Juma

by Madhuri Pavamani

  “Okay, sweetness.” The way she said it made me think she knew I was up to something and she wasn’t going to interfere but goddammit, I wanted her to, just this once. I wanted her to know how fucked up my life was, the hell of Dutch’s, and our deep abiding intense need and love and affection for each other.

  “Be easy, Ma.” I talked my way off the phone. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too, baby girl,” and we hung up.

  And in the ensuing silence, all I wanted to do was shout my need and love and affection for Dutch out loud from the rooftop into the air of my city and give it life and meaning and purpose.

  And so I did.

  I stepped onto the lower ledge of my roof and raised my arms above my head as if to greet the day with a most glorious chair pose. I inhaled deeply, becoming one with the morning and the city and all of its wake-up sounds. And then I added my own.

  “I LOVE DUTCH MATHEW WITH EVERY OUNCE OF MY BEING HE IS MY EVERYTHING I FEEL HIM IN THE DARK CORNERS OF MY SOUL I LIVE IN THE COLD RECESSES OF HIS HEART WE ARE EACH OTHER’S FOREVER EVER!

  “I LOVE HIM GODDAMMIT!”

  “Juma?”

  I turned at the familiar voice and smiled.

  “Good morning, Oscar. Just giving my lungs some exercise is all.”

  He studied me for a second and how I was standing on that ledge and maybe from his perspective it looked like I was about to do something foolish. Then again the man had just busted me doing something foolish so maybe foolish was relative. Either way, he had nothing to worry about, I was finished, the universe had my words and I hoped somehow they would touch Dutch on some cosmic level. That was probably complete bullshit but at that very moment, I was missing him so acutely and needing to feel some sort of connection with him so desperately, that I would do damn near anything, hence the shouting-to-the-rooftops nonsense.

  And fuck it.

  Even if it didn’t work, it felt so damn good doing it.

  I hopped down from the ledge and walked toward the door Oscar held open for me.

  “Feeling better after that little outburst, Juma?” he asked with a raised brow.

  “I am, Oscar.” I smiled and winked. “Thank you for asking.”

  “Because you know what I think about that boy you’re going on about,” he added and I knew he couldn’t help himself. He believed Dutch was a royal fuckup.

  “I do, Oscar,” I replied as we waited for the elevator and he sighed and I remained quiet and we wordlessly agreed to disagree on all things Dutch Mathew. We rode down to the lobby in silence, I’m sure both of us contemplating Dutch from opposite sides of the spectrum, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “What you got, Juma?” Oscar asked as he held the elevator door open for me, studying my curious smile with suspicion as we stepped into the quiet of the early morning lobby.

  “Things to do, people to see, magic to make, Oscar. You know this,” I replied as I made my way for the door.

  “Watch yourself, Juma,” Oscar warned from his post at the front desk as the doors closed behind me and I stepped onto North Moore, headed in the direction of Meg, the East Village boutique I loved so much. I knew it wouldn’t be open at the crack of dawn, but it was where I needed to be nonetheless.

  The city came to life as I made my way east, aware of all movement around me, each passerby, every delivery person, no one entered my orbit without a thorough analysis because even though the Keepers weren’t coming for me, The Black Copse was, and this time I intended to be ready.

  I grabbed a coffee and stood in a doorway across the street from Meg, running my eyes over the gorgeous dresses in the window of the shop while paying close attention to the industrial-looking black door of the building to the right. There was a grime-covered buzzer next to the door and I could make out four buttons, meaning an apartment per floor, meaning I could be standing here for a long time waiting for someone to exit or enter the building.

  I glanced at my phone: 6:23 in the morning.

  Someone had to be coming home or going outside within the next hour.

  Or so I hoped as I looked up and down the street, watching for anyone who might be watching me, resigned to the fact I could only be here for a hot second and I needed to keep my guard up for anything untoward.

  And then I saw it.

  Lavender.

  Just a flash in the corner of my eye, whip fast around the corner, and gone. I dumped my coffee, crossed the street at a jog, and took off after her.

  Frist.

  My only connection to Dutch. At least the only connection I knew how to locate. And even she was a fucking dice roll.

  She was tall and her legs went on forever, so getting somewhere fast with that body was a piece of cake. She already had four blocks on me but thanks to her hair, I could trail her without being too obvious. I didn’t want to spook her and she’d already suffered one attack at the hands of The Gate, so I didn’t need her mistaking me for her next assailant. She cut a quick left at 24th Street and disappeared into the morning pedestrian traffic for a few seconds before I caught sight of her crossing the middle of the street in the direction of Madison Square Park.

  I considered shouting her name, but it hardly seemed the optimal plan given our current circumstances. Instead I picked up my pace, ran across the park, and headed down 25th Street because that was where I saw her headed until she wasn’t.

  Disappeared.

  Just like that.

  I continued jogging down the block, glancing right and left into store windows for a glimpse of purple or leopard-print Air Force Ones but nothing.

  “Ahhhh!”

  And then I was airborne, slammed into the brick wall of the small parking lot as a young attendant looked on, concerned but unsure of himself and what to do next.

  Frist held me to the wall and glanced his way, her breath coming in small spurts, my back screaming where she’d slammed me.

