Benny chuckled at that. “I have no idea, cupcake.” He drew a deep breath and blew it out and up hard enough to make his bangs jitter. “It’s like there’s something in the way. Something blocking me from knowing where, but they forgot to block knowing where he isn’t.”
“That’s great news! Come on!” Shannon swung her legs off the bed and pushed herself to her feet with a groan.
“Shan, you need to—”
“Benjamin Cartwright!” she snapped. “Tell me to rest one more time, and I’ll be visiting you in the hospital.”
She said it with such vigor that Benny couldn’t help but laugh. After a moment of glowering at him, Shannon’s face softened, and she joined in. “Yeah, okay, but lay off, alright?”
Benny nodded and stood up. “Where are we going?”
“Computer,” Shannon said as she strode toward the door.
“What for?”
“Because, silly, there are maps and pictures of every desert in the world on the internet.”
“Ah!” Benny said with a smile. “You are too good for the likes of me, Shannon Bertram. Beautiful, sexy as hell, and smart! How did I get so lucky?”
“I sometimes ask myself the same thing.” She winked at him over her shoulder, and the two shared another laugh.
7
Mike walked into the living room. His hair was mussed, and his eyes burned and stung from too much sleep. And too much grief. Eddie and his wife had vacated the living room, leaving Kristy and Sean to their own devices. “Evening,” said Mike.
“Have a nice rest?” asked Sean, his attention glued to the screen of his smartphone.
Kristy Walker lay her hand on Sean’s thigh and squeezed. It was supposed to be subtle, but Mike had spent too many years as an investigator to miss something like that.
“What?” murmured Sean, then he glanced at his wife and reddened. “Yeah, uh-huh.” His gaze crawled up to meet Mike’s. “Sorry. I get too involved with interesting problems. They call it ‘hyperfocus.’” He hooked his thumb at Kristy. “Doctors, you know.”
“It’s okay,” said Mike, turning to stare out at the twilight dancing on the waves of Lake Erie. “What’s so interesting?”
“Yeah, okay. Benny wanted more information on the lamp. Well, that and we’re doing a special project trying to collate all the instances of Akkadian prayers, magic, or incantations.”
“Why?”
Sean bobbed his head. “Benny thinks the lamp is important.”
“No, why the prayer search?”
“Right, okay. I had the idea that if we can determine the syntax and semantics of Akkadian incantations, we could fashion our own spells.”
“Spells?” Mike’s gaze darted to Kristy’s, then returned to Sean, but the man had turned his attention back to the screen of his phone.
“Absolutely, yes.” He thumb-typed furiously for a moment, then jumped as Kristy poked him in the ribs. “What? Oh, sure. The spells. It seems that Akkadian magic is important to these bigger demons. The maker’s mark was what started me on this path, but also, the mythological history of the one called Lilitu. It starts in Akkad.”
“Sean thinks that if we can learn the hows of these incantations, we might be able to fashion our own.”
Sean flashed a perplexed look at his wife. “Honey, that’s what I’ve been saying.”
She grinned a little and patted his forearm. “Yes, but I said it aloud and without all the fluff.”
Shaking his head, Sean shifted his gaze back to his phone.
“But you mentioned Benny’s request first.” Mike moved to the La-Z-Boy and sat. “What about this lamp is so interesting?”
“Uh-huh, yeah.” Sean lifted his head, but his gaze remained glued to the phone for a few moments, his eyes rolled down comically until his position made it impossible to see the screen. He began to lift the phone, but Kristy put her hand on his wrist. He shot a look of pure irritation at her.
“The lamp?” she said.
“Yes. Okay, right. The lamp.” Sean scrubbed his hands through his hair and then down the sides of his face. “I think the last report went back to the 1500s?”
“The shipping manifest from Lisbon.”
“Exactly, yes. But that was yesterday morning. I was out of pocket all yesterday—well, you know that—and spent most of today on the other project. I was reading the latest report on the lamp a moment ago.”
“Good God, husband! Spit it out.”
