Untouchable

by Stephanie Doyle

  She shook her head. “I am here because I have nowhere else to go. Because I choose to stay.”

  “You came to my room a few nights ago.”

  “You were in pain. Sometimes I can help make pain go away.”

  “You’re a healer?”

  Again, she shook her head. “No.”

  “But you brought medicine. I remember drinking from a cup and then…”

  And then the pain had stopped. Almost as if he’d gone numb from the roots of his hair to his toes. He hadn’t been asleep and whatever he’d sipped had done nothing to reduce his fever. But the next thing he knew the nun was leaning over his leg with a small knife in her hand.

  She’d found part of a bullet fragment the medic he’d gone to in Monteria had left behind. The extraction should have been excruciating, but he hadn’t felt a thing. Funny that it all came back to him now. But why shouldn’t it? He’d been awake the entire time.

  “What was in that cup?”

  “I need to get back to the village,” she said in answer to his question. “First I must dispose of the water. You need to leave.”

  Dispose of the water? Was it some ritual she needed to perform? “I’ll empty the basin for you,” Tarak offered as he took a step toward her.

  “No. You cannot. I must do it. Stay back. Stay back!”

  Tarak stopped in his tracks. He was now only a couple of feet away from her, and he could see the fear return. She was pressed against the partition and couldn’t easily get around it. For all intents and purposes he had her trapped.

  “Please, you must stay back,” she whispered.

  “Easy. I told you I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to touch you. I wanted to touch you that night. I remember that. Your skin is so…”

  “No,” she said and pressed herself against the partition out of reach of his hand. “You cannot. You need to understand. I will hurt you.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” But since his ultimate desire was to win her trust, he folded his arms over his chest. “I hate things that don’t make sense.”

  He watched her search for a reply and finally she shrugged her shoulders. “Tough.”

  He tilted his head back and laughed. It certainly wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. “All right. You win. For now.” Tarak took a few steps back from her and with each one he could see her relax. “But, Lilith, I will see you again. And next time you’d better come with some answers.”

  She said nothing and so he began to head back to his room. Then he stopped as the image of her body came to him, an image he would enjoy conjuring for some time to come. Turning, he saw that she was wrapping the ties around her arms to secure the billowing silk to her body.

  “Lilith?”

  She snapped her head up, no doubt surprised he was still close. “Yes?”

  “It is an interesting necklace. But if you’ll pardon me, I must say that I don’t think it suits you.”

  Chapter 4

  L ilith stared up at the straw roof of her hut and considered her next move. Considering she was into her second hour of thinking, she feared the answers wouldn’t quickly be forthcoming.

  It was his fault. The stranger’s. No, not stranger, Tarak.

  She’d gone up to the monastery to clear her mind so that she could think rationally about what needed to be done. Now all she could think about was his gaze on her, looking at her in a way that she’d never been looked at before.

  She’d been desired before, but it had been different then. She’d been barely more than a child. Just thirteen. But her father’s brother called her closer to a woman than a girl. A temptation, he’d said. She remembered the look in his eyes whenever he stared at her and thought again of Tarak. Definitely different.

  Her uncle hadn’t listened to the warnings that she shouldn’t be touched. Perhaps he should have known better, but that was her father’s fault. Her father had only told others in the village where she lived that she was not to be touched because she was cursed.

  Unclean.

  It was what she believed, too, until she began to understand that what she could do went beyond superstition. Beyond her father’s hatred.

  On that day her uncle caught her alone. He professed that he didn’t believe in curses. He said he would take her to wife if she behaved and did everything he wanted. She remembered the bolt of fear that had shot through her system and how that had caused her skin to dampen with what she believed back then was merely sweat.

  She tried to run, but he caught her. Then he tore away the heavy coverings that she wore in layers to protect herself from the cold as well as from incidental contact, and she watched as his hand roughly cupped her barely there breast.

  Suddenly his eyes popped open and he hissed through his teeth, struggling to catch his breath. Before she could pull away from him he fell on her. Dead weight.

  Her father found her struggling to crawl out from underneath the body. He blamed her for enticing his brother, for causing his death. For being born cursed.

  She tried to explain she hadn’t meant to kill him. She just had.

  That night he took her to a monastery in Nepal where it was known that one of the monks would soon be leaving for India. He’d warned the monk of her perfidy and insisted that she live among the outcast. The monk obeyed and brought her to this village.

  What revenge she might have if her father knew how she’d flourished here. In this place she wasn’t seen as inherently evil or cursed. Here she helped people and worked to find spiritual fulfillment that would help her to someday forgive herself for taking a life.

  Yes, he would be outraged to know that she had made a home here.

  Lilith bolted up from her sleeping mat as a question occurred to her. Her father hated her. She’d always known that. As a child she imagined it was because of her sickness. As an adult she came to believe it was because she’d caused him sadness, the death of a wife he must have loved greatly.

  But the woman who’d given birth to her wasn’t his wife. According to Jackie, Petra had been chosen from a family in Tibet who were well paid for their youngest daughter. Her father, Gensen, was from a village far south of that. Had he even known Lilith’s surrogate mother before her birth?

