“But unwittingly, I created a perpetual curse for myself: Until every last one of the Life Brothers embraced my Path, I would be forced to remain rooted to my own flesh as a teacher. I could not surrender to my Rising. I could not risk allowing even one Life Brother to roam the earth unchecked, or else he might become the monster I have feared from the time of Christ. Only a scant few of the Life Brothers have mastered the first steps of their Rising. The rest . . . ? They are scholars, warriors, idlers. They refuse to give up their flesh. Like you, Dawit.”
David seemed to recoil from the words. His face burned dark. “I . . . have tried, Father.” Jessica heard deep sorrow and regret in his voice.
“Yes, as have others before you. Some try for a time, and then they give up after even the simplest meditations. I have been able to preserve the colony this long, but I am burdened with the responsibility of trying to shepherd my children to their enlightenment. It is a tedious task, perhaps an impossible one. I can use my mental gifts to encourage loyalty and docility, but it is impossible to control all of them. And their Rising must be under their power and will alone, not mine.
“So, you see? I have anointed myself a king with no hope of building the kingdom I dreamed of. It was all vanity on my part, and I am weary. One day soon, I fear, Life Brothers will live freely in the world above. I grieve already for the outcome. They will clash and war with mortal men. Humankind will seek the blood at any cost, and my Life Brothers will use their advantages to protect themselves, or perhaps simply to dominate and rule. Perhaps, in time, immortals will become the ungovernable race I feared, corrupting the blood’s existence even more than I have corrupted it. I cannot prevent it.”
Neither Jessica nor David spoke, although David was squirming, clearly aghast. For an instant, Jessica felt sorry for David; Khaldun’s confession, to him, had to sound like intimate disclosures from a parent. David might be hearing Khaldun’s words as utter prophecy; but to her, they sounded only like his beliefs. And Khaldun was wrong. She felt it in her heart.
“Dawit, I was very worried when the Searchers brought word to me that you had shared your Life Gift with your mortal wife, that you intended to invoke the Ritual. I knew from your own thoughts that you had heard the words I uttered when I brought you and the others into this brotherhood, but I did not believe you would disobey me,” Khaldun said. “The blood has always been kept separate from mortals, except in a few cases that have had no lasting effects—at least I pray this is true. But you, Dawit, seemed determined to set my worst fears into motion. And then I had a vision . . .” Khaldun’s voice faltered.
“About Fana,” David said softly.
“Yes, about Fana,” Khaldun said, his expression growing less somber, more peaceful. “A child born with the power to stand between mortal and immortal, the two races of man. A child whose existence might bring a balance and relieve me from my task, releasing me to my Rising at last. And I have even allowed myself to hope that perhaps she is the reason the blood came into my hands at all. Perhaps now I am redeemed.”
“You want to put that kind of burden on a child?” Jessica said suddenly. “You expect her to be some kind of referee between mankind and these immortal men you created just so you can ease your guilty conscience?”
David snapped to look at Jessica, his eyes burning. “Jessica, you’re speaking to—”
“She is speaking only to a man, Dawit,” Khaldun interrupted gently. “I have never taught that I was other than a man. If I have allowed your Life Brothers to worship me too much, it is only so I could have enough influence to guide them on the Path. So I am only a man, and I must answer for my actions as all men must. Yes, the burden on Fana is great. I’m sorry for that.”
“I made Fana the way she is, Father. Not you,” David said unsteadily. “The blame is mine.”
“No, Dawit,” Khaldun said. “Everything born of this blood is my responsibility. Everything the blood touches has been touched as if by my own hand. Fana is my child, too. Perhaps she is mine even more than yours.”
“Well, she’s not yours more than she’s mine,” Jessica said. Now, she was grateful Khaldun had dulled her fear responses, because she could speak her mind freely without any constraints of better judgment. “And I hope you weren’t filling her head with all of this when we came in here.”
“As I said, I was only showing her a glimpse of her divinity. She’s much too young for me to hope to give her any real understanding of her place in the world.”
“The place you believe she’ll have,” Jessica said. “All I want is to raise Fana to be a good person. Period. And if she performs miracles, it’ll be because that’s what her heart tells her to do. It’ll be because she’s had a good example from me and her aunt, who believe in helping people with this blood. That’s the way she’s being raised. I’m not going to force her to feel like some kind of traffic officer trying to keep mortals and immortals apart. That’s not her problem.”
“You’re discounting the implications of her gift, Jessica.” Khaldun’s eyes gleamed with what looked like genuine sadness.
“Maybe I am,” Jessica said, her lip trembling slightly. “But you’re discounting the goodness of mortals and your own people. You’ve been teaching David and his brothers that humankind is desperate and untrustworthy. Well, I think if you’d been helping the world with this blood all these years instead of hiding away, everyone would have been happier. Maybe that was the reason you have this blood, the reason it came into your hands in the first place. Did you ever think of that?”
“I have thought of everything,” Khaldun said. “More than you could fathom. The potential harm in mingling our people always outweighed the potential good, in my mind. I made the decisions I thought would be safest for all of us.”
Safe for everyone except Fana, Jessica thought bitterly. She felt tears threatening again.
