I awoke from death, as I had so many times, shivering on a slab. For once, I had not been murdered. I had not been hung, stabbed, shot, or poisoned. This time, I had taken my own life. As my memories of the past faded, I awoke to the present.
The body bag that encased me was meant to contain stench rather than heat, and it was frigid. It also reeked of bile, and I was happy finally to work my shivering pinky into the tiny gap of the zipper and slide it down. The handwriting on the exterior label read: DOE, JANE 8W756-D. I stopped and listened carefully. Hearing nothing but the rumble of the refrigeration units, I unzipped the bag and sat up. The small room was crowded with dead. It reminded me of the casualty transports I had the unfortunate occasion to ride during the war. Bodies in bags were stacked everywhere—except on each other. Most were in the rack against the back wall, three spaces high and four long. The rest, like myself, were on metal gurneys, some of which carried a second body on a lower shelf near the wheels.
My first problem was that I was naked. I should’ve seen to it first. Instead, I stepped to the floor in bare feet and began immediately searching for Benjamin’s bones. I found them quickly enough. His was the flattest bag in the room. But it rested on a lower shelf, and I had to push the chain of gurneys to make enough space to squat. They rattled against each other, and I paused again to see if I’d been heard. After a moment, I pulled the body bag’s zipper over the bump of the skull, but rather than a pile of bones, as I expected, I discovered the corpse of a small child. There were deep red burns marks across this face and neck. He couldn’t have been more than four. Heartbroken, I found myself unable to look away. He had a wide forehead that reminded me exactly of Jakub, whose final fate I never knew. I replaced the zipper.
Finding no other suitably flat bags that might contain the remains of my friend, I turned for the door. On the other side was a long, open medical examination hall with several identical stations, each clustered around a single, long table. Two were occupied: one by a bag and one by a collection of charred bones.
“There you are,” I whispered.
It was dim—only the under-counter lights were on—but then, according to the clock on the wall, it was approaching three in the morning. At least it was warm. I shut the door to the cooler with a click and tiptoed to examine the skeletal remains, but all I could see of Benjamin was what I already knew: he had been burned. Whatever had killed him had been extremely hot. His bones were almost black. Most had bits of oily charcoal attached. They didn’t look real, and it wasn’t until I saw the stone—the large, smooth river stone that Etude had put in place of his heart—that I felt anything stir within me. It had been found with the body and kept as evidence. It was blackened as well. I touched it and felt the ash on my fingers.
The last time I had seen Benjamin, we were fleeing the bistro fire. He was hauling the chair away in the back of a van. I watched him go. I had hoped the medical examiner’s file, which rested in a slot near the cabinet, would help solve the mystery of how or why he had made his way to Adams County, Ohio—or what had happened to the throne of Amaimon—but the only clue perplexed me even more than before. According to the report, his skeleton appeared to have been exposed to uranium and as such was slightly radioactive. It wasn’t dangerous, but to avoid contamination, it was to be kept separate from other remains until retrieved by the FBI, who would presumably investigate.
I replaced the file and turned to the nearby computer, which was when I noticed the large viper slithering slowly out from behind it. I froze as the snake undulated unnervingly down the cabinet to the floor. It was big—too big, really, closer to a python than a rattler. As it moved relentlessly toward me, holding my attention rapt, I had no choice but to step back.
My head hit the barrel of a revolver. I heard it cock and raised my hands slowly as the unnaturally large viper slithered between my legs.
“This move was predictable,” a woman said, “given your talents.”
She had some kind of accent—African maybe.
A leather bag with large loop handles dropped near my feet.
“Fendi,” I said. I glanced again. “Fake.”
“Fill it.”
I understood. She wanted me to put Benjamin’s bones inside. I set the bag on the table, glancing back once as I donned a pair of latex gloves from a nearby box. I caught the last of the viper’s tail as it faded into the woman’s brown skin, completing a tattoo that spiraled around her right arm up to her neck. Several other tattoos adorned her shoulders, arms, and back, exposed by the white tank top she wore. Her cheekbones were high and her hair was wild.
I began to lift the bones one at a time and place them inside the imitation designer bag. “You left these inside the elementary school. So it would make the news and I would come.”
“I knew one of you would show.”