“Right, right. My personal physician also says I have a tendency to blather on endlessly about excruciating details.” He smiled at Kristy, then turned back to Mike. “Okay. They’ve found more information on the lamp’s recent history—from Lisbon forward. We almost have the complete history from Portugal until today.”
“Anything interesting there?”
Sean wagged his head side to side. “Sort of. Almost every time a family has owned the lamp, tragedy befalls them. The children die—most often in childbirth, but sometimes murdered by their fathers or mothers. Frequent reports of both miscarriages and abuse.”
“Nasty,” murmured Kristy.
“Yes, uh-huh. But worse than that, when the lamp is owned by a single person, there is almost always a slate of unsolved murders in the area.”
“So either wife-beaters and family murderers or serial killers?” asked Kristy.
“Like Owen Gray in Oneka Falls,” said Mike in a weak voice. “And Mason Harper in Genosgwa.”
“And don’t forget Denny Cratchkin,” said Sean in a cold voice.
“Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of others.” Kristy shivered and rubbed her upper arms.
“The question is why,” mused Mike. “Why bother with mortals at all? Demons feed off negative emotions…maybe the demon driving these things feeds on anger or jealousy?”
“Maybe it’s the lamp itself that drives people to these things.”
Mike shook his head. “The demons are always behind everything.”
“Maybe one of the demons feeds off something more complicated. Obsession, say. Or whatever it is that drives serial killers.”
Mike grinned at Kristy. “You might be right. Just because the demons on the low end of the scale feed on base emotions doesn’t mean ones at the other end of the scale do the same.” Mike tented his fingers and tapped his lower lip with his index fingers. “We know very little about Naamah.” He chuckled. “Even less than we thought if we count how she looked on Saturday after LaBouche got done with her. But we do know that both Mason Harper—Abaddon—and Owen Gray were her pets. Maybe she’s behind their actions.”
Sean shook his head. “Not behind them. Feeding off them.”
“What if…” Kristy shook her head.
“No, tell us,” said Sean.
She glanced at Mike and blushed a little. “This is probably stupid, but what if she feeds off twisting them to their lowest nature?”
“Corrupting them?”
“Sure,” she said with a nod. “Suppose that’s possible?”
Mike shrugged. “Who knows? We keep making the mistake of thinking we understand them, and every time we do that, something happens to blow our ‘understanding’ out of the water.”
Sean inclined his head, glancing at his phone. “We can speculate all night and never know if we are correct or way off base. Let me tell you the rest.”
Mike made a beckoning gesture.
“Okay. Before leaving Lisbon on a ship in the early 1500s, it bounced around eastern Europe, from auction to auction, house to house, as an elaborate gilt candelabra. Guess who owned it before that?”
“I give up.”
“Tomas de Torquemada.”
“I should know who that is, but I hated history class,” said Mike.
“Torquemada ran the Spanish Inquisition from 1483 to 1498. Guess who he bought it from?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike.
“Radu cel Frumos, the successor of Vlad III of Wallachia.”
“Vlad…” Mike sucked
his teeth. “If you are telling me this lamp belonged to Dracula, I’m going to scream.”
“Well, don’t do that. But it appears on an inventory of both Vlad III’s possessions and his father’s, Vlad Dracul. Vlad II received it as a gift from his mentor, Sigismund of Luxembourg.”
“And I suppose there is a neat timeline all the way back through history? One crazy sadist to the next?”
Sean shook his head. “Maybe, but we don’t have that timeline yet. Sigismund received it as spoils after he tried to liberate Constantinople in the late 14th century, but where it came from has eluded us for now.” Sean cleared his throat. “Before that, what we know of its history is like a stone skipping across the surface of a smooth lake. We know Caligula had a decorated oil lamp that bore the maker’s mark around 50 AD, and before that, Nebuchadnezzar II was painted holding another decorated oil lamp in the early 500s BCE. There are numerous references to his madness, which developed after his mistress left him.”
“Let me guess. King Nebuchadnezzar’s mistress had red hair and wore black.”
