The Beast That Was Max (33 page)

"Mrs. Chan," Max called out. Her name burned in his mind almost as brightly as the twins', though she was not a lover. One of the healers brought in to help him, she was also the latest in a long line of teachers whose wisdom and talents substituted for the mother he had never known.

The woman glanced in his direction and nodded curtly, then turned on Mr. Johnson, who was holding a handheld metal detector and trying to sweep it over her body. Mrs. Chan whipped the cane around in a circle, striking Mr. Johnson's wrist sharply. The detector flew out of his hands, and he gave out a yelp, seizing his wrist and taking a step back. One of the dark-suited men stepped forward, reaching for the cane. She slid her grip down to the end and swung the cane, curved handle first, down on the man's face. He staggered sideways, both hands covering his bleeding nose. A third man danced forward, arms, head, and torso moving snakelike from side to side. Mrs. Chan feinted a thrust to the solar plexus. The man froze, ready to embrace and trap the strike. Mrs. Chan's front foot glided toward her opponent. She dipped, impossibly quick and agile, and hooked the cane handle around the man's foot. With a snap of her body, she pulled the cane and sent the man flipping backward. He landed on his shoulders with a surprised grunt, recovered quickly with a kick-up, but assumed a low, and unmoving, guarded stance.

Two other men pulled guns. More agents crowded the outer door, coming from the hallway. Racks of electronic equipment in the alcove shook from the sudden action. Mr. Tung called out in a sharp voice. Everyone froze except for Mrs. Chan, who resumed a normal grip on the cane and brushed her silk pants and windbreaker as if a dust devil had just passed over her. Mr. Tung bowed and spoke softly. Mrs. Chan replied curtly, sparing him a brief, glowering look. Mr. Tung bowed once again and waved her into the loft.

Mrs. Chan walked briskly past the others. The Navajos, without breaking the rhythm of their chanting, watched her go by with bemused expressions. Dex gathered his crystals and moved hastily out of her way, while the mambo hooted and called out, "Make way, bad spirit, here comes your master." The mambo waved her cane in mocking imitation of Mrs. Chan's fighting style, thrusting to a finger's breadth away from the elderly woman's arm as she walked by.

Mrs. Chan ignored the antics of the mambo's loa and stopped beside Max. Shaking his hand, she smiled and said, "Good afternoon, my friend. Not feeling well, I hear." She released Max, slowly ran the palm of her hand a few inches over the length of his body. "Have you been practicing your chi kung exercises?" she asked, the smile fading from her face. Her eyes narrowed, her hand trembled, and shadows seemed to gather in the folds of her flesh.

"Every day, master," Max replied. "Until this."

Mrs. Chan reached under the prayer rug and pressed her palm against his belly. "So. Something blocks the chi. Thought? Spirit? Body?"

Warmth blossomed below Max's belly button. His stomach settled, and a sense of well-being surged through him. Feeling suddenly stronger, he started to get up.

"Body," Mrs. Chan said, pushing him back into the sofa. "My friend, you have a most interesting problem. One I cannot help you with. But do not worry, it is not serious. It will pass on its own, and quite soon. My congratulations."

Alioune and Kueur closed in around Max. The Navajos stopped chanting, and the other shamans and healers scattered throughout the loft broke through the veneer of their aloofness and stared at Mrs. Chan.

"What is it?" Max asked.

"You are pregnant."

The silence was a stone no one seemed strong enough to break. Max opened his mouth, closed it. A smile flickered through his surprise as it occurred to him that Mrs. Chan was joking. But her appraising stare sobered him, letting him feel truth spread through him and numb any conscious reaction. He waited for what was coming next.

"Good luck, my friend," Mrs. Chan said, squeezing his hand as she prepared to leave. "When this is over, you must be certain to return to your chi kung practice."

Max bolted to his feet. Mrs. Chan withdrew, flowing backward like an exhausted wave from the beach. The prayer rug slid down his body and fell to the floor. The twins grabbed hold of his arms, pressed themselves against him.

"Tonton!" Alioune shouted, trying to hold him back. "Be careful!" Kueur screamed, pushing him in a circle so he would find himself back at the couch.