I smiled to myself. It seemed Etude had not yet been found.
“Where did you find them?” I asked as I went about my task. I saved the skull for last.
“Does it matter?” Her tone invited no argument.
“You’re mizzen,” I said.
“What makes you say that?” she challenged. “The tattoos? Or the color of my skin?”
“Neither. You’re using a gun.”
Seeing I had finished, she motioned with the barrel toward the back.
“Can I at least have something to wear?” I nodded to a glass-doored cabinet at the back, inside of which were stacks of folded green scrubs.
“Hurry,” she ordered.
I stepped barefoot across the cool floor and dressed as quickly as I could. The pair of scrubs I donned were too big, but they would have to do.
“I suppose shoes are out of the question,” I said.
She motioned toward the door with the barrel. “No time.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
“Move,” she ordered.
“Why not just shoot me?” I asked.
“Have you tried moving a dead body on your own?”
“Good point,” I said.
“Besides, they pay extra if I bring you in alive.”
“Must be in a hurry.” I started walking. “Can I at least know where we’re going?”
“You’ll see. Don’t forget the bag.”
I had deliberately left it. I lifted it by the handles and walked to the door, which led to a dark and silent office.
“Left,” she ordered from behind.
There was an emergency exit. A red sign warned that opening the door would sound an alarm. A battered sedan waited for us on the other side, probably stolen.
“Drive,” she ordered.
I pushed against the exit and the alarm beeped for several seconds before blaring in earnest. The car was open. The keys dangled from the ignition. I set Benjamin on the seat next to me while our kidnapper got in the back.
I paused. The interior of the car reeked of chemicals—like an over-treated pool. It burned my nostrils and irritated my lungs. I turned and saw stacks of white plastic bottles on the back seat. Each was labeled simply in monochrome lettering, as if they had come from an industrial supply company. I saw the word BROMINE repeated several times, along with screw-top cannisters labeled ANTIMONY POWDER.
“Take a left out of the parking lot.”
“Am I running red lights or not?” I asked as I started the engine.
“Just drive.”
As we drove from the morgue, she seemed to grow more agitated.
“You’re immortal, then?” she asked.
“It would seem so.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s not any different. I’m just like you. I eat. I sleep. I go to the bathroom.”
“No. I meant death.”
“I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person. As we previously established, I don’t die.”
“Take the next right.”
I complied and we joined a country road leading out of the small town.
“So there’s nothing?” She put her gun to the back of my head again. “If I shoot you now, what? You just wake up. Is that it?”
“If you shoot me, we’ll crash and one of us won’t wake up at all.”
I briefly considered doing just that. There were many trees along the side of the road.
“So it’s like sleep,” she said.
“No.” I hesitated. “Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“Does it matter?”
“I wanna know.”
I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. There was an odd look on her face. “Worried about death?” I asked.
“Most people are.”
“Only in the abstract.” I watched the road in silence. It was dark out, and the ancient car’s headlights did little to illuminate the road. “I re-experience my life,” I said finally. “Or parts of it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just what I said. It doesn’t start at the beginning. And it rarely makes it to the end.”
“A dream.”
“No,” I insisted. “Not a dream.” I paused. “A punishment.”
“Punishment?”
“I suspect someone wanted to make sure I had ample time to review my mistakes before sending me out to try again.”
“Don’t you tire of it?”
“No,” I said after a pause. “I quite like seeing everyone again.”
“I meant life.”
I studied her again in the mirror. She was looking away.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her. “Whatever they have—”
“Yes, I do,” she said softly, as if there were a great deal more I didn’t know.
We rode in silence for another ten miles before I was ordered to pull into a gravel lot. Our destination appeared to be some kind of park. I turned slowly, and the weak headlights shone across the simple bar gate to a groundskeeper’s shack. After a short run down a gravel slope, the car stopped beside a square storage shed. It was completely dark. Not a single exterior light shone. I suspect that wasn’t an accident.
“Get out. Leave the engine on.”
“It won’t take the police long to find us,” I suggested as I opened the door. “There were cameras.”
“That’s not gonna matter. Now move.”
I grabbed Benjamin and stepped out of the car. The cold gravel of the lot poked into my bare feet, and I shifted uncomfortably. There were no crickets there, I realized. No birds. Other than the occasional breeze, there was no sound at all.
