by Evie Rhodes
Rashod glared at Me from under the thick molasses of Me’s dark skin. His lips stretched into a thin veneer of distaste. He looked at Me with what could not be mistaken for anything except disdain.
He was his mother’s son, all right. “Go to hell,” he told Me emphatically, without a twitch of fear.
Me viciously backhanded his left biceps. He watched Rashod’s head whiplash from the blow. “Don’t talk back to me, boy. You’re here because you’re the nurtured seed of the host, nothing short of that.”
Rashod snorted but made no other response.
In that instant, Me knew that he would have to greet the other brother, Michael. He would have no time to waste. He knew that Michael would be at Rashod’s very soon.
He had not counted on this; however, provisions would have to be made. His current plans would have to be delayed for the moment. He had planned to get around to Michael, sucking up the aftermath of his spirit once Me’s comrade killed him.
Michael was most definitely on that hit list.
In addition to that, Michael Burlingame was another seed of Tracie Burlingame, the host. Me had already missed devouring the spirit of Randi Burlingame.
He would have to launch a counterattack thanks to Rashod Burlingame’s brilliance. Well, it would be one of majestic proportions.
He would have to be very careful. He could not take Michael’s life, because that would force a confrontation with his comrade. Michael was tied like an invisible umbilical cord to Tracie Burlingame. Therefore, it was not worth the risk of killing him himself.
His comrade was salivating after Tracie. Me knew he both needed and wanted the distinctiveness of Michael’s blood. It would not do to force his hand too soon. The time would come.
He figured his comrade would tire of playing with Tracie soon. When that happened, Me would be there. But it would not do to engage him in a personal vendetta at this time, upsetting the plan or the powers.
However, he would pay a little visit to Michael Burlingame. But he certainly would not go in his present form. No. This meeting would require a different entity. Rashod Burlingame had managed to leave a trail, a link that must be destroyed, erased at all costs.
Rashod glared at Me as though he could read his thoughts, causing an alien feeling to come upon him. A feeling that said, “formidable opponent.”
That feeling, never before felt by Me and unbeknownst to him, would prove to be prophetic.
35
Tracie was in a dark, foul mood, and she knew she was facing a storm of humongous proportions. Even though Rashod was dead, she would still have to deal with Whiskey. There would be no time for mourning. As soon as he was out of the way, she would begin putting a plan in effect to learn the identity of the person who was destroying her life.
She would come straight to the point with Whiskey, who had no respect for her current circumstances. When he wanted to see her, he wanted to see her. Period.
Here she had another dead son, and she could not even attend to his memory until Whiskey’s desires had been met. In that instant she hated him with a passion, but business was business.
She would tell him she wanted the guns moved now.
She arrived at the club on Malcolm X Boulevard and strutted over to the bar. There was an old jukebox spinning off sounds. Some things never changed in Harlem, and this place was one of them. The blue strobe lights flashed streaks across Tracie’s features.
As soon as she sat down, the bartender approached her. “I’ll have a double Rémy Martin,” she spat before he had a chance to ask.
He looked surprised.
He pulled out the bottle and poured the drink. He had been working in the liquor business so long, he prided himself on being able to guess a person’s drink from a mile away, but Tracie Burlingame had just put a stitch in his game.
She downed the drink in one gulp and handed him the glass. “I’ll have another.”
He poured. She gulped that one, too.
She handed him the glass. He poured again. Same drill. Again she handed him the glass.
It was becoming a ritual. This time he hesitated.
Tracie slipped a hundred-dollar bill from her bra. She put it on the bar in front of the bartender’s face. Her gaze was unwavering.
He poured the drink. This time she took a sip and set the glass in front of her. He heaved a sigh of relief and hightailed it away from her to serve another customer.
Whiskey walked in. Tracie spotted him out of the corner of her eye. She gave no acknowledgment of his approaching presence. Upon reaching her, he ran his finger along her cheek. Her cheek was cold, smooth to the touch. Tracie didn’t twitch a muscle.
She was one cool customer, Whiskey observed.
“I want the guns moved.”
Whiskey sucked his tongue. “Ta,ta,ta,ta,ta. Do you think you can be involved with weapons of blood and vengeance?” He hesitated, then smoothly slid into his French accent: “Caro, without having it touch you?”
He leaned over and whispered in her ear while entangling her hair in his hand and turning her face smoothly toward him. “They stay until I say they’re moved. I’ll give the order soon. Oh, and you seem to keep losing things, Caro. I wouldn’t want you to lose those guns.”
Whiskey slid an envelope into her purse, disentangled his hand from her hair, and walked out of the bar. Tracie didn’t acknowledge the cash or his leaving.
Lonzo breezed past Whiskey on his way into the bar. He was officially off duty and had decided he needed a drink.
He noticed Tracie Burlingame immediately. Quickly he moved into her sphere. He took the seat on the bar next to her. She glanced over at him, drained her glass, and then signaled the bartender.
It was getting to be a long night.
The bartender came over, and before Tracie could speak, he said, “I don’t think—”
Tracie cut him off sharply. “I’m not paying you to think. I’m paying you to pour my drinks.”
