"Any time sulfur and brimstone is blowing up in my kitchen, it cannot be a good thing," Marlene said, folding her arms over her chest.
"Then you would have loved the maggot explosion, followed by a larva rain," Carlos said dryly, pushing his body off the wall to begin pacing.
"A what!"Marlene and Inez gasped in unison.
"Damn, Carlos," Damali muttered. "Why'd you have to go there?"
"Because it was what it was," hesaid, his tone defensive. "Look-I made a run this morning to get D some grub that she had a taste for. I was sick and tired of being cooped up in the compound and I took a drive . . . came back, prayed over it, and began telling her about something J.L. showed me, and boom. The shit blew up nasty."
"That was because everything he's been importing for the last few weeks comes in his silver light sweep.So, if your food or whatever hasn't been right, it wouldn't have gotten here . . . but this was hand-carried in. The prayers made it erupt into what it was once I was out of my vision daze and about to pick up a plastic fork. So, on that note, we don't need to panic. Unless someone physically from our side brought it over the threshold, it couldn't have gotten in."
"Aw'ight, that's cool," Yonnie said, lolling a toothpick around in his mouth. "But, uh, homeboy . . . like the lady said, you accidentally brought it over the threshold, so how you know some residual shit ain't still in here?"
Valkyrie gently touched Yonnie's arm, her large brown eyes slowing his words as her graceful, ebony palm traced his cheek. "I'm a half-angel, and can go after it so that it does not harm the teamnor the child. You don't have to ever go back to Hell."
Rider groaned as Yonnie filled his hands with Val's platinum dreadlocks, and her athletic body melted into his.
"In the midst of the Armageddon . . . brand-new couples with the hots, babies, grandmothers, what next, Lord?" Rider said in a sarcastic tone. He turned to Tara and folded his arms. "Would you be too terribly pissed off if I went out to get a pack of Marlboros and never came back? I swear I need a cigarette!"
"The kitchen is cool," Carlos muttered. "You see the silver scorch damage up in there?"
"Word," Shabazz said, pounding Jose's fist. "Butan extra layer of protection before you go in and white light it back together wouldn't hurt."
"True," Damali said, glad that the team's focus had been derailed from her personal circumstance. "Marlene, Val, 'Nez . . . the power of three . . . cool?"
"Done," Marlene said, but she held Damali's gaze for a moment, opening a mental channel to her and Carlos.And until we sweep it, you stay out of there .
Damali simply nodded as Carlos began to pace. "Cool."
"Then, since I was outside," Carlos said, holding Marlene's gaze with mild terror in his eyes, "I'll need you to hook me up a white bath, and make it do what it do . . . I don't want anything I could have made contact with cominganywhere near D or the team."
"I'll blast you, no problem," Marlene said as the team grew tense again. "But I've got something on the doors that would have made you sick as a dog if you were carrying, trust me."
"Cool. I can take that to the bank?" Carlos stared at Marlene.
"You can take it to the bank and cash that sucker with no ID, brother," Marlene said, her tone unwavering. "I knowexactly what's at stake up in here and I ain't playing with the bullshit, either."
"Aw'ight . . . thenwe're good." Carlos dragged his fingers through his hair again as a very quiet team stared at him. "Next issue," he said, beginning to walk down the row of semiautomatic weapons that were mounted on a far wall. "It was really a backhanded blessing that Damali sent me on an errand and then as a result, this shit bubbled up in the kitchen, or we coulda went out there and gotten blindsided as a team. What kicked everything off in the chain of events was the fact that J.L. found something interesting in the airwaves."
Before Carlos had finished his statement, J.L. had jumped up from the stool he'd been sitting on in one lithe move and had begun walking in front of the seated team, waving his hands as he spoke. He looked like a crazed martial arts instructor, using jabs and karate cuts to the air to emphasize each point. Both Neterus watched the team absorb the implications one by one, and only when J.L. was finished and the questions being fired at him had died down did Damali speak.
"That was the good news," she finally said with a weary sigh. "Now let me fill you in on what's waiting for us outside."
CHAPTER FOUR
This was not at all how she'd planned to spend her day, much less her life. The end-of-war hiatuses were always the same-abrupt. Gut-wrenchingly so.
Hours of white-light-bleached communications with members of the Covenant and Guardian team safe houses had left her with a throbbing headache, almost as much as debating about what to do with Inez's little girl and mother had. There was no clear resolution; the team still didn't know what they were going to do. Chaos and the undercurrent of blatant indecision had a stranglehold on the household. Then there was the energy-depleting task of holding an orb of white light around the kitchen while Carlos gutted it and then silver-singed the entire area before rebuilding everything from the wall out.
All this on a bag of barbecue Kettle Chips while waiting to be sure the transaction to procure supplies had gone off without a hitch. Carlos couldn't bring in food until he'd been white-bathed, power hit by the Neteru Councils, and otherwise deemed a non-contaminant. That meant a message requesting grub had to be hot-prayer-jumped from her to local church kitchens on the safe list that would in turn send out deliveries through a Covenant prayer line with food loaded onto armored trucks.
Damali rubbed her temples and stared out the window, wondering if this was what people that'd crossed the prairie felt like in the covered wagon days. Would the food arrive, would the water arrive, what if the truck was ambushed or followed by hostile forces? Supplies had been packed in holy water ice, placed in silver containers surrounded by Red Sea salt, and blessed five ways from Sunday under the auspices of each of the major religions. Once it arrived, Marlene had been given instructions as the elected house chaplain to literally exorcise the food.Meanwhile poor little Ayana was whining and crying because she was hungry and tired. Damali knew exactly how the kid felt.
After five minutes she decided to abandon the fruitless wait by the window; all that was doing was making her stomach growl. A watched pot never boiled. She left the window with a heavy sigh of frustration and went to find the guys in the War Room. They'd all abandoned the Situation Room. Marlene and Inez were putting the kitchen back together with Mom Delores. Ayana was coloring at the kitchen counter. The senior male members of the team had each taken a quadrant to make sure the perimeter was secured and some were busy packing weapons, getting things ready for the inevitable road trip. Young bloods were hunkered down behind serious technology. The process made her tired.
It had taken two hours to decontaminate the house, going through the basic prayer litany with sea salt, white sage smudges, white light, and much holy water flinging and incense burning. Now Krissy was manning four HD screens and keeping track of bizarre news, while J.L. was charting a course trying to triangulate the origin of the contagion. Heather, Marj, and Juanita had gone into an intense divining session. The Neteru Councils had white-light blasted her and Carlos for extra measure, but they seemed to be as stumped on the origin of the plague as the team. This had to be ferreted out on the ground. Everyone was in a holding pattern for at least twenty-four hours, lest they kick off the ultimate human disaster.
From what she could surmise, the contagion was coming from multiple dark vortexes. Yet, it was hard to tell for sure, because every time she tried to focus her inner vision on a source, several scenes would interchange as decoys. Her dragon pearl oracle was baffled, too, and Zehiradangra was working with the Heather trio, igniting the other stones in the Neteru platinum collar necklace, hoping to get impressions for the seers that could help.