“We’ve had a good run, especially considering I’m a spook.”
“But you don’t have to be, mijn lieftje.” She should come home with him to Amsterdam. They could have a good life together there. Money would never be a problem. He’d make sure of that. Business was good. They could have fun. If she’d only let it happen. He stared at her as hard as he could, trying to convey all he felt, hoping that it would be enough.
“Be honest with yourself. You knew we wouldn’t last. Not us.” She put the puppy on the floor and ran a hand through her beautiful, thick hair. Light reflected along the strands of her auburn curls.
He wanted to touch her.
“Part of you must have known,” she continued. “You never stay with one woman for more than a month. We beat your record by five months.”
Her matter-of-fact voice scratched at his heart. “But you… We… are different,” he said.
“It’s for the best. You’ll have fun playing around again.”
He swallowed. Shit. He hated talking about feelings. “Sadie, I’m not the man you think I am.”
Her eyes flashed at him.
“I wanted to tell you before, but it never seemed to be the right time. We were always having so much fun.” He swallowed. “If you knew more about me, you wouldn’t think me a shallow, good-times guy.”
She raised her brows.
“Tante Zen did her best to raise me, but I was a hellion.” He hesitated, not sure he wanted to go on. Shit he hated talking about his past. “I was an angry, lost kid. I felt abandoned and couldn’t figure out where I belonged. At thirteen I started hanging out with some really bad people. They made me feel okay about myself.”
Her full, soft lips that tasted like wine and honey settled into a soft pout.
“They were mostly thieves who laughed at the conventions of our world. I started selling forged paintings to tourists. I got good at it. My young face and ability with languages helped. I made money fast and the more I made, the deeper I got into their dark world.”
“I thought you’d always been a boy scout.” Her eyes softened.
“At first it was fun. There’s a rush to pulling a good con. I liked the camaraderie of the other guys. You know brothers on the street, and all that shit. I made tons of cash, drank lots of beer, discovered sex. But the men in charge started making more and more demands of me. They wanted more.”
“Like how?”
“At first, I sold small prints, then sketches and then paintings.”
She nodded.
“And then…” He heard his voice crack, but he had to tell her. She had to know who he was. “They wanted me to sell myself.”
“You mean…”
He shifted his gaze. Looking out the windows made talking about this stuff easier. “Tourists come to Amsterdam for many things. Some want sex.”
“And you?”
“I thought I had no choice. Tante Zen had thrown me out of her house, because I never came home and she knew I was into bad stuff. I had no one but them. They had become my family.”
“Women or men?”
He shrugged, but his gut wrenched. “Both, and sometimes more than one. As soon as they learned about my, uh-‘stamina,’ they had people paying to watch me.”
“Sebastian, you don’t have to tell me this.”
He hadn’t told anyone this much about himself before, but he kept going. “Yes I do. You think I’m some squeaky-clean knight in shining armor and I’ve let you think that. But beneath the armor is a guy who’s taken a lot of bad turns, and who wants to build a healthy, normal life; maybe even have a family.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again they were brimming with unspilled tears. But her voice held steady and strong. “You pulled yourself out of trouble a long time ago, before you met me. I have nothing to do with your past.”
“To understand me you need to understand my past.”
She nodded.
“I was seventeen and enjoying the money and the drugs. I told myself the sex was meaningless and sometimes enjoyed it. But when Alinda…” His voice became quieter.
Sadie reached over and took his hand. “Alinda?”
He looked at her. “Alinda was another sex worker two years older than me. We often worked as a team and I had feelings for her.”
“What happened?”
He looked at the floor. “I found her in an alley with her throat slit. Our boss, Vlad, said a customer, a real bad ass, did it, but my gut told me it was him. He was a sick, violent asshole and had a weird thing for her. She made a point of avoiding him as much as she could. I couldn’t prove he did it. It was just a feeling. I looked into his eyes and I knew. He told me to leave her body in the alley and make myself scarce.”
“No police?”
“I was a prostitute addicted to heroin. Cops were my enemy.”
“Heroin. So what did you do?”
“The short story: I called Xander. We’d been friends for years, but we lost touch when I took to the streets. He let me stay with him and his family adopted me. Tante Zen cheered from the sidelines.”
A smile wormed its way onto his face at the memory. “I’ll never forget the look on Xander’s face when he saw how wasted I had become.
“He helped me pack my things at the communal house where I’d been crashing. Two thugs who acted as security for Vlad tried to stop us leaving, but Xander pulled a gun on them. A gun! I had no idea he could be such a heavy-weight.”
“You kicked the heroin.”
He nodded. “I had a lot of support and at the time I didn’t think I deserved it. Tante Zen and the van der Valk family were there for me. I got off it just in time. I was beginning not to care if I lived or died.”
“I’ve seen a lot of drugs in the modeling world. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“Do they use it to stay thin?”
“That’s a nice side-effect, but mostly they use it to forget their lives. They enter the world young and naïve and don’t like who they become or how they’re living. They get used a lot. Body and soul used.”
He sighed. “I can relate to that. Did you ever…?”
“For about two months, just before I divorced Jonathon. It numbed me to the world.”
