My Soul to Take Read online

  Essence bestselling and award-winning author Tananarive Due delivers a heart-stopping new novel continuing the story of descendants of an immortal line of people who are the only ones capable of saving the world.

  Fana, an immortal with tremendous telepathic abilities, is locked in a battle of wills. Her fiancé is Michel. But Johnny Wright, a mortal who is in love with her, believes that if she doesn’t stay away from Michel, they will become the Witnesses to the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation.

  Fana and the Life Brothers are rushing to distribute their healing “Living Blood” throughout the world, hoping to eliminate most diseases before Fana is bound to marry Michel. Still, they cannot heal people faster than Michel can kill them. Due weaves a tangled web in this novel, including beloved characters from her bestselling Joplin’s Ghost, in a war of good against evil, making My Soul to Take a chilling and thrilling experience.

  PRAISE FOR TANANARIVE DUE

  “Due has become a modern-day Octavia Butler, a talented storyteller who stands tall among her horror cohorts Anne Rice and Stephen King.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Tananarive Due has one of the more arresting voices in contemporary American fiction.”

  —The Washington Post

  BLOOD COLONY

  “Beware of spooky plot twists that will have your heart racing as you eagerly turn the page.”

  —Essence

  “Due expertly mixes genres and intertwines sociopolitical issues…. Like the late, great Octavia Butler, she fearlessly tackles contemporary issues.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Blood Colony will steal your breath on every impossible-to-put-down page. Due is masterful in crafting this thrill-ride of a tale that was truly worth the wait!”

  —New York Times bestselling author L.A. Banks

  “An elegant, scary, richly exciting tale—all that we’ve come to expect from Tananarive Due.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Greg Bear

  “The genius of Tananarive Due is in weaving an imaginative tale so expertly that the reader is convinced she has suspended time and all reason. Her storytelling is at once intimate and wholly epic. Her characters, though otherworldly and supernatural, are profoundly relatable and eerily familiar.”

  —Blair Underwood, actor, director, and coauthor of In the Night of the Heat

  THE LIVING BLOOD

  Winner of the American Book Award, 2002

  Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year, 2001

  Los Angeles Times and Essence bestseller

  “Stunning … an event of sustained power and energy…. This novel should set a standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The pantheon of modern horror gods is a small and frighteningly talented group: Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz—and Tananarive Due. If there is any justice, Due’s exciting, powerful, ambitious, scary, and beautifully written supernatural thriller will be the first of a decades-long string of hits that will sell millions.”

  —Amazon.com

  “Smart, soulful, crafty Tananarive Due deserves the attention of everyone interested in contemporary American fiction. In The Living Blood, this young writer opens up realms of experience that add to our storehouse of shared reality, and by doing so widens our common vision. She is one of the best and most significant novelists of her generation.”

  —Peter Straub

  MY SOUL TO KEEP

  Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year, 1997

  Bram Stoker Award finalist, 1997

  “I loved this novel. It’s really big and really satisfying, an eerie epic that bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire.”

  —Stephen King

  “One of those rare gems that hook readers from start to finish.”

  —USA Today

  “Spellbinder Tananarive Due has spun a hair-raising tale.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Gripping.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Compelling…. An incredible story about eternal life that induces the reader to suspend disbelief until the very end of the book.”

  —Booklist

  “I enjoy reading the kind of novel that seduces me right into it and makes me forget about work or sleep. My Soul to Keep does that beautifully.”

  —Octavia Butler

  ALSO BY TANANARIVE DUE

  Casanegra

  Joplin’s Ghost

  The Good House

  Freedom in the Family

  The Living Blood

  The Between

  My Soul to Keep

  The Black Rose

  In the Night of the Heat

  From Cape Town with Love

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Tananarive Due

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Washington Square Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition September 2011

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Nancy Singer

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Due, Tananarive, 1966–

  My soul to take / Tananarive Due. — 1st Washington Square Press trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Immortalism—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.U3143M95 2011

  813'.54—dc22

  2011013971

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7614-6

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7616-0 (ebook)

  To my circle of voices:

  Patricia Stephens Due

  John Due

  Johnita Due

  Lydia Due Greisz

  Steven Barnes

  I hear you, always.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: Plague

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part 2: The Cleansing

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part 3: Upworld

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

&n
bsp; Chapter Thirty

  Part 4: Blood Prophecy

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Part 5: The New Days

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  “It wants to … turn me into something else.

