Green: The Beginning and the End Page 18

  The truth came down to a man named Thomas Hunter and what remained of him: one vial of his blood.

  He had to find the truth about himself, but having met Janae de Raison, he knew that her truth was a part of his truth. She was his soul mate. And he knew he would follow her to hell and back. Which is exactly what he was doing, lying on this gurney: following her to hell.

  And hopefully back.

  The murmur of voices interrupted Billy’s reverie. “It doesn’t take that much . . .” The voice sounded as if it came from the edge of a distant canyon.

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything about how this will work.”

  Then Billy knew. The sting on his arm wasn’t Janae. Her mother, Monique, was injecting his arm with a new needle. They were doing it.

  Janae, dear Janae . . . your gamble has paid off. At this very moment they were shooting his arm with Thomas’s blood.

  “Pulse rising!”

  Of course, his pulse was rising.

  And what if you wake up, Billy? What if you’re not dreaming when the blood hits your blood? What if Janae goes but you don’t?

  He began to panic.

  “Pulse 158 and rising . . .”

  Billy jumped off a dark cliff and thought about black bats chasing him through darkness. Down, down. Deeper, still deeper, into the swirling blackness below.

  The darkness suffocated him. Swallowed him with pain. He cried out and he knew that they could hear him.

  KARA HUNTER instinctively jerked her hands to her ears when the scream came from Billy. His back arched. Like Janae, his body had begun to bruise as the capillaries near the skin hemorrhaged, ravaged by the Raison Strain B. Their deterioration hadn’t progressed as quickly as Kara feared, but they were now both dying at a breakneck pace.

  Billy dropped back down on the gurney and went silent except for the ragged sound of his heavy breathing.

  “Pulse 168,” Monique said calmly. They’d already injected a half cc of Thomas’s blood into Janae’s vein, and although she, too, was panting, she hadn’t reacted as violently.

  “Dear God, it’s working,” Kara said. “He’s . . .”

  Monique jerked the needle out and did not blot the insertion point with a gauze pad, as she had for her own daughter. Blood oozed from the tiny wound.

  “It’s too early to tell,” she said.

  “No, I mean he’s there.” Kara’s voice cracked and she continued in a whisper. “Billy’s in Thomas’s world!”

  “We can’t possibly know that,” Monique shot back.

  “He’s there! Look at him.”

  Billy had turned as white as the walls, mouth stretched open, neck veins protruding like ropes. His eyes were wide, staring at the ceiling, but Kara knew better. Billy wasn’t seeing the ceiling.

  He was seeing either himself or someone like himself in another world.

  AN ORANGE GLOW grew in the darkness, and Billy snapped his mouth shut. Held his breath.

  But he was breathing still, staring at a stone wall with two black candles blazing on either side of a crude, black-veined mirror. He . . .

  This was it? He’d made it?

  An image of a hollow man, dead perhaps, stared at him from the mirror. He spun around to see who was standing behind him.

  No one.

  He stood alone in a room, its walls hewn from stone lit by two large torches. Ancient books lined a case along one wall, overlooking an altar that was stained by the blood of both man and beast. It was an ark of covenants, guarded on both ends by the winged serpent, Teeleh.

  Billy knew all of this because he was in his own library.

  To his left stood his desk, carved from a single stump taken from the Black Forest. Marsuuv, the Shataiki queen who’d caged him, had allowed him to take the tree.

  This he knew as well, as if it were his own history. But that was impossible because he also knew that he was Billy Rediger, from Colorado, the United States.

  You’re both. Billy and Ba’al.

  Ba’al. I am Ba’al. He relished the name.

  Then his mind flooded with the full truth, and he had to reach out and steady himself on the desk chair to stay upright.

  He knew who he was, what he’d done here in this world. Why he was who he was. “I am yours,” Ba’al whispered—Billy, who was in Ba’al’s body, whispered.

