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  The henchman choked. Hammered his fist into his chest.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m . . . I’m fine.”

  “At least your tunic and leggings have a more masculine look.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  From the side, Ariston heard Shelamzion huff as she smoothed a beige robe over wide hips and eyed the more attractive drapings of Helene’s attire. The rivalry between his two wives was yet more evidence of the earthly obsessions with which they were all saddled. He’d forgotten how difficult it was to set aside such matters.

  “Come around,” he called to the cluster. “Come close.”

  Still squirming into clothing, they shuffled and hopped his way.

  “If you find this annoying, or even—in my case—humiliating, remember that we’re here with a shared purpose. Isn’t that so?”

  “Lord Ariston, please reiterate it for us,” Eros said. “Let’s be sure our two houses are united.”

  “Certainly. Have some of you forgotten the wrong we suffered? We were two thousand strong. Our cluster was dominant, enjoying the infestation of a single human host. And then—quite rudely, I might add—we were banished by the Nazarene himself. Sent forcefully away. Squealing like swine into the depths.”

  He had their attention now, each word a splash of paint from a haunted brush, flung across the canvas of night.

  “We lost most of our companions in the aftermath. In one fell moment, we were chopped down, belittled, and discarded.”

  Another splash.

  “Separated even further from this land of the living.”

  Splash.

  “Yet,” he said in a whisper, “we did not die.”

  “Really? After two thousand years of inactivity, what’s the difference?”

  The objection came from Sol, his firstborn. Offspring of Shelamzion. Husband of Auge. Father of little Kyria. Without blinking, Ariston allowed the tension to crackle between their eyes. Best to stare down his son’s rebellion here at the onset.

  “We all know,” Sol continued, “what brought us to this point. The question is, what will we do now that the Akeldama’s been opened?”

  “We’re not here to do nothing.”

  “Agreed.”

  “To do nothing is to be nothing, which we are not. We are the Akeldama Cluster. In our stillness, we watched and waited, and we now have a chance to reestablish ourselves.”

  “By tracking down the Nistarim,” Megiste said. She was the former priestess for the House of Eros, a comely woman with auburn ringlets and features carved from pure alabaster.

  “Yes, the Nistarim. The Concealed Ones.”

  Sol folded his thick arms. “Seeking and finding are two different things.”

  “Son, we’re not the only ones who know of them. They’ve been spo-ken of in legend, and they’ve wandered the earth since the final days of the Nazarene. Others surely seek them even as we speak. Such obstacles will not stop us from pursuing our purpose, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “To bring them down,” Eros noted over steepled fingers. “Rabbinical wisdom says that if even one falls without being replaced, they all fall—the human race, included. The entire thing collapses like a house built on sand.”

  “And where do we find these Concealed Ones?”

  Ariston grinned. “Sol, your curiosity pleases me.”

  Cuvin

  Gina crept from her bed.

  The midnight hour had ticked past, meaning she was now twelve years old. In a few hours Nicoleta would pat her on the head and prepare a favorite breakfast for her, but that would be the extent of the celebration. This grim approach to such high-minded affairs was meant only to prepare her daughter for womanhood. Gina understood that.

  Nevertheless, it didn’t keep her heart from skipping in anticipation.

  She closed the bathroom door, lit the candle over the toilet. She unfolded her fingers slowly, as though removing ribbons from a box, and she imagined the Provocateur’s eyes bright with encouragement. In her plam lay a gift meant for a lady: modest earrings with dangling ruby orbs.

  Her heart quickened. These were for her?

  But what would her mother say? Nicoleta had thrown them out, hadn’t she?

  Gina decided she would wait a week or so before testing them in public. For now, she would enjoy them alone and in reflection. She held them to her ears in the mirror, where they seemed to capture the flame’s dance in their deep red centers. She tilted her head, flicking back long chestnut strands for a better view.

  And that’s when she came upon a more jarring discovery.

  A mark on her forehead.

  She leaned closer to the glass, traced fingertips over her it.