  That’s not too terrible, is it?

  Most people would give anything to be

  turned into something else.”

  —Seth Brundle

  The Fly

  … And so a man and woman, mates immortal born,

  will create an eternal union at the advent of the New Days.

  And all of mankind shall know them as the bringers of the Blood.

  —Letter of the Witness

  How can a disaster greater than human reckoning be a triumph?

  —Death and the King’s Horseman

  Wole Soyinka

  MY SOUL TO TAKE

  Prologue

  Puerto Rico

  Ten miles south of Maricao

  2016

  Carlos Harris’s breath rasped as he stared at the building’s side entrance across the muddy courtyard. The door stood halfway open, a taunt. Or an invitation.

  Carlos had scraped his arm raw sliding down from the low-hanging branches of the flowering Maricao tree where he’d camouflaged himself for the past hour, but pain was the least of his problems. Twenty-five yards from him, a stocky U.S. Army soldier patrolled the compound’s gate with an M-16. A shadow hid Carlos from the guard, but for how long?

  Fear stole the oxygen from Carlos’s lungs.

  He was miles beyond the town, past coffee plantations and bamboo forests, stranded inside the razor fencing of a two-story pale green building battered nearly white by the sun; maybe an old water-treatment plant or sewage facility. The building looked like it should have been empty, except for the mud-caked military truck and three civilian cars parked in a neat row near the main entrance’s glass double doors. The soldier with the thick, sun-browned neck guarding the gate behind him might shoot him on sight.

  The building’s side door was midway open, stalled by its rusty hinge. All Carlos had to do was dash fifteen yards to the door and slip in. But his limbs locked as he tried to catch his breath. If he ran for the door, he might not leave here today. At best, he would be arrested. At best.

  His father had warned him to let his friend with the governor’s office sort through the confusion over Mami—but how could he wait? His father hadn’t seen the way the coroner’s eyes had shifted away in San Germán, or how the police officer in Maricao had tugged at his earlobe, itching from his own lies. His father hadn’t heard their flimsy evasions at simple questions any son would ask: Where is she? What happened?

  If Mami was dead, he would accept it somehow. But did they expect him to swallow the story with no proof? No body? Nothing except her purse to show that she had lived and died? Even if Carlos hadn’t been a reporter for twenty-five years, he couldn’t have walked away.

  But Carlos had never expected to make it this far. The driver from town should have spotted him hiding in the back of his cuchifritos lunch truck before he’d begun his drive to the facility at dawn. The army guard should have searched the truck before waving the driver in. Someone should have seen Carlos climb out and run to the tree after the driver parked.

  Truly, what kind of security was this?

  Carlos was angry at the incompetence, the lies. Angry at himself. In his real life, he would never do something this crazy—this was like something Mami would do. One day, this would all be a grand joke to her.

  But he was here now. The truck was long gone, and he didn’t have the ATV he’d nearly killed himself riding on narrow roads the day before, when he’d first come to observe the facility. Carlos could almost hear Mami laughing at him in the rioting birds hidden in the trees. Bees circled him, humming near his ears, but Carlos was too nervous to duck or swat at them.

  Carlos, I got the weirdest phone message, Dad had said when he called three days before, waking Carlos and Phoenix from dead sleep in California. Four a.m. Dad had never gotten the time zones straight, but Carlos hadn’t had the chance to lay into him because Dad had repeated the cryptic phone message he’d received from an unidentified woman:

  Rosa Castillo is dead. Then, the caller had hung up.

  The message would have seemed absurd, except that his father couldn’t reach Mami, and none of her neighbors had seen her in days. Dad was still recovering from hip surgery, so Carlos had flown to Puerto Rico to find her, chasing her ghost like a detective.

  Her girlfriends from the gallery in Old San Juan had told him about their hiking trip to El Yunque, and how Mami had stayed behind to take photographs. A park ranger at El Yunque remembered the woman Carlos described: she’d joined a family from Hong Kong on an impromptu trip to Maricao. Sólo se vive una vez, she’d told the park ranger when she changed her plans: “you only live once.” Because that was Mami. No planning. No consideration.

