To Kill a Sorcerer (8 page)

Lying on the straw rushes the night of the funeral, I thought about it. If I did not need to eat, then I could not starve, could I? What did that mean? Did it mean I could not die? How was that possible? I thought about Marguerite and James, sleeping next to me. They needed food. They could die of starvation and so could my parents.

The realization that I was different from them in such a fundamental way frightened me so badly, I refused to acknowledge it. It was too big for my child’s mind to cope with.

My parents knew there was something different about me. They hadn’t questioned me about it directly. I believed that was because they didn’t know what it meant, so weren’t sure what to ask.

I definitely never brought it up.

But my dearest Marguerite. Some nights, when our parents let us keep the rushlights lit, she would watch me before we went to sleep, and her drowsy gaze told me she knew the truth.

My younger brother and sister had always viewed me with skeptical awe. It didn’t help that we all slept together. Our house had two rooms: one for the five of us and one for our oxen and chickens. We kids slept on the ground, matted straw beneath us. Mother and Father slept in a raised bed on the other side of the room.

One October night when I was eleven, with a fierce storm shaking our house, James and Marguerite pestered me with questions late into the night. James was the youngest at six, and Margie a wise old nine. Marguerite and I were dark-haired and green-eyed like Father. James was fair like Mother.

Wind gusted outside, and the rain was an intermittent patter on the thatched roof. The room was cold, but Father had decided it was not chilly enough to burn our precious firewood.

“Father said you fell right out of that tree picking apples and that you broke your leg,” James said. He was on his back on the hard-packed earth floor, in between Marguerite and me, the rushes underneath his shoulders crackling. He pulled his cloak tightly around his thin body as a draft ran along the floor.

“It didn’t break. It just looked that way to him. I was fine when we got back, wasn’t I?” I was on my left side, my head supported by my hand, looking over James at Marguerite. Though I was always aware of the temperature and humidity of my surroundings, they never affected me. As soon as my body found any condition uncomfortable, it compensated. However, I had learned it was wise to complain about the weather.

“He told us he heard it break,” Marguerite said, shivering. “You always tell us stories.”

“That’s right,” James said.

“There’s something unusual about you.”

“Don’t say that, Margie. I told you, I don’t like it.” I reached over James and twisted her hair. She squealed and slapped my hand.

“Stop it!”

“You kids keep it quiet!” My father boomed at us, and thunder rumbled after, as if he were Zeus shouting down from Olympus. The timber crucks holding up our roof creaked in the new wind.

“She’s right,” James said. His voice throbbed with excitement. He loved being between Marguerite and me when we argued. “You always tell us stories. I saw that time you cut your thumb when you were fixing Father’s boots. You almost sliced it off. There was blood everywhere. And after you were holding it in your other hand for a while, it was healed.”

“I did not almost slice it off, King James,” I said, tickling his side. “You’re the one telling stories.”

It had become automatic for me to deflect or deny any suggestion that I was different from them. I knew I was not doing a very good job of keeping my secret.

Marguerite stared at me the way she sometimes did, her long brown hair spread out over the straw, her big eyes heavy with the fatigue of a long day’s work.

“You can tell us the truth, Sebastian,” she said.

Lightning flashed, a hot, close sizzle. For a moment, lines of fire sliced through the cracks in the shutters, throwing the left side of Marguerite’s face into ghostly, blazing relief.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“I heard Momma and Papa talking the day you
didn’t
break your leg falling out of the apple tree.”

“I told you—”

“Yes, you told us he heard it wrong, and you didn’t really break your leg. And why shouldn’t we believe you? After all, how could you really break your leg, but be healed by the time Papa brought you home?”

“You’ve answered your own question. It isn’t possible. Since my leg was not broken when we got back, it could not have been broken in the first place.”

I could tell she did not believe a word of it.

A steady icy draft wafted over us. James’s teeth chattered, and Marguerite shivered violently. My poor dears! What a terrible discomfort they endured.

