Thirst No. 5 (2 page)

Matt takes my hand. “Sita, come on. I know you’d never purposely lie to me.”

His fingers feel good wrapped around mine.

“There’s the rub,” I say. “I might lie to you and not know it.”

Matt stares at me, waiting for me to explain. My body trembles. I feel a sharp pain inside my head and a dull ache in my heart. Loss, I feel loss.

“Those were dark days, Matt. The darkest of my life. The Nazis did terrible things to me, unspeakable things. It got to the point where I didn’t know my own name. I don’t know how I escaped. But I do know if it hadn’t been for Harrah and Ralph, I wouldn’t have survived.”

“How exactly did they help you?” Matt asks.

His question is reasonable. How were mere mortals able to
help a five-thousand-year-old vampire? I wish I could answer without sounding like a complete nut.

“The Veil of Veronica. Have you heard of it?” I ask.

“I’ve heard the stories, or I should say the myths. Isn’t it supposed to be a cloth that Christ wiped his face on when he was carrying the cross to Calvary?”

“Harrah called it Golgotha but I suppose the name doesn’t matter. It was where the crucifixion was supposed to have taken place. But Christ did not wipe his face on the cloth. It was the other way around. Veronica, the woman in the tales, dipped the cloth in water and wiped his brow. And an image of his face was immediately imprinted on the cloth.”

Matt considers. “From what I’ve read, it was fluids from portions of his face that stained the cloth. From his nose and his cheeks and his brow—the raised parts. The liquid contained just a small amount of blood. It was mostly sweat and lymph fluids. Only a rough outline of a face was created. There wasn’t supposed to be a clear picture.” He adds, “But I’m no expert on the matter.”

“The veil isn’t popular like the Shroud of Turin. Still, there are dozens of stories surrounding its history. These days, the Catholic Church avoids talking about it. But during the Middle Ages, for at least two hundred years, they had it on display in the Vatican. I saw it.”

“Did it have a face on it?” Matt asks.

“It had a face most people associate with early Christian paintings. The image was remarkably clear. It had three
V
s on the bottom, all in a row. One from his beard, the others from his long, draped hair. I always found the symmetry curious. It didn’t fit the style of art that was popular at that time.”

“Why did the Vatican hide it away?”

“Some say it got stolen. Others say it was shown to be a fake. A few say it burned in a fire.”

Matt frowns. “But somehow, a thousand years after the Vatican lost it, your friends ended up with it.”

“Yes,” I say.

“How? And please don’t tell me it’s a long story.”

“It is, and I have a feeling I’m going to have to tell it to the others. So I might as well tell it all at once.”

“You’re stalling. You know Seymour’s not religious and Brutran is certainly not a regular churchgoer. They won’t have any interest in this veil.”

“They will when I explain why I had to kill Shanti.”

“You think she was going after it?”

“Why else would she have these pictures?”

“Because they’re pictures of people from your past.”

“That means nothing. I’m not in these pictures. What’s important is that these people saved me.”

“Using the veil?”

“Yes. But it’s not the way you think. You have to hear the whole story.” I pause. “Or as much of it as I can remember.”

Matt stares at me, his puzzlement growing. “Sita, you’re the same as me. You don’t forget anything.”

I squeeze his hand and lean over and give him a kiss. He reaches out to hug me in return, but I avoid his embrace by sitting back. All of a sudden I feel dirty, unclean. I fear to infect him. I stare down at the photo again.

“Maybe I’m afraid to remember,” I say.

W
e have a meeting planned for early in the morning. There’s much to discuss—like, how are we to stay alive when everyone is trying to kill us?

We get nowhere. As soon as Seymour realizes Shanti is missing, he demands to know why. And when Matt tells him the truth—in more gentle tones than I’ve ever heard him use before—Seymour bolts for the door.

I let him go, feeling he needs to be alone. But as the minutes go by and the temperature outside rises—our motel has lousy air-conditioning—I decide to go after him. The town where we reside, Baker, is what the term “hole in the wall” was born for. I fear Seymour has gone for a walk in the desert. The opposite of an outdoorsman, he has zero survival skills. I worry he’ll get heatstroke.

I have no trouble tracking Seymour. He’s left a trail in the
sand and I can hear his breathing a mile away. I chase after him; it doesn’t take long to catch him.

“Go away,” he says as I pull up at his side.

I offer him a bottle of Evian. “Take a drink.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You’re hiking into no-man’s-land.”

“What do you care?”

I grab his arm, stopping him. It’s not as if he has the strength to resist me. “You’re the one person who knows how much I care,” I say.

The pain in Seymour’s face is heartbreaking, and he’s not someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. His eyes burn and he would probably weep if he weren’t so dehydrated. His love for Shanti was like mine—a beautifully foolish thing.

“Why?” he asks, hanging his head.

I let him go. “Matt told you why.”

His head jerks up. “Matt! Matt didn’t kill her.”

“No, I killed her. But what Matt told you was true. She was the spy who’s been tripping us up from the start of this nightmare.”

“You don’t know that for sure. I know how impulsive you are. I bet you never gave her a chance to explain herself.”

“Seymour . . .”

“Okay, maybe she was a spy! But maybe she was forced into the role. Did you stop and think of that before you murdered her?”

“You have to trust me, it wasn’t that way.”

“Oh really, what way was it?”

I hesitate. “She was possessed.”

He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Turning, I stare out at the desert, seeing the air tremble as it superheats and rises in waves over the bleak landscape. The ground is half dirt, half sand, hot enough to fry an egg. I shake my head.

