“Three months,” said Liv, glancing down into Caleb’s green eyes. His father’s green eyes.
There was a moment of awkward silence, and Liv caught the wife glancing over at her left hand to check for a ring. Liv had long since stopped wearing that fake wedding ring, and even the tan line was gone now. She was just a kickass single mom, and that was that. The Sheikh was a distant memory, and suddenly she was selling houses left and right. Things were looking up. She was gonna make this work. Hell, she was already making it work!
The couple’s financing had been pre-approved, and Liv shook hands with them as she explained the next steps with paperwork and the final closing. Then she got back in her red Mustang (still shiny), strapped Caleb into the backseat, and pressed down on the accelerator with her Christian Louboutins. Life was good. Devil be gone!
She pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex, still smiling as she glanced into her rearview mirror to check on Caleb. But then she gasped when she pulled into her assigned spot and almost hit the silent, veiled woman standing there like a stone statue, her sharp eyes gleaming in the light of the car’s headlamps.
“What the hell!” Liv shrieked, slamming on the brakes and closing her eyes for a moment as she let the adrenaline run its course. She opened her eyes again, half expecting the woman to be gone. But nope, there she was. Standing quietly, hands together in front of her, head slightly bowed, body still displaying excellent posture.
Liv glanced back at Caleb and then slowly opened the door, looking around suspiciously in case there were others around in the dark underground parking lot. She’d sorta expected the Sheikh to follow up in some way, and perhaps this was it. Well, of course this was it! Why else would her attendant from the Royal Palace of Ramaan be standing here in her goddamn parking space in Raleigh?!
“Hello,” said Liv as she stepped out of the car and closed the door firmly. She’d left both front windows open a crack just in case something unexpected happened and she couldn’t get back to Caleb for some time. But the adrenaline rush had worked its way out of her, and when she saw the emotion in the attendant’s eyes, a chill rose up in Liv.
Oh, God, please no, she thought as she wondered if the Sheikh had done something drastic after his mother’s death. After all, he’d pretty much disappeared from the world after she’d inexplicably killed herself. He hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t talked to her. Hadn’t even acknowledged that he was a father. Oh, God, what had she done?! She’d abandoned him when he needed her to be there for him! What kind of a woman was she?! And if he’d done something to himself . . .
“What’s happened?” Liv asked, keeping herself as straight as possible as she tried to match the attendant’s posture. “Just tell me. What’s happened?!”
“Sheikh gone,” said the woman. “No come back. One month. No one know where. No one know anything.”
Liv blinked as she tried to decipher the woman’s thick Arabian accent. She told herself to be cautious, that it could be some kind of trick. Perhaps the Sheikh had decided he wanted his son back—just his son and not her. She frowned and took a long breath as she searched herself, desperately trying to figure out what to do next. She had Caleb to think about, and at this point she had no one to watch her son. She had no relatives, no close friends, and she’d never used day-care.
Oh, God, I’ve isolated myself as much as the Sheikh ever did, she thought as she remembered what her parents had told her about the slow, insidious process of possession, how the demon slowly gets its target isolated from close human relationships, often without the victim even realizing it. I had to think about Caleb, and so I couldn’t just lock myself in a room and do nothing. But I’ve got nothing and no one in my life other than my son.
My son, and his father.
Liv stared into the attendant’s eyes as her mind raced. She had to make some choices, and she had to make them quick. If the Sheikh had been missing for a month, chances were he was either dead or . . .
“Take him upstairs and wait for me,” Liv said, making the choice to trust this woman with what was most precious. She took her apartment key off the keyring and handed it to the attendant. “Apartment 202—though I assume you already know that, since you’re standing in my goddamn parking spot.”
She stepped aside and watched as the attendant nodded and pulled open the car door, carefully leaning in and unstrapping Caleb, cradling the child in her arms and then looking directly into Liv’s eyes.
“No worry,” said the attendant. “I take care. I was mother too. No worry.”
Liv nodded as she leaned in and kissed Caleb on the forehead. I must be crazy, she told herself as she watched the attendant carry her three-month old toward the elevators. I just trusted my child to a goddamn stranger! What the hell am I doing?!
But as Liv got back into her red Mustang and started the engine, she knew she’d made the right choice. Because she knew where the Sheikh was, and she knew that once she joined him there, she might not be able to trust herself anymore. The Sheikh had been drawn back to where this had all begun, to where they’d first met. And now she was being drawn back there too. Who knew what would happen there. The safest place for Caleb was not with her mother and father and right now. Her mother, father, and whatever was drawing them back to that house.
And God said to them, sacrifice your son on the altar . . .
No, she thought firmly as she tried to swallow her fear. I won’t allow it. I have to face whatever’s happening here, and I have to defeat it. No matter what I need to do.
No matter what I need to do.
21
The Sheikh tried to open his eyes. Then he realized his eyes were already open. He just couldn’t see anything.
