My Soul to Take Read online

  “Let’s see if you can say that after we go to Nigeria,” Fana said. Her uncle, aunt, and cousin had described an entire village of corpses.

  Dawit shrugged. “We still don’t know if Michel is behind it.”

  But Fana knew. She might even be able to prove it if she meditated long enough. Then what? Would they all have to stop pretending that she and Michel weren’t locked in a war?

  Fana changed the subject. “What you and Mom have hasn’t been destroyed,” she said.

  “We’ve never recaptured what we had, Fana.” Her father’s voice thinned, as it did whenever he thought about how he’d lied to Mom during the first years of their marriage, hiding who he was. Her father’s guilt over their first daughter’s death always sat with him. “Our lives died in Miami. I can’t blame her for wanting to go back.”

  “You also can’t excuse her, Dad. She’s using Dreamsticks to sleep at night.”

  Fana hadn’t meant to blurt what she’d learned, but Dad was too blind to notice.

  “She told me she’s stopped,” he said.

  “She lied. She uses them to sleep.”

  “I don’t smell it.”

  “But you’re having vivid dreams, aren’t you? You must be,” Fana said. Even when the smell was faint, Dreamsticks were potent in their creation of lucid dreams. Dawit didn’t respond, but she saw realization dawning in his eyes. “She’s very good at disguising the smell with incense. That’s how she hides it. She was trancing for a month before we noticed, Dad. I’m not guessing about this—I know.”

  Fana had promised her parents she would never again probe their minds without permission, but she’d broken her promise because of Mom’s glassy eyes. There would always be an exception, she reminded herself.

  “Leave this to us, Fana,” Dad said sharply, annoyed.

  Fine. But she needs your help, Dad—not your guilt and empathy.

  Her father inclined his head in a half bow, acknowledging the point.

  “Should we have done that concert?” Fana said.

  “Counsel in hindsight?” he said. “I believe that’s called ‘too late,’ sweetheart.”

  “Yes. But I’m curious about what you think.”

  Her father shrugged. “It was a mistake to do it in California. That personalizes it.”

  “You’re right,” Fana said. “But what about the rest? The healing?” Even to herself, she sounded like a child trying to show off a crayon drawing, eager for her father’s approval.

  “Your gift is a beauty to witness,” her father said. “The public nature is worrisome, but … you dazzle, Fana. You’ve come so far, so quickly. You’re full of love, like your mother.”

  “And you,” she said.

  Dad shrugged. “I love a select few. I love my brothers. My wife. And I love my daughter most of all. So be careful about exposing yourself, Fana. Let our blood do the healing. Don’t try to turn the eyes of the world on you. Not simply because of the hazards—it all becomes vanity. I’ve seen it happen too many times to count.” His voice went soft. “Khaldun.”

  He almost never spoke of Khaldun, and certainly never in terms of his faults. The immortal who had created both sects of immortals had claimed to be two thousand years old, the recipient of blood a thief stole from Jesus on the cross. Khaldun had told her father the story more than five hundred years ago, when he passed his blood to fifty-nine men to create the Lalibela Colony in Ethiopia.

  To Fana, it was a grand tale from a storybook: her father and his best friend, Mahmoud, had been traders in Ethiopia, and found a Storyteller with wondrous claims of Living Blood. They had each agreed to a ceremony, eating poisoned bread to stop their hearts … and the Living Blood brought them back to life. Forever.

  Until her father had broken away to be with Fana’s mortal mother almost thirty years ago, the Life Brothers had mostly lived secluded underground, studying in Khaldun’s five Houses of Learning. Her father loved Khaldun, and considered him a prophet.

  But Khaldun had left the Lalibela Colony soon after Fana was born, proclaiming to Dawit and Jessica that their child was Chosen to stand in a coming war between mortals and immortals. Most of Fana’s life, a handful of loyal Life Brothers had treated her like a deity in their own quiet colony in Washington State, virtually outcasts from Lalibela.

  Until Michel found her.

  Like her, Michel had been born with the Blood. Their mortal mothers both died while pregnant, revived by immortal Blood, and their unborn children had gained the Blood and more.

