Dark Time: Mortal Path (3 page)

When she raised her face, the shape had drawn nearer, and still she couldn’t make it out clearly. It was big, twice her height or more, and roughly human shaped. Roughly. There were too many joints, too many places where the creature bent as it moved.

“Who are you?” Her voice sounded strange to her ears. She didn’t know if it was some unnatural quality of the fog or a scorched throat. She looked down again, needing reassurance that she wasn’t burned.

She was anchored to the ground in front of the terrifying creature, with nothing to do but await her fate. “Who are you?” she repeated.

The answer came inside her head, so loud it reverberated in her skull.

Rabishu.

She understood it to be a name, not a place, although she didn’t know why.

“I was burning…. Am I dead? Or dreaming?”

No.

She clapped her hands to her ears. The noise inside her head was excruciating. Had she traded one mode of torture for another?

The voice in her head moderated to a tolerable volume.
Dreams I do not understand, but you are not
dead. Unless you want to be.

“I want to live.” When the words came out of her mouth, she knew it was true. She did have something to live for, but it had nothing to do with motherhood and home, and everything to do with revenge.

You said that in the past. In the flames. What will you do to live?

Susannah tried to focus on the creature’s face, or where a face should be. It was hard to tell where the fog ended and the face began, but she had the impression of wet sockets pointed in her direction, empty of eyes but sensing her anyway. Abruptly her eyes slid off to the side, as though the creature had been caught unaware. She had been allowed to glimpse too much, and the correction was swift.

Do not meet my gaze!
The voice thundered in her head.
What will you do to live? Will you kill your
own kind under my direction?

Susannah thought about the bitterness that permeated her, the unknown time in the fog with heat in 9 z 138

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her blood, the key twisting in the lock. She knew what she wanted.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.” She was shocked at the coldness in her voice, as cold as her baby’s stiff body.

I need a human to do my bidding in the Great Above. In return I offer immortality. You would be
one of the Ageless.

Susannah blinked. “Are you the Devil from hell?”

Not as you believe. I am a demon beholden to Nergal, Lord of the Underworld, god of glorious
destruction and plague.

“Nergal?”

A being of power and darkness far beyond your understanding.

“My baby. Can you—”

Enough questions. Accept or you will be returned to the flames. You have more need of me than I of
you. There are other humans.

“I accept. I choose life.”

The fog formed into a tremendous wall, flattened like the gleaming stillness of a lake at sunrise, a vertical lake. On the surface of the lake, fiery writing began to appear. The characters were completely unfamiliar to her, sticks and three-sided shapes formed into patterns. The luminous writing scrolled upward and towered over her, a dozen times her height. When the writing finally stopped, the characters continued to glow. They had some of the same ability to deflect her gaze as Rabishu’s shape did—slippery, as though not meant to be considered for long.

Sign it.

Susannah dropped her eyes, suddenly ashamed. “I cannot write.”

A skeletal arm with more than one joint stretched out toward her, and she cringed away as much as she could with her feet rooted. She felt a sudden pain between her breasts, and looked down to find a small wound forming there, a perfect circle, with blood welling through the skin. Her hand moved up to protect herself, but before she could reach the spot, the blood flew away from her like an arrow shot by the bow of her ribs. The blood splashed on the vertical surface and joined the sticklike characters of the demon’s writing. As it did, she felt something tugging loose inside her, and a puff of dark smoke emerged from her chest.

Death has left you through the mark I have made. You are now beholden to me, as I am to Lord
Nergal. Your first task is a simple one to accustom you to your new role. You must kill your accuser.

For the first time since Susannah was pulled from her husband’s bed, she smiled.

Finding herself back in the flames but not feeling them, she stepped naked from the fire. The ropes around her wrists were gone, the injured flesh there healed. Her stomach was tight and flat, showing no trace that she’d been pregnant. Alice’s smug look was replaced by one of revulsion, mirroring the faces of the others around her. Susannah walked right up to her.