  After scrubbing at it with her hand, then trying again with soap and water, she decided the faint symbol was part of her skin. It looked like a splash of ink, a translucent blue x with curled tips.

  Was it a bruise? A stain? Did it have any significance?

  Her mother’s words: Do you wish to die . . . babbling incoherently while some blood disorder turns your brains to mush?

  If Nicoleta were to spot this mark, Gina suspected the knife would come out again. Maybe if she just left the thing alone, these thin lines would fade away. It was the best she could hope for.

  She tugged on a lock of hair to shield her forehead, thankful for the first time for this unruly, thick mop of hers.

  Judean Hills

  “We will find them,” said Lord Ariston.

  In the broadest sense, Collectors were body thiefs. They sought out vulnerable creatures for vicarious thrills, any who might surrender their wills. Of course, he knew that some preferred nonhuman hosts—no questions of morality or ethics, and none of the archaic burdens of guilt or restitution.

  It was survival of the fittest in its most twisted form.

  In Greece and the Balkans, Collectors favored the fangs and claws of lycanthropic beasts, which humans called vyrkolakas or loup-garou: were-wolves. Collectors in Russia, India, and the Arabic world often disguised themselves as eretiks, rakshasas, and ghuls.

  Some chose more innocuous forms.

  Always, though, they leeched off the life force of others. Always, they started with mortal hosts.

  Until tonight.

  Beneath the branches of the acacia tree, Ariston concluded his address to the Akeldama Cluster. “I believe those of us here have an unprecedented opportunity. By escaping the prisons of death’s darkness, we’ve been equipped like no others to hunt down the Nistarim.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Eros said. “They’re only thirty-six in number.”

  “Thus the meaning of their name. They’ve been concealed for quite some time. Oh yes, other Collectors know about the marks borne by the Nistarim, but they’re blinded to them by their own hosts’ limitations. Such things are dark to mortal eyes. We, on the other hand, are the first Collectors to be looking through the eyes of the undead.”

  “We can see beyond.”

  “That’s right, Megiste. Their marks will give them away.”

  “Upon your command, of course, Lord Ariston.”

  Ariston gave his firstborn a hard stare. “All in good time. We’ll first need a secluded place from which to forage and gather our strength. Meanwhile, with our victims in two separate locations, the governing authorities will be kept busy trying to understand what took place.”

  “Hunt us all they want, they can’t cause us harm.”

  “But they can,” Ariston pointed out, “alert the Concealed Ones to our presence. For now it’s better to maneuver stealthily. Sol, since you seem full of energy, I want you to shoulder the corpse the rest of the way.”

  “Lord, I can carry on all night,” Barabbas said.

  “No, I want my son to share the burden.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’ll be mostly downhill from here anyway. Can anyone else smell the salt in the air?”

  Sol let out a defiant breath, glanced aro
und the cluster, then acquiesced. Grunting, he hefted the body over his back and set off over hard-packed sand.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The Dead Sea, Israel

  Benyamin Amit found and radioed in the dead body on the beach.

  Male. Eighteen years old. Norwegian, judging by the passport fished from the deceased’s belt pouch. Tattered clothes. Features shriveled beyond recognition. Skin covered with sores that’d festered and turned yellow-green.

  What’d happened to the poor devil?

  With orders to wait here for an American, Benyamin returned to pacing the gritty sand in shorts and a tan tank top. The temperature hovered at 104 degrees. With an M-1 carbine slung from his shoulder, he was on patrol for the Mash’az, a volunteer division of the Israeli Police, formed in 1974 in response to escalating Palestinian unrest.

  Where was this Cal Nichols? Why were the Americans involved?

  The patrolman waved off a young Russian-speaking couple. “Not today,” he said. “You’ll have to go further up the beach.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Official police business. Move along.”

  Benyamin’s fingers curled around the rifle stock. He felt irritable from lack of sleep. He lived in a city twenty minutes west of here, but he and his son Dov had camped last night in a wadi, a dry streambed, that sliced from the Negev toward the Dead Sea. Twice they’d been awakened by unearthly sounds. He’d told Dov it was the bleating of Bedouin goats, though he really wasn’t so sure.

