The Binding

Chapter Twenty

Leif cursed himself again for having never learned Hebrew. Everything would have been so much easier if he'd simply understood the language. His hand trailed along the stone railing guarding the front steps of the apartment building. Finding the right apartment should be easy. A middle-aged woman with a small dog walked out the main door, and he bounded up the steps before the door closed. He held it open for her and nodded politely as she passed.

He glanced at the list of names next to the buttons of the call box and nodded in satisfaction. Esther's name was on the list. He glided up the stairs quickly, taking two at a time. He stopped on her floor and glanced at the numbers on the doors, searching for the right one. He heard someone moving softly around in the apartment and gently rapped on the door.

A young woman with golden skin and dark flowing hair cascading down her back peered out at him. Leif dipped his head to the side as his eyes took her in. She looked enough like Esther that the two could easily be mistaken from a distance.

Her eyes widened faintly as she gazed up at Leif. He smiled at her with genuine warmth and confident ease.

"I'm looking for Esther Shemer," he said in English.

She blinked for a second then bubbled girlishly. "That's me."

* * *

Worn stone steps climbed and twisted in front of me. We had been climbing for twenty minutes, with no end in sight. Ezra had been driving for nearly two hours, refusing to give any sort of hint as to where he was taking me. I climbed uneven steps, worn both smooth and rough over the centuries. How many centuries I couldn't guess. Each step had been carved and assembled haphazardly; a few were a mixture of gravel while others were cut out of huge stone blocks. Some were only a few inches high, and others were elevated a foot high. Gnarled branches curled and hung over the path, spreading into the darkness around us. It was past two o'clock in the morning, and the deep shadows combined with the uneven terrain meant I had to pay strict attention to where I was going. The last thing I wanted to do was twist an ankle, or break my neck. No telling how long that would take to heal.

If Ezra brought me out to see an ancient staircase, I wasn't impressed. I'd seen stairs before. I'd even seen ancient stairs before.

We climbed for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes more when I noticed the trees begin to clear and the curved crest of the hill rounding above me. The leaves and branches parted, slinking into the black, revealing an astonishing canopy of stars. I could count on one hand the number of places I had seen the night sky like this. It was as if the stars were pushing against each other for a small piece of the night. Living in a city it is easy to forget how many stars there really are, that is if you were ever lucky enough to discover it in the first place. It was moments like this, I realized how far from nature the world had come. This was the real sky, in all its magnificence. This was the sky Ezra had known most of his life. Today, the places we could go to see the stars, naked and natural, were shrinking day by day.

Ezra stepped behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist. I looked back to the ground, and I gasped. I stepped forward, unable to believe what was happening around me. Fire. The mountain was burning. Not the trees or grass but the mountain itself. All around dozens of gold, yellow, crimson, and blue flames were burning through the stone. Some of the fires were small, wavering and licking no higher than my ankles while others came past my thighs.

I walked up to a fire and placed my hand on the stone next to it. Even inches from the flames, the stones were still cool under my hand. I turned in a slow circle, mesmerized.

"These are the fires of the Chimaera. A monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent," Ezra said close to my ear. "This is where the gods display their vengeance." I raised an eyebrow at him. "There used to be a temple over there," he gestured to an open space to the right. "These fires have been burning for thousands of years. If you try to put one out, it will just flame up again."