atone for her role in Gavriella’s death? To fix things in her life before moving on and mend the bridge between Jezebels and Chariot perhaps?
Rafael was wrong. The bamah wasn’t code for some amulet. It was exactly what it purported to be: a high place. Specifically, the Jewish cemetery, located up a hill. Very specifically, the one where Gavriella was buried.
Connection upon connection. My gut had never steered me wrong: Gavriella’s grave was key to something. But what?
Chapter 25
The pain of my burns rushed in. My hands were slick on the wheel, the world fuzzy at the edges, and I barely made it to a local clinic where I was rushed to the Nightingale to be healed.
I was capable of the drive back, but it was a long way from the church to the Jewish cemetery, and I did my best not to brood. Or shiver, even with the heat cranked to high and my leather jacket on.
One lone bobby pin poked my scalp. I tore it out, wincing as a couple strands of hair came with it, and shoved it in my pocket.
HOOONNNK!
I wrenched the wheel to the right, back into my lane, keeping a careful distance between me and the logging truck ahead. There was a silhouette of a woman on its mud flaps with a breezy tilt of her head and the wind ruffling her hair. Oh, to be that carefree.
A zippy blue convertible shot past in the left lane, honking at both me and the silver SUV with a dented bumper behind me keeping a sedate speed.
I rolled down my window, the breeze blowing my cobwebs away, and called Miles on Bluetooth to update him on the events at the church.
“Almost getting caught up in a fanatical attempt to bring on the Rapture,” he said, when I was done. “Only you.”
“We can get the congregation on varying degrees of attempted murder, right?”
“I’ll send a team, but you’ll need to make a statement, and it’ll depend if they close ranks on their testimony. You think Eve will side with you?”
“We could pressure her and…” My hands tightened on the wheel. Did she deserve being forced to testify against her father and fellow congregants after all she’d suffered?
This would ruin their lives. I had the law on my side, but I also had the power of choice. Instead of an absolute insistence on punishment, could I show mercy? What would help more? Anger or forgiveness?
“I don’t want them arrested,” I said. “Is there some way to get medical professionals involved for rehabilitation purposes? Let’s get Eve the help she needs and work with the other congregants.”
“This might be an uphill battle,” Miles said. “But yeah, I’ll reach out and put people into place. I’ll also go out there and impress upon them that it’s in their best interests to go with the program.”
“Thanks, Miles.”
By the time I reached the iron gates of the cemetery, it was early evening and they were locked tight. A curl of anticipation knifed through me as I put the car into park, made short work of the lock on the gates, then closed them behind me so that someone driving by wouldn’t notice anything amiss.
I walked over to where Gavriella was buried and knelt down, placing my hand on the grass, my fingertips tingling. This was the bamah in question, I was certain of it. I half-expected that Gavriella’s body wouldn’t be here, having been stolen by Chariot for some nefarious purpose.
There was one way to find out if I was right.
Jews had a lot of prohibitions and grave digging was probably one of them, so how far was I willing to go to determine if my instincts were correct?
I smiled. Pretty far. Except I hadn’t brought a shovel. Eh. What were another couple of sins at this point? I broke into the groundskeeper’s shack and stole one, along with a ladder.
Now I was in business.
The shovel made a “che” sound as it bit into the grass, the dirt flying to one side with a soft “ffffp.” Good thing Asherah had given me enhanced strength, because digging up a grave was freaking hard. Even so, by the time the shovel struck the lid of the plain coffin with a dull thud, I was deep in the pit and soaked in sweat, my skin streaked with dirt, and my pony tail half-fallen out.
I cracked the lid open, recoiling from the stench inside. It was rotten broccoli, unwashed feet, and a sewer. The body was mercifully buried in a linen burial shroud, which had been stained with its decomposing fluids.
One hypothesis disproven: there was a body. Was it Gavriella’s? It felt pretty skeletal, so identifying features were out.
The faint hum of traffic floated on the breeze and birds twittered in the branches of a leafy tree. I made the mistake of taking a deep breath, then gagged as body rot went up my nostrils. I flinched, accidentally jostling the body with the shovel.
A glint of metal caught my eye. I reached under the deceased and pulled out a short tube, shaking it. Nothing rattled.
I tapped my finger against the metal cap, an icy prickliness dotting my skin. The smart thing to do was get this back to Rafael and let him open it, but I couldn’t. Fifteen years ago, my magic and my father’s actions had set something in motion and if I was correct—my hand tightened on the tube—tonight it came full circle.