He shrugged, and they fell away. Thoughts sparkled like a thousand stars scattered across the darkness of his mind, remote, unattainable. Emotions rumbled through him, raw and intoxicating. The twins, his work as an assassin, his past of rape and torture and killing, the unfolding mystery of his future, spread before him like an endless savannah. He felt the power of creation coursing through his veins, felt a bond to everything that lived. He was a hunter surveying his territory, a god looking over what his hand had made. The world belonged to him for a bright, burning moment, and nothing seemed impossible.

Joy made Max cry out. As if through a fog, he saw Mrs. Chan waving her hands in his face, the oknirabata and the sadhu and the mambo and all the rest staring at him, mouths shaping chants and spells and curses. In the distance, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Tung stared up from their handheld electronics, faces sundered by expressions of astonishment. A moment later, the golden brown visages of Kueur and Alioune, skin smooth as polished wood, eyes deep as pools in the depths of undiscovered caverns, fell across his sight like a curtain.

Tears flowed, forging cold tracks across his cheeks. Terror shattered the foundations of his power. He collapsed into their arms, and the twins eased him back onto the couch. It was all too vast, he realized. Too much to hold, to own, to bear. Even the spark he carried that was his own life was too heavy a responsibility. So much more dire, then, was the bud of life Mrs. Chan had identified in him. How could he bring another life into the world where everything was his to destroy?

Max cried out again. The Beast, cowed by the intensity of his visions and the glow of life within him, keened in mourning.

Thoughts extinguished. Emotion ran dry. Max surrendered with relief to the blackness closing around him.

~*~

"He's only fainted," the mambo said, and only stopped slapping Max's face when he opened his eyes. She picked up the end of the prayer rug and began chewing at loose threads.

"Someone should feed the loa," said the youngest of the Navajo shamans standing behind the crowd huddled around the couch.

Max grunted, feeling as if he had just woken from one nightmare only to stumble into another. Faces bobbed around him like multicolored buoys warning of secret tides and underwater reefs. His stomach lurched, and the room seemed to spin around his head. He clutched at the edge of the couch while Mrs. Chan pulled the prayer rug back over his naked body.

"I'll get something for the god," Kueur said. She patted Max's hand but avoided eye contact. She stood and left the immediate circle around him, with Alioune following wordlessly in her wake. Distracted healers filled in their places.

Mrs. Chan took up Max's hand. His fingers tingled. A river of warmth traveled up his arm and through his torso, settling his stomach and pooling in his belly. He rubbed the mound of flesh, looked up at Mrs. Chan.

"Is it true?" he asked, horrified.

"Do not worry, my friend," she said. "The young ladies felt further involvement by Western medical professionals might lead to personal complications for you. I have assured them that, with the assistance of some of these good people, we can deliver your child. Everything is quite natural, I assure you. Except, of course, for you."

"It's true," said Max, shaking his head.

"I have had some experience in the delivery of little ones, although," she said, with a wink and a pass of the hand over his crotch, "the mechanics were not the same." She laughed at his expression. "My friend, you will survive to make children in the more usual fashion, perhaps with your two lovely companions?"

"How could this happen?" Max asked. "Why?"

"We might be able to answer those questions," Mr. Johnson said, waving at Max from the background. At his side, Mr. Tung nodded his head. "Private hospital, a medical research team with the latest technology—"

"Thank you," Max said, "but I'm not ready to sell myself to you."

"A most interesting condition," the sadhu said, thrusting his head to the forefront of the group. "Have you engaged in any unusual activities lately?"

"Your dreams, have they spoken to you?" the oknirabata asked.

"Been fucking spirits?" added the oldest Navajo shaman, an emaciated sliver of flesh and bone.

"I will see you in a few days, a week at the most," Mrs. Chan said. "You will know when the baby is ready to come out."

"So soon?"

"Better nine days than nine months," the twins' own healer, a Moroccan shuwwafat in robes and a veil, muttered as she got up. "Allah is always merciful to men. It must be that he knows men are not as strong as women."

"And, my friend, I would meditate a great deal if I were you," Mrs. Chan added, "to prepare for the pain."