They would have burned my baby inside me….

Alice was too shocked to run, and a scream died in her throat.

“Come,
friend
, I have something to share.”

Susannah’s voice had a new timbre, a new power to it. She grasped Alice’s hands and pulled her.

That startled Alice into acting. The woman yelled and dug in her heels.

“Get away from me, witch! Magistrates, kill her now! Stone her! She’s evil.”

Susannah tugged harder. All of a sudden it was easy to move Alice, as easy as plucking a berry from a bush. She was aware of the others staring, aghast at both her nakedness and the fact that the fire hadn’t killed her. She swiveled her head, looking for Nathan in the crowd. His face showed no trace of the love they’d shared, of the new life they’d built together inside her body. He was repelled by her, convinced now he’d been deceived and that she had planned to take his life. She was indeed a witch in his eyes.

She held Alice effortlessly with one hand, and pressed the fingers of her other hand to the circle between her breasts.

Rabishu’s mark. This is my future.

The bloodied skin pulsed with power beneath her fingers, and she caught a faint whiff of the foul odor that had made her sick earlier.

A timidly thrown stone struck Susannah’s leg, tearing her skin. Blood welled and a rivulet ran down her leg, but before the blood reached her ankle, the cut healed. Another rock, with some determination 10 z 138

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behind the throw, hit her soundly on the knee and ripped open a large gash. She traced the path of the rock back to the thrower, and was saddened to see that it was her own Nathan. His face was contorted with a mix of anger and fear.

The wound on her leg closed, the skin pulling together before her eyes as though sewn by an invisible needle and thread, and the pain faded.

Susannah pulled Alice into the fire and grasped her around the waist so she couldn’t escape. The woman writhed in agony as the flames took her. When Alice was dead, Susannah tossed the charred corpse aside. She stalked away, enjoying the feel of power that flowed through her, her bare skin feeling warm and vibrant in the morning sun.

The terrified villagers parted in front of her.

T
he government agents would have to explain how an intruder had gotten past them so easily, and how they ended up with their hands and feet tied and their service revolvers boiling merrily away in the stockpot on the stove.

The house was in Springfield, Illinois, one of a few dozen like it on a street carved out of a farmer’s field. The kitchen was cramped, but judging by the items on the counter, the lady of the house took cooking seriously. Susannah tested the air. Tomatoes, garlic, onion, herbs, more garlic. As she glided across the linoleum, the light of a full moon poured in dining-room windows open to the night air in the vain hope of a cool breeze. The moonlight rippled across her body and glinted from the hilt of a knife at her waist, one of several weapons she carried. There was no one awake to see her move through the house like a shadow cast by Death.

The living room next. A sterile place, a place to sit on facing sofas and utter social banalities. With her toe, she touched something that hinted at the true life within the house: a doll, no doubt dropped on the way through. That’s what people did most in this room: walk through it. The comparison to her life was inescapable, a life where friendships were frequently left behind and love was never more than a fling.

Like a doll left behind on the floor.

She shook the feeling, picked her way carefully through a playroom littered with toys and books, and made her way down the hall. The first room on the right, she knew, was Patty’s. Easing the door open, she slipped inside.

The curtains were open and a square of moonlight fell on the bed. A young girl was there, blanket thrown off on a sticky summer night, her nightgown twisted around her legs. Patty had turned fourteen a month ago. The faint odor of nail polish hung in the room. The top of her dresser was crowded with hairbrushes, bottles of cream, makeup, and a jewelry box a much younger girl would have, the kind with the dancing ballerina. Next to the jewelry box, in a prominent position, was a framed photo of the family, mother and father beaming as their daughter blew out the candles on her birthday cake. Susannah peered at the photo and counted the candles. Fourteen, plus one for good luck.

Susannah had never had a birthday cake.