  And his sect, which called itself Sanctus Cruor, guarded the Blood as theirs alone. They adhered to a document called the Letter of the Witness with instructions to Wrest this Blood from the hands of the wicked—which, as far as Fana could tell, they interpreted to mean anyone who wasn’t chosen by Sanctus Cruor. The Letter also described a prophesied mate who fit Fana’s description so well that it was hard for her to deny that whoever had written the words—Was it Khaldun?—had known that she and Michel would be born two thousand years in the future.

  Sanctus Cruor had tortured and killed Glow couriers to get closer to Fana, and Michel had nearly destroyed her family the way he had destroyed their Washington colony. Fana had offered a ten-year engagement to Michel to save her family.

  But had Michel expected her to love no one?

  Johnny had asked her to give him the Life Gift so he wouldn’t age or get sick. And she could do it—she or her father could perform the ceremony on any mortal they chose. But Fana had refused Johnny. She knew his true reason for wanting the Blood: he hoped to compete with Michel, and that kind of thinking would get Johnny killed.

  All of them might as well be mortals in Michel’s shadow. His abilities were dazzling.

  Fana’s body and mind were still wide awake from the concert, hungering for the floating feeling again. How much of her elation had been from healing, and how much from the pleasure of her power? She couldn’t tell.

  The concert had shown her a power source she hadn’t known before. Without Johnny to urge her, she might not have learned for years.

  Dawit sighed. “Your schoolgirl crush, sweetheart …”

  Fana flinched. Had he peeked at her thoughts?

  “It’s not only dangerous for both of you—it demeans you, Fana. You are too many things he is not. Every minute you spend indulging in your stolen joys with Johnny is time spent away from cultivating your gifts. You don’t have room for him. Let him go.”

  Fana didn’t blink, but she couldn’t stop the stinging of her unshed tears. Her father’s words seemed to cut past her skin to her bones.

  Dawit leaned over to kiss her forehead before he stood up. “It was a beautiful night, Fana,” he said. “I see why you chose the singer. I’m proud to see what you’re becoming. But if you love this singer, be careful where you take her. We’re very good at hurting the people we love—never meaning to. There may be consequences.”

  Consequences ruled Fana’s life. She had avoided Michel for a year, and now evidence of Michel’s anger might be waiting in Nigeria.

  “I hoped our engagement would change Michel,” Fana admitted, her voice quiet.

  Dad’s chuckle was sour. “You’ve denied him even mental visits, Fana. Why should Michel change because he’s engaged? But he may one day be changed … by his wife.” The gentle way her father spoke the word wife, with tenderness, sounded like a betrayal.

  Was he saying she should marry Michel? Fana shivered. “Dad …”

  “I would not have counseled you to agree to marry this man, Fana,” Dawit said. “Like Menelik and Taytu, we could have chosen war against great odds. And if you refuse to honor your engagement, I’ll kill anyone who tries to take you to him, or die my last death defending you. But I think Michel feels a strong attachment to you. He gave you ten years to grow up, and we both know he didn’t have to. What do you gain by alienating him?”

  She couldn’t speak to answer.

  Dad’s advice was even wiser if Michel had already begun the C
leansing that was at the heart of his beliefs; his twisted interpretation of the Letter of the Witness. Michel expected her to help him exterminate most of mankind, saving only a chosen few. She’d hoped a long engagement would delay him, but he might have begun without her. She had to behave more like Michel’s true fiancée, or she would lose any influence she had over him.

  Fana leaned forward in her chair, bowing to her father.

  Thank you for telling me the truth, Fana said.

  “It’s my birthright, Duchess,” Dawit said. “I speak with twin tongues: as your father, and as your war counsel. Don’t make provocative gestures unless you hope to provoke.”

  Teka, her teacher, believed he could help her grow strong enough to stand against Michel one day—but not yet, and not by a long way. Michel was older, so his gifts had a thirty-year head start. She might need more time than she had.

  She might have run out of time already.

  Nine

  Kano

  Northern Nigeria

  Dawit had flown directly to Kano after depositing Johnny Wright and Caitlin in Lalibela, and by three a.m. local time he had been in the air a full day. Some of his Brothers barely slept, but sleep was a mortal habit he had trained his body and mind to appreciate. He looked forward to joining Fana in the nearby private house they had rented. Dawit avoided lodging in hotels when he traveled with Fana: her rest was too easily disturbed by the dreams of guests.

