Part 29 (1/2)

Berkfield's palm slid over his balding scalp. ”I been a cop for a lot of years, and seen a lot of sick s.h.i.+t, honey. But every day, things are getting worse-like this infection is beyond anything we could ever comprehend. I used to ask myself, where do these animals come from? I don't feel better now that I know. I almost turned into one and shot a Guardian and my own daughter. I'm scared. What if we fail?”

When she remained still without answers, he clicked off the television with an angry snap and searched his wife's face for understanding. ”You and I, the kids, and this whole crew have seen ent.i.ties slither up from h.e.l.l, and oddly, I've sorta made my peace with that-because there was a separation, a line between human and demon. But even in broad daylight, I can't make out the difference anymore... and that frightens me more than whatever bears fangs.”

”I know, I know,” Marjorie finally said, beginning to walk in a distressed circle as she fidgeted with her nightgown strap. ”Just knowing that there are actually demons is bad enough... Now people are turning into beasts?” She spun and looked at her husband. Panic hitched her voice. ”How do we raise children in a world like this? A mother did this to her child, Richard. She cut off her baby's arms because she claimed she was depressed? Dear G.o.d. Will we get like that in less than thirty days? Will our children ax murder us? I'm so scared, Richard, I can hardly breathe.”

Marjorie stopped pacing and stared at her husband, stricken, as he came to her and held her. Everything was so strange and different in her life, and that he'd also subtly changed was both unnerving, yet also exciting. During the past six months he'd lost his beer belly and his body had hardened under the exercise and rigors of team life. But it was his eyes. They no longer contained the dispa.s.sionate malaise of a man who hated his job and was clocking time until his pension kicked in.

No. This Richard Berkfield was different. Despite all the horrors, she'd watched her husband come alive. He now looked forward to each day, felt deeply about the things he saw, and seemed to believe in something greater than himself again. He'd lost the jaded edge and found something beyond the mundane to give him purpose. As she filled his arms and felt his body stir, she remembered his toned, stocky build, broad square shoulders, perpetual tan from walking a beat, and how handsome he'd been when they'd first met... all that was back again, except his sandy brown hair, but she could live without that. What she held in her arms was a gift, and she appreciated how handsome he'd become from the inner fire of contributing to something great.

She touched his rugged cheek and gazed into his eyes, marveling at the transformation that she'd almost missed. No matter what was going on in the world or how their lives had changed, she was quietly glad that he had come back to life.

”At first, I thought it was imagination that things were getting worse,” she said in a faraway, quiet voice as she buried her face against his shoulder and breathed hard. ”On every channel there were horrible acts of cruelty being committed, but I didn't want to believe anything else was wrong... After Philadelphia, I just couldn't take it. The weather was weird, natural disasters were everywhere. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes... and the wars... terrorism. Even the church has sickness... young boys, to this degree? It wasn't just one priest in one parish.” She covered her face and began to quietly weep as her husband kissed her temple hard and just rubbed her back. ”I kept saying, things will be all right. Now I know they won't be. We're all losing our minds.”

Marlene sat on the bed in her room, staring at multiple newspapers and then looked up at Shabazz. Quiet tension still strangled their relations.h.i.+p, but what she was witnessing went beyond that. ”Baby, I know people have been crazy for a long time, but the type of brutality going on now seems... I can't even describe it. Father Patrick tried to warn us, we braced ourselves, but even I'm not ready for this.” She stared at him. ”That's all he was trying to tell us,” she added quietly, also saying everything and nothing about the Kamal subject that was still too hot to touch.

Shabazz nodded and kept his gaze out toward the marina, holding the doorframe with outstretched hands. ”It's day and night, now. Our Neterus got most of the seriously lethal vampires, and only lower gens are still skulking around, but it feels like something has kicked up a notch in addition to the contagion. The stars say anything to you, baby?” He let the reference go.

Some things couldn't be discussed until time had pa.s.sed.

He turned to look at Marlene when she didn't respond, his eyes filled with pain. ”I keep asking the Almighty, why? What's our purpose, now? Are we making any kind of real inroad? Then the contagion was added to this insanity. We'd slay demon after demon, win battles, and then there was always still more... like we were all trying to clear a beach of sand using a teaspoon.

Then it got to the point where I couldn't read the papers anymore, baby. I could hardly watch the news. It took my mind and my spirit to somewhere so dark that...” his voice trailed off and he swallowed hard, and then closed the French doors as though shutting out the world. ”Now, if we don't close those portals, we'll be the same horror we used to fight.”

Marlene shoved the newspapers off the bed and patted the covers gently, inviting him to lie next to her. She waited until he sat down and then pulled him against her in a gentle hug. ”Hold me,” she whispered. ”Just hang on to me tonight and don't let me fly away.”

”Then don't leave me tonight for him... even in your dreams,” he whispered back thickly.