“It’s all right,” Lonzo jumped in quickly.
“Really, it’s all right, Willie; I’ll make sure Ms. Burlingame gets home. Give me a seltzer water.” Seeing as Lonzo was a cop as well as a regular, Willie backed off. He tossed an exasperated glance in Tracie’s direction before walking off.
When he returned, Tracie said, “I’ll take another one; that way I won’t have to bother you again in a few minutes.” Willie bit his tongue, pouring another drink. The woman drank like a fish.
Lonzo stood, stretching his arms and legs. “Excuse me for a minute, Ms. Burlingame, I need to use the restroom.”
Tracie didn’t even acknowledge his words. First Whiskey, now this; they were like parasites draining her flesh.
Somewhere in the distance a phone rang. Willie answered and walked up to Tracie. “You’re Tracie Burlingame, right?”
“I am.”
“This is for you.” He handed her the phone.
The now familiar distorted voice floated over the wire. “You can run, but you can’t hide, Li’l Caramel. Oh, and I’m sorry about Rashod. His death and all, you know. Consider him another contribution to my endowment in my thirst for blood. You know?”
Tracie couldn’t believe her ears. She hissed into the phone, “Screw you.”
“Are you angry at me, Tracie? It’s only a game. We could meet if only you’d be willing to travel back in time.”
A loud click ended the call.
Tracie was fuming. She would find this child-eating monster if it was the last thing on earth that she did. He could count on it. She was so furious, she could hear her own blood supply pounding in her ears. Her blood pressure was skyrocketing.
First she would have to make sure that her other two sons were safely tucked away. The audacity! This maniac actually thought killing her sons was a game.
She would kill this bastard.
She stood up, steady as a rock despite the amounts of alcohol she had consumed. She threw another couple of crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills on the counter fo
r the bartender’s trouble of having to deal with her tonight.
She left the bar before Detective Lonzo Morgan had a chance to return from the men’s room. He was an incompetent dog of magnified proportions. He couldn’t even find her son’s killer.
Upon Lonzo’s return from the men’s room, Tracie Burlingame had vanished.
36
Michael arrived at Rashod’s studio in the hotel in a foggy state of mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten—or even slept, for that matter—and he was hungry. He was also exhausted. The emotional roller coaster he had been set on was draining him.
He had this weird sense of being a spectator, as though he were watching someone else go through the motions, but that someone else was not him. Somehow he was not really attached. He put one foot in front of the other.
He needed to take one step at a time. That was it. He could do this. He just needed to take one step at a time.
He flipped out his spare set of keys, the same keys he used to let himself in with, to leave Rashod food and money at times when he was skied out of his mind on crack cocaine.
“Hey, Rebound.”
He turned, thinking he had heard Rashod’s voice whispering to him. But of course, Rashod wasn’t there. He was in the morgue. Michael knew that. He ran a hand through his thick, short dreadlocks and sighed.
He decided he would go home once he was done and have a serious chat with Tracie. He knew from the medical examiner that she had already been to view Rashod’s body and that she was devastated over the loss of another of his brothers.
A sense of unreality settled over Michael, gripping his brain cells and squeezing tight. His head was pounding. The tension was starting to creep along just at the base of his neck. How could two of his brothers be dead?
Another day of school was being blown off. He couldn’t play the benefit game with the Harlem Globetrotters. He felt as though his life in school and on the basketball court belonged to another person.
It didn’t seem as if it was his life anymore.
He had another brother who had been put on ice. Surely that was a legit reason for missing school as well as basketball practices and benefit games.
Besides, he couldn’t concentrate on anything. His focus was dimmed. All he could think of was the sketch that had portrayed Rashod’s death, as well as his recent conversations with Rashod, although the last one had been more of a one-sided deal that he hadn’t yet come to grips with.
Suddenly he recalled Rashod’s words with stunning clarity: “I know we didn’t grow up religious man, but sometimes I wonder if there’s something else out there. Do you believe in dreams? Or seeing things before or after they’ve happened? Even if you weren’t there?”
Michael slipped his key into the lock on the studio apartment, trying to keep the recalled words at bay. He had lied to Rashod because something had happened to him that he hadn’t felt ready to talk about.
Michael shook away the thoughts. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand. He decided he would probably need to open the windows to get rid of the closed-in, musty scent of the place and let some sunshine in.
Rashod needed to air the place out more. When Michael was here the last time, the place felt stuffy and airless to him.
Rashod had been something of a slob in his own right, except with his sketches. He was known to throw his things around everywhere. His room generally looked like a cyclone had hit it. You could clean up his room, and hours later it looked as if it had been turned upside down by a tornado.
He smiled at the memory of Tracie screeching at the top of her lungs for Rashod to clean up the room. She had actually chased him through the brownstone with a broom handle once because she was so infuriated with his pigsty methods of keeping his room.
Michael couldn’t stand disorder, so in contrast to Rashod’s bedroom, when they both lived at home, his room had been neat as a pin. They were probably about as different as they could be, even though they were brothers.