“When I was at IIC’s headquarters, while I was trying to take control of their Cradle, I had all kinds of strange psychic experiences. I shared some of them with you, but the worst ones, the ones where I came face to face with this demon, I didn’t talk about. I couldn’t. It was so awful, it almost drove me mad.”

“You always seemed in control.”

“It was an act. At the end, I was losing it.”

“How do you know you didn’t lose it last night?” he asks.

I reach out and put my hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to shake it off. But he is listening, my old friend, he continues to listen. Yet he wants hard answers, logical reasons, and I doubt if I can give him those.

“I caught her in a lie,” I say. “A big lie. Then it was only a question of getting her to admit what she was, which she did.”

“
What
she was? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I told you, she was possessed.”

“Get off it, Sita. This isn’t
The Exorcist
. Shanti was one of the sweetest girls I ever met.”

“Yeah, sweet as apple pie. I thought the same thing. So damn sweet.” I pause. “Look how we found her, with half her face melted away from acid a jealous boyfriend had thrown at her. How could we help but feel sorry for her?”

Seymour is suddenly confused. “That was true. She didn’t lie about that.”

“Nothing she said was true! She lied to us from the start. Those facial wounds—they were self-inflicted. She poured the acid on herself.”

Seymour shakes his head. “No one could do that to themselves.”

“No normal human being could do that. But she did.”

“You keep saying these things as if they were facts. You don’t know.”

“I do, I saw her for what she was. At the end she didn’t even try to hide it. She was happy that I knew. Please, Seymour, I swear to you on Krishna’s name that she was gloating.”

Seymour stands silent for a minute, then takes the bottle of water from my hand and pours it over his head. He stares up at the burning blue sky. I have never sworn to him before. I’ve never had to. Certainly I have never invoked Krishna’s name before.

“I thought when we escaped IIC’s headquarters, we were safe,” he says miserably.

“So did I.”

“I thought you said the Telar were all destroyed.”

“I think they are.”

Seymour sighs and throws the empty bottle aside. “What a way to wake up,” he mutters.

“I’m sorry. Honestly, Seymour, the instant I killed her I thought of you. How much it would hurt you. It was all I could think about.”

Now he looks to me for comfort, and I’m amazed at his ability to forgive me, to trust me. “Did she suffer?” he asks quietly.

I think of the fires that await those who fail the test of the Scale, and how poorly Shanti will do when she reaches that judgment. But Seymour’s expression is so desperate, I believe a lie is better than the truth. Besides, I couldn’t have given Shanti a faster death than ripping off her head.

“It was quick,” I say.

We walk back to town. Seymour stops once to cry, but he is all right. I know eventually he will be fine.

F
inally, the gang is gathered in Matt’s room. His air conditioner actually works. Cynthia Brutran sits at the head of his bed, an open laptop resting on her crossed legs, a pillow at her back. She has changed clothes since the start of our flight. Gone are her jewelry and expensive suits. Her pants look as if they were bought at the local drugstore—I suspect they were—and her top is a deceptive T-shirt with a sketch of Baker looking not only exotic but actually inviting beneath the rays of the setting sun.

Even though we are on the run, the woman—an old foe of mine—looks more relaxed than I have ever seen her. I wonder if the destruction of her company’s headquarters has given her a sense of freedom. I would not be surprised. Rather than your normal platoon of crooked tax accountants and boxes of records of phony stock options, the firm had demons in its basements.

Yet I am slow to trust Brutran.

She did try to kill me, a few times.

Her five-year-old daughter, Jolie, sits in a chair in the corner beside the TV, flipping channels between cartoons and the film
Rosemary’s Baby
. How appropriate, I think, since Jolie was the product of a breeding program designed to manufacture psychic mutants. The child also looks relaxed, happy even.

Seymour and I sit at the desk. Matt stays on his feet. He likes to pace when we have meetings, but not out of nervousness. I may have been the boss while we were trying to bring down the IIC and Telar, but Matt is our natural leader. The change in roles doesn’t make me feel threatened. I’m hoping I’ll find it a relief.

“Are we still on the list of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted?” Matt asks Brutran.

She nods. “We didn’t fall off during the night. The only difference now is that treason has been added to our list of crimes.”

“Terrorism and murder were not enough?” Seymour asks.

“Apparently not to whoever is after us,” Brutran replies.

“Do we know who that is yet?” Matt asks.

“Our capture is a priority for every law-enforcement branch of the government,” Brutran says. “That hasn’t happened since Bin Laden and his minions hit the World Trade Center.”

“Won’t someone high up the chain of command realize, soon, that these charges have been fabricated?” Seymour asks.

“They haven’t been fabricated, not entirely, and that’s the key to our dilemma,” Brutran says. “We did blow up IIC’s headquarters, and because the Pacific Coast Highway is loaded with remote cameras, chances are we were seen leaving the area immediately after the explosion. That building was full of children. Those children were incinerated in the blast. The police and fire departments are still trying to dig what is left of their bodies out of the rubble. That footage is running almost continuously on CNN and a dozen other news stations, and it’s creating a national anger, a raging wave. The American people want the perpetrators caught. They want them tried and punished. Imagine the pressure that rage puts on the politicians, on the police, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA.”

“But why have they latched onto us as the guilty parties?” Seymour asks. “So we were in a van leaving the area. Lots of vehicles were leaving the area.”

“Good question. It leads me to my second point,” Brutran says. “In the midst of this mass hysteria, pictures of us in the van are suddenly sent to every law enforcement agency in the government. A fake history of us is created. I just read an in-house email that is being circulated at the FBI that states that Sita—whom they are calling Alisa Perne—spent five years in Syria in a terrorist camp, where she learned the art of bomb making. All of us are being assigned similar pasts, and this information is being widely circulated by the program the Cradle created and placed on the Internet.”