Her body tensed for a moment and then relaxed. Their eyes met. He knew, and was beyond cool. That was Shabazz; she would have never expected less from him. The master of Zen cool. Was she mad? This was her man, her life partner, and she'd almost gone too far.

His eyes had held hurt, worry, and stress had permeated the air around him as he'd neared her. Tears rose to her eyes as she absorbed the doubt-filled expression on his regal, African-featured face. His strength was a mask, just like it was a part of his DNA, but she knew he was quietly bleeding inside.

She loved him so much that her fingers reached out and trembled as they stroked the smooth line of his jaw. A pair of dark brown eyes searched hers, intensely burning with unspoken questions as they looked into hers for answers. She would give him balm and so much more... not just because he deserved it, but because she loved him to the depth of her soul. There were things that they'd shared that no one would ever know or be able to understand. He was also her friend.

Warm, dark, walnut-hued skin slid beneath her palm as he hugged her, and her hands traced the steel sinew beneath it that made his every fluid movement graceful. As he lay beside her, he stared at her as her hands worked to remove the heavy burden. She kept her gaze on his toned but weary muscles, watching them as she kneaded his shoulders, his strength-conditioned arms, every defined section of his abdominals clenching as he settled back against the pillows, his thighs and b.u.t.tocks seemingly cut from sculptured granite. She kissed the wisps of gray that had come into his locks at his temples, and he closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around her.

”I love you,” she whispered. ”I would never disrespect you like that.”

He rubbed her back and pressed her head against his shoulder. Then he kissed her temple. ”I won't let you go, either,” he murmured. ”Not in the end of days.”Carlos sat on the edge of the bed, his attention glued to the television as he endlessly flipped channels. Oddly, the side of his neck tingled where he remembered he'd been given an invisible tattoo.

”Damali, is it me, or does it seem like things are getting real bad, faster than the thirty days Father Pat had talked about?” He looked up at her, and hesitated.

”I don't understand. Demons have always been topside, to some degree, causing chaos,” Carlos said quietly, standing. ”There was always murder and mayhem, D. In the old days, they might inspire a person to rob somebody. That's wrong, but when the victim handed over the money, the thief rolled. Basic. Or if it got hectic and the victim pulled a weapon, okay, they might get shot-not that I'm saying it's right, but that makes sense, if you're living that kinda crazy, off da hook life. The human side still had some... I don't know what you call it. Honor among thieves. Serial killers, rapists, the numbers, man, are staggering, D.

How we gonna get this under control fast enough?”

”I don't know,” Damali whispered. ”We get on the plane, find the Chairman, get him to guide us to Lilith, and close the portals, first, I guess.” She twirled a lock around her finger, deep in thought, and glanced out the window, remembering what her mother had said. ”The critical question is, even if we find and kill her, how do we get all this stuff to slither back from whence it came?

The d.a.m.ned will either ascend or go to ash if we can deliver the book. But people seem like they're being affected by original demons... We have to somehow get them to go back under, too, once we close the portals.”

”You're right,” Carlos said quietly. ”You can tell that's what's up by the slant on these crimes.” He motioned toward the television. ”Bank robbery. Should been an in-and-out deal. But to unnecessarily take hostages, mutilate them, cut off their heads and hands, torture... baby,” he whispered. ”That's the d.a.m.ned. But the outright feedings, those are ODs. This s.h.i.+t has got to go back underground. We can't let the human condition go that far. We've gotta fix this thing, me and you, girl.”

She stared at Carlos, her stomach clenching. She wanted to trust this man with all her heart, but even her mother had told her to wait and see. She watched true horror glitter in his eyes, as though everything he'd witnessed on television was brand spanking new. And the tone of his voice was so mystified by it all, almost naive. Fighting evil was their purpose, their mission. This was the end of days, and h.e.l.l yeah, things were getting worse; they'd been warned. The person who was glued to the news seemed like a person she didn't know. Even his soul felt lighter as she discreetly scanned him; his aura seemed different than it had been since Philadelphia, like a giant weight had been lifted from him. With all that was going on, any change in any of the team members, even within herself, made her nervous.

Yet, to see his righteous indignation gave her hope, even while the thing that had gone down with Jose made normal seem abnormal in their relations.h.i.+p. Especially in the tight confines of a hotel bedroom. There was so much to think about that her mind almost couldn't hold it all.

Just like the horrors on the television, the secret in her mental black box had grown, had a scent, a touch, a taste, a moan and a lingering question... what would have happened if she'd made a different choice today?

For the first time in months, she felt the Sankofa tattoo on her back move. She kept her secret to herself as she felt it literally s.h.i.+ft position on her skin and face forward, so that the bird was no longer glancing over its shoulder.

”What if we can't find that book in time, D?” Carlos said, his gaze still on the television set.