They had all been tight as a family at one time, because Tracie was all they had—her and each other. Their father had died when they were young. There was little or no memory of him, except for the stories that Tracie had shared with them while trying to evoke a male presence in their lives.
Michael pulled himself from his reverie, deciding he would look at the sketches, search around for whatever else he could find that might lend some reality to the situation, and then later come back to put things in order.
He didn’t want Tracie to have to deal with the pain of sorting through Rashod’s room so soon after Randi’s death. She hadn’t touched a thing in Randi’s room as far as he knew. Randi’s room looked as though he would be back at any minute.
Michael opened the door to the studio, knew he was right about letting in some air, and flicked on the light switch. Before he was fully in the room, the first thing he noticed was another one of Rashod’s sketches lying on the table in the small alcove that served as a kitchen.
That struck him as odd, because Rashod’s sketches were the one and only thing he had kept in order. He had been meticulous with the keeping of his artwork. There was a sequence to Rashod’s work; he had never liked it to be skewed. Michael sighed. He would need to go through the other sketches leaning against the wall, too. As far as he could see, only the one on the table was out of place.
A strange feeling shrouded him. He realized with a start that he did not want to see the sketch on the table. The feeling persisted, draping itself over him like a strong electrical surge. For no reason that he could explain, he just didn’t want to see it.
But he was drawn like a magnet to the sketch on the table. He had absolutely no will of his own. His limbs were acting under their own influence. They drew him steadily and with fixed focus on his collision course. He couldn’t have stopped himself any more than he could have stopped breathing.
When he reached the table, he stared down at the drawing. He reached out his hand to pick it up. The paper scorched his hand as though he had stuck his hand in fire. Michael pulled his hand back as a shocked gasp of air burst of its own accord from his lungs. His eyes misted over.
He was staring directly at a sketch of what had happened to him when he was cruising Chelsea—right down to the bloody raindrops falling on his head. It was unmistakably Rashod’s work.
It was impossible. How could he have known? How could Rashod have sketched a picture of his shame in Chelsea? He hadn’t been there. Michael stared down into the tracings of his own agonized image. His mouth was thrown open as a plea for mercy escaped his lips.
There was a tingling in his scorched hand. The pain in his hand receded as if it had never been there, as though he had only imagined that he scorched it. He needed air. He went to the windows snapped up the shades on each one, and opened the windows with a frightening speed.
He ran from window to window. He had to move. He could not stand still. His heart was pumping out an erratic tune he had never heard before. It was actually skipping beats. He hoped he wasn’t having a heart attack. No, he couldn’t be. He was too young to have a heart attack. Creepiness had clamped itself to his skin like a sticky slime he couldn’t detach himself from.
He had the vague feeling that this was how a horse must feel when someone other than its owner was riding it. The alien rider was in control, demanding that the horse bow to his will. The other gave subliminal physical signals that the horse knew it must obey.
It also dawned on Michael that Rashod must have guessed or known all along that he was sadomasochistic. Yet he had never mentioned it or treated him like anything other than the little brother he loved. The force of this knowledge staggered Michael.
Once the windows were open, he walked back to the table with the sketch on it. Suddenly every shade and window in the place snapped shut, one by one. Michael watched in fascinated horror as the room began to shut him off from the outside world.
His surroundings had come alive. A force of energy swept t
hrough the room, causing the very air to shiver in its wake. A resounding bang reverberated like a firecracker exploding as each window slammed shut.
The shades on the windows snapped shut with an eerie finality. Rashod had one of those old-fashioned police bolt locks with the long iron rod on his door. It slid into place, metal banging against metal. Michael turned and jumped at the sound of the clanging metal lock.
The floor shook, literally knocking him off his feet. His ears exploded as though he were being dropped from a great height.
And then he was. “Sweet Jesus!” he yelled.
He was falling through the air. He threw out his arms, and he could feel nothing to latch on to. There was nothing for him to grab. He was flailing, sailing through the atmosphere. His oxygen supply was being sucked away. He gasped, trying to gulp in some air. His chest caved in. He was hit with a sledgehammer blow.
It was just like the dreams he had heard people talk about, so he knew he couldn’t land or hit the bottom. If he hit the bottom, he would be dead.
“God, no!” Michael screeched as he fell through layers of air.
“Please!”
A loud thump, and Michael was gripping the threadbare rug on the floor of Rashod’s studio. He lay on the floor like a beached whale.
The room plunged into total darkness. Not the same kind of darkness as when the shades were closed, but darkness that felt total in its completeness. This darkness was all-encompassing.
All along, Michael had felt that something was amiss when he stepped in the room, but he had not been able to put his finger on it. The dawning awareness of what that was made him grit his teeth in horror.
He could feel no trace of Rashod’s spirit. It was as though he had never been there. But there was some kind of spirit in the room, and it was not a good one. There was a demonic force in the room.
Although Michael had no experience with it whatsoever, he knew it was so. He identified it as the same force he had felt when he looked at the sketch Rashod had shown him. The force was alive. It was very, very much alive.