The Awakening

by Shakir Rashaan

  I found the number I wanted, but before I could dial it, my phone rang again, and my hand shook as I attempted to answer it. It had the same private call message on the ID, and I tried to garner the strength to answer.

  Something came over Jay. Without warning, he walked over to me, snatched the phone away from me and answered it harshly. “You could have left our friends out of this, Jasmine.”

  I could only hear one end of the conversation, but it was clear there was a power struggle going on as well. “Jasmine, Kane didn’t hurt you…look, you need to listen…I don’t think so, you’ve hurt enough people…look, where are you, and don’t bullshit me, Jasmine…okay, I’ll be there in ten minutes, alone.”

  He hung up the phone, and when he looked up, Jay saw two rather shocked faces staring at him. It was clear we hadn’t seen this side of him before, but then it clicked inside of me as to how he and Kane were when they were both single, and I began to slowly realize I had Jay pegged wrong. I think we both did, considering the look on Candy’s face as well.

  “I’ve got to go, ladies. She has got to be stopped before she really does hurt Kane,” Jay said, kissing Candy softly across her lips. “I want you both to go to Amenhotep’s house. You’re going to need some people around you after this all goes down.”

  Jay knew his shotgun partner would do the same for him, and he had to resolve this, once and for all.

  But by then, I was already on the phone with Dominic, asking him for a favor since he was off-duty. I explained what had happened to my husband, my voice trembling with each word that came out of my mouth. I told him I didn’t need the police involved, I’d called a couple of the other ruffnecks Kane had always used in the past whenever something needed to be handled off the record. He might have had a clue that I knew about the book, and while I wasn’t naïve, I kept out of the madness when I needed to stay out of it.

  Upon hearing me finish my tearful rant, Dom let me know he’d ensure that nothing happened to Ramesses. “He’ll be cool, sweetness. Tell Jay that we’ll meet up with him at his house in twenty minutes, and to stall until we get there,” he told me. “In the meantime, go and see if your friend Amenhotep is okay. I just heard on the scanners that they found him tied up near where they kidnapped Kane.”

  35 RAMESSES

  All I heard were gunshots…sirens and gunshots.

  Everything felt so surreal. I could have sworn that I saw Jay and Dominic fighting with Lee and the stocky dude. The tall dude was nowhere to be found, no matter how hard I tried to twist to find him.

  I thought I saw Jasmine on the floor, bleeding from her chest, struggling to breathe…

  Feeling the carpet against the left side of my face, I prayed that through all the gunfire, no one had been killed. Someone had been shot. I felt a pain in my shoulder that proved that much, and watching Jasmine not a couple of feet away from me bleeding out, reality was going to be a bitch when I finally became lucid.

  My eyes were still glassy, but I thought I saw ghosts drop Lee and the stocky dude where they stood with kill shots.

  Ghosts that probably were figments of my imagination. At least, that’s what they were supposed to be until they were needed.

  The officers finally broke through the door, guns drawn as I saw the ghosts disappear. They immediately started securing the place, a couple of officers helping me out of the chair and the rope I was tied in. I heard police radios going off, asking for EMTs to be brought in to see about the wounded, possibly dead on scene.

  As I was brought to my feet and helped out of the door, I took a quick look around the room, taking count of the dead bodies on the floor, swearing my mind was playing cruel tricks on me. Maybe I was hallucinating because I’d been treated like a Whack-a-Mole all night.

  The scary thing was…I had a funny feeling this was not a hallucination.

  36 NEFERTERRI

  Patience is supposed to bring good luck…please let that be true tonight.

  Waiting on phone calls while at Amenhotep’s from anyone to give us a lifeline to figure out what happened to Ramesses and Jay was absolutely excruciating. I couldn’t stop pacing the floor, stopping abruptly whenever any phone rang within earshot of me. Candy was as I had never seen her in a long time: agitated and at a loss as to what to do. She had always been the rock for me whenever Ramesses had to go somewhere with his father and he couldn’t tell me the specifics, but now the shoe was on the other foot and we had to lean on each other. It had been a couple of hours since Jay split from us, and the silence was killing us all.

