The Living Blood Read online

  The blood, the precious, damnable blood, would bring Bee-Bee back. Just as it would bring Jessica back when it was her turn to experience death.

  Or hadn’t she already experienced death once? That night in the motel room, the night Kira had died, David had given Jessica some kind of tranquilizer, and her senses had felt hazy, as if she were suspended in molasses. Not fully unconscious but unable to move, she’d been deeply afraid, but even more confused. She’d felt David’s smooth palms nestle her neck, tenderly at first, but then they tightened around her throat with a vicious suddenness that hadn’t felt like her husband’s hands at all. The thought What’s he doing? vanished quickly, giving way to a formless, desperate desire to breathe, to live. But maybe she had not lived. Maybe David had killed her, too—and then somehow brought her back.

  However he had done it, David had given her his blood from a needle, and Jessica had not just healed, she had been reborn. At the same time, the blood had done its miraculous work on the embryo inside her, on the child Jessica hadn’t even realized she was carrying. Bee-Bee.

  So, Bee-Bee had been born with the blood. That meant she would come back.

  And, as Jessica had known she would, on the day she drowned, Bee-Bee finally opened her eyes with a startled, gurgling gasp as she spat water from her lungs. It was only then, when Bee-Bee was awake, that Jessica had allowed herself to cry, only after the girl who woke up calling herself Fana had been resurrected.

  “Mommy, don’t think about that. Don’t ’member when I made you cry,” Bee-Bee said, scrunching up her face as she gazed at Jessica. Pulled from her memories of the drowning, Jessica’s lips slowly fell apart.

  Bee-Bee was naturally intuitive, remarkably so, and many times before today had said things that made Jessica wonder if her daughter knew precisely what she was thinking; Alex had remarked on it, too, pointing out how it was impossible to keep secrets from children because they always somehow knew, and Bee-Bee was worst of all. But something in Bee-Bee’s tone just now, her authoritativeness at the precise moment Jessica had been remembering her tears, jarred her a little.

  “Read Alice to me, ’kay? Please?”

  “Okay, Bumblebee . . . Mommy will read to you.” Jessica took the book from her daughter’s hands to turn to Bee-Bee’s favorite chapter, about Alice’s game of croquet with the spiteful Queen of Hearts.

  • • •

  There were already people in the house. After Jessica had gotten dressed and sent Bee-Bee out to the kitchen to help Sarah fix breakfast, she noticed a growing din of rapidly speaking voices in the living room. Unlike Sarah, Alex, and Bee-Bee, who were practically fluent in Setswana by now, Jessica could barely understand a word. She hadn’t really tried to learn. Whenever she could, Jessica avoided the people who came; no part of her could rejoice in the wanting in their eyes, in knowing that she was what had brought them here.

  She especially avoided looking at the children. How many other children in the world were just like these? There were so many, they seemed like an endless trickle that might easily drown her heart one day. Or harden it, which would be even worse. No, she would not go to the living room and greet the sad children there by saying Dumelang, bana, or “Hello, children,” one of the few phrases she knew in their language. Not today.

  Rather than staying in her room, which was what she often did on days when there were people at the house, Jessica decided to go outside. She felt her windowpane, and the glass was cold with the winter air outside, so she pulled on the fur cap one of the parents had brought as a gift long ago, when they’d first come to Botswana. The cap was a patchwork of animal furs—Jessica couldn’t identify them and she didn’t want to know, not really—and Bee-Bee despised it. It smells dead to me, Mommy, she always said, so Jessica never wore it in Bee-Bee’s presence.

  But, oh, was it warm! The fur hugged her head and the top of her earlobes as though the creatures who had been sacrificed to make it were still warm and alive. Jessica had been born in Miami and had lived there all her life, and she’d always vowed she would never live in a colder climate. Now here she was in Africa, of all places, and it was cold. Not to mention that the seasons were flipped in southern Africa, so June was one of Botswana’s coldest months. After Jessica tread quietly through the hallway to slip out the back door, she guessed the temperature outside was in the low forties, and she shivered. It was ironic and appropriate, she thought, that the seasons were upside down; everything else in her life was certainly on its head.

