My Soul to Take (24 page)

Fana did not want to see Michel hurt his friend. She turned away.

“For me, I put my friend in a coma when he teased me,” she said. “Then, a storm. A hurricane. People I’d never met …”

Cold rain fell on them. Michel’s warm breath huffed against her cheek as he instinctively pulled her closer, giving her a canopy against the rain. Gently, he steered her back to the bridge.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But others before that, no? All when you were three. You must have been confused, to have been so young. I’d had an accident with a nanny before Nino, but that was different. I didn’t really understand. After Nino, I had an appetite.” The wind whispered the last word,
appetite
. “Papa told me my appetite would make me strong. So he fed me—and it did.”

Fana did not remember having an appetite, but maybe that was why she’d shut down for so many years as a child, fleeing to her head. Maybe Khaldun had joined her thought planes to help her forget the appetite the Shadows had shown her. But why hadn’t Khaldun ever told her about Michel? Why hadn’t he helped Michel, too?

They had reached the center of the bridge again. The city now looked more a life-size painting, everything frozen, the colors brightened. Instead of storm clouds, the sky was awash in strokes of light like Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
. The two boys were leaning over the balcony, frozen in solidarity as they waved their fists at the truck. Michel was a painter, she realized.

“No further outbreaks,” he said, “until you come.”

“And after I come?”

“I have conditions too,” he said, ignoring her question.

Fana waited. He had waited a year, so she could be patient with his conditions.

“Stop defiling the Blood,” he said. “No more concert spectacles.”

“Until I come.”

“Yes,” he said, reluctant. “Until you come. And …”

He didn’t have to say Johnny’s name. His voice told her.

“Were you watching me?” Fana said.

“I smell him on you.”

The waters below them rippled as if from a school of feeding fish: Michel’s anger.

Fana wrestled with embarrassment. “A goodbye kiss,” she said. “You’ve had others.”

“When you come, there won’t be others,” he said. “How could there be?”

“I promise you, Michel—no one will touch me.” In the physical world, her voice would have been shaking with unmistakable resolve.

The wind sighed, far from satisfied, and the waters’ rippling spread to a bigger ring. Nothing would be gained by talk of touching. Still, she pleased him every time she spoke his name. Naming him was a small enough courtesy.

“I shouldn’t have kissed him, Michel,” Fana said, and the waters calmed.

A confession
could
sound like an apology. Kissing Johnny had felt like a mistake from the moment their lips touched—because it had been so unfair to Johnny. Unfair to her.

“I don’t want to think about him when I’m with you,” she said. “If that’s all right.”

“That would make me happiest, Fana. If you don’t think about him, I’ll forget him too.” He spoke gently enough, but the threat hung in his words.

The woods reappeared on the other end of the bridge. He was inviting her to return to her own thoughtstreams. Light glowed from the kitchen window, where the curtain had been pulled back. Someone inside was watching her.

“You can show yourself now,” Fana said.

And so he was there—standing beside her on the bridge, three inches taller, his smooth hands folded across the railing as he stared down into the calm waters. She had made herself forget how handsome he was, too. His honey-colored face was hairless, his lips faintly pink, dark eyelashes as full as a child’s. Shiny black ringlets of loose, springy hair cradled his ears. The sight of him also brought scents: clove cigarettes and mango.

His face pricked her, hard. He was Charlie.

Despite everything, he still seemed to be the persona he had created for her to love when she had run away from the woods: a brave teenage mortal risking his life on the Underground Railroad. Her beloved phantom had been molded in Johnny’s image, but she
had loved Michel’s face first. Michel had known whom she wanted before she did, fooling her the way her father had fooled her mother. History repeats, she remembered.

Fana glanced at him sidelong, careful to move no closer. “Hello, Michel.”

“Hello, Fana.” His eyes swallowed her before they skipped back to the water. “I’m sorry I was so …
terrible
… to you. To your family. I became the creature Nino saw when he threw the lamp at me. I will not be that creature again. Not with you.”

Michel’s voice was so weighted with shame that the wind could barely lift it.

His idealized painting of Tuscany faded in the rising mist. A joyless castle appeared before them on a mountaintop, the sole structure visible in the fog. She had dreamed of it once.

“Let Phoenix go, Michel,” Fana said.

“I never sent for her,” he said. “A network is a living thing, with a mind of its own.”