  “My queen, Marsuuv, I am your only lover, and I will die to prove my worth.” Ba’al’s voice was scratchy and thin, barely more than a whisper, but here in the subterranean library, it vibrated like the hiss of a snake. Billy’s mind blossomed with the nature of the Shataiki queens. Teeleh and his queens longed to be loved, as Elyon was loved. They were incapable of sexuality but commanded absolute loyalty and servitude. To be the lover of a queen meant throwing your life at his feet.

  Billy turned to face the room. Two books sat on the desk. Books of History. These were a fraction of all the volumes that told the stories of history, a recording of all that had ever happened in human history. These two were filled with facts already. They didn’t have the power of a blank book, which could be used to create history, but the sight of them eased his fear.

  He had come home. This, more than Colorado or Bangkok or anywhere in the other reality, was home. It was exhilaration, not fear, that he felt. After so many years wondering who he was and why his battle with evil was so monumental, he finally knew. He hadn’t just created evil, he was possessed by it. The only time he’d really embraced redemption had been in a dream. He’d never fully pushed evil from his heart. Not like Darcy and Johnny had.

  Another book lay open on its spine next to an ink jar and quill. Ba’al’s blood book, another term for journal.

  He stepped up to the desk and reached for the blood book. Then, for the first time since awakening in Ba’al’s library, he saw the flesh that encased his wrist and fingers. He stared at the flaking, cracking skin, and his first thought was that he’d been consumed by a severe case of scabies.

  But the thought was immediately displaced by Ba’al’s knowledge. This was the scabbing condition caused by the Shataiki, a badge of honor to be worn by all who refused to drown in the albinos’ red water.

  Billy turned to the mirror, pulled off his hood, and stared at himself. His cheekbones were pronounced beneath his gaunt, white face. Gray eyes, like clay dimes. White morst paste coated long dreadlocks. The image was at once terrifying and beautiful.

  He reached up and touched his cheeks, but the sensation in his fingertips was deadened by the scabbing disease.

  This is me, Billy. Ba’al. He pulled his robe aside and looked at his chest. And I still have the blood of my priests on my flesh.

  The memory of Marsuuv’s power flowing through his tall, thin frame as he stood over the son’s corpse flooded him now, and he trembled with pleasure. He was greater than anyone could possibly imagine, in either world.

  Then again, he’d seen the power of the light in both worlds. Thinking of it now, fear crept back into his bowels. A light so bright that no wraith from hell could stand in its presence without screaming in pain.

  You are weak . . .

  The thought was Ba’al’s, not Billy’s, and it was laced with such hatred that Billy froze. He realized then that he wasn’t wholly Ba’al or Billy now, but a strange breed of both.

  A half-breed.

  But he had been a half-breed before, in the worst of ways.

  Ba’al impulsively walked to the desk, picked up a knife, cut his wrist, and let his blood dribble into a bowl. “Rid me of this weak parasite, my lover, Marsuuv. Cleanse me and make me whole.”

  Billy blinked at the audacity of the wraith called Ba’al. Didn’t they share the same history? Weren’t they of the same blood?

  “I’m you, you fool!” He squeezed his wrist and wrapped a strip of cloth around the cut to stem the flow of blood.

  Billy stared at the blood book on the desk. Here, in this one secret volume, Ba’al had collected all that he knew about the world. He lifted the b
ook and slowly turned the pages, which contained drawings and explanations of everything from the Roush to the Shataiki, excerpts from other scribes pasted in, memories from the time before . . . all here, carefully pieced together.

  And who better to write of this world’s deepest, darkest secrets than Ba’al? Because Ba’al had once been Forest Guard. A follower of Elyon.

  The thought nauseated Billy.

  “Hello, my love.”

  Desire bit deeply into his mind at the sound of the soft voice behind him. He turned around and looked at the priestess who’d entered. This was Jezreal. His lover, as humans loved.

  “Haven’t I told you not to disturb me in my sanctuary?” Ba’al spat.

  “Yes.” Jezreal moved forward, smiling. Her ruby fingernails toyed with a golden cord that hung from her long gown’s plunging neckline. “And has that ever stopped you from ravaging me before?”