  Lilith struggled to recall what she’d read earlier. There had been so much and it had all been so distressing that it was hard to remember the specifics. She reached for the necklace around her throat and looked to the laptop that still sat on her desk.

  “Only the information about me,” she promised herself as she got up and walked over to the computer.

  She removed the flash drive from the necklace and booted up the computer. Then she walked through the steps Sister Peter had given her earlier to access and read the information in the files. She searched for and found what she was looking for.

  Gensen.

  She clicked on the folder and selected the first file in it.

  Gensen was a proud man. It was his pride that drew me to him in the first place…And made me want to crush it…

  Lilith continued to read about how Jackie had met the Buddhist monk. Once a leader among his people, he had been on the path to enlightenment. But Gensen had not been prepared for Jackie’s unique brand of temptation. She didn’t immediately offer him her body. Instead she played on his intelligence, his spirituality and his pride. She made him believe that the two of them were connected in some universal way.

  Then she seduced him. Once his vows of celibacy were behind him and he considered himself fallen from the path, he no longer fought her control over him. She asked for and was given his life essence. Once she had what she needed, she left him broken and humbled.

  Lilith leaned back in her chair as a wave of regret and sadness threatened to smother her.

  “You did not hate me because of what I was or what I did. You hated me because of her. Because I was part of her.”

  She knew from the stories that her father had told her that Petra had gone into premature labor with h
er and that before the doctor had pulled Lilith free from the woman, she had died. Then the doctor who first held Lilith died, too. A quick-thinking nurse with a heavy blanket had pulled the child from the dying man’s hands and managed to save her. Because Lilith had been responsible for Petra’s death, Gensen told Lilith that her mother’s family had disowned her and that all she had left was him.

  Doctor. Nurse. The story had always seemed odd to Lilith. All the babies born in the village where she’d grown up and even here in this village were born at home with only a midwife in attendance.

  Not her.

  Jackie must have been there. She must have waited to see what her egg had produced. Then she had handed her over to Gensen to raise…why? Maybe as a means of protection. Or possibly Jackie wanted to put Lilith someplace where she could easily find her again.

  How angry Jackie must have been when she returned to Gensen’s village only to find that he’d banished Lilith to India. Considering what she’d read about Jackie, Lilith had to wonder whether or not her father was still alive. It seemed likely that the woman called Arachne would have dispatched him when his usefulness was over.

  Lilith didn’t know how she felt about that. Surely she should be sad if her father was murdered. She had always carried the sadness of killing the woman she’d believed to be her mother. But Petra had been an innocent. Her father was not.

  For that matter neither was Jackie. Lilith felt no remorse over her passing.

  Vaguely she wondered how many monasteries Jackie had searched before finally finding the one near a leper colony where her daughter lived. Her visits had started years ago. If Lilith had been looking for it back then she might have sensed a certain satisfaction in Jackie’s expression when they first met. But of course, Lilith hadn’t been looking for it. Naively she’d accepted the story the woman spun never realizing that she was in the presence of her mother.

  Or the presence of evil.

  The memory of each visit would need to be scrutinized. Every word exchanged, analyzed for new meaning. But before any of that happened, Lilith had to make a decision about the information that was now in her control. She was about to turn off the offensive machine when a file name caught her eye.

  Children.

  Children. Not child. Unable to help herself, Lilith clicked on the file and began to read about Jackie’s other…offspring.

  Two other women. Both with unique abilities. Both her half sisters.

  Eventually Lilith turned off the laptop. It was too much to learn in one day. About her mother, her father and her sisters. Sisters. Related to her.

  Family.

  The crush of emotions made her nauseous.

  Three women all spawned in a lab from the eggs of a woman who was clearly immoral. What Lilith was given was only a third of the entire picture. Jackie said the pieces needed to be put together, but Lilith wasn’t sure what her mother’s intention had been. Whether she imagined her three children joining together for some nefarious purpose or if somehow the three flash drives were connected.

  It didn’t matter. Lilith’s piece would never be joined to complete any puzzle that Jackie had a role in creating.

  And what about her sisters? Did they want to claim their full inheritance? If, like Lilith, Jackie had given the two babies to other people to raise, they might not share Jackie’s depravity. They might be just as horrified by the information as Lilith. What if at this moment they were seeking her out, hoping that Lilith might have some answers for them?

  She needed to find a way to contact them. Instantly she thought of Sister Peter. She would know how to find someone. She was forever talking about how the Internet was such a powerful tool. Bringing the entire world together. Once Lilith found her sisters Sister Peter would know which authorities could be trusted. As an American, she had a deep understanding of justice and the system that upheld it.

  But to use her like that, Lilith would have to tell the nun why she needed her help. The burden of Jackie’s files was too much to share. Lilith couldn’t claim to be an expert on the world, but she was at least savvy enough to know that the information in her possession could make her a target. Certainly the people listed on these files would want to find this information once they learned of Jackie’s death. Find it and destroy it along with anyone who might continue to blackmail them.

