The Devil's Poetry

by Louise Cole

  Enough. I had to sleep. I closed my eyes and tried something I hadn’t done since childhood. I imagined my mother sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair. She came to me straight away, and I felt a rush of affection for her. If I held still, I could feel her weight dragging on the edge of the mattress and the thin band of her wedding ring grazing my scalp. I fell asleep under her silent vigil.

  My dreams were turbulent and confused. Random images seared through my mind. A baby in the arms of a smiling, brunette woman. Her hair burned red in the light. A war zone, crowds fleeing in panic as explosions scattered dust and debris around them. A dog barking at children, its hackles raised, and the shadow of pain in a soldier’s green eyes. Words and fragments of verse tumbled through my mind, often with flavors I could recognize but gone too fast for me to know them.

  I woke feeling as exhausted as when I lay down.

  I took a shower, scrubbing my skin raw to wash off the stink of the Cadaveri. Wandering

  downstairs, I heard Jace’s voice and smiled to myself. I walked towards it.

  “So what will you tell her?”

  “Everything she needs to know.” That was Ella.

  I paused, my hand on the handle of the kitchen door.

  “She deserves to know everything,” Jace said. “Who are you to decide what’s right for her?”

  “I’m the one in charge,” said Ella hotly. “Get out. Now.”

  For a moment I thought she was evicting Jace but then I heard him say: “I’d be careful where you shoo him to. It’ll take more than nine lives to walk across that lot.” Jace’s voice became muffled as though he’d moved outside.

  They must be talking about the cat now.

  I took a breath and stepped into the kitchen.

  “Miles has made us safe then?” Ella asked, her back to me.

  “Yeah. He said this place was fastened tighter than a nun’s . . .” Jace stepped into the kitchen and saw me in the doorway. “Erm . . . it’s secure.”

  “Good,” said Ella coolly, following his gaze. “You’ll have to forgive them, Callie. Army boys have filthy mouths.”

  “Marines, please.”

  Marine, I noted. No wonder he could fight.

  “Whatever.” Ella poured three mugs of coffee. “How are you this morning?”

  “OK, I guess.” I took a seat at the table. “There’s still quite a lot of stuff I don’t understand.” And now I’m wondering how much you’ll tell me.

  “Of course.” Ella gestured expansively, coffee cup in hand. “Ask whatever you want.”

  “OK. Erm . . . in no particular order, really. You said I was a Reader. What makes you think that?”

  “That’s easy,” said Jace. “I gave you the book, you read from it, the Cadaveri tried to kill you. They only do that to Readers.” He shrugged. “If I read from it, it wouldn’t matter to anyone.”

  I took a moment to process this. “So you gave me the book as a test?”

  “Pretty much. There’s no other way to be sure.”

  “What about all that ‘Don’t read it’ crap, then?”

  He shrugged. “We were still checking you out. If you were a Reader, you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself. Apparently, Readers get obsessed with the book pretty damn fast.”

  “I’m not obsessed with it,” I said.

  Ella smirked. “Last night, you asked about the book before you asked about your father. That says something.”

  That stung. “I only said we needed to fetch it.”

  “What you actually said was ‘I need the book.’ It’s already forged a connection, hasn’t it?”

  I pushed back from the table and walked away. My face warmed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I turned to Jace. He leaned against the counter, but all I could see were dead hands gripping knives, Amber falling, Alec wide-eyed and terrified. Jace had put people in danger. My people.

  Me.

  “What you’re really saying is you used me as bait.”

  He hesitated. “We always let candidates try the text to gauge their potential. It’s the most reliable way.”

  My voice hardened. “Do they all nearly get killed?”

  “Look, I was there the whole time to keep you safe—” he started.

  “Except when Amber and I walked home across the fields.”

  “Well, yeah, I’ve already said I messed up—”

  “And when they got in my room last night.”

  “I was outside the whole time. I killed four.” Jace dumped his coffee in the sink.

  “They wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t given me that damn book.”

  “Be rational,” he said dismissively. “How would you help us if I didn’t give you the book? I saved your life.”

  “By an inch,” I snarled.

  Jace threw his hands up and turned away, and rage overtook me. Rage that he’d dragged me into this. Rage that they had endangered my friends. Rage that he wasn’t even listening.

  Don’t bloody ignore me.

  The heart-stopping terror of almost being killed, the horrible pain and pathos of Alec, my hatred of Jason Shackley, every stupid adult who was out there chanting “war, war” and ruining our lives instead of fixing things, the sheer helplessness to put any of it right . . . and nobody even listened.

  No one will ever listen to me, I thought suddenly.

  It hurt too much, and I crunched it down, like I always did, made it hard and jagged. Anger didn’t leave you vulnerable like pain. He’d listen to rage.

  My hand found something hard and cold, and I threw the object straight at Jace’s head. “You had no right. No right to drag me into this!” I yelled. A bowl smashed against a cupboard door inches from Jace’s ear, and he instinctively swung away from the pottery shards ricocheting around the kitchen. I froze in horror.

  “Enough,” said Ella. “Be quiet, both of you.”