  Because of the blood, everything just felt different to her now. Cold was colder, hot was hotter. Sensations felt more acute. Even food tasted different; she’d never cared much for fish before, but she’d found herself craving it now. And beef, which she’d always liked well enough, suddenly tasted exquisite to her. She could even taste the air now. The air tasted slightly bitter from dust—and she could smell the manure from the goats they kept in the wire kraal an acre behind the house—but she also could taste the openness of the sky above her.

  And so much else was different that her mind still refused to grasp.

  Inhaling the air, Jessica surveyed the property that was her home now, at least in name. Theirs was the only Western-style house in a small rural village of homesteads, at the end of a dirt path. Their three-bedroom ranch house, built of concrete, glass, and shingles rather than with mud-packed walls and a cone-shaped, thatched roof, would have been ordinary back in the States, but here it was a true palace. Even the simple water spigot at the front of the house, near the property’s edge, was treated almost as a holy thing during the dry season, when neighbors saved themselves long trips to town by lining up to fill cans with water they would use for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing. Their property was the only one that supplied its own well, and their working shower in the bathroom was an outright novelty to the few who had been invited inside to use it. The boy who tended their goats and chickens for them, a twelve-year-old named Moses who watched Bee-Bee at times, looked forward to a luxurious shower each week.

  Although Jessica had kept her distance from most visitors, she did enjoy her neighbors. In South Africa, she and Alex had been sloppy, too giddy with their ability to help people, and the neighbors had singled out Jessica, beholding her with outright reverence. The Magic Lady, the Zulus had called her, even if they weren’t sure exactly why. Even Sarah, for the longest time, had been reluctant to stare Jessica in the eye, calling her “mistress” and refusing to become more familiar until after they had moved to Botswana. The strange attention had mortified Jessica at first, but what mortified her more was the way she’d grown to expect it.

  Here, thankfully, it was different. The reverence she received wasn’t so different from what any wealthy foreigner would have received. Children came by and occasionally asked for sweets the way they would from tourists. And a half dozen neighbor women regularly invited themselves over, bringing tea or homemade beer, teasing Jessica and Alex about their lazy, uncallused hands and asking questions about life in America, which Alex answered in her limited Setswana. The stories never ceased to amaze their neighbors.

  Yes, Alex told them, in America most people drive cars, and many families have more than one. In America, people take their dogs to groomers to have their coats shaved and nails painted. In America, grocers hire people to put food in your bags for you, and the bags are then thrown in the trash. In America, many elderly live in nursing homes and walk homeless on the streets.

  And the disclosure that brought the loudest cries of outright disbelief: In America, parents appear on television talk shows to complain that they can’t control their children. Can’t control children! The neighbors always left the house cackling and smiling, or shaking their heads about what a crazy place America was, with children insulting their parents on national television.

  Of course, the neighbors also knew sick people came. When their own children were sick, they brought them here rather than taking them to the hospital in Serowe; or worse, to Francistown, wh
ere they would be subjected to long lines and indignities. Alex had visited a clinic for poor Africans in Francistown once, and she’d come home ranting about the experience. And Francistown, for all its European doctors and medicines, was nearly two hundred kilometers away, which meant a train ride from nearby Palapye, an extra expense most of them could not afford.

  Most neighbors first consulted the medicine man, an old man whose homestead was at the outer edge of the little village. Jessica had never met him, though Alex had, but he was reportedly trusted because he had been treating the villagers for years against the diseases brought on by witches and curses. Often, his herbal cures worked just fine. If not, he sent the sick to Jessica’s house, just as Alex often referred minor cases to him, as if their two homes exercised a professional courtesy between them. But if the neighbor’s child was really sick, as in the case of a child who’d ingested some kind of poisonous plant and was already in shock when she’d been brought to the house, Alex gave her a shot of their serum.