What is happening to me, he wondered as he moved his head left to right, clenching and releasing his fists as he slowly became conscious of his body again. The past year had felt like a dream, with only moments of clarity between long stretches of living under what seemed like a dark cloud. At first he’d chalked it up to the shock of losing his mother that way. But soon he had to face the truth that it was more than that. Hakeem had faced death and tragedy before, and he knew he was resilient enough to not be broken by it. After he’d lost his father, he knew he’d be able to handle it when the time came to say goodbye to his mother. So it couldn’t be just the shock. He wasn’t a child to be hopelessly broken by the loss of a parent. So what was it?
Searching for answers, Hakeem had gone back over everything his mother had said in those last moments: “The clues are there for you to follow!” “You must find your way back to the Garden of Eden together!” “We are all bound together in this!” “We are the demons, and this is hell!”
Some of it sounded like the rants of a madwoman, and the Sheikh could not seriously consider most of it. In fact for the first two weeks after her death, he refused to consider any of it. It was only after his inexplicable reaction to the news that Liv was pregnant that the Sheikh went back over everything—from his earliest memories of childhood to the last words of his mother. And then he was prepared to face the possibility that what was happening was not just in his head.
“Tell her to go,” he’d told the attendant after she’d brought him the news that Liv was pregnant with his child. “Take the child and go. The child is not safe with me, not safe when his mother and father are together. They need to go.”
His decision to send her away had come from a place deep within that dark cloud that had descended upon him, and it was only months later that the Sheikh made the connections: the possession ritual his mother had performed years ago, the recurrence of that symbol in Liv’s life, that connection between mother and son, father and son, devotion and sacrifice, God and the Devil.
Both the Quran and the Old Testament describe Abraham or Ibrahim being asked to sacrifice his son, the Sheikh thought. Ibrahim’s devotion and trust in God is supreme, and so he is prepared to
do the unthinkable—at which point God intervenes. Was this the choice being played out in their lives? Was this the choice his mother had been asked to make way back when?
The Sheikh had thought back to his childhood, and slowly memories had come back to him. Memories of hospitals and doctors, injections and tubes, people milling around his bed and shaking their heads, his mother crying, father shouting in anger. Then there were memories of that ritual his mother had performed, and after that the doctors were gone, the visits to the hospital were gone, the needles and drugs were gone.
“Ya Allah,” the Sheikh had said when he finally put it together, understood what his mother had done, the choice she’d made to save her son. “She could not make the choice Ibrahim made! She could not sacrifice her son, and instead she called upon the assistance of the serpent. But it was the wrong choice, because the Quran promises that complete devotion and trust in Allah will be rewarded. My mother lost her nerve and she made the darkest of choices, making a deal with those entities that are always offering deals. So her son was saved, but at what cost? Could it be that the price of a son had to be paid eventually, and now the demon wants to collect?”
It had sounded insane and twisted, but the Sheikh had felt its truth in his bones when he heard about Liv’s pregnancy. He felt something move within him like a serpent tightening its coils, and he knew it was that demon asking to be paid. So he’d done what the light left within him prompted him to do: Send her away. Far away. Give her a chance. Give them both a chance.
The Sheikh had stopped eating, a part of him wondering that perhaps he could sacrifice himself to save his unborn son. Wouldn’t the demon accept that? After all, he was the son who’d been rescued from whatever childhood disease plagued him. He could sacrifice himself and fulfill the deal his mother had made, yes?
But he hadn’t been able to do it. Even after a week of taking no food and very little water, the Sheikh had felt his strength cling to him like the very disease that had stumped the doctors all those years ago. This was not the answer, and so after almost a year of toying with the idea of suicide, he’d done what he knew the demon wanted him to do: He’d accepted it, invited it, given himself to it.
And now, without really understanding how he’d gotten here, he was back in this house, staring at the walls, feeling its energy clawing at him from both within and without, inside and outside, above and below.
“Hakeem,” came her voice, and the Sheikh blinked and frowned, turning towards the sound. “Hakeem! What the hell are you doing?! What’s happened to you?”
The Sheikh saw her image slowly come together as his eyes focused on her. She looked beautiful, he thought as the focus returned so fast it took his breath away. “Where is my son?” he said, puzzled at the words coming out of him.
“He’s nowhere near here, and he’s not going to be anywhere near here. Anywhere near you. Anywhere near us,” said Liv. “Not until we sort this out, once and for all.”
“There is nothing to sort out. I am here. You are here. Soon our son will be here. Then we will be a family, and that is all that’s needed.”
Liv came close, and the Sheikh shuddered as he smelled her perfume. He could feel his body tense up, his cock harden. He had not taken a woman to bed in a year—there had been no one since Liv, since that one time with her, that one time in this very house, on these floorboards, within these walls.
“There is something else I need right now,” he said, reaching for her and grabbing her arm.
She pulled away, her eyes widening as she glanced around the room. “No, Hakeem. We need to get you out of here. We need to get you to a place where I can help you.”
“I do not need help. I have accepted it into me, Liv. That is all it wanted, to live in harmony with me, with all of us. My mother sacrificed herself. She paid the price. Fulfilled the bargain. We are safe. Our son is safe. Come here.”