“What an odd place.”
“Move.” She pushed me toward the shed with the barrel of the gun.
The weak yellow light from the headlights flickered slightly as the car idled, but they shone bright enough to reveal the small placard near the door: SERPENT MOUND PARK.
“Where are we?”
I stopped when I saw the marking at the top of the shed door. It explained why we were there, of all places. A minotaur’s head had been etched into the frame: the sign of the labyrinth. It was old and the paint around it was heavily scuffed, but it was unmistakable.
“Get ready to run,” she said, taking up a defensive position behind me. Whatever was about to come through the door, I was apparently the shield.
“Run?” I scowled. “You realize I’m not wearing any shoes.”
“You’ll think of something.”
There was a loud click, and the handle of the shed door turned slowly.
“You’re early,” came a voice from the dark. By its sound, I could tell that the man who owned it had his face covered and that he was standing in a large, hard-walled room and not the long utility shed that held the door.
He stepped from the dark into the feeble glow of the headlights and let the door close behind him. He was dressed in crisp, dark business attire. His face was covered in etched gold. It was creepy.
A warlock.
“That’s far enough,” my captor barked. “Where’s my brother?”
“You’re good,” he said. “I mean, they told me you were the best, but—”
“Where?” she demanded.
The young warlock opened his hands. “To be honest, I didn’t expect you’d actually pull it off. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been looking for her?”
“You wanted her alive, right? Well, she’s alive. Now, where is my brother, you piece of shit?”
“You misunderstand,” the warlock said calmly, strolling forward once again.
“No, you misunderstand.” She pointed the gun at the warlock and he stopped again. “My brother and I are twins.” I could hear her voice shaking next to my ear.
“Is that supposed to mean something?” the young man asked.
“You think I don’t know what happened? You think I didn’t feel it?”
It was then that I was aware there were two more warlocks behind us, one on each side. My captor turned, surprised, and for a moment, no one moved. The gun shook. And then she opened fire. Three loud shots rang in quick succession. The lead warlock turned slightly, as if being shot merely stung. I smelled brimstone then—potent, like a cross of rotten eggs and mineral ash. He tugged on the side of his white shirt and three twisted wrinkles were pulled taut. No holes.
“Tsk, tsk,” he said.
He produced a key from his vest pocket. I froze when I saw it. Although I recognized it immediately, I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was a Master key, an antique, with an ornate loop at the end of a long stock. Its teeth were not metal but variously sized lion’s teeth, stained yellow-brown. It was Beltran’s key—or rather it had been once upon a time.
“Where did you get that?” I demanded.
The lead warlock chuckled, and his companions did the same. Their masks were not gold but rather black acrylic, which made their heads seem like voids in the dark. One of them took me by the arm while the other grabbed my kidnapper. But she didn’t struggle. She didn’t run. In fact, she hugged the man, who stumbled back in surprise. Then she started laughing—louder, louder—as the snake uncoiled from around her arm and wrapped itself like a python around the warlock’s neck, both choking and binding him. He struggled against as the woman, who released another of her tattoos with a wave of her hand—a starburst behind her left shoulder erupted into the night like a flare and disappeared.
Then nothing.
I dropped and covered just before the blast ripped out of the car. It wasn’t very strong, as explosions go, but it was enough to shatter the windows and release burning antimony into the air. It was an obscure alchemical weapon only a mizzen would know, for it was a weapon to kill a mage, their ancient enemies. Unfortunately, despite its effectiveness in breaching magical defenses, Hessian Fire, as it was known, was also quite toxic to people, which meant there was no way my kidnapper would survive the caustic chemicals that billowed over the gravel lot. It seemed she intended to join her twin brother. I only survived by dropping and staying low.
The car burned in white fire. The second warlock, the one who had been grabbed by the snake, was prone and not breathing. Neither was the woman. The third warlock held onto me, but he was coughing violently, and I pulled free and bolted past the door and around the corner of the shed, where in my bare feet I immediately tripped over a fallen branch. Before I could rise, I saw a specter standing before me. It was Anya, still wearing the brown dress we buried her in. She looked down to the branch. I did as well. Then she was gone. I grabbed the heavy stick and tossed it into the trees, where it rolled down the brush-covered slope.