Emily’s room was on the left side of the hall, the moon-dark side. Susannah let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness, and then stood just inside the room. The sleeping girl wore pajamas covered with sheep.

Emily was seven, and the owner of seven times seven dolls. They were all over the room, propped on a dresser, piled on a chair, mounded at the foot of her bed. Sharing the dresser with half a dozen dolls was a photo of Emily with her father, dressed for Halloween as matching clowns, clowns with laughing eyes.

The picture had a frame made of Popsicle sticks, glued on neatly except for one that sagged on the bottom. Susannah put her face up close to the framed picture, looking at the latticework of sticks. A few still had traces of orange on them, her favorite as well as the child’s.

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Emily stirred in her bed, and Susannah backed out into the hall.

Mary’s room was next on the left, closest to the master bedroom that was across the hall. The room was dark, like Emily’s, and the door was pulled mostly closed. Susannah put her hand on the door, but was suddenly reluctant to open it and enter. Instead she peeked in to see the dark-haired girl baby sleeping peacefully in the crib.

As Constanta should have been.

She pulled her hand away.

A smell drifted from the room. Mary needed a diaper change and might wake soon, crying because of that or hunger or the pure cussedness of being eight months old.

In the master bedroom, Katherine DiNina wore a delicate nightgown that the moonlight turned the color of old blood. She had a few extra pounds on her, no doubt a result of cooking to please a family, and a sweet face that wasn’t quite beautiful. Black hair spread over the pillow. Pictures of her family crowded the top of her dresser, but the side of the bed where her husband slept was empty. Her arm rested across the space where he should be. Susannah’s gaze fastened on a Moonbeam alarm clock on a stand next to the bed. The lighted clock face said 2:45. Susannah had a clock exactly like it. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh scents of soap and shampoo. This woman went to bed clean, ready to embrace her husband.

Thoughts tickled the back of Susannah’s brain. From the infant girl to the mother’s black hair, this family could have been hers and Nathan’s, in a different time. The pain of remembrance coursed through her in a way that it hadn’t in centuries.

My job is to destroy this family, so like mine could have been. These people are like piers of a
bridge. Yank one out and the bridge is unstable. That’s what I’ve been doing since I became Ageless, I
just never thought of it that way. One strike, one kill—but a cascade of ruined lives.

It was time to leave.

As Susannah retraced her path, she understood why the man of the house, Lorenzo “Ledger”

DiNina, had made a deal with the Feds to turn on Adamo Tenaglia, a ruthless crime boss. He did it for the four dark-haired females in this house, who meant more to Ledger than his life did.

A
week later, she ran on a dusty road, breathing evenly, enjoying the feelings of her muscles moving and blood pumping.

It was half an hour past sunset on a late August evening in Iowa, the darkness beginning to gather, yet the temperature was ninety degrees and so was the humidity. Cornfields ran on either side of the road for miles, interrupted only by the occasional driveway marked by a mailbox. The air was saturated with the intense smell of ripening corn.

In an hour, she’d be invisible under a thin slice of moon. Her clothing was black from head to toe, the silk fabric snug against her skin and as supple as she was. Her long, black hair was braided atop her head and her pale face concealed by black silk wound around it from the neck up, leaving a narrow gap for eyes as green as the fields around her. She wore skintight black leather gloves with padded palms, and a leather pack snuggled against the small of her back. It was her killing outfit.

Running with her mind elsewhere, she retraced her path through Ledger’s home to the moment she’d frozen in front of the baby’s door. Her memories of Constanta were so strong that Susannah hadn’t been able to enter the baby’s room.

Not in my killing outfit. Not with a knife at hand.

A doe ventured out into the road ahead, followed by her spring-born fawn. Susannah maintained her speed, judged the moment, and launched herself into the air, arcing over the two deer. The larger one startled as Susannah’s foot lightly grazed the fur on her back.

It was an exhilarating moment, one of the many Rabishu’s gifts afforded her.