“Not this time,” said Sean. “His mistress did wear black, but her dark blue hair moved like a viper’s nest, and she was rumored to be a sorceress. She was by his side as he ransacked kingdom after kingdom. He’s the same guy that threw Daniel to the lions.”
“Nice,” said Kristy.
“That’s not all—remember when I told you guys about the incantation bowls? I showed you one that had the redhead in the bottom?”
“Sure,” said Mike.
“Well, it seems the incantations inscribed on them were also used during a cleansing ritual. An exorcism, if you will. The conclusion of which ended in the smashing of the bowl.”
“I’m not sure where you are going with this.”
“Yeah, okay. So, we have this lamp that bears an incantation of welcome to this Lilitu. What if we destroyed the lamp while performing one of those exorcisms?”
“That—”
Somewhere upstairs, Benny whooped. A moment later, he came sprinting down the stairs. “We found him!” he shouted. “We found Toby!”
8
When Toby awoke, the evening had bared its claws. Lily wasn’t at his side, and panic buried his ability to think. He thrashed to his feet. “Lily!” he cried.
“Calm yourself, habibi. I’m right outside.”
Relief washed through him, as crisp and refreshing as a mountain stream. Something felt…off…within him, and he frowned. He couldn’t put his finger on it, the mysterious wrong feeling that persisted through his relief. He cocked his head, listening for Lily’s footsteps.
Then it hit him. The thing that felt wrong was the lack of the faint strains of Lily’s badlands threnody. For the first time in what seemed like months or years, no melody haunted the empty spaces in his ears, his mind. “It’s gone,” he murmured.
“Did you say something, kisa?” She walked to the open wall of the pavilion, her orange eyes whirling, her lips glossy and red. She smiled at him and cocked her head to the side.
“No, nothing.”
She chuckled and waved her hand at the desert behind her. “Shall we walk?”
“Sure. My muscles feel tight, wound up. I need to stretch them out.”
She treated him to a knowing smile and turned away from the pavilion. She lifted an arm and pointed. “That way is east. It leads to nothing but more desert all the way to the sea—what modern geographers call the Persian Gulf. To go that way would mean a long, long walk for not much reward.” She turned ninety degrees and pointed south. “To the south, there is nothing but the Arabian Desert until you reach the shores of the Arabian Sea.” She lifted her other arm and pointed in the opposite direction. “To the north is the land that was once Akkad. Sumer. Mesopotamia.”
“The cradle of civilization.” Toby exited the pavilion to stand by her side, their shoulders and arms almost touching. An electric feeling raced across his skin at her nearness, and he couldn’t resist stealing a quick peek.
“If you keep looking at me like that, bizcocho, we will not leave tonight.”
Toby turned his gaze toward the north as the hot blush crept from his neck to his cheeks. “And that leaves only the west, and the Mediterranean Sea.”
She turned to him and came up on her tiptoes to brush her lips against his cheek. “There can be a thousand million nights for us to do what you’re thinking,” she crooned in his ear.
He didn’t trust himself to speak, so climbed the dune face to its peak, casting his gaze north, trying to imagine what it must’ve been like in the days when Lily had been summoned.
Behind him, Lily loosed a deep-throated chuckle, and then came up to stand at his side. “Have you decided?”
“Which way should I go?” Even as he said the words, a lump of icy fear formed in his throat at the thought of leaving Lily and walking away.
“Aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” crooned Lily. “But I will go with you. I doubt you would survive on your own.”
Toby turned and looked down on the pavilion. “I guess I can decide on a direction while I pack everything.”
Lily laughed and swatted him on the shoulder as if he’d told her a funny joke. She snapped her fingers and the pavilion was gone.
“Illusion, then?”
Lily winked at him. “That would be telling.”
“You said before that if I heard you out you would take me home.”
Lily’s expression sobered. “I did, and I will.”
“Is there more, then?”
“Tobycakes, sometimes you act the child. Let me show you. Let me show you how it would be if you chose life by my side. Let me show you the wonders of the world that would come into being, the world that you and I would create together.”
“And in which direction does that lie?”