  Amenhotep worked every back channel at His disposal, and even He was finding it difficult to get any information. I saw the worry on His face. He’s never been this nervous before, or at least He’s never shown it in front of any of us. paka tried to settle Him down, but it wasn’t working. Thankfully, He was in one piece when the police arrived. He had a good knot on the back of His head, and He was a little pissed off the assailants had gotten the drop on them both. He told us there were four of them, three men and a woman, and they came out of nowhere while they were on the way back to the car. He knew it was Jasmine because, according to Him, she wanted Him to know it was her before he was knocked out.

  I thought I would have heard from Dominic by then on word of the location. I wasn’t going to go down there, I wouldn’t be any good to anyone, but I at least needed my mind calmed to know they were able to find my husband. The whole ordeal was driving me insane. I kept his mother and my mother updated to keep the girls calm because they knew one of us would have picked them up from their grandmother’s by then. His mother made sure to tell them that “Daddy was with Uncle Amen taking care of some last-minute business.” Knowing those three, they would treat it as a sleepover night and not give a second thought about it. In their minds, their daddy was bulletproof.

  I hoped at least on this night they were proven right.

  Finally, Amenhotep’s cell phone rang, and He picked it up before the first tone could finish. “Yes? Okay, we’ll check it out.” He then exhaled before walking to the big screen to turn to the local news. “I think we’re all going to have to sit and watch this. I understand things didn’t turn out as the officers had planned.”

  Officers? I uttered under my breath. Police weren’t supposed to be involved. Dominic promised me that there wouldn’t be.

  I didn’t know whether to scream or faint, Amenhotep’s words were so chilling. He turned on the television, and we saw a house somewhere in Tyrone, which wasn’t far from where we lived. I read the ticker at the bottom of the screen:

  “Hostage standoff ends in fatalities…”

  I kept screaming, Oh my God, in my head over and over again, praying for once they would get to the heart of the story quick and not try to build suspense. As the female reporter on scene began to recount what had happened, I could see in the background paramedics were treating both Ramesses and Jay, with Dominic in tactical gear nearby checking on them. I distinctly saw blood on both of them. I didn’t see any sign of the other guys who were supposed to be with Dominic, but I guess I should’ve figured I wouldn’t. They had to be ghosts for a reason, especially considering cops were brought in after the fact.

  “Be calm, ladies, the contact who called Me said they are fine, just flesh wounds from what I understand. But it doesn’t sound good for the young lady and the others that were involved,” Amenhotep stated flatly.

  As He said that, we saw four gurneys being rolled out in front of the cameras, and then they quickly panned to the police spokesperson to get further details of the incident and confirmed what Amenhotep was saying: four people dead, two officers and the hostage shot in the gunfire exchange. Three males, one female were dead on the scene, with more details to follow.

  I felt this uneasiness come over me. Yes, this nightmare was over and my husband was in one piece. But they had been through an ordeal, to say the least. And Jasmine…my God, poor Jasmine…and whoever the other people were were now dead because of a severe bloodlust
for revenge. I didn’t know how to feel. I kept my eyes fixated to the screen until the broadcast was over, keeping my eyes on my husband the entire time, just to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming or my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.

  My twilight zone moment finally came to a halt when I saw Dom’s cell phone number finally appear on my cell phone screen. I swear it was the best thing I could have seen all night.

  “I’m okay, baby. I’m okay,” I heard him say over and over on the other end.

  “I know…now.”

  37 NEFERTERRI

  Time stood still until I got to the hospital.