The warlock, wounded and coughing, had immediately given chase, but it was dark in the unlit park, especially with the half-moon hidden behind the trees, and his face was covered in a dark mask. Once outside the range of the headlights, it was difficult for him to see me hiding in the grass, and he instead took off after the sound of the branch rolling through the dark grove. He made so much noise himself, swatting branches or breaking them, that no one heard me creep, barefoot, back around to the front of the shed. The lead warlock had lifted his gold mask over his hair to catch his breath. He was frantically dragging the still body of his comrade toward the door, desperate to leave no trace. He was young, younger than I expected, and I imagined then that he had been given this assignment with a kind of promotion, and he was presently mucking it up.
It wasn’t until I had retrieved the bag from the ground that I made any sound. He turned. But I was already swinging it, and I knocked him hard across the face and chest. Without the protection of his mask, I broke his nose. I grabbed the key from his pocket as he fell back. He grabbed my leg as I fled, and I fell, and we both scrambled to our feet. I was closer to the door, but the heavy bag slowed me down, and I barely had time to turn the key in the lock before I was grabbed again from behind. The door opened, and we both fell forward. I thought that would be the end of it. He would fall onto me on the floor and I would be caught, but luck or magic was with me, and the ancient temple that held the door from which we exited had collapsed with the rest of The Masters’ regime. With its spells of protection gone, the bulk of it had been carried over the edge of a high cliff by an avalanche long ago. All that remained was some exposed stonework attached by mortar to the wall of a jagged crook. The door swung wide over a great empty expanse, and I grabbed a handle, then two, and held on, leaving the warlock nowhere to step. The weight of his own falling body was too much for his one-handed grasp, and it slipped free of me as he fell down the snow-swept cliff. As his scream faded, I reached out with a foot to grab the door frame and pull myself back.
Unfortunately, the black-masked warlock who had chased me, by far the largest of the three, returned. He appeared at the corner and stopped. I spun and inserted the key into the door again, turning it the other way. Warm air hit as the door opened upon the high-arched vestibule of the Kaaba in Mecca. I couldn’t see the famous black cube beyond the high, arched hall, but neither did I have time to look. I stepped through and tried to slam the door shut, but the warlock was right behind me. And he was stronger than I. The door was pushed back and I ran. All around, men bent in prayer rose in angry chant. Nor could I blame them. Not only was a nonbeliever running barefoot through the holiest place in the Muslim faith, my head uncovered, I was barely clothed. Hands grasped at my shoulders and ankles as I fled. But I was in front, which meant I could stay just ahead of the crowd’s reaction. My pursuer, on the other hand, had to contend with the angry mob I had awakened. Amid the noise, I heard the sounds of a spell being cast, but in the shadow of the great holy stone, it fell flat and I was free to continue my escape. I pulled my ankle from the hand of a prostrate Syrian and ran through a high arch, down the staircase that encircled the enormous structure, and out into the crowded square. Alarms blared as rising shouts warned me that the warlock, while harried, was fighting his way through the faithful after me.
Guards appeared in the open corridor ahead. I turned and threw Benjamin over a metal security fence before scaling it myself. It was not the first time my brief but tragic career as a circus tumbler had paid its costly dividend. My feet landed on hot asphalt, and I grimaced as I picked up the bag and took off again, leaving the heavy guards to slam their palms against the bars in frustration.
It was not my first time in Mecca. I had been there once before in the 1930s in the company of a scholar-spy named Hank Hunter, whose voice immediately rose in my head amid the foreign and yet distantly familiar sights and smells of the city.
“She’s the perfect spy,” I heard him tell Master Crowley, who only ever looked on me with a Devil’s bargain of disgust and desire.
“Hardly,” I whispered as I ran.
Heads and eyes turned as I passed. People shouted and pointed. One fellow tried to stop me and got my knee in his crotch instead. With the police now after me, there was little chance of hiding. Barefoot and dressed in green surgical scrubs, I would stand out wherever I went. And then there was the fact that the sunbaked concrete was painfully hot on my bare soles. But then, Mecca was one of the most important cities in the world, and the Kaaba one of the most important relics, which meant there was not one but two doors in its vicinity. The other was in the archaic Mosque of the Jinn, where, according to the Quran, a group of jinn had once gathered to hear the Holy Recitation, after which they pledged their allegiance to the Prophet.