  Her mind wandered back to the man in the monastery. The brothers called him a warrior. Warriors fought. But who did he fight for? A man of violence, did he use his skills to help or to hurt people?

  Dismissing the idea before she let her mind formulate it fully, she knew she would not ask Tarak for help. It was too risky. She couldn’t involve anyone she didn’t trust. Better to keep the information hidden rather than risk exposure.

  Which meant she was on her own in trying to find a way to locate these other women. She would see if they had received a spider from their mother. Then together they could decide what to do next. The simplest solution would be to destroy it all. Lilith, however, would wait until she had their counsel.

  Outside she heard a noise. Acting quickly, she hid the computer under her sleeping mat. She returned the memory stick to its hiding place in the necklace and dropped the spider inside her silk coverall.

  Another helicopter. This one circled overhead searching for a place to land. The pilot must have spotted the small landing area, because it began its descent.

  “My, we’re becoming popular around here,” Sister Joseph said as she hustled her round body over to where Lilith stood in the center of the village. “Do you know what this is about?”

  “No, Sister.” It wasn’t a lie but she knew it could not be a coincidence.

  Calmly Sister Joseph folded her arms over her large bosom. “Are we in trouble, Lilith? I’m not asking because I am upset. I just want to know what we’re dealing with. I have more than my sisters to think about. I feel responsibility toward the villagers, as well.”

  Lilith turned to find Sister Peter rushing up to join them. She stopped short and also crossed her arms over her breasts. She looked as concerned as Sister Joseph.

  “I do not know what this is about. But I cannot promise it will not lead to trouble,” she said honestly to both of them. “Be alert.”

  Sister Peter nodded. “I’ll round up the villagers. Let them know to keep the children close.”

  Lilith waited as once more it was the children leading the parade for the visitors coming out of the jungle. Until their parents intervened and pulled them away from the excitement. At first the children resisted, but ultimately they obeyed, leaving only the helicopter’s passengers.

  Lilith counted five large men of varying colors and race, all outwardly armed. Some with more than one weapon attached to different body parts. They looked as fierce as she imagined they wanted to. More men of violence.

  But it was the woman in front of them that caught her attention.

  About Lilith’s height, the woman’s skin was a lighter shade of brown than Lilith’s, but her eyes…they were Jackie’s eyes. Not the color, but the shape. There was no doubt she was looking at another one of Jackie’s daughters.

  “Let me guess,” the woman said to Lilith, opening her arms in welcome. “You are Lilith.”

  “Yes,” she whispered even as she felt the air clog in her throat.

  The woman smiled broadly and widened her arms even more. “Well, hell. Come give your big sister Echo a hug!”

  Chapter 5

  T he woman stopped a few feet short of Lilith. Her arms dropped to her sides. “Oh, that’s right. No hugging, is there? Oh well, we’ll just air kiss and call it a reunion.”

  The words made sense, but Lilith couldn’t decipher her tone. Nor did she understand the woman’s attitude. They were two women who were linked by a biological bond. They were relatives coming together for the first time. Yet Lilith could find no sign of the significance of this moment in the woman’s voice. She seemed cavalier about their meeting. Not relieved. Not happy. Not afraid.


  Nothing.

  “You found me,” Lilith realized. “How?”

  “Mummy’s little gift to me,” Echo told her. “I have to assume you got one, too. A special gift, that is?”

  “I…” Lilith’s throat locked up. “I do not think we should talk about this in front of others.”

  “Oooooh. A cautious little thing, aren’t you? That’s good. That means you’re smarter than I was probably going to give you credit for being.”

  Sister Peter stepped up to stand beside Lilith. She was touched by the sign of support from the sister, but still Lilith would rather Sister Peter not say anything. “Lilith, what is this woman saying? Is she your sister?”

  “The name is Echo.” Echo stretched out her hand to the nun but quickly pulled it back. “Oh, sorry. I keep doing that. This is a leper colony, right? Maybe I would do better not touching anything while I’m here. So, a nun? Wicked. Are you my sister’s friend?”

  “I am,” Sister Peter said.

  “Then you must know about her loss. Our mother—a mother we didn’t even know we had—is gone. Killed. I’ve come to grieve with the only family I have left. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  “Killed?” Lilith repeated, focusing on only that. Killed was very different from dead.

  “Yes,” Echo relayed. “It was awful. When I heard I was angry. So hurt. But it’s true. I had my people verify the information. Mummy was murdered by a woman named Allison Gracelyn. You don’t know her, but our two families have been at odds for years. Where Mummy succeeded in making something important of herself, Allison’s mother failed. Allison never got over that. She wanted revenge. More than that, she wanted to steal our mother’s empire. Something you must understand by now is quite…extensive.”

  Lilith said nothing, but she felt Echo’s eyes boring into her, studying her as if to learn something that Lilith didn’t want to reveal. She tried to focus on the story that Echo was telling her, but all she could think was…danger.

  “Or do you?” Echo wondered aloud. “In this backwater village maybe you don’t even know what…” She stopped herself and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m here. You and I are connected. Isn’t that amazing?”