Khaldun went on, his voice heavy. “There is something else, even more troubling . . .”
More troubling? Jessica wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. This entire visit had been bewildering to her, and she was sorry she had come. Khaldun might not be telling the truth about that soldier in Rome, and everything else he said might be a lie, too, all to suit his strange agenda for Fana. He might have conjured that image of the airport as a trick—
“She is being tempted by the Shadows,” Khaldun finished.
“I don’t want to listen to this anymore,” Jessica said.
Khaldun’s expression did not change, as if he hadn’t heard her, although David was clearly taken aback by her disrespect; he gave her a pleading, exasperated look. Khaldun went on, speaking deliberately, pausing between sentences to give weight to his words. “I haven’t the time to explain everything you should know about the Rising, but I will try. It is a literal Rising of man’s spirit, reaching toward the plane of divinity that lies within each of us. Fana, miraculously, was born within that divine stream. She has Risen. She can touch physical objects with her mind and alter perceptions on her whims. There is no end to the good she could do. You speak the truth about that, Jessica. She is a miracle bringer.
“But there are other powers at work within the same stream, at a lower plane. Mortals who have touched it have too often become drunk with power and control—persons characterized in your world as sorcerers and witches, evildoers who seek to elevate themselves by casting harmful spells upon others. These ‘spells’ are no more than a simple bending of that malevolent stream, like building a small channel from the waters of a great river. Fana, being a child, has no conscious awareness of seeking power from this stream, which I can only describe as Shadows. But the Shadows are courting her. They know who she is. They seek to live through her.”
Jessica’s mouth and throat suddenly felt so dry that it was painful. She tried to pull her lips apart, and they felt stuck, fighting her before they separated. Khaldun’s words had become more nonsensical than ever, but a part of her seemed to understand that everything he said had a strange logic.
Her fear was still well at bay, but she knew she would one day be overcome with terror at the mere memory of Khaldun’s words today, especially the word they.
Who in the world, she wondered, were they?
“Shadows do not ‘live’ as we understand life,” Khaldun said, “but they have a distinct existence, something very much like their own mind and purpose. There are mortals who have touched them and been beset by them, even accidentally. Men have unknowingly become washed in the Shadows because they have come too close to them; your Roman Catholic Church would describe this event as demonic possession. Or, sometimes the Shadows occupy a physical space, and contact with that space enables Shadows to bleed through to them, sticking like tar. Many mortal cultures understand this already and have always passed knowledge through generations to combat them. They avoid grounds that are accursed; they know incantations and rituals to keep them safe. The cultures that have forgotten the Shadows’ existence consider these beliefs primitive . . . but, if anything, those who know and respect the Shadows are the more enlightened.”
“You’re talking about Satan,” Jessica said in a hollow voice.
“The Shadows are beyond the simplified idea you have been taught to call Satan, Jessica, but you may think of them as Satan if you like. And, like me, they have been waiting for Fana.”
“Waiting . . . why?” Jessica said, nearly whimpering.
“Why else?” Khaldun said. “So they can rule through her.”
Suddenly, Jessica began to shake her head wildly. Whatever Khaldun had done to calm her mind had to be wearing off, because she felt a growing unbalance and fright. The faint drumming she could hear from the garden mingled with her heartbeat, quickening, rising and falling with the frenetic pulses of her heart. “I’m sorry, I can’t believe any of this. It’s too . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence; she wanted to say ridiculous, but the word that almost came out was frightening.
“You think you don’t,” Khaldun said, a sad smile pulling at his lips. “But you will believe soon, Jessica. You will see the work of the Shadows. And when you do, I only hope you will remember what I have said. Your only thoughts must be of Fana. You and Dawit, together, must guard her highest nature—you must give her what all children need, nurturing her instinct to love—or you will lose her to the Shadows. We all will.”
Together. Jessica, unable to help herself, glanced at David. Their eyes locked briefly, but then they both looked away. To her, that one gaze had felt like rubbing against the skin of a shark. Her stomach knotted itself.
“If you cannot begin this undertaking together,” Khaldun said, his eyes closing as if he meant to drift to sleep, “we have lost Fana already.”
“What is our undertaking exactly, Father?” David asked softly. “How do we begin?”
The drumming, much louder now, echoed around them in the vast chamber. Jessica and David waited a long time for an answer, but Khaldun never opened his eyes.
27
Miami Beach
Patrick O’Neal, at the age of seventy, had become a philosopher of sorts. It was a little late in the game to consider his new outlook a “mid-life crisis”—his ex-wife had accused him of that cliché when he was forty-three and she had caught him fucking an office intern, a redhead, in the backseat of his Benz during his lunch break—but he had definitely begun examining life in general with greater respect. Miracles will do that to a man.
His new attitude touched everything he did. He’d become a model driver, no longer speeding through yellow lights he knew were a fraction from red, or zipping carelessly from lane to lane like south Florida’s other manic drivers. He’d quit smoking cold, even the Havana cigars he savored so much. And he’d cut red meat out of his diet, period. Life was goddamn precious, after all.
Patrick planned to be around for a long, long time. He had recently discovered that longevity ran in his family.