  “It’s okay, JJ,” Frist called out. “I got this.”

  JJ turned on his heel and headed for the car he’d left running. “Whatever you say, Frist.”

  Still pinning me to the wall, her arm heavy across my neck and shoulders, Frist finally turned her attention to me, slowly taking in my presence, her eyes running over every inch of my face, my hair, my throat. If our encounter wasn’t so violent, her exploration would feel incredibly sexual.

  Instead, it was dry cold purely factual.

  She was sizing up every feature right down to my freckles and I figured the next words out of her mouth would have something to do with Dutch and how she could not understand what he was doing with a woman like me. Especially when he could have her. And good fucking lord, the girl was gorgeous. Flawless skin like porcelain, large, almond-shaped eyes with the thickest dark lashes, an aquiline nose that led the viewer right down to her perfectly shaped, full pink lips. Lips that just begged to be kissed. I didn’t dare glance at her breasts but I suspected they, too, were utter perfection, perfect to accompany the remainder of her lithe and seductive body.

  Her ass would fit in Dutch’s hands perfectly, there would be no booty hanging out and over and around with her because I suspected hers was tight and high and small and round. And as I stood there contemplating her probably-perfect ass, I wondered what witty comeback I would have to the near-certain insult about to be tossed my way when she broke the silence.

  “I love Dutch, but hot stuff, you are too fucking beautiful to be messing around with him.” She eased up the pressure in her arm, but did not release me. “I hope you make him worship the ground you walk on.”

  “You know Dutch better than I,” I replied as she released me and I could breathe easy again. “He worships nothing.”

  I wiped off the ass of my pants as she watched me.

  “Juma,” she replied. “Dutch worships at the altar of Juma.”

  For some reason, hearing those words from her mouth, regardless of the fact he had proved to me time and again he loved and adored me, took my breath away. I looked do
wn at my feet for a second and felt a flush expand across my cheeks.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, it’s amazing. Since I met that guy, I’ve been hoping and dreaming you would come his way. I mean, not you-you, because you’re a Poocha and his job is to kill your kind, so yeah, I never considered you would be you, but you catch my drift.”

  “I do,” I nodded and agreed.

  “But what the fuck, Juma?” She changed her tone and suddenly looked almost fierce. “Why are you sneaking up on a girl like that? I could have killed you. I’m a goddamned eighth degree black belt and do you have any idea the kind of shit I walk around with on a daily basis to protect myself from sneaky fucks?”

  The black belt explained her stealth and speed, I thought to myself as I fished around in my pocket while I explained myself to her. “I’m sorry, but I was desperate to talk to Dutch, just hear his voice, and you’re the only person I could think of to help me.”

  Frist shot me a strange look as I continued digging around in my pockets.

  “Just call him, Juma. He’s an asshole, but he’s all bark, no bite.”

  “I don’t have his number,” I admitted and cringed at how ridiculous that fact sounded as the words left my lips. She shot me another strange look and started to comment when I held out my palm to her, revealing the tiny white packet Dutch had given me when we parted ways. In fact I did know the kind of stuff she walked around with on a daily basis.

  She grabbed my hand, forced it into a fist, and pressed it into my chest.

  “Jesus, Juma.” She looked around. “Let’s get out of here.”

  And without a word, Frist forgot about my lack of contact information for the man I loved and died for time and again and took off down 25th Street, back across the park and east, never once looking back to see if I followed, just running. Fast. Until we were at her front door, slightly out of breath as she pulled out her key and let us inside the dark building. The staircase was wide and metal and industrial-looking, like much of the inside of the building. We climbed side by side until the first landing when she stopped me, put her finger to her lips, and we both listened to the quiet. Then she tapped my arm and we continued, repeating the process on the second-floor landing, only moving again when she gave the signal.

  It was her building, she knew its sounds.

  But when killers moved in silence, listening to the quiet rarely made a difference.

  They came out of nowhere as if the walls created them, gave them life, and spit them forth. Dressed in black, silent, deadly, they used small weapons and fought in a hand-to-hand combat style, making my machete almost useless. The attack was so well coordinated there was no time to think, just kill on instinct, and my instinct as of late was to make the streets weep red.

  I wielded my small blade in my right hand since it was dominant and Simone in my left. She felt heavy and awkward, but a few strong slashes across someone’s thigh, a cut through bone, and I was ready. I glanced at Frist for all of one second, then killed everything in sight, the stairs slick with blood, my body covered in the remains of others, and death all around my feet. A deep gaping gash to my shoulder added to the carnage, but it didn’t slow my defense and attack.

  My arms screamed in exhaustion as I ripped my blade across another throat while I gutted someone at my back and a blade sliced the tender skin at the crease of my neck. It was a blood bath shrouded in silence as the attackers never made a sound, Frist and I followed suit, and the stairways and halls rang out with the simple ting of steel on steel. There was so much death and gore and I wondered how it would all end, would Frist and I make it out alive, would these black-clad bringers of death ever cease and desist and as these thoughts filtered through one half of my brain and the other half kept killing

  killing

  killing

  anything moving until my name rang out in the eerie darkness.

