Blood Colony (11 page)

Tuesday
6:54 a.m.

T
he sun outside was awake to light a bad day. Teka stood posed in front of the stone fireplace in the living room of the Big House, smiling as if he could blunt his report with a pleasant face. Lucas Shepard had never believed the tiny man’s expressions looked quite right, as if they’d been chosen at random. Bea was absent, upstairs at Alex’s bedside.

His wife had been catatonic all morning. Now maybe Lucas would learn why.

“Fana has run away with Caitlin,” Teka told the group of five. “Alexis encountered Fana and Caitlin as the girls were on their way to the woods. I imagine Fana only wanted to quiet her long enough to pass safely.”

“Quiet her?” Nita Duhart said. Fear thinned her voice. “What does that mean?”

Lucas stared at Jessica and Dawit, who sat on the love seat directly across from him, but they avoided his eyes. Jessica looked as shell-shocked as Lucas felt, holding her husband’s hand. Jessica and Dawit were strangely silent; they knew more than they had let on. Cal and Juanita stood behind the sofa above Lucas, each resting a hand on one of his shoulders.

“There is an injury to Alexis’s memory centers,” Teka said, exactly the way he had explained it to Lucas earlier, which had hardly been an explanation at all. “It is akin to…a stroke, I suppose. A mental paralysis. I will work with her to restore what I can…but I believe Fana herself is the one who can bring Alexis back as she was.”

Teka raised his eyebrows, as if to say
Will that be all?
Lucas’s limbs tensed with anger, but he was sadder than he was mad. He felt spent.

“
Bullshit,
” Cal said to Teka. “Tell us what the hell you did with Alex and Fana.”

Lucas noted the flicker of annoyance across Dawit’s face, and something else in his brother-in-law’s eyes he didn’t like. But Teka’s polite smile remained. “Fana is very special,” Teka said, surveying their group. “What she has marred she can also repair, with time. I know this to be true. But I’m prepared to say no more. My apologies for your confusion. I dare not proceed without my Brothers’ agreement.”

“What’s he talking about?” Nita said to Jessica. A plea.

For the first time, Jessica spoke. “I’ve told you Fana has gifts.”

Beside her, Dawit sighed, as if she had already said too much. How dare they conceal information that the rest of them had a right to know!

“
Gifts
?” Lucas said, rising halfway from his seat. “Yeah, you said she had gifts. You never said she was going to fry my wife’s goddamn brain.” Dawit’s face got tight, and Jessica blinked fast.

“Lashing out at us helps no one,” Dawit said. “We’re concerned, too. Fana’s our child.”

Lucas sighed, rubbing his face. “I get that, Dawit. And Alex is my wife.”

“And my sister,” Jessica said.

Teka raised both hands to his chest level, palms out, as if in surrender. He gave a low, courtly bow; his forehead almost touched his knees as his spine folded. “I’ve said what I can. I think the concerns of this household are best discussed privately among its members. If no one objects, I must return to the Council House.”

“Yeah, you do that,” Cal said sarcastically. “Thanks for clearing this up.”

Cal’s taunt had no visible impact on Teka, whose smile never faltered.

Silence hovered in the room while Teka made his way to the front double doors. Lucas heard Hank and the twins whooping in the dining hall. They sounded like they were chasing each other around the room instead of eating their breakfast as they’d been told, but neither Cal nor Nita moved to quiet their children. No one spoke a word until they heard the front door open, then close. And then they waited nearly twenty seconds after that.

Cal went to the foyer to peek out of the door’s lace-covered window. “He’s gone,” he said. “Now maybe someone can tell us what the hell is really going on here.”

Dawit stood up to block Cal’s return path. “Cal, don’t ever let my Brothers hear you address Teka with such disrespect. I give that advice in the strongest possible terms.”

Cal’s face turned bright red. His hair had gone white, but he was still full-faced and thickly built, and suddenly his chest was thrust out like a bar brawler’s. His eyes flared. “Or what?” he said, pouring on his thick Georgia twang.

“Cal…,” Lucas warned. He met Cal’s eyes to telegraph a message:
Careful.