Of course, everything I remembered about Mecca was almost a century old, and when I emerged from the outer colonnade of the Masjid al-Haram, I was greeted not by throngs of tent-pole market stalls, which occupied my memory, but the wide hotel towers of a major 21st-century metropolis, packed one against the next. Nor were all of those rooms enough. Construction cranes arced across the sky in every direction, sometimes straddling their half-finished steel lattices in triplicate.
“Shit.”
A commotion behind me propelled me forward. A white-robed man on a moped passed on the street, and I struck him down with another swing of the heavy, stone-filled bag. Passersby were too shocked to stop me, which gave me just enough time to straddle the slim motorized bike and take off between the traffic-stalled cars. I turned my head once to see several dark-uniformed policemen helping the prone man to his feet and speaking into their hand radios. The Saudis took their stewardship of the holy city very seriously. It wouldn’t be long before I was surrounded.
The Mosque of the Jinn was to the north, I remembered, and I banked left at a stoplight amid the honking and screeching of cars. The moped’s little engine sputtered like an exhausted bee as I ran over the curb and onto the sidewalk, dodging more stopped traffic. As I emerged from under an overpass, pedestrians jumping out of my way in fright, I caught sight of a drone, high in the air. I was being tracked. Already sirens approached in the distance.
I slammed on the brake. In my distraction, I had passed my destination. So choked and modern was the street around me, with high-rise hotels in every direction, that I failed to notice the little mosque, whose ancient structure was now covered in a modern concrete exterior. After struggling for a moment to turn the half-fallen moped, I gave up and ran in bare feet, pushing through the men and occasional dark-robed woman to hop a turnstile and enter the ancient site, where a state guard waited inside the vestibule. We faced each other under a glass ceiling. The sandy-stone walls of the tiny, ancient mosque it protected, one of the oldest in the city, was just behind the guard, who had a gun. He drew it and shouted at me in Arabic.
I raised my hands calmly, taking the moment to catch my breath.
“As-salamu alaykum,” I said, repeating the simple Arabic greeting I had learned.
I looked at the gun in his hand—a tool of violence, not of peace.
He looked at it as well.
“Wa ‘a laykumu s-salam,” he said softly in response, lowering the weapon.
He wasn’t letting me go. In fact, he reached immediately for his radio. He knew there was only one exit from the mosque, and he saw no reason to shoot me, especially at its doorstep. He simply had to make sure I couldn’t leave.
It was quiet inside and smelled of centuries. Despite that I had not the time, I prostrated myself and gave thanks to the Creator and asked forgiveness for the intrusion. I have never been a religious woman, but in the circumstances, it seemed the proper thing to do.
My destination, a low and heavy wood door, sat under a block-stone arch in the side wall. Visual representations being forbidden, the head of the bull was absent from the apex of the door frame. In its place was a stylized, interlocking design reminiscent of a labyrinth. I stood and walked to it. I thought for sure I had enough time to do something as simple as open and close a door. But I was wrong. Somehow, my pursuer had found me ahead of the authorities. The state guard who, in letting me pass, had given me one of the simplest and greatest courtesies of my life now screamed in agony as something horrible was done to him. The tall, dark-suited warlock stepped into the small sacred space, still wearing his faceless black acrylic mask.
“This is holy ground,” I said.
Not that he cared.
I bolted to the door, almost forgetting Benjamin in my haste. I leaned back to grab the imitation Fendi, which now sported a broken strap, and made it to the squat door under the arch just in time to turn the key and be shot from behind with the guard’s gun, which the warlock had taken. I stumbled forward and collapsed on damp dirt. The air was cool. I was in a small outdoor fish market, or so my nose told me. But luck was again with me. I was in Siberia. I could tell instantly, not just from the cracked and faded signs in my native language, but from the people—their faces, their dress.
The warlock strode forward—right into a slammed-closed door.
A wrinkled old woman, a shamaness, had shut it. She looked down at me, both quizzical and serene.
I collapsed and felt the damp earth of my homeland.
“You are not well,” she said in Russian.
“I’m going to die,” I said in faint breath. “Please listen carefully . . .”