  After that, the child got better. This was something their neighbors understood rather matter-of-factly, and this was what Jessica liked about them. Here, she was not revered, only accepted. They made her feel she belonged. If she was standing outside, passing women made attempts to greet her and speak to her at length even though they realized she was only nodding with little comprehension, but that seemed all right with them. They talked on and on, gesticulating and touching her, as if through pure persistence their meaning would be made clear. And maybe it worked. Jessica never failed to recognize one phrase—Ke a tsamaya, which meant “I am going”—and then she knew she could wave good-bye.

  But Jessica was not in the mood for prolonged conversations today, so she confined her walk to the more secluded rear portion of their ten-acre property, which the previous owners had fenced with barbed wire to keep neighbors from grazing herds there. The secluded little house had been built by an English couple who’d decided to retire early to “the bush” with a small cattle ranch, but they’d quickly felt bored and isolated, so the For Sale notices had gone up only six months after they’d built the house. Alex had begun periodic scouting trips after it had become clear their situation in South Africa was more and more unstable, and she’d seen the notice posted at the mall in Gaborone. The price would have been an impossible fortune for most Africans, but it was more than reasonable for Jessica and Alex after they pooled their remaining savings. The owners must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven: Imagine an American family wanting to buy their little rural house that seemed at times like the most remote place in the world! Alex said when she first drove out to talk to the couple, they’d forgotten all rules of salesmanship and sputtered as if they thought she’d lost her mind. Why in the world would your family want to live out here?

  Since Alex could not tell them the truth, she only said they were tired of the bustle of America and wanted to live closer to their African roots. That seemed explanation enough.

  There was no breeze, but Jessica suddenly stopped walking and turned to look over her shoulder because she’d felt a tickle at the back of her neck, or she thought she had. Forty yards behind her, the windows of her box-shaped house were all empty, which surprised her. She’d been nearly certain someone, maybe Bee-Bee, was watching from the house.

  She’d had the feeling before.

  She remembered, when she was living her old life in Miami, how she’d often caught David with an intense, distracted expression on his face, and she’d been so insecure that she’d always assumed it was because of her. Her husband was bored with her, she told herself miserably. He thought she was too ignorant, too provincial. He felt tied down because she refused to consider his elaborate plans to leave Miami and travel the world with him and Kira.

  Now, she knew what his expression had really been about; he’d felt weighted down by his secrets. And he was waiting, bracing for something, because he’d known he was being watched.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight on this side of the house, only the arid prairie land that was home to clumps of thorny bushes. Three shade-providing merula trees grew right outside the fencing of the cattle kraal they had never used because they had no cattle, but most of their property was made up of underbrush and dry soil dotted with patches of tall prairie grass, except at the far west end, where there was a woodland of a few dozen thin, stumpy mopane trees that seemed to live just fine with little water. The parcel was empty and private.

  But no matter how much solitude they seemed to have found here, Jessica knew she could not lull herself into believing she and her family were ever truly alone. The others were watching, she knew. They had watched David in Miami, and they were surely watching her now.

  They were scouts called Searchers, David had told her. They were David’s brothers, sharing the same strange blood, which meant they were her brothers now, too. In all, fifty-nine men had this blood, living in an isolated colony in Ethiopia, David had said in one of the precious few moments he’d finally revealed anything about his history. He called the men his Life Brothers, and he claimed he had lived with them for nearly five hundred years.

  But her brothers or not, the Searchers were ruthless, and Jessica was afraid of them.

  In a few minutes, when Jessica saw her sister walking toward her across the property with a noticeable limp, she was reminded of just how dangerous the Searchers were. In Miami, one of them had thrown Alex from an eight-story window because Jessica had told her about David’s blood. The nightmare that had overtaken Jessica’s life had begun almost as soon as David admitted who he really was, because Jessica had behaved exactly as any mortal would: She had told.