  “JUMA!”

  I didn’t think twice, I moved toward her and flung my packet of white and shouted “run Frist! Now!” and may the gods bless her, she did. And then they were upon me, a swarm everywhere, my eyes filled with black and steel and blood, knives biting into my tender places my muscle my bone. I screamed, no longer considerate of the unspoken vow of silence we had all taken, shouting my pain to the skies above calling on my gods begging Death to heed my pleas.

  And finally

  when my body could take no more

  my blood ran cold

  my entrails littered the stairs

  my tears soaked the cement

  my cries fell on deaf ears

  I was forgiven my trespasses

  and bad behavior

  and she once again

  turned everything to black

  and brought me home.

  36: JUMA

  “UHHHHH!”

  I sucked in air gulped it drank it greedily desperate to fill my lungs and nourish my blood and inject life into my cells and as the oxygen went to work on my body, my soul calmed and I eased back into the comfort of his familiar.

  Dutch.

  I didn’t need to be fully formed and on this side of life to know it was him, we had become so interconnected I could sense him without comprehending his specifics for his essence flowed through my veins he lived in my bones he was my breath.

  That, and he’d sworn to always find me, no matter what. And even though it seemed impossible to do on his part and ridiculous to believe on my part, the fact of the matter was I expected it. Or I had grown into the idea of waking in his arms, that he would be right there to ease my soul back to his side of life, because somewhere in my deepest selves lived a girl with freckled skin and short hair and a crooked smile who wasn’t so dark and full of death and who loved a boy with brown skin like summer and dark eyes like danger and believed him when he said he would always find her because she believed in dragons and vampires and magic—and most of all, she believed in him.

  Dutch.

  I looked up at him and touched his face, trailing my finger along his lip and holding my breath as he kissed each of my fingertips, amazed to be in his presence again, devastated by his everything. I’d longed for him for days, wondering as to his safety his care his well-being, desperate to hear his voice, yearning for his touch, incapable of finding peace in any of my usual refuges without knowing his whereabouts.

  Now to lie next to him, touch him, listen to his heartbeat—I was wholly overwhelmed, incapable of much more than tears, for him for me for us, and for the first time in a long time in my many lives, I sobbed. It was uncontrolled and feral, a kind of keening of my soul, a sadness and need buried so deep within myself for so long that when it finally reached my surface, it was brutal, the sound so full of anguish and despair.

  “Juma.” Dutch pulled me close and whispered into my skin. “Shhhhhh, it’s okay.”

  “It’s not, Dutch,” I cried and I felt foolish but also tired and full of something worse than sadness, resignation perhaps to our places in these games of lives and the fact there was very little we could do but kill or be killed. Those were our options. Grim and horrible as they were, we took them up and handled our business and we continued doing so. But still.

  “It’ll never be okay, Dutch.”

  He inched down next to me so we were lying face to face and something about the gesture was so sweet, I only cried harder because it was unfair that this man, this sweet loving man, walked the world with scars like his and had done so alone for so much of his brutal horrific tortured existence.

  “You saved Frist’s life.” Dutch pushed my hair out of my eyes and wiped away my tears. “Without you, she would have never survived that attack. I don’t know why you were together, but thank god.”

  And I knew he believed relaying that information would make me feel better because I’d saved her, because without me Frist would have succumbed and Veda would have stolen yet another piece of Dutch’s soul. And yes, I loved that, but I also hated it and I sobbed harder, cries wracking my chest and my tender parts, tho
se pieces of myself I liked to keep hidden, out and fully exposed for Dutch to see.

  And he saw them, he studied them, took notes and learned all of my vulnerabilities, claimed them as his own, put them in a box, and kept them for himself. In their place, he brought me quiet and peace and understanding. In their place, he embraced my sadness, collected my tears, kissed away my worries. In their place, he loved me for my weaknesses.

  I settled and calmed and, for the first time in days, felt at peace. I twined my fingers with his, brought his hand to my lips, and kissed him.

  “I have always worked alone,” I whispered so low he had to lean closer, so close our noses almost touched and our breath commingled. “Even though I have a team of Alighters, I am a solitary beast. I’ve always been a loner since crossing into Death’s domain. Perhaps she wanted it like that, believed I would be easier to manipulate and control. Either way, it’s always been just me, I take care of everyone and everything and I care about little else besides my well-being and that of my parents.

  “I’ve often wondered, had I survived that shooting, would I have been so cold? Would my life have been so closed to others?

  “And then I saw you in Frank’s and my entire being shifted. Your darkness, the danger that clings to your shoulders and lingers on your lips, it called to me, begged me to save you and even though I know you don’t need anyone to save you”—I smiled and traced his cheek—“you definitely needed someone to love you.”

  Our legs wrapped around each other and he inched closer to me and I continued my quiet story of love and discovery, my story of us.

  “So I became that person and you lashed out and snarled and scratched, but I knew, I could tell, just as you mattered to me, so too did I matter to you. And slowly we have danced around each other and pressed close and undressed one another until both of us know the other’s scars and nightmares and darkness, until we’re so close sometimes I can feel you settled in my skin playing along my curves inhabiting my blood.”