“Then don’t interfere when we find her,” she said. “I won’t come to you until Phoenix, her husband, and her son are free.”

“She’ll be free,” he said. “As long as you don’t use her to defile the Blood.”

“Until I come,” she clarified.

“Yes,” he said. “Until you come.”

“And after?”

Michel stared toward the waiting castle hidden in rising river mist.

“We begin,” he said.

A
lthough the late-afternoon sun is still bright above them, the zoo is unusually empty for a Sunday. Jessica is tired, but Kira won’t rest until she sees the white Bengal tiger. The tigers will be their last stop, Jessica decides. Then she’ll be ready to go home.

It is daylight, but Kira is amusing herself by reciting her nighttime prayer in singsong: “Now I lay me down to sleep …”

The day is so bright that Jessica’s vision is clouded, forcing her to blink to see more than a few yards in any direction. All the animals must be hiding from the sun, because the grassy hills, ponds, and trees beyond the fenced-in ditches are empty.

Is the zoo even open? How did they get in?

Bea is walking ahead of her, never far out of sight. Jessica reaches out to grab the sleeve of Bea’s lilac batik blouse, her favorite Sunday-outing clothes, to slow her down. When Bea turns around, her face is nearly washed out in the brightness. “Lord, I’d forgotten about this sun,” Bea says. “Kira and I shouldn’t be out here today, Jessica.”

Bea looks younger every time Jessica sees her. The wrinkles that lined her face have smoothed out, and her arms’ muscles are springy again.
This
face is the one Jessica remembers from her parent-teacher meetings and Sunday-school programs and Girl Scout campouts.

Jessica is holding Kira’s hand, all warm stickiness from Kira’s ice-cream cone. Kira grins at her with a wide smile, showing off her missing bottom tooth that fell out last night. Her tongue is coated with light brown chocolate. Jessica hoards the details.

“Mommy, where’s the tiger?” Kira says.

“We’re almost there. Pinky swear.” Jessica hooks their free pinkies
together, but Kira unhooks herself. She doesn’t like childish gestures in public. She also doesn’t like Jessica holding her hand, but that’s the rule: Kira always has to walk right beside her.

Loose strands of Kira’s hair are escaping their barrettes, so Jessica lowers herself to one knee to smooth out her daughter’s soft curls, clipping her two pigtails back into place. Jessica wipes a dab of dried ice cream from the corner of Kira’s mouth.

Kira’s brown eyes, so much like David’s, take on an adult aspect. “You shouldn’t look at me so much, Mommy,” Kira says. “You should look where you’re going.”

“I know, baby,” Jessica says.

Bea sighs, impatient. “Well, I don’t care if it’s a tiger, a bear, or a flying dragon, I need to head back,” Bea says, fanning herself. “You two go on.”

Jessica searches the zoo’s empty pedestrian walkways for David, but he’s nowhere in sight. She is sure that David was with them, but she can’t remember where he went.

Jessica holds tightly to Kira’s hand. “Mom, let’s not separate now. We’ll get lost.”

Bea laughs, smoothing Jessica’s hair away from her forehead the way Jessica fixed Kira’s. “Pumpkin, you can’t get lost when you always know where you’re going.” Her brown eyes are flecked green near her pupils, a detail Jessica had nearly forgotten. How can she remember it all?

The growling sky steals Jessica’s gaze. Not far from them, the bright light is cleaved by a bank of heavy, dark clouds. In Miami, summer storms appear from nowhere.

“Whatever you need here, better hurry,” Bea says. She covers her head with the loose pages of the
Miami Sun-News
, which flap in the cooling breeze, hiding her face. “You hear me? Better keep that girl out of the storm.”

“She wants to see the tiger, Mom!” Jessica calls after her, but Bea is already hurrying away. Bea takes the path that forks right, but a sign reading
BENGAL TIGERS
steers Jessica left. Jessica fights tears as she watches her mother go.

But at least she is still holding her child’s soft, warm hand.

“Come on, sweetie,” Jessica says. “Let’s hurry, before it rains.”

They run together, giggling like playmates. Breathlessly, Kira sings “I Am the Hare that Stays in the Road,” a children’s song from Botswana. The song isn’t in English, but Jessica understands her daughter’s words. Where did Kira learn it? Where did
she
? Neither of them has ever been to Africa.

