pack some things. I’ll contact Roland as discreetly as possible—he deigned to take a cell phone with him, and you know how he hates technology. I’ll call and hope he can figure out how to answer. I’ll find out where he’s decided to take the survivors.”
Brigit nodded once, patting her pocket. “You have my number.” Then she sent James a long look that spoke volumes, turned and ran from the basement.
James nodded firmly and made himself face corpse number one, which was still lying on the table, twitching every now and then, as if in the grip of a restless sleep. Time would tell whether it would return to full lucidity or remain a mindless animated bag of meat. But time was something he didn’t have. He moved to corpse number two and held his hands over it.
Lucy knew something drastic was going on when Brigit came slamming into the office, practically emanating rage from her pores. Lucy looked up from the tablet, where she’d been right in the middle of something major—then froze as she saw what appeared to be a light glowing from behind Brigit’s eyes.
Lucy found herself caught off guard. She’d seen a glow behind James’s eyes, but this one was different. His glowed the way she would expect an…well, an angel’s eyes to glow. His sister’s seemed to gleam the way a demon’s would. The light from within had a redness to it. And it felt…angry.
“Brigit? What’s wrong?”
“Later.” The blonde with the angelic face sped into the next room—the little kitchen, and on through it to the first of the bedrooms.
Lucy got up, about to follow, but she stopped after only a single step. She felt an instinctive fear that she didn’t dare ignore. The hair on her forearms was standing upright, and the nape of her neck was tingling. Every cell in her body was warning her away from Brigit, and she decided she would do well to listen.
Swallowing hard, Lucy sat back down at the table and bent over the passage she’d been working on. It wasn’t hard to focus her attention on the job at hand, because it was fascinating beyond all reason. In all her years of studying the tales and texts and legends of ancient Sumer, she had never seen this one—this account of the death of Utanapishtim. And what stunned her most of all was that the story matched what the vampires had told her—of how he had been punished by the gods for sharing the gift of immortality with the great king, Gilgamesh, and how Gilgamesh’s sworn enemy, Anthar, had forced the old man to share immortality with him, as well, to better enable him to fight the king. And how Anthar had then beheaded the ancient one, and abducted his young servant and taken him as a slave. She picked up her smart phone, hit the digital recorder and began reciting her translation of the text into it. She had written it down, as well, but felt compelled to have more than one record of this vital piece of history.
“‘Thirteen days passed, thirteen nights, as Ziasudra lay there. Dead, but not. Eternal and imprisoned. Until the old woman, the one they called Desert Witch, came upon him there, as if asleep. No maggots, nor flies, nor stench of decay, did she find upon him. And it was she who burned his body. With fire and with herbs, with chanting and with dance, did she burn him, to break the curse that could not be broken, to free the spirit that could not be freed.
“‘His ashes she took to the artisan of Uruk, that he might make for her a likeness of the man himself, with his remains secreted within, and to engrave upon it his secret name, Utanapishtim, that the gods might never find him and curse him again.
“‘And so the craftsman formed the limestone into the likeness of the priest-king Ziasudra, although he knew it not. The length of his forearm, he formed it, in a pose of submission, and obsidian eyes he gave to him, that he might see. Ziasudra, who had been made like a god, given the breath of life by the gods and cursed to suffer by the gods, now, he was ash and dust, hidden within the statue. But his curse was not to be broken, not until he reversed his sin against the gods.’”
Lucy lifted her head. “I think I know where he is,” she whispered. “Oh, my God, I think