  Alex wrapped herself tightly in the bright red wool sweater she was wearing as she made halting progress toward Jessica. The fall had broken Alex’s back and nearly killed her, but the only remaining evidence of the ordeal was her limp. Sometimes Jessica barely noticed her sister’s limp, but it was pronounced today. Alex always complained cold weather made it worse.

  “Girl, I hate when you do that,” Alex said when she finally reached her, slightly winded after her two-acre walk. “I wish you wouldn’t just walk out of the house without saying anything, Jessica. I look for you, and you’re gone. Why do you scare me like that?”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not like I took the Jeep and drove to town,” Jessica said, but her words instantly felt petty. She told herself she couldn’t let Alex’s overprotectiveness push her baby-sister buttons just because they always had up until now. Alex had thrived on being bossy when they were children, something Jessica had rebelled against ever since; but everything was different now, she had to remind herself. Now, they both had reason to be overprotective.

  Besides, Jessica had also seen a slight hurt pass across her sister’s face, reminding her that Alex was more sensitive to her words now. In the past four years, their relationship had slowly begun to shift as Alex’s unspoken awe for her grew. Alex was still Jessica’s big sister as much as she could manage the role, but she was something else now, too: She was just a mortal like most of humankind for all history, and Jessica was not. Jessica and Bee-Bee were part of another race now. Literally, they had inherited the world.

  Jessica gazed at her sister, seeing her more clearly in the bright sunlight than she usually did inside the house. Alexis had just turned thirty-eight, six years older than Jessica, but the age difference between them seemed to have stretched beyond that already. Alex was taller than Jessica, tall enough that she carried her stockier frame very attractively, despite a slightly stooped carriage from her injury. But the skin on Alex’s face seemed loose in a way that made her look matronly, and her hair was painted with too much gray at the scalp line. Should Alex look so mature, or was Jessica’s imagination only preparing her for the inevitable chasm that would continue to grow between them? Jessica had been twenty-eight when David had changed her blood, and she would look twenty-eight forever. Bee-Bee’s physical development seemed almost normal so far, only slightly delay
ed, but Jessica guessed one day Bee-Bee would stop aging, too, hopefully when she was a young woman.

  But that would never be true for Alex.

  Jessica shuddered as she thought of what David had said to her during his brief visit to their clinic in South Africa nearly two years ago, when he’d tried to convince her that healing people with her blood endangered her and that she should relinquish her mortal ties, even to her mother and sister: In a very short amount of time—it will amaze you how quickly—one by one, they will be gone. They are mortals, and you are no longer of them.

  And in a way, she had seen the truth in David’s words already. Her mother and stepfather had gone back to the States because her mother’s health had begun to fail. Bea was seventy now, suffering from diabetes that interfered with her circulation, and she’d chosen not to follow Jessica and Alex from South Africa to Botswana.

  And, like Alex, Bea had refused to take an injection of Jessica’s blood to see if it would help her ailment, citing a Christian rationale about leaving her health in God’s hands. Injections wouldn’t give them instant immortality—apparently only David could do that—but Jessica figured her mother and sister could use her blood to ward off cancer and other diseases, clean out their arteries, and God knew what else, probably extending their lives for years. Bea and Alex might both reconsider their positions if their health ever became dire, Jessica thought, but then again they might not. Bea, for one, didn’t seem to fear death at all. Anytime Jessica offered her blood to either her mother or sister, a heated argument was sure to follow.

  Jessica just didn’t get it. Maybe it was pride. Maybe fear. But whatever their reasons, if they did not use the blood, Jessica knew both of them would simply continue to suffer needlessly, then one day they would get sick and die sooner than they should. Refusing the blood was a waste of an opportunity most people would give anything for! It was stupid, frankly, she thought.