“Come on, then,” I said. I rolled over James and took the middle position. This put James on the side of the door, exposing him to the drafts. I swathed him in my long coat and pulled him against my side, draping my arm along his back. Marguerite scooted against me, pressed her head to my shoulder, and like James, wrapped her arm and leg around me.

Though the strange engine inside me operated automatically, it responded to certain commands. I thought about raising my temperature. In moments, my skin blazed as if I were in the grip of fever, and my body became a coal against which my brother and sister could huddle.

After a couple of minutes, their trembling ceased.

“You know, it scared Momma and Papa when that happened,” Marguerite said softly, her breath on my cheek. “That’s what I remember most about listening to them talking that night. Papa was scared. I could hear it in his voice.”

“But I was fine.”

“That’s not what he was afraid of. He said that if you were different, really different, people might fear you and hate you.”

“But if I am invincible,” I said, feeling James’s arm tighten around me, “why should that worry Mother and Father?”

“Are you, Sebastian? Are you invincible?”

“Oh, Margie!” I crushed them to me and kissed their foreheads. “These are all just stories. There’s nothing different about me.” I leaned up, made sure they were both well covered, then settled back and pulled them tightly to me. “Now keep still, both of you. We need to get some sleep. We have a lot of work tomorrow.” Rain began to tap the roof with a fat, heavy tattoo.

Marguerite stared at me. I knew what she was thinking: she had never seen me tired. I pretended to be, but always sensed she could tell I was faking. She would never stop questioning me, and neither would James. Eventually, I would have to admit to certain truths.

Because when I fell out of the apple tree that day, I had snapped my leg in half. The time I was fixing Father’s boots, I had almost sliced my thumb off.

And both times, my body had miraculously healed itself.

There were other things they didn’t know about, like swimming in the River Arun and keeping my head under water for an hour, or going one month without food and drink and feeling fine.

And not sleeping. Though my mind required rest, my body did not, so I always remained conscious of everything around me.

As I lay in the dark, feeling their chests rising and falling and listening to the waxing symphony of the storm, I thought about the time I watched Marguerite sleeping one morning when she was five.

When I saw her hands twitching, I became frightened and called her name softly. She didn’t seem to hear me. I leaned over and looked at her. For the first time, I understood that she was
asleep
, and dreaming—not just lying there quietly, thinking, as I always did.

I had seen my parents in this otherworldly state, and it had upset me, but I assumed it was something that happened to you when you were older, or maybe when you had children. It gave me a nasty shock to see it happening to my little sister. That meant it didn’t have anything to do with being an adult or being married.

I never dreamed, except for the memories. I never truly lost consciousness. Lying on the straw every night, I listened to the sounds in and around our house. I could remember doing so since I was three or four.

Through the years I kept mum, at first from fear, and then from a feeling of separation. There seemed to be a great gulf between my family and me, and I was scared of it, baffled by my uniqueness.

No kid wants to be different from everyone else.

Other than these signs of my physical invulnerability, I am the same as mortals. I laugh and cry, experience joy and despair, and search for meaning in life. I crave companionship and long for the intimacy of romance.

The first thing God says of human nature in the Bible is, “It is not good for a human being to be alone.” I can attest to this.

I have had two wives, and by them two daughters and four sons. If I have an immortal gene to give, so far I have not passed it on to any of my children. Long ago I realized I have never known pain or the fear of death the way all of my friends and family have known them.

I only know what they have told me it feels like.

The buzz of my cell phone brought me out of my reverie.

“Montero.”

“Hamilton. We have another one.”

Wednesday, December 22, 2:40 p.m.

By the time I arrived at 14724 Greenleaf Street in Sherman Oaks, yellow bands of crime scene tape surrounded the residence. A Channel 5 news team had a van parked across the street. I stopped half a block away and pulled to the curb, parking in the shade of a broad maple tree.

I stepped out of the car, sliding on my jacket. The wind had eased, but the temperature was still in the eighties. As I neared the house, several photographers turned my way. I averted my head as they took pictures.

