Ten Plagues

© 2011 by Mary Nealy

DEDICATION/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In Corinthians 12:8–10 is a list of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As I read the list it was very familiar. I’d heard this list many times before and had heard of people with nearly all these gifts. Wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, faith, healing, performing miracles, discerning spirits, speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues. But this once, as I read, I was struck by the gift of discerning spirits. I wondered what that would be like. What if you could walk up to someone and immediately know that they were good or evil, or even discern evil spirits—demons—within them?

When an idea comes to me while reading my Bible, I try to pay very careful attention to that, because I believe God sometimes speaks to us in a voice so still and small that it amounts to not so much a voice as an idea. From this idea a book was born. I’m dedicating this book to the God who gives me ideas.

CHAPTER ONE

With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood.

A cold chill of evil sleeted through Keren Collins’s veins.

Wind howled like a tormented soul between the Chicago tenements. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Her hair blew across her eyes and blinded her. Being sightless made the evil more powerful, as if it cast her into the presence of a blackened soul.

She felt an impending doom so powerful her hands shook as she twisted her mass of unruly curls into a messy bun and anchored it with an ugly but functional leather contraption.

She had parked her Impala a half block away from the decrepit brownstone she was watching. The front stoop and the young punks gathered there were visible. She looked around, listening. Did the evil have a source? Could this feeling be coming from inside that run-down building?

No way was Keren going in alone to find out. Chicago cops were about as popular in this part of the South Side as the Cubbies. She sat in her car, and waited and itched.

O’Shea, why’d you pick today of all days to be late?

To keep from fretting over this strange premonition, Keren pulled her notes out to reread what she had on Juanita Lopez, reported missing two days ago. Keren and O’Shea had done some preliminary checking yesterday that had led Keren to this old hangout of Juanita’s. No one had seen the young woman for a week. Keren had read about two sentences when she snapped the little book shut and jammed it back in her blazer’s inside breast pocket. She couldn’t sit still when things felt this wrong. Pushed to action and against all common sense, she reached for her door handle.

Pounding footsteps drew her eyes to the left and behind her car. A man raced down the sidewalk on the far side of the street. The beat of his sprinting feet made Keren’s heart speed up. He raced past her, straight toward that cluster of thugs Keren figured for Juanita’s old gang. They saw the man running and straightened like wolves scenting blood.

The runner went up the brick steps right between some of the meanest scum in the city. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for air. Keren narrowed her eyes as he lifted a small piece of … something … and pressed it to the side of the door, sliding it sideways and jamming it into a crack he must have found. A sign maybe, brown wood, a foot or so long and half as high. If it had a picture or words on it she couldn’t make them out. Just as he pressed it against the wall one of the gang members slapped a hard hand on the man’s shoulder, ripped the sign out of his hand, jerked the door open, and shoved him inside.

That sense of evil grew, but Keren didn’t have to be a genius to know that the guy who’d just been shoved inside could be in big trouble.

A half-dozen Hispanic boys erupted from the brownstone and took up positions in front of the building as if they’d been assigned guard duty.

Keren slumped low in her seat, sitting on her backside while someone was being killed. But she couldn’t take on a gang alone. Minutes ticked by.

“O’Shea, where are you? C’mon.”

She couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached for the door handle and her phone at the same time.

An explosion blasted bricks loose from the building’s foundation. The kids standing guard were mowed down by shrapnel.

Keren’s car rocked on its axles. Its car alarm went off and the airbag deployed and punched her in the face.

A blast of heat hit next and gritty dust enveloped the car. She leaped from her car and charged toward the crawling, bleeding boys.

Running and stumbling, she was blinded by the billowing smoke.

Another explosion knocked her down. She could hear glass shattering to her right. Flames shot out of the windows on an upper floor, cutting through the gritty air.