  The connection between them was far beyond anything so banal as the mere copulation of animals. She was the only human who understood Ba’al’s dependence on Marsuuv, who had first let him drink Shataiki blood. One drop, and any mere human was forever locked in the embrace of evil.

  Indeed, Shataiki reproduced through blood, Billy realized. They were asexual, neither male nor female. They wanted slaves, not partners.

  Jezreal, on the other hand, was human. Human urges raged behind those glassy gray eyes, and unless Billy was mistaken, Janae and Jezreal were one.

  She stepped up to him, close, so that he could smell her sick breath. Her tongue toyed with the tips of her front teeth. “Billy . . .” she breathed. “Or should I call you Billos?”

  He didn’t respond, in part because the knowledge that he had once been an elite fighter named Billos, sworn to protect Elyon’s forests from the Horde, was one of his most closely guarded secrets. He’d once bathed in Elyon’s lakes and sat around fires late at night, speaking of his greatness. He was a Judas who’d gone in search of the lost books—the books of blood—found them, used them, and then lost them.

  He had been Billos of Southern, and if the people knew that he was not full-breed Horde, doubt would be cast over his loyalty.

  More than this, he despised even the name Billos. Marsuuv had given him a new name, and he’d embraced the full embodiment of Ba’al, the god who required blood sacrifice.

  “Billosssss . . .”

  Ba’al slapped her face with enough force to cut her cheek with his fingernail. How many times had he insisted she not use the name that she alone knew? Jezreal smiled, then winked. She wiped some of the blood from her cheek, looked at her fingertips, and licked it off. “I’ve told you before, my love. I don’t require warming up. And yet you insist.”

  She slowly stretched her hand out to his lips, offering him a taste of her blood. He turned away, not because of the blood, but because she was mocking him, reducing him to his former self. To this Billy that had haunted him. To Billos, whom he despised.

  He was Ba’al, lover of Marsuuv, the twelfth of Teeleh’s twelve queens.

  “You’re not Billy?” she demanded. “You’re Ba’al, of course, my master and my savior. And that’s all.”

  His anger fell away as Ba’al’s presence was appeased.

  Billy reasserted himself and swallowed.

  “Right?” she pressed, eyes skittering over his face. “You’re not Billy?”

  “Janae.”

  Her eyes widened, and the look of concern faded to a smile. Her voice shook when she spoke. “We made it, Billy. We’re here.” She turned, drinking in the library, the torches, the books, the altar with its winged serpents. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “We’re not alone.”

  Janae, who was also the priestess Jezreal, didn’t seem bothered by this fact. She touched the altar. Ran her fingers over the dried blood. “I feel like I’ve come home. The smells, the feel of the air . . . it’s as though I’ve gone back into the womb and have been born again, baptized in blood.”

  He couldn’t help but be seduced by her awe. Billy loved this woman. Janae, not Jezreal, though they were one and the same, and he suddenly needed to tell her what he knew.

  His breathing thickened. “Janae . . .”

  She looked into his eyes, reacting to the tenderness in his voice.

  “There’s more you should know if we’re going to do this together,” he said.

  She stepped around the altar, and this time he didn’t pull back when she touched his lips with her fingers. “Tell me.”

  He took her hand in his and kissed it. “We’re home, but not truly home, not as long as we are parasites in these wretched bodies.”

  The Ba’al in him boiled with rage, and Billy felt his face contort.

  Janae hushed him, smoothing his knotting lips. “It’s okay, ignore him. Tell me.”

  He wrested control away. So . . . Ba’al was the weaker one. He continued in a whisper but with more confidence now.

  “There are four lost books. If all four are gathered and touched with blood, time is unlocked.”

  “Time?”

  “It’s how we can return here. You and I.”

  “In the flesh?”

  “In the flesh.”

  Her eyes frantically searched his. “How is that possible?”

  “How is this possible? But I’ve done it. When I was Billos.”

  She stepped back and paced to her right. “Then we have to do it! We have to wake up and return!”

  “We don’t have the books.”

  Janae spun back. “What? You tell me this, but we don’t have the books? Where are they?”