“So how did you kick it?”
“The CIA found me, straightened me out and then sent me to the farm for training.”
“Hmm. So that’s part of your loyalty thing to them.”
She nodded. The tears were gone, but her lips still held sadness. She released his hand and leaned back into the sofa. “Did Alinda have family?”
“She belonged to the streets. Her step-father sexually abused her from the time she turned six. Her mother refused to believe it. Alinda said she had no one, but when she died she was pregnant.”
“She had you.”
“Lot of good I was.” He gripped the arms of the chair. “I should have seen it coming. I should have protected her. But the drugs stopped me from seeing anything beyond the next fix.”
Sadie took a deep breath. “So that’s why you’re reluctant to get deeply involved with women? You don’t want to feel that responsibility and guilt again?”
“Fuck. I don’t believe in psycho-babble. I just know that until I met you, I never wanted a close relationship.”
“And now I’m pulling away.” She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry Sebastian.”
“Sadie, you gotta give us another chance. Don’t end it. Don’t say anything you can’t take back. It’s like toothpaste pushed out of the tube, you know. Give us time.”
21
Chapter Twenty-One
Cairo
Khalid could have gone to a holy site, one of the pyramids or temples, to do his thing, but there were too many people around. The last thing he wanted was an audience. No one but him should hear what the spirits had to say to him.
He headed up to his guest room, which was larger than his whole apartment in Amsterdam. The largeness of the place blew his mind.
<
br /> As he walked along the second balcony he ran into Darius, the servant who his father said would attend to his needs.
“May I get anything for you,” he said in heavily accented English.
“No, thank you. But you could do one thing for me.”
He bowed his head.
“Make sure no one disturbs me for the next hour.”
A glint of curiosity crossed the small man’s dark eyes, but he said nothing. He simply bowed again.
Once in his room, Khalid locked the door and pulled from his knapsack a candle, matches, incense and his wand. He placed a towel on the floor to act as an altar, and placed the candle and incense holder in the middle. He lit both. The incense had been prepared by his mother, in the same way it been prepared centuries ago in ancient Egypt for religious rituals. It smelled distinctly different than any he’d been able to purchase. As Khalid steadied his breathing and his mind, the sweetness of the honey and cinnamon in the kyphi filled the room.
Chanting in his mind the ancient mantra passed down to him, he continued to breathe deeply. “Open universe. Open time. Open spirit.”
He lifted his wand as it began to vibrate. “I am the keeper of the Akashic Records, all of which is, and which shall be. Eternity and Everlastingness, open your portals.” Energy, dark energy, flowed through his veins chilling him to the bone. His eyes stung as if he’d been slapped by a strong wind. The ritual had not been this difficult before he took his mother’s life. “May I fly like a falcon. May I see the dark truth revealed.”
His chest tightened. A strong presence entered his mind and he faded within myself.
“I am Ammit the soul-eater.” Her voice spoke from his mouth, strong and demanding. Khalid knew her to be a female demon, described as part lion, part hippopotamus and part crocodile in the old scripts. His old self shivered within his mind, watching her take over his essence.
Khalid would have screamed if he had a voice, but he no longer had one.
He’d called on evil before, but those spirits had been undead souls that roamed the earth. Nasty, but not controlling. They had been willing to use him for their own pleasure, and his. An equal opportunity kind of gig, which he had enjoyed and respected.
Never had Khalid connected with the man-eating demon before.
“Have I already been judged?” he asked. “Doesn’t that happen after I die?” The ancients believed when you proceed to the after world, the god Anubis weighed your heart and compared it to the weight of a feather. Ma’at, the goddess of justice brought the feather. If the heart was judged unworthy, Ammit, the demon now within Khalid, devoured your soul. You died a second time, to spend eternity in a state of restlessness.
The spirit world was complicated, and he didn’t believe the old stories in a literal sense. He considered them warnings. But the beast within him felt a hell of a lot more powerful than a metaphor.
He tried to swallow but couldn’t. He’d killed his mother and that would certainly increase the weight of his heart, soul… whatever. Maybe that’s why the soul eater had come early.
But he hadn’t meant to kill his mother. The spell had gone wrong and it was her fault, really. Her fault. That had to count for something. Would he be given an opportunity to speak on his own behalf?
“No,” boomed Ammit, hearing the young man’s thoughts. “Only the gods can judge the true heart of a man. We have no use for your words.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her.” His voice sounded weaker than he wanted it to.
“We shall talk about that later. For now, you want guidance, and I am offering you mine.” The air chilled in the room.
Guidance from a soul-eater? “At what cost?”
“What?” Her voice shook Khalid’s whole body. “You dare to talk to me about cost? I am not for hire.”
If I could only turn back time. “I… I…”
Her spirit slid outside his body and appeared an apparition standing before him. Ten feet tall, with the head of a crocodile, she exhaled foul air that smelled of rotting flesh. She peered down on him with beady eyes. “You want to be the most powerful sorcerer in the world. I can make it so.”
With a snap of her jaws she transformed into a voluptuous, raven-haired woman his age, naked, except for the tattoos covering her honey-toned skin.