  It didn’t take long to find the boys at Piedmont Fayette Medical. By the time we got there, my husband pretty much looked close to his old self. I saw he was still a little shaken up, as was Jay, probably because it’s not every day you watch people die in front of you. They were both joking while Ramesses was being attended to. That was his defense mechanism, one that he picked up from his father. Jay was really focused on staying cool for the most part. I understood, because I don’t know what I would have done if someone I cared about died in the manner that Jasmine did.

  Dominic was filling out paperwork with the nurses and flirting with them at the same time. I laughed to myself, shaking my head. They’d survived a gunfight an hour ago and the only thing he could think of was the lovely young nurse fawning over the “big, strong officer.” He finally saw the two of us and motioned for us to head into the room, turning his attention back to the nurse, who wrote down her number as ordered.

  Candy didn’t know whether to hug Jay or slap him silly. She really was never good at these types of situations. The closer we got to them, the more she shed tears of relief and joy they were both okay, and the “bytch” I was used to finally succumbed to being a woman relieved to seeing her man in one piece.

  “You scared the hell out of us both, damn it. Do you realize you could’ve died? Do you hear me, Jay?” Candy scolded before giving him the tightest hug that I’d ever seen her give any man. She turned her attention to Ramesses. “Kane, are you okay?”

  Ramesses lifted up in the bed and patted the spot next to him for me to sit. “I feel like shit for letting myself get jacked like that. This was not the way I thought this was going to go down.”

  Dom walked in and replied jokingly to Ramesses’ statement, “That’s what you get for choosing to be a shutterbug and not a detective, knucklehead. Not my fault your instincts are getting rusty.”

  Ramesses laughed off the chide and began to explain he and Amenhotep were in the bank when he saw Jasmine waving at them like she was in trouble and needed their help. When he approached her as they were walking toward his car, she couldn’t stop crying, which kept him distracted long enough for three of her thugs to take the back of a gun to his head, knocking him cold.

  That was consistent with what Amenhotep explained when we were at his house.

  When he woke out of it, he could only hear Jasmine around him, and he was tied down completely with no chance of getting loose.

  “She kept mocking me,” he said.

  At first, Jasmine wanted to have him call me, for dramatic effect, but then she realized I knew his patterns better than anyone. Once she realized I hadn’t heard from him, her threats would be taken more seriously. He heard her end of one of the conversations she’d had with us, but he couldn’t say anything because she’d gagged him with a towel to keep him from trying to warn us of where he was. Of course it didn’t stop him from trying to scream as loud as he could each time she was on the phone.

  Jasmine had popped him with the gun again until he’d blacked out. The next time he woke up, Jay was on the ground, face-down with a gun to his head and he heard the faint noise of sirens in the background. By then his head was throbbing and he could feel blood dripping off his forehead. The sirens got louder, and there were distinct noises of the police officers loading weapons.

  After that, Dominic took over and gave his account of things from that point, because he had just gotten into the house.

  “Things took off quick,” he said.

  Lee and the stocky dude broke out the windows in the front of the house while the tall dude took a spot in the back. Dom said the guys I called to help out only identified themselves as “J-Roc and Boney-T,” names Ramesses recognized as Dominic continued his account.

  “J-Roc took out one of the guys in the back of the house and gave me cover while we cleared the rooms, in case there were more than we originally thought,” he recalled. “Boney-T popped the third guy that was in another room. No guns, he just manhandled the guy and damn near twisted his head off his shoulders.”

  Ramesses was still holding the ice pack on his head as Dominic kept rattling off the details. “Jasmine answered her cell phone and talked to the police negotiator to find out what they could do to diffuse the situation. While she was on the phone, Jay saw us trying to make a move on Lee and got up from his spot on the floor. I guess Lee forgot to bind his hands and feet before the cops showed up. Jay lunged at where Lee was posted up at the window. Lee fired a shot off, which triggered the shots from Boney-T and J-Roc. But Lee didn’t hit the target he intended to hit.”

  “What are you talking about, D? Jay took a bullet in the shoulder,” Ramesses pointed out.

