Ark of Blood

Chapter 4

4

Oxford, England. 10.22am

Leaving the hospital, Morgan caught a taxi back to Jericho in the centre of Oxford, a combination of terraced houses on the edge of the canal squashed together against the stately homes of the old town. She passed the great gates of Oxford University Press, the entrance flanked with towering Corinthian columns, stone the color of liquid honey in the morning sun. It could have been one of the prestigious University colleges, the last bastion of old school publishing in the heart of the city.

The taxi pulled up in front of her little two-up-two-down house. The tiny garden out front was overrun and weeds were encroaching onto the short path up to the faded blue door. It wasn’t much, but this was her home here in England, far away from the craziness of Israel and her past. Morgan unlocked the door, walked into the small entrance hall and shut the door behind her.

For a moment, she just stood and breathed, enjoying the sensation of being home in her retreat, her refuge.

She walked into the living room and put her bag down. The corners were cluttered with old books, for one of her passions was to hunt through antique shops finding knowledge by long-dead authors who had attempted immortality through the written word.

Her eyes fell on a photo on the mantelpiece. It had been taken one summer day on Brighton Beach and showed her twin sister Faye and little Gemma, her niece, building a sand castle. The sun gave their hair a shining nimbus, as if their energy lit up the sky itself. Faye’s blue eyes sparkled, the violet s***h in her left eye vivid in the image. Morgan had the same s***h in her right, the only thing that really gave away the fact that they were twins. Faye and Gemma were her real family, but the people at ARKANE were beginning to feel like family too.

Perhaps it had been the Israeli Defense Force that had done this to her. After so long, she hankered for somewhere to hang her loyalty.

A plaintive ‘meow’ broke the silence, as Morgan’s sometime cat, Lakshmi, came in to greet her. Morgan picked her up and pressed her face into the soft fur.

“I missed you too. Was Mrs Dawes good to you?”

Shmi’s rounded tummy was evidence that the kindly next door neighbor was doing more than was necessary. Shmi squirmed and meowed to be let down, for she would only allow a brief cuddle. Morgan knew that the pair of them were suited, each as prickly independent as the other.

She looked at her watch. She had to be at the ARKANE office in the next hour which gave her just a little time to clean herself up.

Upstairs in her sparse, utilitarian bedroom, Morgan unbuttoned her shirt in front of the mirror. She gingerly pulled it away from the wound and examined herself in the reflection. The hospital diet and the craziness of the last few months had further streamlined her already slight figure. The lack of extra padding meant that the demon’s knife had cut deep, narrowly missing her vital organs. The wound was an angry red around the stitches and bruising spread across her back and around to her flat stomach. Even on her mediterranean skin the darker browns and purple stood out.

She touched the stitches gently, feeling the edges where her body could sense something other than pain.

It would take a while to heal completely but that was comforting in a way. Her suffering would last as long as Jake’s, and when her body was healed, when Natasha had been stopped, then perhaps Jake would be ready to join her again.

Her phone buzzed with a text from Martin Klein at the ARKANE office. He was waiting for her at the Pitt Rivers Museum, so she had to hurry. Morgan looked back at herself in the mirror. Her dark curls were lank, her skin paler than usual and she needed a long bath and some recovery time. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so a quick shower would have to suffice, with plastic taped over the dressing.

But first, there was something she needed to do.

Out on the landing, Morgan used a hooked stick to tug open a tiny loft trapdoor. She pulled down the ladder and climbed up awkwardly into the tight attic space. Putting on a head torch, she switched it on, then crawled along the main beam, wincing slightly from the pain in her side.

At the back of the attic space was a loose roll of old carpet. She reached inside the far end and pulled out the battered old suitcase hidden within.

Kneeling before it, she opened it with care. This was her external subconscious, containing memories she wanted to keep hidden but close, physical reminders of her life. Morgan touched the objects within, a sacred ritual she performed when she infrequently visited this confrontation with her past.

Her fingertips caressed two sets of dog-tags from the Israeli Defense Force, her own, removed after serving as a military psychologist on active duty, and Elian’s, taken from her husband’s bullet-ridden body. He had died embodying the leadership principle taught to the officers of the IDF, shouting, “Follow me” to his men as he had run headlong into a fatal ambush. Morgan touched the soft felt of her father’s yamulke and a tiny shoe, belonging to her niece Gemma.

The actions were her reverence, her devotion, her remembrance.

Morgan pulled a long sliver of bone from her pocket. It felt like the needle of a primitive race but it had been pulled from Jake’s body after the events of Sedlec when he had been crushed beneath the body of the demon, Milan Noble. As the chandelier made of human bone had shattered on the ground, exploding shards had pierced his body. She had watched as Jake stood to confront evil, his face shining like an angel, but he had paid a great physical price for his courage.

There had been another witness that night, Natasha El-Behery, murderer of innocents and still out there, causing destruction. As Morgan knelt there in the attic, she whispered a silent promise.

This time, it would be an eye for an eye.