“I’m not going to hurt you,” Levi said. “Please calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.” She tried to get free again. “Let go of me, you son of a bitch.”
Maria raised her free hand and slapped at him. To her dismay, she missed. Levi blinked as the blow whizzed by. Her hand glanced off the seat. It seemed impossible to her. This close, there was no way she could have missed.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated, his voice patient. “Please. I just need you to listen to me and I don’t want to be hit. Okay?”
Breathing hard, Maria nodded.
“Okay.” He released her wrist and folded his hands in his lap. “I’m sorry if I upset you. That wasn’t my intention. I’m just scared, is all.”
“What you are,” Maria said, “is lucky. Lucky I didn’t knock your head off.”
He smiled slightly. “Even if you’d wanted to, you couldn’t have.”
“Oh, believe me—I wanted to. You gonna tell me you’re an expert at Amish karate or something?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that I carry something on my person that prevents attacks like that. Your aim was true. It just wasn’t effective.”
Maria started to protest, but Levi held up his hand.
“Please, let me continue. I’m sorry for upsetting you. I shouldn’t have touched you and I know it was wrong. But we have a very serious situation here and not a lot of time to deal with it. I can’t do this alone. I need help, starting with Adam Senft.”
“Is this some kind of powwow thing?”
“No. The powers that I’ll be calling on and the methods I’ll be using have nothing to do with powwow. They are a much older and much more dangerous form of magic.”
“I think I’ve heard enough,” Maria said. She reached for the pepper spray again. “I’d like you to leave. Now.”
“Listen to me,” Levi pleaded. “You don’t understand what’s going on. If I could just—”
“I want you to get out of my car right now.”
“Please…”
“Let’s see if powwow has a cure for pepper spray to the fucking face!”
She raised the canister and pointed the nozzle at him. Her thumb was on the button.
“When you were eight years old,” Levi said quickly, “you had a pet turtle named Lucky. You called him that because your father found him in the middle of the Garden State Parkway, crossing several lanes of traffic. He was lucky to be alive.”
“What—” She lowered the pepper spray and stared at him, gaping.
“One day,” Levi continued, “you came home from school and took Lucky out into the backyard. You had a small, plastic wading pool with green and pink fish painted on the sides. You used to let Lucky splash around in it. On that day, Pete Nincetti, the bully from next door, came into the yard and stole Lucky from you. Your parents weren’t home yet, and you were scared of Pete because he was older than you were. You tried to get Lucky back but Pete shoved you down. You started crying. Then he tossed Lucky into the air and hit him with his baseball bat. He did this four more times, cracking the shell and finally knocking Lucky down into a sewer drain.”
Tears streamed down Maria’s shocked face. “Stop it. How do you—”
“You told your parents when they came home. Your father hollered at Mr. Nincetti, but nothing ever happened. The police did nothing. His parents did nothing. Pete wasn’t punished.”
“I…I never told anyone.”
“Wrong. You told Clarissa Thomas, your roommate during your freshman year in college. But what you never told anyone was that three months later, it was you who wrapped the rat poison up in a piece of bologna and fed it to Pete’s dog.”
“Shut up,” Maria sobbed. “Just stop it.”
“The dog vomited blood and died. Pete cried. So did you.”
“Are you some kind of stalker or something? Have you been following me?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know this? Tell me!”
“I just know.”
She buried her face in her hands. “You son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry that I had to do this,” Levi said, “but I needed to get your attention. I had to show you proof that this isn’t just the ramblings of a crazy man. I need you to listen to me, Maria. More importantly, I need you to believe what I’m saying.”
“But you just—”
“If it’s any consolation, you might like to know that, years later, Pete was shot in the head by two men named Tony Genova and Vincent Napoli, after he ran afoul of the mob. Despite the severity of the wound, it took him a long time to die. He suffered. His body is buried in an unmarked grave near Manalapan.”
Maria opened the console between them and pulled out a tissue. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, then tossed the crumpled tissue on the floor.
“How the hell do you know all this?”
“The methods don’t matter,” Levi said. “What matters is that you’ve seen incontrovertible proof that I can do things like that. Things that you don’t believe in. Except that now you’ve got no choice but to believe in them. This was no parlor trick. It’s real. Do you believe?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Good. Because I’ve got a lot more to tell you, and if you’re going to help me, then you can’t have any doubts.”
“Help you? I’m not involved in anything, Levi. I’m just researching a book.”
“No,” he said. “You’re involved. Whether you realize it or not. It feels…right, to me. You’re a part of this. Not by your own hand, but because that’s what God wants of you.”
“I may believe you’re some kind of mind reader, but I definitely don’t believe in God. I was raised to believe in Allah, but I’m not even sure about that anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter. God. Allah. Yahweh. These are all just different names for the same being.”
“Whatever. I’ve heard that before, too. Still doesn’t mean I believe in any of them.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.”
Maria smirked. “Is this the part where you tell me that’s okay because God believes in me? If so, save the clichés for somebody else. I’ve heard that one before.”
“No.” Levi shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that. Because by tomorrow night, if we don’t stop what’s about to occur, you’ll have your disbelief resolved whether you like it or not.”
“How?”
“All souls, whether they believe in Him or not, stand before God after they die. And unless we act soon, there are going to be a lot of people dying—us included.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The end of the world.”
“Okay,” Maria agreed. “You’ve got my attention, at least. Let’s hear what you have to say. Should we go somewhere more secluded or are you comfortable here?”
Levi glanced out the window and checked the parking lot. While his attention was diverted, Maria reached down and quickly turned on her digital voice recorder, which was sitting in the console’s cup-holder. She sat back up and smiled as Levi turned back to her.
“We should be okay here,” he said. “I’m sure it will put you more at ease.”
“Whatever you prefer.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled. “Much of what the human race thinks it knows is actually wrong. The history of our planet—of our past—is full of inaccuracies. This is especially true of our religions. The primary texts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Shinto, Satanism, Wicca, and all of the others are fundamentally flawed. They’ve been tampered with and rewritten by man so much over the years that much of them are now filled with falsehoods. It takes many years of study and searching to learn the real truths.”
“And that’s what it means to be Amish?”
He snorted. “No. We’re just another Christian denomination—and we’re just as flawed. Perhaps more so. I no longer believe what they believe, because I’ve seen the bigger picture. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, one of his sons.”