  “You were already on the floor, K. Remember?” Dom pointed out to him. “And Jay never got hit, either.”

  “He’s right, Kane. You must be imagining things,” Jay added.

  Dominic calmly reminded Ramesses he’d tipped Ramesses’ chair to avoid the gunfire coming from Lee’s random firing. Lee tried to fire off another shot, but then realized who he hit with the first bullet: Jasmine.

  Lee began freaking out as he watched Jasmine bleeding from the wound she suffered in her chest, which tipped the officers at the front door that he was distracted, and they came in blazing. Lee got hit several times in the chest. Jasmine was still on the floor struggling to breathe, and Jay rushed to her side to try and keep her breathing. She died before the paramedics could rush in to administer CPR to get her stabilized.

  “The negotiator said she sounded like she was hopped up on drugs, but he wasn’t sure,” Jay finally chimed in. “She looked so wild-eyed when I came through the door. It was like she’d never seen me before in her life. I couldn’t reason with her. She just kept saying, ‘I want my husband back,’ over and over again.”

  “I’m just glad you’re both safe.” I finally opened my mouth. I couldn’t stop staring at my husband. It was like we were dating again. “Amenhotep will be pleased that you’re in one piece.”

  “Yeah, thank God He wasn’t harmed in all this craziness.” Ramesses breathed deeply. “This wasn’t His fight. I’m glad He was with you both to help keep things calm.”

  Candy asked the one question I guess no one wanted to ask. “What happened to J-Roc and Boney-T? Neither of you mentioned what happened to them.”

  Ramesses gave a look at Dominic, who stayed tight-lipped and stone-faced. He closed his eyes for a minute and said to Candy, “You’re on a need-to-know basis, babe, and right now, you don’t need to know. Trust me on this one.”

  In the past, I would have been pissed off at that damn statement. Now I knew exactly why he said it. Some things we didn’t need to know about, as long as it didn’t come back to haunt us. I guess my husband was right: J-Roc and Boney-T are ghosts for a reason, and that reason needed to stay with those who could keep those reasons from hitting the streets.

  “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to be in this hospital any longer than the rest of you. Can we head home so we can relax and put this whole nightmare behind us?” Ramesses looked at Dominic again, nodding in his direction. “Do you think you could get that pretty little nurse to page the doctor so I can go? I really would like to go home tonight, if possible.”

  38 EPILOGUE

  Being on the white sand beaches in Dubai in late November was something out of a fairy tale.

 
Amenhotep spared no expense to fly a small wedding party which consisted of Sinsual and both of her sub bois, which meant Ice was with her; Myself, Neferterri and Kitana; Master Altar and his slave girl chastity; finally, Lord Magnus and his slave girl jewel as well. Come to find out, Magnus is an ordained minister, albeit retired from actually leading a church, but he also fits as the perfect divine facilitator for this most auspicious of occasions.

  He put us all up in suites at the Burj Al Arab Hotel for the week, and arranged for all of us to have separate chauffeur-driven SUVs to make sure that we took in all the sights. Of course, the girls all wanted to go shopping and such, which was fine. It wasn’t like we would actually be able to come back there without saving up some serious change not only to stay for a few days, but to sightsee and other things. So, they went to the Al Khaleej Shopping Center, the Al Shindagha Market, the Wafi Mall complex and a few other places, which meant for the majority of the husbands and Dominants in the group, that some credit card statements were going to be rather thick the next month.

  I’d never seen my Mentor so relaxed, so at peace, in my life. He sipped on drinks with the rest of the Dominants and enjoyed the luxuries of being in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Yeah sure, it’s my opinion, but I would challenge anyone to find another one without going to a tropical island climate. Every time that he looked at me, he gave me this knowing glance, as if I eventually would be in his shoes one day. I could only hope. But with all the money that he was shelling out for this wedding and festivities, I couldn’t help but wonder how much Amenhotep was actually worth.