Again, Lily snapped her fingers, and he was clothed in the manner of the Bedouins. She wore her black leather dress and accompanying black leather boots with chrome heels that somehow managed not to sink into the loose sand. “Let’s go north.”
“And you will answer my questions as we walk?”
Lily stared at him for a moment, her expression utterly devoid of any human emotion Toby could identify. Her eyes whirled and seemed to pulse. It was difficult, but Toby maintained eye contact through it all. Finally, she sighed. “As you wish.”
9
“Where?” asked Mike, coming to his feet and thrusting his hand into his pocket for car keys.
Benny shot a glance at Shannon. “You’re not going to like it. He’s somewhere in the Syrian Desert.”
Sean looked up, his brow wrinkled. “You know that desert is like two hundred thousand miles square, right?”
Mike’s shoulders slumped. “Why do you think he’s there?”
“Something is blocking Benny when he tries to use his telepathy to find Toby, but they forgot to block him checking to see if Toby isn’t in a place. Because of my desert dream, we checked all the deserts in the world, and by process of elimination, found him.”
Sean smiled, wrinkling his nose. “What a clever solution.”
“Okay, so Toby’s in Syria,” said Mike. “What do we do with this information?”
“He’s in the Syrian Desert, but that spans borders—Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and western Iraq.”
“Fine. What do we do with this information? We can’t send teams there for obvious reasons.”
“No, we can’t do that,” said Benny. “But I can go there.”
Mike shook his head and held up a hand to stop Benny. “You can’t go there either and for the same reasons.”
Benny grinned. “But I can, Mike. And in perfect safety.”
Mike frowned, and his forehead wrinkled. “How?”
“Don’t you remember what I used to do in Millvale? How I used to travel?”
“I thought…”
Benny laughed and clapped Mike on the shoulder. “You thought I was hallucinating. I wasn’t.” He glanced at the others
. “Call it astral projection or spirit walking. I can travel places with only my mind.”
“Neat trick,” said Sean.
“And why do you think that will be safe?” asked Mike.
“Because no one can see me. I don’t need a passport or anything.”
“Don’t you think this Lilitu thing will see you?”
The memory of visiting Owen Gray’s cell flashed through Benny’s mind. Naamah had looked directly at him and had threatened him in his astral form, even if she hadn’t carried through with it. She had somehow sent him spinning back into his body with a flick of her fingers, and that gave credence to her claim that she could see him and cause trouble for him.
Benny dropped his gaze. “I’ll stay hidden.”
Mike turned his attention on Shannon. “And you’re okay with this?”
Shannon closed her eyes in a slow blink. “Toby’s in trouble, Mike. Desperate trouble, and he needs help—even if it’s just a link to another human mind.”
“And what’s to stop Lilitu from taking Benny as well?” asked Kristy.
“I won’t let her,” said Benny. “I held off Naamah during the fight. I’m stronger than even I knew.”
10
They walked side-by-side as the moon rose in the east, and for a while, they didn’t speak. Their arms brushed from time to time, and on each occurrence, a thrill raced through Toby.
“What is it that keeps you here, Lily?” he asked when they stopped and sat to rest.
“As I said, I keep my promises.”
“I don’t mean here here.” He threw his arms wide. “I mean what keeps you here on Earth. Why not go home?”
“Do you want me to leave?”
Toby’s stomach tightened, and a grimace distorted his face.
“Ay, que chulo, Tobycakes.” Her voice was soft, but her eyes danced with mischief.
“I just mean that you said your life here has been a series of betrayals. Why not go home? Why not find another seraph, another…”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Another like Lilu?”
Toby opened his mouth but couldn’t find his voice, so he settled for nodding.
Lily shook her head. “No, I’ve traveled that road, Tobes. I know where it ends.” She stood and whirled in a circle, arms outstretched, head thrown back, eyes closed. “But here, here everything is new, even after four millennia.” She stopped spinning and stood facing him. She inclined her head and looked down at him. “Your race has the capacity to change, to perform feats of novel magic, to achieve things that are beyond even the seraph.”
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