The Secret of Ka (30 page)

As it was, I was the one who saved us. Like an angry ball of lightning, the pashupa flew past the gap between us and hit the wall farther up the cave. It exploded with the force of a cruise missile. The shock wave and shower of dirt and rock did not scare me. I still wanted to make a run for it. But Lova froze in place and I wasted valuable time trying to get her butt in gear.

I should have left the stupid djinn behind.

Mrs. Steward and my father appeared. Neither seemed angry at me. Of course I was the dead Kala, the sacrifice, the meat on the altar. No one could blame me for wanting to escape.

But Lova had broken their deal.

They were not pleased, nor did they seem like the forgiving type.

My father spoke to Lova. "We have gone out of our way to help you possess this human, and yet you try to help her escape. Explain yourself."

Lova was stunned. She looked to me to defend her. What a joke. I was going back in the freezing water. I wasn't going to waste my breath on her.

"This behavior cannot be tolerated," Mrs. Steward said, her pashupa still sparkling with green light. "This djinn should be terminated."

My father disagreed. "Destroy it and its hold on Sara is terminated."

"That doesn't sound so bad," I muttered.

"Then kill them both," Mrs. Steward said.

My father spoke mechanically. "We want the djinn to enslave her to take her out of our future equations. Kill her and there's a chance her kind will locate another body for her spirit and restart her work against us. You recall I have experience in these matters. Look at how long it took me to negate the one called Tracy."

"You're all cowards," I said. "Put me back in your pool, I don't care. I'll never be anyone's thrall. You may kill my body but none of you will ever touch my soul."

My father stared at me with blank eyes. "Return her to the pool."

An hour had passed since my failed escape, and I was sitting in the shallow end of the pool with my head nodding. I was flat on my butt and the warmth seemed to be flowing out of my body so fast they could have been pumping ice water into my veins.

I had passed the point of shivering. My physical warmth was being washed away, but I felt a deeper warmth begin to glow inside. It was a psychological warmth, maybe even a spiritual one. It was surprisingly pleasant. It kept urging me to close my eyes and relax and let go.

Lova sat nearby. They had put some kind of weird eye above her head. The strange thing was, I could see it only when I closed my eyes. It looked like a snake's eye. It floated in the air, watching and waiting.

"Stay with me!" I heard Amesh yell. "Sara?"

"Tired," I mumbled.

"Fight it. Fight the djinn. You're strong. Remember what the carpet told you. You have powers they don't know about."

"I'll fight them after I die," I muttered.

"I'm not going to let you go!"

I struggled to get out some nice last words.

"Amesh," I whispered.

"Talk louder. I can't hear you."

"Listen, I'm going to black out. I can't stop it. But I want you to know it's not so bad. What I mean is, I'm not scared."

"Stay awake. Keep talking to me."

"Can't. Amesh, I don't mind it ending this way. I feel like we got to be close, and that makes me happy. I'm going to die now, but I want to say I love you. Yeah, I love you. Is that okay?"

"It's better than okay. It's fantastic. I love you, too."

"Really? You're not just saying that because I'm dying?"

"Sara. I loved you the moment I met you."

"Is that why you hit me?"

"I didn't hit you."

It was hard to remember. "How did I end up on the floor?"

"We were fighting over a package."

"Oh, that's right. I'm sorry."

There were tears in his voice. "It doesn't matter. You're great, you're amazing. You were a much better girlfriend than I was a boyfriend."

"It was easier for me. I wasn't possessed."

"I'm sorry I acted so crazy."

"No, Amesh, no. It's not like that. I don't care what you did. The love I feel for you just loves. So when I say I love you, everything is sweet and wonderful like the day we met."

"We only met two days ago," he said.

I smiled to myself. "That's what's so amazing about us. It feels like we spent a lifetime together."

"Thanks for taking away my pain."

"No problem. It's what good girlfriends do," I said.