”I don't know what to say,” she murmured, her hand discretely rubbing the stinging sensation on her skin. They had to be tight, operate in total sync, to go after the threat and beat it, but how?

She kept watching him, wondering how he could just act like she hadn't walked in on anything deep a few hours earlier. Denial was one thing, shame another, but this man didn't seem like he even had recollection. He was completely relaxed around her, but she was a wreck around him. What she'd witnessed created a wall, made syncing up as one next to impossible.

Although she wanted to probe him deeper than a discreet surface scan, to do it meant she'd have to let him into her psyche. That immediately changed her mind about entertaining a mental synthesis lock with him. If there was something eating away at his brain, she needed to know how to guard hers before casually dipping into his.She definitely wasn't ready for him to go poking around within her consciousness.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sleep was fitful, and the hours leading up to, and during, the long flight to China were uneventful.

From her perspective, she and Carlos seemed to be cloaked in a surreal, platonic dishonesty that shrouded their relations.h.i.+p.

Carlos either knew what she had been alluding to every time she vaguely attempted to find out what was going on with him, or he didn't. She didn't bother to clarify. There seemed to be no point in that. His responses to her were civil, absurdly warm and brotherly in affection, but there wasn't the spark that had once ignited them as a couple. She didn't bother to attempt to stoke those dead embers. He didn't ask any questions; she didn't ask any questions. He'd stayed on his side of the bed; she'd stayed on her side of the bed. She and Jose kept careful distance, just like Krissy and Dan seemed to. Marlene had prepared her for a lot of things, but not this.

Damali kept her gaze dispa.s.sionately fixed on the clouds. They'd literally be flying into the future, or the next day, as the case may be, since Tibet was, oddly, thirteen hours ahead of U.S. time. That number stuck in her mind, whittling at it, as she made her peace with another one of Marlene's wild travel routes.

They'd had choices and all of them seemed unacceptable, now, as she sat on the interminable flight. They could have flown into Indore, India, a thirty-four-hour travesty of time, with stops in Frankfurt, Germany, changing planes in Bombay. Then they would have had to endure a ninety-four-mile b.u.mpy drive to Nepal, where it would take days to cross by minivan into what was now called the Tibetan Autonomous Region by the Chinese government-a place that was hardly autonomous, under martial law, and where the culture of the native inhabitants had been suppressed with sheer butchery and terror.

Or, they could do it the so-called easier way, by taking the sixteen-and-a-half-hour-flight to Beijing, and from there take another five and a half hours to get to Tibet's capital city, Lhasa. She just wondered why she and her team always had to do things the hard way. Obviously, there was no such phenomenon called easy. But easy was relative, as was hard. Flying into Beijing was nothing compared to what they had to do once they got to the Himalayas.

To her mind, it all seemed crazy, no matter what Monk Lin had said about the spiritual prowess of the region. If demon madness had come to the surface, there, they were screwed. At least she knew her way around an urban firefight. But in some mountain-nah. Not her environment, and a sister wasn't down with snow.

The only saving grace was that in the one-day wait to get a flight and health checks, the team's elders had found, of all things, an old Beverly Hills mansion to convert. Marlene had slapped a ridiculous deposit down on faith, and walked. It had to be divine intervention, because that helped to keep everyone talking about safe subjects, like retrofitting the new location into what they'd need to survive in the future... which oddly kept everyone half believing there might be one.

All she hoped was that when they returned from this odyssey, things would be as close to normal as their lives would ever be.

Damali stifled a sigh. She could deal with rickety, diesel-leaking buses that smoked, flatbed lorries to carry her team as far as there were pa.s.sable roads into the mountains, and even going by yak mounts or horseback up into the Himalayas to find Nirvana, if need be, to stop this insanity from spreading.

She counted every blessing presented that could make the mission easier. First, she knew she should be thankful that it wasn't winter over there, when temperatures plummeted to minus ten degrees, or the rainy monsoon season of summer when the permafrost ground couldn't absorb the torrents, and whole villages were known to be swept away in floods and mudslides.

But they would still have to deal with exploration at severe alt.i.tudes of eleven thousand feet or more above sea level, which would offer nasty results on the human body, everything from shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and chest pains, to nausea.

She didn't even want to think about feeling ill while trying to divine the mysteries of the universe to find the antidote and kicking a.s.s. But she couldn't worry about it, because failure was not an acceptable outcome. Puhlease!

Carlos just kept his gaze fixed on the sky. He hadn't bothered to question the intimate details of Marlene's route decisions for this journey. Everything that he could remember from his experiences with Damali's family told him that the reason would be revealed in due time. So, he'd made his peace with this crazy adventure. Actually, he'd embraced it, because something way down in his gut rang out as truth as he sleepily stared out the window. The bottom line was, they had to close the portals.