  In Maricao, Carlos had finally gotten lucky. Or so he’d thought.

  The wild-eyed tourist from Chile had drawn Carlos a map to the facility, afraid to lead him there. The tourist had sworn he’d seen six bodies loaded into a truck from the hacienda, the little hotel, in the middle of the night. The authorities had been dressed in plastic suits from head to toe, as if there had been a radiation leak or a terrorist attack. The man’s worry for the spirited Negrita with silver braids had made him follow the truck into the rain forest.

  The stranger had met Mami only twice in the plaza, but he said he’d liked her and urged her to see a doctor when she complained of a stomachache. Then she was gone. And those radiation suits! It was all so suspicious, he’d said, the way the police wouldn’t answer questions, just like Chile under Pinochet. Then the hacienda where the bodies had been found was closed right away, the manager among the missing.

  What were they hiding? Fury welled up in Carlos, silencing his fear.

  Carlos’s legs were churning before he realized he was running for the propped door, his breathing so loud in his ears that he was sure the guard could hear him. His legs were rubbery, ready to fold, but he bounded up the two concrete steps and peeked inside the open doorway first: he saw a short, narrow hallway, part of an L intersection from the main hall. Three doors on each side, two open, four closed. No soldiers. No one in sight.

  Carlos slipped through the building’s open door, barely nudging it, in case touching would set off an alarm. He was glad it didn’t close behind him, because God knew he might need it again. One of the open rooms was six strides from him, the lights off, so he ran to the doorway just as he heard voices from the wider hall.

  He didn’t have time to see if he was alone before he closed the room’s door behind him; the click rang in his ear like a gunshot. He pushed in the lock, another terrifying click. Only then did he whip his head around to see if he’d stumbled into the lion’s den.

  But he was alone.

  The room was a small office, three drab metal desks without cubicles. The walls were rimmed with wire bookshelves that were mostly empty except for a few piles of papers and paperback manuals. Something white near the window caught Carlos’s eye, and his heart rejoiced: a lab coat was hanging on the desk chair!

  Shivering with gratitude, Carlos grabbed the coat and flung it on. It was short at the sleeves, too tight—maybe it was a small woman’s—but it felt like his armor and shield. His lungs opened, allowing him to breathe.

  The room smelled dusty, as if it hadn’t been aired out in years. The desks were old and scuffed, but the wire shelving was new.
So was the slender tablet computer sitting open at the desk where he’d found the coat. Carlos hadn’t thought to bring gloves—one in a long list in his plan’s oversights—but he tapped the computer screen and prayed for a miracle.

  The opening screen flared, bright blue. A username was saved in the top field behind a row of dots, but the password field was blank. He cursed. Had he thought he could type in his mother’s name and find a complete report?

  Carlos peeked through the window’s vertical blinds, saw the side of the guard’s checkpoint. The bulky soldier was pacing with his gun slung across his shoulder, bored.

  What now? As Carlos panicked, his mind went white, skipping like an old LP.

  The desk drawers were bare, emptied long ago. Carlos rifled through the papers and manuals on the wire shelves, but the pages were crammed with unfamiliar symbols. Chinese? No … Korean. A thick manual looked like a medical journal, judging from the photographs of deformities inside, but he couldn’t read a word. Carlos cursed again.

  As his adrenaline wore off, he felt wearied by the futility of his plan. What would Phoenix say if she saw him now? His father? His capture would make international headlines. He was transforming into a crazed stranger, and over what? A tourist’s delusion?

  Still, Carlos left the sanctuary of the office with the manual under his arm to complete his costume, keeping his face down as he scanned the hallway. It was still empty, but he wouldn’t have time to search every room.

  He saw a handwritten sign in bright red at the end of the hall, near the fork. The sign had an arrow pointing to the right, like a trail of bread crumbs. OBSERVATION, the sign read in English. A matching sign was posted on a nearby stairwell door; this time, the arrow pointed up.

  Carlos opened the door to the stairwell and found it empty, too, lighted by fluorescent bulbs that flickered and buzzed.

  Another sign waited at the door on the second floor, and Carlos opened it without giving himself time to change his mind. Bright lighting assaulted him, and he shielded his eyes with the manual. His reflection stared back at him from a glass panel five yards in front of him that stretched nearly the length of a long, narrow room.