  I trembled. I couldn’t believe what I had done. There were no Cadaveri to blame here. That violence was all me.

  Jace glowered at me, lips and eyes scrunched. He’d gone straight past disbelief to fury. My gaze dropped to the floor.

  “Callie,” Ella said, “you’re overwrought. It’s understandable, but get something straight right now: this is not Jace’s fault. It’s simply the way it is.” She turned to Jace. “As for you”—she shook her head—“you’re supposed to be one of the best, Jace. But the girl’s right. You’re making mistakes.” She peered at him, pursing her lips. “I think I know why. My question is: do you?”

  Ella stood a head shorter than Jace, and yet, there was nothing compromising in the way she challenged him or the clench of her jaw. I noticed Jace didn’t meet her eyes before he slammed the kitchen door behind him.

  I sank down onto a chair. My fingers shook. I wrapped them around the cup of coffee. I opened my mouth to apologize, but the words never made it out. I turned to Ella instead. “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said. “About why you thought I was a Reader.”

  She gave me a calculating look as though trying to anticipate my reaction to her answer. In the end, she shrugged and said, “Because your mother was.”

  Chapter 8

  Aadil Hanaan, an intelligence officer working for the Saudi Arabian government, glanced out of his office on the corner of the tenement block in Washington, DC. He could see the corner of the John F. Kennedy Arts Center, and, if he leaned to the left, the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. From here, it looked as though Lincoln would be bathing his feet into the gray sheen of the Potomac. He knew that, despite the armed guards on every street corner, old Abe would still be teeming with schoolchildren and flattered by the click of a thousand cameras, even though there was no logical reason for cameras to click anymore.

  Maybe that’s the secret of people’s resilience, mused Aadil. We go out of our way to keep the world as we know it.

  His fax machine whirred. He picked up the single piece of paper. It bore an intelligence code he hadn’t seen in eleven yea
rs.

  He stood in silence for a moment, weighing the implications. He should report it straight away. He had to. But that wasn’t enough. He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “Farid,” he said to his young assistant. “Get me in to see the director. As soon as possible. Then get me on the first flight to London.”

  Farid looked puzzled but tapped away at his keyboard for a moment. “Tomorrow lunchtime is the first available flight. That soon enough?”

  Aadil blew out a breath. “I sincerely hope so,” he said.

  ***

  Jace swerved the pickup down the country lane. He liked Ella, but he hated working with her. She saw too much. No doubt a report would be flying into Washington at any time. Not that that really bothered him. He gripped the steering wheel tightly and drove fast around random country lanes. She was right—he needed to get his head straight.

  He flipped his phone open and pressed it to speaker before dialing Miles’s number.

  “What’s up?” Miles asked.

  “Checking in.” The road turned suddenly and took a ninety-degree angle over a stone bridge. Jace hit the brakes, and the little truck skidded sideways for a moment.

  “You OK?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. I’ve got your back, that’s all.”

  There was a silence. Jace tried to find the words he needed, but they were drowned by the pulsing anger in his head. Miles didn’t have his back—he was waiting for him to foul up. He hated that Jace had been given the lead on this.

  Jace swallowed the acid back down. That wasn’t fair. Miles had been his friend through plenty of bad times, more than a friend. They were Corps. They were family. Being angry with Miles was deflection, he knew that. He was angry with himself.

  Miles waited in the silence.

  Two deer leaped a fence into the road and skated to a halt. Jace hit the brakes hard, and the truck slewed to a stop mere feet from them. The younger one looked up at him, all brown eyes, oblivious to how close it had come to a bloody death.

  “I know you do, buddy. I know,” Jace said eventually. “You’re right. It’s bothering me. What about protecting the innocent?”

  “Everything we do is to protect the innocent.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She seems pretty well protected to me.”

  “Don’t play games, Miles. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Look J, we all play our part. You, me, the girl. All pawns. We do our duty to protect everyone else.”

  Jace stayed silent. He heard Miles swear softly to himself.

  “Don’t overthink it, J. Don’t make yourself a liability. We have a mission, we have a crew. Let’s just do our jobs.” He paused. “It’s your game now. Whatever happens, I’ll be close by.”

  Jace punched the disconnect button. He didn’t need that decoding. Miles was the Order’s back up. If Jace wasn’t up to it, Miles would be there, ready to step in. Maybe Miles was right. Maybe he was the better soldier. Well, from now on Jace would be all business. No more mistakes. He would be the better soldier. He just wasn’t sure it would make him a better man.

  ***

  I couldn’t hear Ella’s conversation, but it didn’t last long. She returned to the kitchen, slipping her mobile into her back pocket. She had made the call almost as soon as Jace had left. I wondered if she hadn’t wanted him to hear it either.

  She slid back into her seat at the kitchen table.

  Embarrassed and confused, I sought for a polite question. “So, this Order? What is it?”

  “A group. It’s very old. The members change, but the mission is the same. To identify times when the world may be dragged into unstoppable war. Then we try to prevent catastrophe.”

  “Who runs it?”