Those were the last intelligent words I said. Amesh told me again that he loved me but his voice was far away. It came to me like an echo down a long cave.
Love ... Sara ...
They were the best last words to hear in my life.

Even though I could no longer feel my body, I somehow knew I was sitting with my chin on my chest, my blond hair hanging in the water. Since I was about to die, it did not really matter if I slipped under. I was so far gone I doubted I would feel any choking sensation. But I felt there was something dignified about sitting up while I died. I tried to open my eyes one last time to make sure I was upright.

Then I heard my name.

Sara Sashee Wilcox, listen to me. Obey me.

I knew immediately the voice did not belong to a friend, but it took me a moment to recognize its source. Then, for the second time that night, I felt weird tendrils trying to enter the back of my skull. It was fortunate that I had felt them before because they immediately put me on the defensive.

It was Lova, reaching for my soul, trying to make me a thrall.

I did three things in that instant to block her.

I remembered the white light and it was there.

It filled my head as if by magic.

I remembered my father was no longer my father.

That meant Lova did not know my real last name.

My father had forgotten to tell her what it was.

That fact caused her to panic. I felt her scream inside.

What is your last name, Sara?

Then I laughed, at her fear, and I think it was this laughter that saved me the most. Because only someone who feared they could lose their soul could have it taken away. I was never going to become anyone's thrall.

I lost all awareness of where I was. I was just gone.

But I did not black out. If anything, a switch was thrown on the inside and I began to feel another part of me waking up. This part of me had always been there, I realized. I had just not been aware of it because for fifteen years my head had been consumed with trivia. It was sad but true—99.99 percent of my thoughts as Sara had been worthless. For example, I realized I had spent up to two hours a day thinking about my body—whether I was cute or not. That seemed impossible but it was true. Worse, I had spent another two hours a day fantasizing about what I was going to eat. Finally, when it came to guys, forget about it. I thought about guys even when I was looking at myself in the mirror or eating a cheeseburger.

Yet these thoughts didn't bother me because they were not me. I'd had them, of course, but that part of me seemed far away. That part concerned a girl named Sara. The rest of me had just sat back and watched.

That was what I felt like right then. Like I was the Watcher.

The Watcher was huge, and I was her, and I could go where I wanted and do what I wanted. These Sara thoughts—I could worry about them later, or never. They sort of bored me anyway.

Bored me to death. Ha! I think the Watcher had just made a joke. I suspected I was dead, and although it was nothing like I had imagined, it was not bad. Where I was and who I was felt pretty perfect. Still, a sublime restlessness swept over me. The Watcher wanted to communicate with another Watcher.

The Watcher thought of Tracy and just like that I flew to her.

T
HE NEXT THING I KNEW
I was sitting in a hospital room beside a patient. The woman was lying on her back in bed with a tube down her throat and another tube attached to her belly. She also had an IV line dripping a clear solution into a shunt in her left arm.

The woman on the bed was Tracy. She had once been beautiful, but years in a coma had eaten away her fat and what was left was the proverbial bag of bones. Still, there was something in the contours of her sunken cheeks, in the color of her hair, and especially in the glow that lit her sleeping face that said her beauty was far from exhausted.

"Do you really think so?" a woman across from me asked. She was sitting on a chair on the other side of the bed. Her shiny blond hair was cut short, her nose was cute, small like my own. She had blue eyes like mine, too, but hers were pure cobalt.

"Tracy!" I said.

"Hi, Sara."

"Are you alive? Did they lie when they said those were your ashes?"

"My sister didn't lie. She thought I had been cremated. Your father lied."

"He's not my father."

Tracy chuckled. "Don't you think I know that?"

I laughed with her. "This is amazing, sitting here, talking to you. It's something I've dreamed about for years." I paused. "It's not a hallucination, is it?"

"Does it feel like a hallucination?"

"It feels real, more real than the life I just came from. You wouldn't believe what I've been through."