It was a cloudy day, the sky steeped gray with waiting thunderstorms, so the water was dark and choppy as Patrick drove toward Star Island, which showcased the multimillion-dollar mansions on its shores like a display case. Mansions of every architectural style and excess lined the MacArthur Causeway toward South Beach, and when he turned north on the bridge to Star Island, his rear view mirror showed him massive white cruise ships with inane names such as Funtastic and Eden’s Envy docked behind him. The guard at the villa-style security booth at the end of the bridge eyed Patrick carefully, then waved his car close to the window. A host of celebrities had homes on Star Island. The guards didn’t take any shit, and Patrick liked that. One day, he figured, he’d have a house here, too. Maybe a couple. And that would just be for starters.
Patrick didn’t recognize the guard, although he noted his orange-blond hair with surprise; so many of the guards were from one of the islands south of Miami, either Cuba or Jamaica or Puerto Rico or someplace. This pink-faced guy looked Irish, like him. “Help you, sir?”
“Yeah, I’m expected at Twelve Coral Boulevard.”
“Name of resident?” The guard was poised with his metal slate. He would call to verify the information, the most important part of his job. If he didn’t, Patrick would report him. This rent-a-cop didn’t know it, but he was helping to safeguard the future of the world.
“Shannon O’Neal,” Patrick said. “I’m his son, Patrick.”
That wasn’t the truth, of course. Patrick’s father had died in a car wreck right after the Depression, and he’d barely known the guy. Patrick was related to Shannon O’Neal, all right, but the lines were much more diluted than that, and the family resemblance was pretty much shot.
But blood was blood.
• • •
The hard part, to Patrick, was actually seeing him. He could count on a few bad dreams every time he visited the three-story, Spanish-style O’Neal Estate, with its high, wrought-iron security gate, stucco walls, and perfectly landscaped gardens of roses, hibiscuses, and bougainvil-leas. A gathering of sculpted marble cherubs spat water from their mouths in the fountain in the center of the crescent-shaped driveway, which was paved with elegant white brick.
The house was a waste, really. It wasn’t the nicest house Patrick had ever visited—Mr. O’Neal had bought it on an impulse when he decided to move his company from Chicago to Miami, and the exterior struck Patrick as overdone and tacky—but it was a shame its owner was a man too old to enjoy his own pond-shaped swimming pool or even stand up to take in the full view of the bay at twilight. The guy’s staff got more use out of the house than he did, Patrick mused, and the thought filled him with a shiver of dread. Would he ever want to be that old?
Inside, the house was crammed with antique objets d’art hurriedly placed and never moved. The decor looked like the scene of an estate sale, but Patrick figured that was just because its owner was confined to his upstairs quarters; Shannon O’Neal was always either in his master bedroom suite or his library. The rest of the mazelike mansion, large enough to house a small army, was unoccupied except for his staff’s sleeping quarters.
But that was about to change, Patrick reminded himself. They were expecting guests.
Nash, towering, met Patrick at the door. Nash obviously spent several hours a week pumping weights in the mansion’s exercise room. As always, he was wearing a tailored gray suit and neat black T-shirt. His dark hair was short-cropped, military-style, and his face was always set with slight distrust. He was nurse, butler, and head of security; Nash fussed over his employer like a mother hen, but he always kept a loaded Luger in his side holster. Patrick liked Nash. He could understand why the old man wanted to keep him close.
Before he offered a greeting, Nash began patting Patrick down: his chest, his arms, and up and down each of his legs. The ritual amused Patrick. With a quick glance upward, he saw the silhouette of one of the other security staffers in the shade near the clay-colored rooftop. Patrick didn’t know how many security guards were posted at the house, but he guessed there were at least five or six. Not many other CEOs were affo
rded this kind of protection, he mused. But then again, how many needed it?
Finally, Nash stepped aside to invite Patrick in. “He’s been waiting,” Nash said.
The only way to reach the third floor was in a private elevator behind the winding marble staircase, and Nash swiped a keycard through and then punched in a numerical combination to open the elevator doors. The polished doors slid open. Inside, the elevator floor was covered with a small, impressive Persian rug.
“Don’t upset him today,” Nash said, escorting him inside. “He’s cranky.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Patrick said, and that was the truth. He’d be a fool to get on Shannon O’Neal’s bad side. There was too much to be gained on his good side.
“He’s in the library,” Nash said when the elevator bobbed, stopping at the third floor.
Patrick felt his heart beating then. Yep, this was always the hardest part.
Patrick didn’t see him at first. The library was larger than an entire floor of most houses, even big houses, and he walked past row after row of books set apart just as he’d find in any Dade County public library, alphabetized and categorized with printed signs at the end of each row. Geography. Biography. American Literature. European Literature. World History. The room was illuminated by the light from the massive picture window facing the bay, even though the window was tinted dark enough to protect the precious books from the sun’s glare. Patrick walked toward an enclave near the window, where a large L-shaped oak desk with two computers and a fax machine was surrounded by what looked like a mini-grove of tall, potted palm trees. On the wall above the desk were a large world map and a blue company banner: Clarion Health Inc.—Health for the Ages.
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