  “It’s a secret order, Callie, for good reason. I’m not going to identify individuals for you. Suffice it to say they are men and women with considerable power—politicians, industrialists—who try to use their influence to protect people. It’s based in the US, but we have members all over the world.”

  “My mother worked with them?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt a secret thrill at this, the first flicker of light I’d felt in days. I knew so little about my mother, and my heart beat faster at the thought that she might have had a clandestine life, an important role to play.

  “She was a Reader?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how did she get involved? How did you know she was a Reader?”

  “Well, I probably don’t remember this any better than you, but eleven years ago, there were the two local wars about oil in the Middle East. Your mother was brought in to stop those conflicts growing worse.”

  “But why would we both be Readers?”

  Ella topped off her coffee. “It’s complicated. The most convincing theory I’ve heard is Readers are distant descendants of the people who first wrote the book. Certainly, where there’s one Reader in a family, others tend to crop up. Eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  Ella shrugged. “Readers are very rare. There are maybe a handful in every generation who would have the power to reach people on a wide enough scale. So if it is inherited, it would have to be a recessive gene or something. If it even works that way. Who knows if magic shows up in DNA?”

  “Magic?” My God, I was becoming her echo.

  Ella sighed and put down her cup. “Who knows what it is really? People used to think the sun coming up was magic. It’s like a spell. Or a prayer. The words of the book have to be poured afresh through the mind of a living person. That’s how it makes sense in a different time, in a real place. Every generation needs its own Reader.”

  I thought about this. “So the book does what? Spread good vibes?”

  Ella’s expression flickered. I got the feeling she was choosing her words carefully. “When there is too much aggression and negativity in the world, the balance must be restored. You are the key. Your interpretation of the book as you read is what is carried out to people, what changes them.”

  I must have looked blank, because she tried again.

  “The book . . . the book is a conduit for energy. Everything is energy, Callie. Emotion, sunshine, rain . . .” She glanced around as though hunting for inspiration. “The kettle. We add energy to the water to make it hot and turn it to steam, right?”

  I nodded. I didn’t see how a book could boil a kettle but, hey.

  “Music,” she carried on. “Music is just energy making the air vibrate a certain way. Like my voice coming to you now.”

  “Yes, OK. Everything is energy.” This was like a third-year physics class. Then again, I’d been pretty crap at physics.

  “The thing about energy is it can’t be created or destroyed. It just gets changed from one form to another.”

  “Or moved,” I said. “Like heat passing from the element to the water.”

  Ella frowned. “I prefer to think of it as transformed. That’s what you do with the book. When you read, you transform the energy around you. It pulses out into the world . . . like . . . like a domino effect. If you are powerful enough. You correct the balance.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. Reading the book turned negative energy positive. OK.

  “So,” I ventured, feeling my way. “It’s not that different from the way a really great speaker can whip up excitement in a crowd? Like Kennedy or Martin Luther King or someone?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it’s similar. They projected emotion and charisma. But this is stronger. More like . . . like a prayer that reaches deep inside people’s souls. It speaks to what’s best in us.”

  I swirled the dregs of my coffee in my mug, buying time. “Is there another Reader out there now?”

  “If you didn’t pan out, I believe our next candidate was in Romania. However, we have one book, and now we have a Reader, so that’s academic.”

  I didn’t miss the fact I wasn’t being given a choice. �
�So why don’t you go and ask the Romanian? Why me?”

  Ella looked a little embarrassed. “He’s Romany. We can’t find him.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A gypsy. He moves around a lot. And for whatever reason this guy doesn’t have a cell phone or an email account. We couldn’t track him down.” She sighed. “We wasted too much time trying to find him.”

  “Huh.” My brain chugged like the little engine that could.

  “What?” asked Ella.

  “Maybe nothing. I just wondered if the phone thing was like me. I can’t use mobiles or computers. They stop working if I touch them. These days I feel blessed I can use landlines.”

  Ella considered this. “Maybe it’s because you’re a Reader. You probably project more energy than most people. Or different energy.” She shrugged. “Computers are pretty recent, so it probably wouldn’t have been a problem for Readers in the past.”

  I drained my cold coffee. Caffeine was my friend today. “This book. There’s just one copy?”

  “The original Sumerian text is two thousand years old. Obviously, copies have been made over time, but it’s difficult and expensive—more art than science. At the moment we only have one book that is powerful enough to create a reading.”

  I tried to wrap my head around all of this. “So the book restores the balance? Between good feeling and bad, war and peace?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “The Reader does. But the Reader needs the book to do it.”

  “And the Cadaveri want the book?”

  Ella grimaced. “They want to stop the reading. But I dread to think how much despair they could spread if they ever got their hands on something so powerful.”

  “Why would they want to do that?” I asked.

  She looked at me blankly. “Because they are evil,” she said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “And if I were six years old, that might satisfy me. No one does anything just because they are evil.”

  Ella shrugged. “You want me to tell you they had sad childhoods? Someone killed their puppy? I don’t know why anyone would want to stop us but they do and that seems pretty evil to me.”