Jessica reached up to gently pull back on Dawit’s arm, and he took his seat again, eyes on Cal. The sadness and shock on Jessica’s face turned to alarm.

Something had happened here overnight. Despite all of their differences with the Life Brothers, yesterday this had been a single colony with a unified mission. Today, Lucas felt like a stranger. An outsider. And Alex had known much more than she had told him, even after all they had endured together. Lucas felt pissed off and betrayed, which only sharpened his grief.

“This is a hard day, and we’re all emotional,” Jessica said. “But we’ve been family for a long time, so let’s not turn on each other. Ask me your questions, and I’ll answer them.”

“Shouldn’t Sharmila and Abena be here too?” Nita said. Two of their colony’s other women were married to Teferi, and they lived in separate houses on the western side of the colony, ensconced in their own lives. Their three children attended school with Hank and the twins, but the women rarely socialized. Lucas knew there would be no privacy if they were here.

“Let’s keep this to just us, for now,” Lucas said.

“If it’s privacy you want, I’ll join Teka,” Dawit said, meeting Lucas’s eyes so squarely that it was as if the man had heard his thoughts. “Will you be all right here, Jess?”

Jessica nodded, resigned. Dawit leaned close to Jessica’s ear, but they could hear him. “Alex will be herself again. I won’t rest until Fana is home. Please don’t complicate matters.”

Jessica closed her eyes as Dawit left the room. Her face was at war.

“They’re thick as thieves,” Cal muttered, watching the front door close behind Dawit.

Nita sat down beside Jessica, taking Dawit’s place. She clasped her friend’s hand. “Honey, I’m sorry…,” Nita said. “I know you’re hurting and Fana is your little girl, but you need to talk to us. We’re all very nervous right now.”

“Scared to death is more like it, Jess,” Lucas said.

“And when did Justin and Caitlin get here?” Cal said. “That’s news to me.”

“First things first,” Lucas said. “Tell us about Fana, Jess. Please. Everything.”

“Everything is a long story,” Jessica said.

“We quit our day jobs a long time ago, sugar,” Nita said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

Staring at the braided rug four feet ahead of her, Jessica didn’t look like she was ready to talk yet. Nita got up and went to the kitchen, angling her wide hips through the French doors; she’d gained forty pounds in ten years, blaming Bea’s cooking. Lucas sighed and glanced at Cal, who gazed back with lips pursed hard.

The French door flew open, and Nita came back with a tray of slightly burned biscuits and coffee, remnants of the breakfast Bea had been starting before her daughter had been carried to her doorstep. A lump in his throat, Lucas reached for a cold biscuit and buttered it. Cal and Nita followed his example. The biscuit was a rock in Lucas’s mouth, but at least the coffee was warm.

Once, Lucas had been naive enough to think that he had lived to see almost everything: raised in Georgia at the end of segregation, an MD degree from Meharry, an adventure in the Peace Corps, and a Lasker Prize for his smallpox research. He’d gone through hell when his first wife had died, but Cal and Nita had helped him through it. He and the Duharts had lived across the street from each other on a shaded Tallahassee road.

Then Jared had been diagnosed with leukemia. Lucas had gone to Botswana to chase down a rumor about a clinic with blood that could heal anything. Everyone, including Cal and Nita, had thought he’d been acting out of desperation. For a while, he’d been afraid they were right.

But he’d found Alex, and the blood. Or, rather, Alex and the blood had found him. Chaos had come crashing into his life on the heels of his discovery, and the trauma of that time had torn a hole in his memory. But Alex remembered. Sometimes, Alex woke up trembling and sweating with memories of torture. She was afraid it might happen again.

Lucas had died, after all.

Lucas hadn’t been surprised that awful day when he’d felt a gun’s nozzle against the back of his head. He’d heard a bullet cycle into a chamber before the explosion behind his ears. As an end to one’s life, Lucas’s had been extraordinary: Mercenaries. A hurricane. And miraculous blood.

