“Who are you?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. I notice an unusual watch on his left wrist. At first I assumed he was trying to stop the flow of blood with his left hand, but now I realize he’s trying to keep the dial of the watch pointed at me. Could it be a weapon?
“Raise your arms, now!” I snap.
He tries to follow my order, but his arms flap uselessly. Still, his odd watch is no longer pointed at me. I move closer and sniff the air. The shock I experience right then forces me to take a step back.
He’s not a vampire!
How do I know? He doesn’t smell like one. All vampires—even the disgusting Eddie Fender—have a faint smell of our creator, Yaksha. This man smells more human than anything else.
There’s another reason I know he’s not a vampire. This close, I can hear the subtleties of his heartbeat, things I could not hear at a distance. A vampire’s pulse, even under stress, is extremely regular. One might say the sine wave never wavers. This man’s heartbeat is slightly erratic. True, his heart pounds with a strength much greater than an ordinary mortal’s, but the rhythm is more akin to a human’s. The same with his breathing. It’s not as smooth as it should be.
“What are you?” I ask.
He glares at me. “Kill me.”
“Are you so anxious to die?”
“Kill me.”
“No. I want to talk. You owe me that.”
He sneers. “I owe you nothing.”
I cannot place his accent. His English is perfect—the majority of people would assume he’s from England. But I hear other lands in his words.
“Why the hostility?” I ask. “You attacked me.”
“With good reason.”
“What have I ever done to you?”
“I know what you are.”
“Maybe you do. But whoever you are, I mean you no harm.”
“Liar!”
“I speak the truth. You can hear the truth, can’t you, when it’s spoken? I honestly don’t know who you are.”
My remark surprises him. He chews on it a moment.
“Can I rest my arms?” he asks.
“Yes. But keep your watch pointed away from me.”
His arms drop to his lap. “Can you pull out the knives?”
“I will if you answer a few of my questions. Agreed?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not allowed.”
“Allowed? You say that like you report to someone. Who?”
He shakes his head. He won’t answer.
I move closer. “Look, I’m serious when I say I mean you no harm. But someone sent you here to kill me, and frankly, that pisses me off. If you don’t start cooperating, I’m going to do things to you that will hurt a lot worse than that leg and those knives.”
He lowers his gaze, his eyes focus on his watch.
“I’s toad bein, jar?” he whispers softly.
I recognize the language, but only because I spent time in ancient Egypt. That was back in the days of Suzama. I doubt my attacker and whoever he’s talking to know that. My foe just said, “It is her, is it not?”
A voice replies via the watch, in the same forgotten dialect.
“There’s no doubt. You’ve done well.”
“Can I end it?”
“Yes. Now return to the Eternal Goddess.”
“All glory to the Eternal Goddess.”
The words are no sooner out of my assailant’s mouth than he twists his jaw to the right side and bites down. I hear a tooth inside his mouth—it can’t be a normal tooth—explode. Instantly I catch a whiff of something acidic in the air and leap back. A glowing cloud of red gas expands around his body as he exhales. The fumes are extremely corrosive. Within seconds his face melts away, his clothes catch fire, and his body begins to burn with a ferocity I’ve never seen before.
The blaze is as short as it is fierce. A minute later it’s gone, and so is the man. All that’s left is a pile of ash. Whatever he used to kill himself belongs to a technology more advanced than anything I’ve encountered.
Yet somehow he’s connected to ancient Egypt. The clue gives me small comfort. I still don’t know who or what these creatures are and why they want me dead.
FIVE
Four days later I wait for Teri and Matt to visit my new home. For obvious reasons, I rented it in a hurry. The place is closer to town and lacks the security system my original home had. But since the system proved useless in the last attack, I don’t fret over its absence.
I have learned little about my assailant since he burned to death. I was able to retrace his steps and find his Gatling gun, and from there I was able to follow his path back to a van parked at the end of a road that lay about three miles from my home. A search of the van turned up nothing: no ID, fake or otherwise, no money, no hotel keys, no maps, not even a round of ammunition. Yet it’s clear the van was a rental, and I’ve passed its license plates on to the same FBI agents and detectives that are working on the IIC mystery.
I feel the two mysteries must be connected. They entered my life at the same time—the same day—a remarkable coincidence, and I have never believed in coincidences. So far everything Lisa Fetch and Jeff Stephens told me about IIC has proven to be accurate. Although my sources have been unable to discover how the firm excels in the market, they have uncovered proof linking it to other investment companies. It appears IIC and its partners are quietly accumulating a trillion dollars without anyone knowing about it.
Lisa had spoken of the disappearance of an old boyfriend, Randy Clifford, who vanished into thin air while hacking into IIC’s computer system. My friends in the FBI have been able to determine that a certain “Marko” visited him the night he vanished. Marko is known to the FBI to be a highly paid hit man with Mob connections. My people tell me his price is high for the best of assassins—a million even. It seems he can charge so much because he has the ability to make his “marks” disappear without a trace. I can only assume that’s how he earned his nickname.
I plan to visit Marko soon.
After all the noise on my property, I had to act fast to keep the local police and a stream of higher authorities from investigating too closely. I managed to keep my privacy the old-fashioned way—by paying exorbitant bribes through my East Coast attorneys. The money has worked so well, not a single person in town has asked why my house just happened to explode.