  Was this crisis in Nigeria as bad as it seemed?

  Dawit’s nephew, Jared, looked shaken as he met him beneath the dripping awning of the Tahir Guest Palace hotel, his T-shirt damp from the rainy season’s last warm rainfall. Jared had three days’ worth of facial hair and was nearly four inches taller than Dawit, a giant like his father. Jared started to speak, but Dawit patted the young man’s shoulder to silence him.

  Dawit signaled to a nearby porter who was hovering in hopes of a late-night tip. “Ya yi. Na gode,” Dawit told the porter in Hausa, dismissing him. That’s fine, thanks.

  The porter’s smile grew forced as his thoughts slung obscenities. Dawit’s meditations with Fana were improving his mind arts so quickly that he could often hear thoughts without trying. Like his daughter, he now heard more than he wanted to.

  “I hope you haven’t been exposed,” Dawit warned Jared, brushing rainwater from Jared’s thin back as he ushered him across the hotel lobby’s tile floor.

  “We wore the hot suits. I’m fine. But it’s getting worse, Uncle Dawit.”

  “More dead?”

  “No, thank God,” Jared said with haunted eyes. “But I knew one of the victims. Well, I’d met her. Do you remember the woman from Oxford I wanted to marry last year?” Dawit had no memory of his nephew having had a fiancée, but he nodded vaguely so that Jared would go on. “It’s her younger sister. Gabrielle.”

  That was too mighty a coincidence! And the largest known outbreak was in Nigeria, where so much progress had been made with Glow, and too close to Ethiopia for comfort. Fana’s suspicions about Michel might be right after all. Why doubt her?

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Jared,” remembering politeness despite his frenzied thoughts. “Did she live in the village?”

  “No, she’s from Tanzania. She’d been a part-time English teacher out there for a year. We think …” Jared swallowed his tears away with great effort. “We think it spread quickly at the school. Issa hasn’t heard from me in months, and I have to tell her this.” His voice was almost unrecognizable with pain.

  “Not now,” Dawit said, softening his sharp tone with another pat. “We have work first.”

  Jared gave him a baleful look over his shoulder and produced a plastic key card at the hotel door at the end of the hall. “We’ve already been working, Uncle Dawit.”

  Beside the door, a hotel sign promised twenty-four-hour electricity and water because of storage tanks and backup generators. Inside, the room was filled with bland fluorescent lighting. After the pure light under ground in Lalibela, fluorescent bulbs were an affront to Dawit’s eyes.

  The large room’s hum of activity stopped when the door opened. Dawit was dismayed to find a mortal he didn’t know in the hotel room. The young man had features from Southern Africa, wearing gloves and a lab coat. Jared’s father, Lucas, was hunched over a too-small desk crowded with three laptops; his wife, Alex, was making a graph with a black marker on one of the large sheets of paper taped to the walls. At the top was a photograph of a lovely young woman, beneath neat red letters: PATIENT ZERO?

  Alex walked to David, squeezing his hand. “Hey, Dawit, we’re—”

  “Who’s the boy?” Dawit said.

  “That’s Dr. Dilebo. Moses! You don’t remember him? He used to come play with Fana in Washington. Jess and I knew him before then, in Botswana. He hung out at our clinic, and now Clarion hired him as a researcher. Dawit, we told you we’re grooming people.”

  Alex should know better! The Lalibela Council had strict vetting procedures before mortals could have such close contact. It was bad enough that Alex maintained ties with a South African nurse whose brother and sister had died at the clinic that Alex and Jessica had run in Botswana, where mercenaries hunted them down for their blood. Alex had witnessed the shooting, and had nearly died. Jessica and her sister were painfully slow to learn.

  “Are you studying this disease, or trying to spread it?” Dawit said. Privately, he added, New mortals? Are you mad?

  The young man flashed Dawit a tired smile before resuming his work. Alexis pulled Dawit around the corner of the suite, her voice quiet.

  “Only Jared and I went with Lucas,” Alex said. “We got sent back after an hour, so don’t worry. And we’re taking injections. So we’re feeling fine—maybe too fine. How do ya’ll walk around with this stuff in your veins all day?”