  “We don’t know. But we can’t risk waking up until we find out.”

  Ba’al’s outrage at the suggestion that the books were for Billy, not for him, threatened to send him into a fit. Billy noted that he shared the body of a viper that would strike him down without hesitation.

  Could he kill Ba’al now? What would happen if he committed suicide? No, he couldn’t risk death. But he could draw the battle lines clearly.

  “It’s okay, Janae. I’m going to get the books. It’s my destiny.”

  “And it’s my destiny to be here, Billy, so I hope you know what you’re talking about.”

  “I do.”

  Her look of uncertainty slowly changed to interest.

  “Oh?”

  “Ba’al has just made it clear to me,” he said, smothering the weaker Scab. “He’s assumed that the saying was about him, but he’s wrong. It’s about me.”

  Then he quoted the prophecy given to Ba’al by Marsuuv. “‘There will come from times past an albino with a head of fire, who will rid the world of the poisonous waters and return us unto Paradise .’”

  Meaning ignited her eyes. She stared at him for a long time and then spoke in barely more than a whisper. “An antichrist.”

  Billy didn’t respond. But in that moment, all of his own turmoil and angst made more sense than it ever had. This was the demon in him, that evil nature that refused to be extricated, haunted by Marsuvees Black in one world and held captive by the Shataiki queen Marsuuv in this world. He, Billy, was destined to crush this world. And to usher in Paradise in the other.

  Janae approached again, dripping with desire. “And I will be by your side. Your queen.”

  Billy wasn’t sure why he was suddenly compelled to remove the strip of cloth from his wrist, but he pulled it free and let her see the fresh cut.

  Her eyes dropped and she smiled coyly. Touched the blood and playfully brought her finger to her tongue. But the moment she tasted his blood, her face registered shock.

  “What’s this? This is Teeleh’s blood?”

  “Marsuuv’s blood.” Because Marsuuv had bitten Ba’al and allowed him to take some of her blood. It’s where his own thirst had come from.

  “Marsuuv,” she whispered, staring at his wrist with a craving he’d not yet seen in her. “May I?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  She brought his wrist to her m
outh, smothered the bloody cut with her lips, and sucked. Her whole body trembled with desire.

  Then Billy knew the truth: Janae, like Billos, had Shataiki blood in her veins.

  And Ba’al despised them both.

  22

  “NO ONE knows of this room?” Thomas asked, leading the way down the flight of steps.

  “None,” Qurong said gruffly. “Keep your eyes ahead.”

  “I’ve had ample opportunity to take you out, if I had any intention of doing so.”

  “Don’t think so highly of yourself.”

  “You’ve let your guard down a dozen times. You know I have no desire to see you harmed. It’s not only against my nature, it’s against Chelise’s.”

  Silence.

  “She knows,” Qurong said.

  “Of this place?”

  “I showed it to her when she took such an interest in the books. But that was before I came into these lost books you speak of.”

  The light from Thomas’s torch cast a flickering glow over the stone stairs. They came to a small atrium shut off by a wooden gate.

  “Inside.”

  “How did you manage to build this without anyone’s knowledge?” Thomas asked, pushing the gate wide.

  “It was here.”

  “It was?”

  “The tunnels and caves were here. A nest of some kind—Shataiki, for all I know. Ba’al tells me they have a wicked appetite for the books.”

  “Naturally. They seek to make their own history by bending the will of all men in the same way they’ve bent yours.”

  Qurong grunted and steered him to his right, into one of five tunnels beyond the gate. The hollowed passage looked as old as the world, carved through the rock but straight enough. They walked twenty paces before making another right through another wooden gate and into what appeared to be a library.

  Old books lay on a round table at the center. Bookcases along the right wall. A writing desk to his left. He was about to ask if this was it, when a glow flooded the room. Qurong had lit a second torch on the wall.

  Four chairs sat around the table, and beyond it, a couch with stuffed silk pillows. There was everything a reader intent on studying could want down here, including a pitcher of water, a bowl of fruit, even a fireplace.