  One thing he was sure of: he’d been bitten.

  By a desert ant? A spider?

  He stopped to scratch at the shekel-sized wound on his heel, then looked up as a tour bus braked at the nearest hotel and emptied its passengers onto the pavement. Vacationers had been surging to this Ein Bokek resort area, and international investors were taking notice.

  But still no sign of the American.

  “I won’t wait here all day,” Benyamin complained aloud.

  He took another look at the corpse. Had the boy been shot? Stabbed?

  Until this morning, weekly patrol shifts had never diminished Benyamin’s appreciation of the Dead Sea. More than thirteen hundred feet below sea level, it was the lowest spot on earth, part of the Rift Valley. Fed with therapeutic minerals from the Jordan River, the dense aquamarine water glittered in the sun.

  The sea’s high saline content made it virtually impossible to drown here, and swimmers often bobbed along while reading paperback novels or newspapers. The few who did perish were victims of panic.

  This region did, however, have its history of woes.

  According to the Torah, Lot’s wife had been turned to a pillar of salt just south of here, and the city of Sodom had been destroyed by brim-stone and sulfur. Those same fumes continued to linger, and salt deposits crystallized along the shores, delivered by the lapping waves as though reminders of God’s wrath upon those who looked back.

  Old stories. Nothing more.

  Benyamin Amit considered himself a modern man, a secular Jew. His grandfather had perished in the Shoah—the Holocaust—and he questioned the existence of a God who would allow such atrocities.

  He rubbed at the itchy spot near his foot. Flipped open the dead man’s water-bloated passport again. The name was indecipherable.

  Just one more example of the Almighty’s seeming apathy.

  “Mr. Amit?” An American voice at his back. “Sorry I’m so late, man. I got held up at a West Bank checkpoint. Whew, it’s a scorcher. Or is this just normal weather to you?”

  The patrolman turned. “Nothing is normal, Mr. Nichols. Not today.”

  Cal Nichols was a billboard on two legs. Wearing Nike running shorts, athletic shoes, and a black T-shirt that said Just Do It, he bore a JanSport daypack on his back. His shoulders tapered to narrow hips. With lean ropes of muscle stretched across his quadriceps, he looked no older than one of the Israeli Army’s mandatory enlistees. A European might’ve called his nose Romanesque, yet it seemed proportional beneath a tan forehead topped with wheat-colored hair.

  “Mr. Nichols,” Benyamin said. “Black absorbs the heat.”

  “What? Oh, the shirt. Yeah, didn’t think about that.”

  “You need to, with your fair skin.”

  The American pinched his nostrils and eyed the deceased.

  “Even with salt water to cleanse and cauterize the wounds, a corpse still stinks,” Benyamin said. “Some days the sea’s odor isn’t much better, but one gets used to it.”

  “Sulfur and death.”

  “I hardly notice anymore.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  The accusatory tone annoyed Benyamin. “Please, explain to me your jurisdiction here. My superiors insisted that I not only wait for you, but that I also give you every liberty necessary to carry out your duties. Can you tell me why they would do such a thing, Mr. Nichols?”

  “Call me Nickel, just plain ol’ Nickel.”

  “Like the metal.”

  “Sure. That’s one theory.”

  “Nickel, I find you exasperating. Are you capable of a direct answer?”

  “I’m working for a very rich individual. He sent me. Does that help?”

  “Hardly,” Benyamin said.

  The American stepped past and lowered a bare knee to the earth. He tapped fingers against his cheek, while green eyes flecked with gold roved the leathery corpse. The tapping came to a stop. Unblinking, he stared at the wounds that circled the Norwegian’s throat—a necklace of round, puckered sores.

  “Been a long time,” he muttered.

  “Yes, I would guess two or three days.”