  Dawit’s teeth tightened. How crude it sounded to hear Alex speak of the Blood aloud, even at a hush. And jokes besides! Blood sharing with mortals had been forbidden, and now Alex and Jared were treating the Blood like aspirin. But he couldn’t stop Alex’s husband, Lucas, from giving his Blood to her. Lucas Shepherd had been a stranger when Dawit passed him the Blood—only because Alex had begged him to save the dying man’s life. Dawit hadn’t been able to deny a woman whose eyes so closely mirrored his wife’s.

  Many of Dawit’s Brothers in Lalibela still refused to speak to him or make eye contact because he had shared Blood with Jessica and Lucas. Most blamed him for the turmoil with the new sect of immortals that had overwhelmed him in Washington State last year. His role as peacemaker between his family and the Lalibela Council was a daily challenge.

  “He’s no risk to us, Dawit,” Alex said. “He’s an epidemiologist, and he was Fana’s best friend in Botswana. This has nothing to do with ya’ll.” Ya’ll was Alex’s code word for his Life Brothers, or anyone with the Living Blood.

  She was three years old, Alex! In his anger, Dawit tilted his head close to her forehead. The goats were her friends!

  Alex jumped, startled by the amplitude of his mental stream. She rubbed her temple. “Dawit, chill out with that. I don’t need a headache. Fana wants him in our inner circle, so he’s here. ’Kay?” Alex patted his shoulder to end the conversation. Jessica and Alex often dressed up their own words or desires as Fana’s to get their way. “How did Fana’s concert go? Was Phoenix good? Her music is stone genius.”

  Dawit still couldn’t fathom that Fana had staged a concert to promote sharing the Blood at Michel’s doorstep, all because the singer didn’t like airplanes. Madness! But that was a worry for another night.

  “Suppose we talk about the outbreak?” Dawit said tightly.

  A spark left Alex’s eyes. She nodded.

  Lucas Shepherd stuck his head around the corner with a hollow-eyed stare, tall above them at six foot six. His Georgia accent never hurried. “We knew you’d be pissed off six ways to Sunday, Dawit, but come on back to the living room. We’ve got a full report.”

  Alex doused her throat with a sip
of stale, warm Coke Zero, which had kept her awake for two days straight. They needed fresh eyes—even if those eyes were two weeks late. Maybe two weeks too late. And he had the nerve to scold her for bringing in outside help? Waiting for the next reports of infection kept them all awake at night.

  Where the hell have you been, Dawit? She hoped he knew what she was thinking.

  “It’s bad,” Alex told Dawit, the point she’d been trying to make in her email reports and sat-phone calls since the first reports from North Korea. The cold brick that had lodged at the rim of Alex’s lower belly since her first visit to North Korea had resurfaced in Puerto Rico and bloated her stomach in Nigeria. She wasn’t a hypochondriac, but it was hard not to wonder if she’d caught the bug. Alex injected herself with Lucas’s blood once a day, to be sure.

  “The mortality rate was nearly a hundred percent after contact,” Alex said. “The only survivors were out of the village during the forty-eight-hour outbreak period, or had no contact with the infected. Two hundred dead, but no new reports of the infection in three days.”

  Alex checked Dawit’s face for signs. Anything. He was only nodding as if she’d been reciting ingredients from a recipe book. Yes, yes, go on. Alex knew in her heart that Dawit loved Jessica and Fana—he might think he loved her, too—but he was still The Brother from Another Planet. Dawit’s eyes were only mirror panes. How hadn’t Jessica seen it before she married him?

  Moses walked forward, pointing out the photograph of the pretty young woman who was barely more than a child. “We think the teacher was patient zero in this outbreak,” Moses said.

  “Gabrielle,” Jared corrected, hoarse. There hadn’t been any time to console Jared in his private nightmare.

  “Yes, Gabrielle,” Moses said, apologetic. “She knew the man who ran the school. He was in Jos visiting family the day she arrived, but they spoke by phone. She said she’d had a terrible stomachache for an entire day and would try to make it to the school. She lived alone, and none of her neighbors have tested for the infection. Or reported significant illness.”