Khalid cringed. Could he work with this demon? How much more powerful would he become? “What do you want?”
A wicked smile spread across her delicate face. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Khalid could feel her answer in every fiber of my body. She already had what she wanted. Him.
I should have anticipated this. He had, after all, crossed a sacred boundary. His soul was doomed for eternity. Knowing this should be a source of strength for him. Should…
A tremor of regret squeezed his gut and a glimmer of hope burbled inside of him. Could he use his new power to redeem myself? Maybe save his sister? His skin prickled.
The beautiful demon raised her chin and an evil, cackling sound danced in the air between them. “There are souls so dark that redemption is impossible for them. You are a black spirit now. One of mine.” She cackled some more.
“But…”
“Do not fear. If you do my bidding, I will give your eternal death some comforts. Over time you will become used to the smell of death. The screams of tortured souls will be like music. My world will become yours. It is not so bad.” Her purple lips pouted.
“A sanctuary in hell?”
“You do want to live with me, don’t you?” An orange glow gleamed from her eyes reminding Khalid once again that no matter how hot she looked, she was far from mortal.
“What is it you want me to do?”
“Help your father attain King Tutankhamen’s scarab. Then bring it to me and we will use it for our own ends.”
“But my sister…”
“Is destined to die. The scarab can give her only a few months. It cannot give her eternal life.”
“What about my father? He’s a violent man. Crossing him is dangerous.”
“If you have the scarab, he can’t touch you.”
That all made sense, but she wasn’t telling him what he really wanted to know. How could he phrase it?
“You idiot. Do you not realize that I hear all that is in your mind? It is not for you to question me or my purpose. But if you really want to know…”
“Yes, I do.”
“I want you to use the scarab to create chaos on the mortal plane. You know the regular juicy stuff that breaks families and friends apart; jealousy between siblings, distrust and animosity between lovers, hatred for people who are different in any way. I want to weaken the world with black thoughts. Terrorize it with sin.”
“And this scarab will help?”
“It is a powerful amulet crafted with great care by a holy man, endowed with the secrets of the ancient spirits. Trust me. It will make a difference. One hell of a difference.” She gave a nasty chuckle.
Khalid scratched his chin. A demon who makes hell-puns? Maybe I’m having a left-over hallucination from the party last weekend. Who knows what was in those yellow capsules. I still can’t remember half of what happened for two days. Waking up spooning a complete stranger who smelled of pickled cod had sobered me quickly. Maybe what I’m experiencing now isn’t real. I’ve never had a drug hangover like this, but…
A lion’s roar answered his meandering thoughts. “I am real.” Her voice bounced off the walls and echoed through the sinews of his body. “As real as your soul. Do not underestimate me. I am a powerful demon-goddess. You may live to become the most powerful sorcerer the world has ever known, but your power will never be anything compared to mine.” As she hissed, her beady eyes shone with a wickedness that sent icy waves of foreboding clawing up his back. It was all so bizarre, but all so real.
A loud banging sound caught his attention. He looked towards the door. “Master, are you all right?” Darius’s voice came through the old wood.
“Yes. I told y
ou not to disturb me.”
“But all the noise in there and the smell.”
Khalid looked back to the demon, but she had vanished.
“I was just… reading out loud. I like to do that.”
“Get the scarab for me,” Ammit’s voice commanded through his trembling mind. “Do it now.”
22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chasisi stepped into Bakari’s office. Sitting behind his desk Bakari waved his brother to come closer noting something about him looked off. Even under horrendous circumstances—and they’d had their share of those in the their business—Chas had kept his composure. Nothing ruffled the man. But today he looked awful. His face had lost color, and his dark eyes darted around the room like a caged animal. “What’s wrong?” Bakari asked.
Chas limped over to the seat opposite his desk and folded his lean body into it. “Khalid is like poison. I don’t want him in our home. The boy is evil.” Spittle flew through the air.
Anger rose in Bakari’s gut like a flash flood, but he pushed it down. “I know you are only concerned about our family, but he is family too.”
“I found him with Rashida.”
Bakari glared at him. “What are you suggesting?”
Chasisi looked at the ceiling. “He has no respect for any of us. He’s crude. He’s base. He doesn’t belong here.”
Slowly releasing his breath, Bakari shook his head. “We must give him a chance. If you are concerned about Rashida, place a guard on her. I will have her mother talk to her as well. But make no mistake, Chas, I intend to make Khalid welcome in our home.”
Chas stared at him for a moment then his eyes softened, as if he agreed with Bakari but it was more likely he recognized there was no purpose in continuing the argument. He took a packet of cigarillos from his chest pocket “What will you do with him when you go to London? I presume you want to be there when we take the scarab.”
Bakari pushed an ash tray in his direction and nodded. “I will be leaving shortly.”
Chas lit his cigarillo and inhaled deeply. Funny how the sound and smell of something so unhealthy could be comforting, but it was. Bakari enjoyed hanging out with his brother. No one understood him better. The sharp anger now completely forgotten, he looked out his window at his garden. He’d have to commend his gardening crew. It had never looked lovelier.
Ancient Danger: Mata Hari Suspense Series #3 Page 10