"I wouldn't believe it? Sara, I've been watching you."

"How?"

"How do you think? Through the carpet."

"You can see through the Carpet of Ka?"

She nodded solemnly. "I can speak through it as well."

I almost fell off my chair. Honestly, I was the ghost who almost fell.

"Are you saying I've been talking to you this whole time?"

She grinned. "Who else would have taken the time?"

She teased me to keep the mood light. But this new information didn't just fill me with joy. It made me want to explode. The carpet was so dear to me and here we had shared it in such an intimate way. No wonder when I had found it, I had felt like I had found my best friend. I wanted to run around the bed and hug her.

She must have read my mind. She made a gesture for me to remain seated. "I don't know how much time we have. And there are things you must know."

"What sort of things?" I asked.

"The rules have not changed. I can tell you many things but it is still better if you ask the right question. Then I'm free to say more."

"Who gives you permission to answer any of my questions?"

She smiled. "I'm sorry, I can't answer that one."

I considered. "You're acting like I might survive this ordeal."

"You can survive but you must act soon."

"But I'm dying in a pool of freezing water, never mind the fact I'm surrounded on all sides. I've got Lova waiting to change me into a thrall. And I've got the three Anulakai sitting around with their pashupas." I paused. "How am I to escape?"

"What do the temples on the island and the Shar Temple have in common?"

"Cold water?"

"True. What else?"

"They're both djinn temples."

"Excellent. They're connected—the djinn connected them. Your fake father said as much. But what he doesn't know is that at the height of the war with the Anulakai, the djinn created a gateway between the temples."

"But my father said the devices the Anulakai installed in the cavern are there to keep the djinn out."

"This gateway is secret and is not affected by those devices."

"Are you saying I can use the gateway to reach the island?"

"Yes. Lova knows about it, the others don't. But she doesn't imagine for a second that you'll be able to use it to escape."

"How do you know about it?"

"I've used it in the past."

"What do I have to do?"

"Swim."

"Swim where?"

"Down and out. You've seen how the pool deepens as it approaches the rear of the temple. You have to swim to the center and then down. If you swim deep enough, a powerful current will take hold of you and sweep you to the island."

"But the island is a hundred miles out at sea," I protested.

"Time and space are not constants."

"You're saying this gateway is like a dimensional doorway between the Shar Temple and the island?"

"If you like. Humans have yet to invent the right words for these things."

"Hold on. Don't start talking like the carpet again."

"The carpet did not talk to you. I talked through it."

"Why?"

"It's very old, ancient, and it's sacred."

"Sacred? Does that mean it's alive?"

"That's a mystery you must solve for yourself."

"I think I know the answer. It feels ten times more alive than most people I've met." I paused. "Have you owned the carpet before?"

"No one owns the carpet. It chooses a different partner at different times. Right now, it has chosen you. You belong together."

"Who built it? Or made it?"

"That's a great mystery. Many mysteries surround it. Another time, I will tell you stories about it, some so beautiful they'll bring tears to your eyes."

"Can I ask about the djinn island?"

"Of course."

"You wanted me to go there."

"You had to go. You had to begin your education."

"My education to be a Kala?"

"Yes."

"What will I do as a Kala?"

"Right now a war between humans, the djinn, and the Anulakai is about to start. You must help stop it or you must help win it."

"Where do the Anulakai come from?"

"Out of the darkness."

I sighed. "What do they want with Earth?"

"They're a race that seeks to enslave other races. But they're not all evil. There are many among them who question the direction they've chosen. It's my hope that you'll be able to contact such beings in the near future. They could be of immense help to us."

"Who is 'us'? What are we trying to do?"

"'Us' are people like you and me, and others who are human beings descended from powerful bloodlines. We are the Order of the Kala. Our purpose is simple: survival. We are fighting for the survival of mankind."

"Could the Anulakai propel us into another realm the way they have the djinn?"

"It's possible. It's possible they could wipe us out altogether."