  “A long, long time,” he repeated, as though referring to something else entirely. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his Nike shirt. “Poor kid. Looks like a stinkin’ Capri Sun—you know, right after all the juice has been sucked out.”

  Benyamin frowned. “Capri Sun?”

  “Somebody shoulda called sooner. Why the wait?”

  “I radioed it in this morning, the very moment that I—”

  “Not you, Mr. Amit. I’m talking about the kid’s father. No, you’ve been a big help, keeping your eyes peeled for trouble. Thanks for doing your job.”

  The Israeli shifted the M-1 on his shoulder. “It’s my . . . Well, it’s my job.”

  “Exactly. And mine’s security. An intel broker, you could say.”

  To Benyamin, it seemed a vague title for this puzzling individual. “And what exactly do you do, Nickel?”

  “Oh, you know, nothing too glamorous. I get the call, and off I go. Gathering and processing data for different clients. Getting more, uh . . . more personally involved when the situation calls for it. Been to spots all over the globe, on all sorts of assignments. Work alone, mostly.” Nickel eased his pack onto the ground, pulled out a Polaroid camera and clothes-pins. “Still kills me every time I lose one, especially a kid like this. Man, not even nineteen.”

  “You don’t look much older.”

  “Good genes.” A quick snapshot. “Often works to my advantage.”

  “Have you told me yet who you’re working for?”

  “Right now, I’m on payroll at Marka Shipping. Omulf Marka’s the owner.”

  “Based in Oslo, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You know your stuff.” Nickel circled the corpse, clicked another photo. “And take a wild guess who we’ve got here. Lars Marka, his son.”

  “Have there been any ransom notes or calls?”

  “Not jack-diddly. From the moment that Omulf—sounds like something outta Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?—the moment he learned his boy might be in Israel, he started pulling foreign diplomats into the loop. With his money and influence, he was able to get round-the-clock access to your commissioner’s office. One more day, they told him, and they’d have Lars pinned down.”

  “Instead he vanished.”

  “Gone.” The young intel broker snapped his fingers. “Lars never showed up for w
ork, and neither did one of his coworkers, some guy who’d been in and out of local medical clinics. Name of Thiago. Whaddya think of that? Sounds like a hobbit.”

  “It’s Spanish, I believe. Maybe Portuguese.”

  “He was Brazilian, yes,” Nickel said. “According to the police report. But his name hasn’t shown up on any of the flight manifests out of Tel Aviv, so I think he’s still in the country.”

  “He could be an Israeli citizen, one of the Jews who’ve made aliyah —a return here to his homeland. Every day our nation grows stronger in this way.”

  “Yeah. Part of some prophecy, right?”

  Benyamin shrugged with disinterest. He considered the quagmire of Zionist thinking a distraction from his country’s more pragmatic concerns.

  “Anyway,” Nickel said, “their boss reported all this to the Jerusalem police, said he figured Lars had gone missing due to his embarrassment over some snafu.”

  “Snafu?”

  “Bless you.”

  “Please,” Benyamin said. “I’m not familiar with the American way of speaking.”

  “Snafu . . . a mistake, a screwup. Like when you’ve royally blown it.”

  “Royally?”

  “History’s biggest blunders, done in the names of gods and kings.”

  “On that, we agree. So what was this particular . . . snafu?”

  “That’s what I gotta find out.” Nickel took two more pictures and handed over the set. “You mind clipping these to the pack’s flap? On the shaded side. Yeah, just use those little plastic thingies.”

  “It’s like hanging out a dead man’s dirty laundry,” Benyamin said drily.

  “Hey. That was funny. It’s not easy cracking jokes in a second language.”

  “I must say, Nickel, for this sort of occupation you seem very . . . cavalier.”

  “Just a big softy. Ask all my friends.”

  “You said you work alone.”

  “I did? Yeah, well—print me, cuff me, and lock me away.”

  Final snapshots. Another hand off.

  “You know,” Nickel said, “Lars ran off back in January, but I didn’t personally get a call to start tracking him down until a few days back.”