I had to be the one to open it.
I ripped the cap off. Inside were two scrolls. One gave off nothing. It was the fake created by my Uncle Paulie. The other assaulted me with the smell of a hot sandstorm.
I slammed the cap back into place, sealing the scrolls up, and took shallow breaths through the adrenaline flooding my body.
“Isaac wanted the bamah because somehow, someone in Chariot buried their two scrolls here.” The real one and Dad’s fake. Connections. I bumped the tube against my forehead. “Deepa Anand.”
“Very good, Ashira,” Isaac said, rolling the “R” in his Italian accent. He stood at the top of the grave, looking down at me with an approving smile.
“Lookie lookie,” I said. “It’s one of the Ten. Nine? Poor Theresa.”
His smile faltered for a second, replaced by a shrewd look. “You knew about me.” Wow. Such compassion for his dead co-villain. “Then I was even more correct to set you the task of finding these scrolls.”
There are two types of people in this world, Ash, my girl. Those who are marks and those who aren’t.
I’d hallucinated an entire alternate version of my life, and yet not for a second had I imagined a reality where Isaac Montefiore had played me.
I still couldn’t.
The shovel’s wooden handle that I held broke into splinters. “You didn’t hire me. Nicola did.”
“We always underestimate the wives and mothers, don’t we? You’d never have believed she could be that duplicitous, but she’s a fine little actress. When it matters to her.” He casually called back over his shoulder. “Your precious son’s life mattered a great deal, didn’t it, my love?”
Nicola cried out.
I cracked the metal shovel in half. “I am not a mark,” I snarled.
“I’d have to disagree,” Isaac said. “Rather delicious, fooling the daughter of the man who tried to con me by hiding your magic. Adam always did think he was smarter than everyone else, even when it was painfully obvious that he was not. It seems you share that trait. How sad that your family is now zero for two on attempts to put one over on me. Sorry, zero for three. Isn’t that right, Talia?”
“Leave my daughter alone,” Talia said, her words practically a growl.
My heart skipped a beat. Had Isaac turned that charming smile on her, convincing her to come with him under the pretense of a donation to the party? Had she fallen for his honeyed lies, not seeing the blood in the water? Was my mother so used to being the predator in the room that she failed to see she’d become prey?
A pair of daggers flew from my hands but I was down in a grave, my arms already throbbed from digging, and I missed my target.
Isaac tossed down a pair of magic nulling cuffs. “Pu
t these on and come up or I’ll shoot your precious mother.”
I clicked them onto my wrists, filling with that dull flatness. I didn’t bother hiding the hate in my eyes as I climbed out of there. It was almost a relief. There was no more pretense, no more hiding, no more pretending that I could let him live after this.
And Levi?
He didn’t matter. He couldn’t. Isaac had killed my father and then he’d conned me. One might have been forgivable, for Levi’s sake. For our future. Not both. And especially not when Isaac had brought my mother into this. There wasn’t a corner of the world far enough he could go to escape me.
I hissed, a splinter from the ladder lodging under my skin, but I pressed my hand harder against the rung, relishing the pain, and climbed out of the pit.
Isaac stood next to a familiar slender man, who trained a gun on Nicola and my mother. Nicola was clearly terrified, barely holding it together. Talia, however, was pale but defiant, her chin up, despite the purple and black bruise around her right eye.
A red wave rose up hot and sharp inside me, before it was swept away by my core fusing, cold and hard like a diamond. My father’s voice whispered in my ear. If you want to spend the extra money, spend it on clarity.
The tableau froze for the briefest second, and realization slammed into me. Fifteen years of secrets and cons, of loss and rage, all driving me towards this night, this moment. The journey that my father had embarked on with Isaac that had upended my life ended tonight. This wasn’t coincidence, it was inevitability.
It was closure.
I sketched a mock bow. “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”
“And I yours,” the German assassin said in a heavy accent.
“Confirm something for me, Isaac,” I said. “Deepa’s pilgrimage. Was she atoning for everything she’d done in Chariot’s name, including having Gavriella’s death on her conscience?”
Isaac jammed his hands in the pockets of his light trench coat. “None of that would have caused Deepa a moment’s loss of sleep had her daughter not been killed. That’s when her childhood beliefs in karma got the better of her and she decided that none of us should attain immortality.”
Revenge & Rapture: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 4) Page 24