Chapter Nadine Haikal El Agamy, Alexandria 2004
“Don’t take her! Safa, give her back!” Nadine screamed. Her sister ignored her, wrapping Nadine’s daughter in the paisley blanket. Nadine tried to move. Hot pain razed through her.
Their mother accepted the crying bundle from Safa. She smiled down at the infant and said, “I hope it picks her. She has your grandmother’s freckles.” A ringed finger smoothed the baby’s hair from her forehead. “A little freckle cluster, right on her temple.”
Nadine curled against the tile, the residue of blood slick between her thighs.
Everything inside her howled, demanding she stop them from taking her child.
They couldn’t do this. She had paid Bamba’s debt her entire life.
Ruined family after family, inflicted this very same agony on other mothers.
What was the point if her own daughter wouldn’t be spared?
“Get up, Nadine,” her mother sniffed. “This behavior is unbecoming.”
“Love has made her soft. Look at her. Probably thinking of her little graduate student in his sweater vests,” Safa sneered.
Nadine glanced up sharply. Safa laughed. “Oh, did you think we didn’t know who the father was? How the mighty do fall. Have you forgotten who we are, sister? Who we serve? You had no chance of running away with him.”
“Spare the girl,” Nadine ground out. “Spare my daughter, and you can take Hatem.”
Even Nadine’s black heart shivered at the callousness of her offer. She loved Hatem, yes. More than she thought possible. But she would also hand-feed him to wolves if it meant keeping her daughter.
“What would we do with him?” her mother asked, perplexed.
“Maybe we can show him exactly who his sweetheart really is. How do you think Hatem Mansour will react to learning that his rosy-cheeked love is the Terror of El Agamy?”
While Safa spoke, Nadine closed her hand around the scissors by her knee. Safa had used them to cut the umbilical cord. Nadine hid the scissors in the folds of her gown.
“Don’t worry. It rarely rejects Haikal women,” her mother said.
She smiled down at Nadine. “The three—maybe four—of us in this house are its last agents. The only ones capable of repaying Bamba’s debt.
It needs us. I’m not angry with you for trying to run, ya umri.
But you must understand that wherever you go, it will find you. ”
Nadine’s mother flicked the switch, pitching the second floor in darkness. “No!” Nadine cried out. She groped for the wall.
In the center of darkness, a set of steps materialized.
Her mother’s robe swirled around her ankles as she walked, carrying Nadine’s daughter toward the steps.
Safa followed eagerly, barely sparing her older sister a glance.
In moments, they would lay the baby down at the door.
The orange light would spread over her newborn in the test most Haikals had taken to determine their role in preserving the family line.
If the child was chosen to serve the curse, then she would never be safe again.
If she failed the test or failed to take it, then her life would be in the hands of the only people who could serve the curse: Nadine, Safa, and their mother.
As her mother ascended the stairs, a figure appeared beside her. The curly-haired girl in the slippers. She glanced back briefly, and Nadine’s heart stuttered.
She had freckles on her temple.
The girl vanished, but Nadine was already moving. Any earthly pain took a back seat to the determination blazing through her. She crossed the floor, scissors held in a tight grip.
Nadine shoved Safa aside as she raced up the steps. The baby wiggled as Nadine’s mother gently deposited the bundle on the ground. “Mama!” Nadine shouted. “Stop!”
At the door, Nadine’s mother turned, the beginnings of a disapproving frown on her face.
Without a second of hesitation, Nadine plunged the scissors into her mother’s heart.
The moment stretched for eternity. And as Nadine watched blood soak into her mother’s robe, a chilling thought struck her.
Evil was built into the bones of the Haikal villa.
Like toxic dust motes floating on the stagnant air, it settled on the nearest breathing surface and corroded.
Layers of tragedy and pain and loss. How long had Nadine been buried beneath them?
Bamba’s deal didn’t give Haikals roots or a legacy. It gave them chains.
Her mother stumbled into the banister, staring at Nadine with disbelief. Safa screamed. More tragedy to whet the house’s appetite.
Nadine had ruined countless lives at the threshold of this door. She wouldn’t let her child be next.
Nadine scooped up the baby and yanked the scissors from her mother’s chest. Blood spurted onto the tile, a growing pool that dripped down the top step.
A macabre grin split Nadine’s mother face as she collapsed. Her tongue flicked over red-stained teeth. “My favorite daughter. So cold, so compassionless.” A laugh gurgled wetly in her chest. “You are an artist of cruelty, Nadine. Your child will be the worst of us. Worse than Bamba herself.”
As much as Nadine wanted to bolt down the stairs, heedful of her dangerous proximity to the door, she couldn’t help herself. “I’ll raise her to be kind. Gentle, like her father. She won’t be anything like us.”
Twin rivers of blood streamed from her mother’s nose. “Oh, you foolish girl. A beast cannot raise a butterfly.”
Safa rushed to their mother. Nadine pointed the scissors at Safa, and her sister glared at Nadine with unmitigated hatred. A shiver of unease traveled down Nadine’s spine. Safa was savage. Shallow and eagerly violent. Nadine had done her a grievous wrong tonight, and it would not be forgiven.
She and Safa would find one another again. Their story would not die here today.
“You and me,” Safa whispered. “We will end in blood.”
Nadine gripped her whimpering child against her chest. A hollow smile sprang to her lips. “A Haikal can only end in blood.”
Her feet trailing red tracks on the steps, Nadine left a dead woman in front of the third-floor door.
If she had known what would happen to her daughter in seventeen years’ time, Nadine would have turned around. She would have gone back upstairs and shoved the scissors into Safa’s neck, over and over until the blades snapped against bone.
But Nadine didn’t remember the girl in the slippers. Not for nine long years.