“No,” Liv whispered, shaking her head vigorously. “That’s not how it works. Every demon has a pattern that gets played out again and again. It doesn’t break from that pattern. I’ve looked up the demon Antaraksha, and the mythology is clear: Antaraksha appears in many of oldest stories across religions and cultures, and is closely tied to the conflict that created the universe itself. It is in direct opposition to the light of the divine, the essence of God. In other words, it’s the reverse image of God, and if you interpret that in the context of the first book in the Bible—Genesis—you could argue that the demon asks for the reverse of what God asked Abraham to do. Hakeem, both the Quran and the Bible state that God was simply testing Abraham’s faith, but the mythology says that Antaraksha is an imposter spirit that pretends to be God. It asks for the same sacrifice, but it does not grant the reprieve that God granted Abraham. It takes the sacrifice! It demands the sacrifice! Somehow we’re all connected to this particular demon: my parents, your mother, my ex-boyfriend’s parents. I believe Steve’s parents killed him in some crazy plan to free themselves of the demon. Or maybe they thought they were being tested by God. This demon is in our lives, Hakeem. Perhaps it’s always been in our lives.”
“Silence,” the Sheikh growled, standing up as he felt a superhuman strength flow through him even though he hadn’t eaten in days. “There is no such thing as a demon. There is just you and me, and you belong to me, as does our son. Now come here and submit. Allow me to possess you. Submit, or I will make you submit.”
Liv took a step back as the Sheikh rose to full height, and she glanced back at the open front door. One more look at him and her face twisted into a mask of fear, a gasp emerging from her lips as she turned and made a run for the door.
But the Sheikh was quick like lightning, and he was on her before she got anywhere close. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down to her knees. He went down with her, ripping her top off and clawing at her breasts from behind as he licked her neck and jammed his erection against her soft ass, grinding into her as she struggled and screamed.
“Let me in,” he whispered as he moved his hands down to her crotch, rubbing her mound roughly as her struggles slowly ceased and she began to push back against his cock. “Let us in. Open up and let us in. Let us in.”
A low moan came from her lips as he grabbed her throat and twisted her around, kissing her hard on the lips. “Let us in,” he whispered again, the sound coming from deep within him, a low guttural sound that sent a chill through him. “Say yes. Say yes.”
“Yes,” she finally whispered, and when she opened her eyes he could see the change, see that she had opened up for him, for them, for it. “All right. Come in. Take me. Take me, Hakeem. Take me, Antaraksha.”
22
“It is only in the most extreme cases that the exorcist puts herself in the line of fire, offers herself to the demon as a substitute, takes on the challenge of allowing the demon to possess her so she can fight it from within.”
Her father’s words rang out as Liv heard herself speak, say the word, “Yes,” the word that signals consent. She felt it enter her even as she felt the Sheikh’s fingers slide between her legs, beneath the waistband of her panties, curling inside her vagina like claws, tentacles, horns.
What am I doing, she wondered as she felt her wetness ooze from the Sheikh’s dark touch, felt her nipples stiffen as if she was being ravished by more than just Hakeem, taken by man and demon at the same time. Have I lost it? Am I insane? How is this going to end?
An image of Caleb flashed through her mind as the Sheikh ripped off her clothes, pushing her down on her back, burying his face between her legs as she howled like a beast in heat. She forced the image out of her mind, as if by doing that she could protect her son. A part of her still screamed that this was insane, that there were no such things as demons or ghosts, that even God and the Devil were inventions of man. But she couldn’t hold on to that belief, and before she knew it she was sobbing and laughing at the same time, shivering and screaming
as the Sheikh’s long tongue swirled around the walls of her cunt like a living thing, howling as her orgasm came and went like a flash.
The Sheikh flipped her around and smacked her naked bottom hard, and as she heard him grunt like an animal while he unbuckled and unzipped behind her, she closed her eyes and then she saw it: Antaraksha, in all its glory, living within her, within both of them, all of them.
It had wings and horns, a tail and claws. It was black and red and gold, and although Liv knew it was just in her head, she also knew this was as real as it got. She’d accepted it into her, and now she had to fight it from within. It was all in her hands now. She could save herself, save Hakeem, and save Caleb. Everything in her life had been leading up to this, hadn’t it?
Reach for the divinity within you, she thought as she felt the Sheikh lick her rear pucker and spank her so hard she screamed. He was growling and grunting behind her, and Liv was too scared to turn her head, not sure what she’d witness if she did. Would she see a winged beast behind her, taking her with its gnarled claws and twisted horns?
Reach for the light, she told herself again as she felt the Sheikh enter her from behind, his cock stretching her rear hole and driving in so hard she almost passed out. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself bathed in divine light; but it was all black, all dark, all wings, all horns.
She spat onto the floor as she braced for the Sheikh’s violent onslaught, her body shuddering every time Hakeem pounded into her, his powerful hips slamming against her rear cushion, his cock driving all the way deep into her anus. For a moment Liv felt the deepest, most hopeless sense of despair, and she knew she was feeling the essence of the demon.
“Despair and desolation are the foundational emotions of a demonic presence,” her mother had said. “It is the empty yearning of the demon to reach back to the light, the light that it has forsaken in exchange for darkness.”
Haunted for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 15) Page 10