Officer Chen guarded the perimeter, standing on the path leading to the front door. She held the tape up, and I ducked under it. Yellowish flecks dotted the sleeve of her uniform shirt. Her face was white.

I removed my sunglasses and slid them into my coat. The officer maintaining the crime scene log leaned inside and shouted for Hamilton. As I started up the red brick walkway, he came out of the house, hustled down the steps, and walked toward me quickly. I stopped, seeing he intended to intercept me.

“Feeling better today?” he asked. His detective’s shield was clamped to his lapel. He wore black examination gloves.

“I felt fine last night.”

“Want to tell me what happened?”

I stood there, working on the tan on the back of my neck.

He grunted. “All right, we’ll let that slide. For now. Come on.”

He led the way to the stoop, stopping next to the table with the log. I signed in. The high smell of vomit issued from a camellia bush.

The log officer handed me a pair of examination gloves. Pink. Everyone else wore red or black.

“Thanks.” I glanced at her name tag. “Officer Kennedy.”

“You’re welcome. They support breast cancer awareness.”

I snapped on the gloves. “I knew that. I’m always willing to do my part to keep breasts safe.”

“We appreciate that, sir.”

Gonzales appeared in the doorway. When not wearing unfashionable formal wear, he favored brown suits, knit ties, and short-sleeved dress shirts.

“Well,” he said, “if it isn’t Jacques Cousteau. Nothing happened in the pool in the backyard, but I suppose you’ll want to inspect the bottom anyway, right?”

I gave him a grin.

The four of us stood there, Gonzales the only one inside. I held my pink hands up, thought about using them to light a cigarette, put them back at my sides. Birds tweeted. Carbon-14 decayed. The earth orbited the sun.

Hamilton said, “Girl’s name is Jessica Patterson. Seventeen. Same as the Barlow kill. Bloody. We’re supervising the SID team as they finish collecting evidence, then we can take a closer look.”

“They’re still in there?” The members of the Scientific Investigation Division were LAPD’s crime scene forensics specialists.

“Yeah. And they’re still taking pictures. The medical examiner’s techs haven’t touched the body yet.”

“What about the parents?” I asked.

Gonzales’s mouth tightened. “We had the EMTs take them to the hospital. That was a balls-up, they never should have been allowed to view the scene.” He glanced at Kennedy, who fidgeted. “The father had to be restrained—tried to throw himself on his daughter’s body. The mother—she took one look and fainted dead away.”

“Can you imagine?” Hamilton asked.

“No.” Time had withered my five children, each one of their deaths as painful as the first.

This was magnitudes worse. What must it be like to live each day, knowing your child spent her last moments being tortured and gutted by a homicidal maniac? Mr. and Mrs. Patterson must be facing the most agonizing human experience imaginable.

Gonzales stepped back and gestured inside.

“Welcome to the party.”

We walked through the front door and turned into the family room.

There she was, her body suspended from the rafters by a thin cord around her ankles. The three of us stopped a meter from the body so as not to interfere with the techs processing the physical evidence.

I thought the photos of the Barlow kill had prepared me for this sight, but it is not possible to anticipate the shock your mind and body receive in the face of such mutilation. I studied the scene, suppressing the anger growing inside.

Gonzales watched me. I raised my eyebrows at him.

“I got a twenty-two-year veteran upchucking in the master bathroom,” he said, “but you stroll in here cool as dammit and look at the corpse like it’s a mannequin.”

“Is there a question in there?” I asked.

“Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”

“A concerned citizen.” I turned back to the body.

Jessica’s limp arms hung toward the floor, splattered with blood. The killer had slashed her torso vertically, then splayed the flesh to either side.

“Other than the Barlow girl,” I said quietly to Hamilton and Gonzales, “have either of you ever seen anything like this?”

Neither answered. Gonzales gave the tiniest shake of his head, his gaze never wavering from Jessica.

The burning scent in the air caught my attention.

“Incense again.” I pulled out my phone and dialed. While I was listening to it ring, I said to Hamilton, “Tell them to close the back door and any other doors.”