Lucas remembered the eerie few seconds of consciousness after he
knew
he would die. He’d felt his thoughts go white and his body sink into stony paralysis. A euphoria had swallowed him, much more intense than the mental rush from a shaman’s
ayahuasca
he’d once sampled in Peru. Jessica, Bea and Alex would say he’d felt the first welcoming winds of Heaven. But it had been DMT, of course. Dimethyltryptamine. Humans experience the release of DMT twice in their lives—at birth and at death. Nature’s way of easing the transitions.

Lucas didn’t remember the rest. Dawit had brought him back with his blood, as he had once brought back Jessica. The cost had been high, but the blood’s rewards, it seemed, were boundless. The blood had overtaken Lucas’s system, rewiring his cells so that they forgot how to age. And the healing! When Lucas was cut or bruised, he healed in eight to ten hours
without a trace of injury
.

And the blood could help others. Trace amounts were slowly reaching select rural portions of the world, controlled and contained. In their lab, Lucas and Alex kept a computer model of the raging impact of AIDS, whole nations and regions painted in bright red, and they watched the statistics fading before their eyes.

Fewer orphans. Fewer young people cut down. More industry. Botswana had rebounded so quickly, no longer saddled with its health crises, that it was second only to South Africa in its regional influence, creating one of the best universities on the continent. It only made sense: When your people are sick, what else matters?

Lucas had more influence on world health than he had ever believed possible. But five years ago, the Brothers had banned Lucas from visiting clinics and officials in Ghana and China because he’d become too easy to recognize. That damned Lasker Prize and his renown when he’d worked for the National Institutes of Health had stripped him of the anonymity he needed. Too many people recognized him as Dr. Lucas Shepard.

Dr. Voodoo, he’d been called. His fame had outlived its usefulness.

Long ago, Lucas had torpedoed his career because people had thought he’d believed in magic, and now he couldn’t say
Told you so.
Lucas had made his peace with that. Hell, he’d planned to retire in his sixties anyway, and he’d just turned sixty-nine. He wished he’d gotten the blood when he was thirty, but freezing time at fifty-five wasn’t shabby. And he had a gorgeous lab to study his blood.

Lucas had joked, cajoled and begged Alex:
You’ve earned the right to this blood. Tell Jessica and Dawit to give you the Ceremony so you’ll be like us, too. Put my worries to rest.
But, like her mother, Alex had refused. Would Alex ever have the chance now, or had he just lost another wife? Lucas didn’t want to live a single day without Alexis, much less hundreds of years.

“Jess?” Lucas gently prodded his sister-in-law, who was still staring at the floor. “Please.”

Jessica looked up and nodded, sighing.

“Fana isn’t the only one who can reach people with her mind,” she said, pausing between sentences. “The Brothers are telepaths. The Blood seems to open up a new mental receptivity, depending on how much it’s nurtured. Some, like Fana, have a more natural talent than others. That means, among other things, that they know what other people are thinking. I don’t know yet if I can learn it—or you, Lucas. It takes years, Teka says.”

Lucas’s mind went blank, just like the day he’d felt the life leaving his body. The room was so silent that it was as if no one had heard.

“You mean like aliens?” a voice said. Hank was leaning into the entryway, eavesdropping. At fourteen, Cal’s son was stocky, just like him. “Vampires?”

“Where’s your brother and sister?” Cal snapped.

Hank ignored the question. “Look, I know something happened to Aunt Alex. I have a right to hear, too.” He reminded Lucas of Jared as a young boy, when illness had made him old for his years. Cal, Nita and Jessica shook their heads in unison.

“Go mind Maya and Martin. Pronto,” Cal said.

“Look, I’m not a little kid,” Hank said. “I just want—”

Nita shot to her feet. “So help me, if you don’t get moving right now, I will break off a switch and wear your behind out. I don’t care how old you are,” she said. “
Go,
Hank. And don’t come back in here.” She sounded like Alex, except for the terror hidden in her voice.

Jessica mustered a smile as placid as Teka’s for the boy. “Alex will be fine. Really,” she told Hank. “Do what your mom says, hon. This is a meeting for the grown-ups.”

Hank gave them a nasty look, but he retreated. Cal nudged Hank along, then watched his son walk to the playroom on the other side of the house. Lucas heard the door slam. Hank was getting close to the age when he would want to decide more things for himself.