The shaded tiger enclosure ahead is so big that Jessica forgets that it’s a part of the zoo; she is hypnotized by the temple set against the shade of palm trees. The temple is Khmer architecture, modeled after Cambodia’s famed Hindu temple Angkor Wat. Like a holy place.

But none of the tigers is in sight.

The singing stops. Jessica feels her daughter’s pace slowing beside her.

“Don’t worry, baby,” Jessica says. “The tigers will be way over there, and we’re way over here. They can’t hurt us.”

“Where’s the white one?”

“Maybe it’s hiding,” Jessica says. “That’s my favorite, too. One-of-a-kind, like you.”

Her daughter giggles again, but she still sounds nervous, pulling closer to Jessica.

More thunder above them. The sky is growing darker. Trees sway, leaves and fronds hissing and rustling overhead. Jessica hadn’t realized that there were so many trees around her, a jungle. The path behind them is wrapped in shadows.

Jessica studies the temple’s intricate carvings, waiting for a tiger to emerge. Nothing.

She looks for her watch, but her wrist is bare. What time is it?

Jessica sighs. “Sweetie, I don’t think we’ll see the tiger today.”

The growl that comes from behind her, low to the ground, turns Jessica’s skin to ice.

Jessica whirls around to see the snowy striped tiger, massive sinews gliding beneath white fur, as it winds toward them at an angle ten yards back, herding them. The tiger’s paws are heavy, bigger than baseball mitts.

Jessica looks for zookeepers, for anyone with a gun, but she and her daughter are alone.

Tigers give chase
, she reminds herself between the violent knocks of her heart. She clutches her daughter’s hand tightly enough to crush her bones. “Stand still,” she whispers.

The tiger’s attention snaps to them with alert, cool blue eyes. A hunter’s eyes. The tiger’s massive jaw falls open; impossibly sharp, yellowed teeth. The tiger’s eyes stare through to Jessica’s soul, and he issues a sound midway between a growl and a roar, close enough for her to smell the beast’s rancid breath.

Our Father who art in Heaven … hallowed be Thy name …

Armed with nothing but prayers, Jessica lifts her daughter into her arms. A tiny, terrified heart patterns against her bosom. But it isn’t Kira! Her daughter’s face is smaller and rounder with baby fat than before, familiar features mismatched. All her tiny teeth are intact. Her hair is wound in thick dreadlocks.

“I’m scared, Mommy,” Fana whispers, clinging tightly.

I know you’re scared, baby. It’s hard for you to say it, but I know. I’m scared too
.

Jessica won’t let Fana feel her body’s tremors or see the fear eating her heart. She will be strong for Fana, just like when she stole her back from the Shadows.

“Mommy’s here, Fana,” Jessica says. “Mommy’s here.”

The tiger springs just as the clouds open, drenching them with rain.

Jessica sat up with a strangled cry just short of a scream. She curled herself into a ball, expecting to feel the tiger’s hot breath before his teeth ripped at her neck.

“It’s okay,” a man’s voice said. “You were dreaming.”

Jessica looked up and saw him standing over her with her drinking glass, his fingertips damp from the water droplets he’d sprinkled to her forehead. It was hard to see him in the room’s light, in the spinning walls.

“David?” Jessica wiped her forehead with her forearm. Still no watch. “What time …?”

“There’s no David here,” the man said. “It’s just me.”

Jessica sat up so quickly that she bumped her knee against her
table, and the jittering pain snapped her back into focus.
Dawit
, not David, she corrected herself. But the man above her wasn’t Dawit. He was much younger, with a thin mustache, a small cross dangling from his ear. His golden cross winked in the room’s light.

Johnny Wright.

At any other time, Jessica would have been pissed that Johnny had come into her room without an invitation, but she was so grateful that she wanted to hug him. She’d never had a bad trip on sticks.
She
was supposed to control her dream!

Jessica held in a deep breath of air. Real air. From the real world.
Thank you, God
.

“There was a … tiger,” Jessica gasped, trying to explain what she’d seen.

Johnny Wright nodded. The wretchedness on his face told her he already knew all about the tiger. His voice was hollowed out. “Fana …”

Jessica covered herself, realizing that she wasn’t wearing a bra beneath her oversized T-shirt. She wouldn’t want to see herself in a mirror. “Give me a few minutes,” she told Johnny Wright, her voice still hoarse from dreaming. “We can’t talk here.”