Mrs. Chan bowed to Max, presenting a fist in hand, then picked up her cane and, after a word with the mambo and a few others, left. Her departure signaled an end to the search for spirits for many in the loft. The Navajo shamans destroyed their sand painting; Dex gathered his crystals; others picked up bones, feathers, grimoires, and other paraphernalia, picked through the mound of coats, jackets, and hats piled by the alcove, and drifted past the suited men on their way out.

Kueur stepped out of the pantry at the back of the kitchen, opposite the walk-in freezer, and studied the departing shamans. Alioune, holding a woven basket, straightened at the dining counter and held her head high, as if she were sniffing a scent in the air. The twins watched the group like a hunting pair of lions paring down a herd to the most vulnerable prey. Separating companions and friends from casual acquaintances, men and women carrying true power from those who only wore it.

The Beast's ghost growled. Max tasted blood in his mouth and realized he had bitten his lip in a moment of excitement.

"Dex?" Alioune called out.

Kueur dumped the armload of fruits, cheese, bread, and pastries she was carrying into Alioune's basket and rushed to the New Age healer's side. "We were wondering if you could show us your crystals," Kueur said with a touch of breathlessness.

Alioune placed the basket among the branches of the ficus tree in a planter at the center of the loft, between the couch and the scenic window overlooking the Hudson. She guided the mambo toward the tree, and as soon as the woman began eating, Alioune glided back to take Dex's other arm. Together, they brought Dex to the kitchen counter, where they leaned against him, casually brushing legs and shoulders and breasts against him as he took out his jewels, held them up to the light, and droned on about their properties and use with the vigor of a faithless priest performing the ritual of transforming a wafer into the host of his savior. His interest, like his gaze, was drawn to the twins themselves.

Max found himself drawn into their game of seduction. He shuddered at the scratching of long nails at the back of Dex's neck, swayed in rhythm to the dance of slender fingers across Dex's chest, twitched in response to the tweaking and pinching of nipples. Dex fumbled a crystal, let it fall. It bounced on the floor, until Alioune stomped on it with the heel of her short, black boot. The sound of crystal breaking and crunching underfoot carried through the loft, momentarily distracting the mambo from her gorging and the suited men in the alcove from the growing latticework of instrumentation. The tail end of the departing train of shamans glanced at the twins. Unlike Max, they did not linger to watch the show.

Alioune smiled at Dex's shock. He started to hunch down to pick up the pieces, but Kueur grabbed his ponytail and pulled him back up while Alioune pressed against him and wrapped a leg around his thigh. Stones clattered onto the floor. Dex forgot to close his mouth, and Alioune kissed him, long and hard, the muscles of her neck and jaw working as she probed him with her tongue. Max's mouth watered with the taste of her, his nose filled with the sweet and musky scents of her body, his body warmed in the spots she leaned against on Dex with sympathetic heat from the undulating curves of her body.

Alioune broke the kiss, pulled back while keeping her leg around his thigh. Dex chased her, eyes half closed, sweat giving his face a sheen. Kueur palmed his chin and drew him back, took his ear into her mouth, ran her other hand down the front of his shirt. His eyes widened. Suddenly, he cried out. Blood streamed down his neck. Kueur giggled as she drew away, lips and teeth bloody. Alioune gave him a sharp knee blow to the groin, and Dex doubled over, hand over his ear.

Kueur unzipped the front of Dex's pants, reached in, and pulled out his balls. Dex moaned, started to go down on one knee, but rose back up as Kueur's grip did not follow him down. He tried to bat away her arm, but his blows fell without effect and became weaker, like a fly slowly succumbing to a spider's venom. Alioune rubbed her body against his as she went onto her knees in front of him. Licking skin left uncovered by Kueur's hand, she picked up Dex's fallen stones with one hand, shattered pieces with the other. Like a snake on a tree she crawled back up his body, shook the broken fragments of gem from her palm into Kueur's hand. Kueur kissed him on the eyes, nose, cheek. Then she slapped him, and ground her hand against his face. Dex's head rocked to the side. He swayed away from her, but she held him close by his penis. Alioune grabbed his hair and drove his face into Kueur's shard-covered hand. He sobbed as his blood mingled with Kueur's.