by Tal Bauer
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.
He closed his eyes, groaning. Nightmares in blood lapped at the edges of his consciousness. Words from dusty pages in old books hadn’t helped after Africa. He’d listened when the shaman, deep in the heat of the Liberian jungle, suggested he head to Rome. For the Eternal City. Wash his soul in the bells of St. Paul’s. Find truth there, the big Truth. Capital T Truth.
That hope he’d had when he started this journey seemed thin now, ground down to nothing as he watched the sun set on the Eternal City. Even the bells were hollow. There was no Truth to be found here. Only secrets and pain.
Fine. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He could take a message.
What next? Cristoph heaved a deep sigh, tipping his head back against. If he quit the Guard, then his military career was over. He couldn’t just return to his old unit. Quitting the Guard meant quitting the army. The Swiss army looked at a Swiss Guard enlistment as something almost saint like. Anyone who quit the Guard was no longer welcome in their ranks. Leaving the Swiss Guard would close more than one door in his life.
The army hadn’t been much, but it had been everything he had. There, like everywhere, he’d fit in like a bad screw, all right angles and sharp edges against people who didn’t like him, who never wanted him around. He’d been That Guy: conversations had stopped when he walked in the room, and there was a mountain of forgotten invitations for drinks or kicking back with the others staring him blatantly in the face.
Unbelievably, his thoughts wandered back to the jungle. Dare he even think it? He chewed on his lip. He could go back to Africa. He’d lost himself there and found something he couldn’t explain. Maybe he needed to head back, find whatever part of himself he’d lost. Some irreplaceable part of his soul, perhaps. Something that set him apart from the world, from the rest of humanity.
Whatever he needed, it wasn’t here. It had been a mistake to come to the Vatican. Nowhere was that clearer than in the forceful distancing Alain had pushed between them.
He wasn’t wanted. Time to cut his losses and run.
It seemed he was always running.
The sun was drowsy on the horizon, burnt umber rays roasting Rome. Rust turned to bronze, lilac and peony strands threading the sky above the city. Cristoph threw his empty cup after the useless bottle of wine.
He’d made up his mind about leaving, but he was no closer to actually walking out. How far would he get with a bum leg and unfinished business with Alain? Though, there really was nothing there between him and Alain. Him and Sergeant Autenburg. If he was lucky, he’d never see the man again. The memories already stung too much, more of his stupid optimism and foolish hope. Alain was the last person he wanted to think about. Or remember.
So, of course, he wallowed in his memories, in his thoughts of Alain.
He’d wanted Alain to be proud of him. He’d wanted to not be a fuckup for once. He’d wanted someone to see that he was good enough, where it mattered. All of the spectacular course grades and the field accolades and army awards meant nothing if the actual people who thought he was worth something, who wanted him around, were so few and far between.
His one weakness: he craved the tiny drops of kindness he found, so rare in his life. Others seemed to lap up affection, acceptance even, like rain. Why did it seem he was wandering in the desert, always searching but never finding a place in the world to call his own?
Cristoph gazed down the sloping Vatican hill, away from St. Peter’s and toward the Castel Sant’Angelo. The black turret of the Vatican Bank rose, a barred fortress, not far from the barracks.
So long Eternal City. I’m done with you. The sun’s rays peeled away from the Vatican’s buildings. Shadows built around the ancient walls. Stillness crept in with the darkness, silence settling as the Vatican turned in for the night. Lights winked on in the Apostolic Palace in the pope and the secretary of state’s apartments.
His eyes caught movement by the base of the Vatican Bank. A figure huddled at the base, hidden by the ramshackle assortment of badly parked cars crowding for space. Jerking, staggering steps limped forward. Someone was heading for the barracks, it seemed, wrapped up in a tattered blanket. One hand shot out, grasping the rough stone of the tower. The man barely managed to stay upright.
Cristoph froze. The inner spaces of the Vatican, especially the walkways between the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican Bank, and the Swiss Guard barracks, were some of the most secure spaces in the world. Who was this man stumbling up the hill toward the barracks? A guard, back from a day of debauchery?
A chill settled in his bones. A guard back from an assault, like him the night before? Cristoph scooted forward for a better look.
The man pulled himself another step, using the bricks of the tower to keep him going.
It was one step too many, apparently, because he pitched forward, falling flat on the cobbled passageway between the barracks and the bank. He rolled to his back and Cristoph finally saw his face.
Alain!
He was on his feet before he knew it. He stumbled, then cursed as he grabbed his crutches. Uncoordinated and woozy from wine, Cristoph careened sideways before righting himself. He managed a stumbling sway toward the roof access and hopped down the stairs on his good foot, huffing all the way down the five floors to the rear exit of the barracks. He shouldered open the door and heaved his way out on his crutches.
Alain hadn’t moved. He was still motionless on the cobblestones.
Cristoph flung himself across the cobbled street. He was at Alain’s side in moments, and he dropped his crutches with a clatter as he fell to his knees, barely wincing at the pain in his leg.
His hands hovered over Alain. One side of Alain’s face was gashed and bloody, like he’d gone ten rounds with a prize boxer or been attacked with a cheese grater. His suit, normally comfortably rumpled, was shredded, and bruised and flayed skin bled through the suit’s tears. He was soaked and shivering, and a filthy blanket wrapped around him. It stank like the city’s homeless, like piss and rust and smoke. Cristoph gagged as he peeled it off Alain.
Alain moaned. His teeth clattered together, and his hands reached blindly for Cristoph.
“Alain? What the fuck happened to you?” Cristoph’s hands fluttered over Alain, hesitant to touch. There wasn’t a piece of skin he could see that wasn’t bruised or bloody.
“Have to…” Alain coughed, spat blood on the cobblestones. His teeth kept chattering. “Have to get to my apartment,” he forced out. “Help me. Please.”
“You need to get to hospital.” Cristoph dug in his pockets, pulling out his cell phone. He punched in the emergency number.
“No.” Alain rolled away from Cristoph, trying to get his hands and knees under him. “That’s not what I need.”
“You’re beaten half to death.” Cristoph barely caught Alain as he lurched to his feet, almost falling. Cristoph grimaced, putting weight on his cast and his broken foot, and he felt bones and tendons shift and crunch as fire rocketed up his leg. Alain sagged against Cristoph. Cristoph managed to get one of Alain’s arms over his shoulder. He gazed at his crutches, tossed aside at the base of the tower. There was no way to get them now. Not without dropping Alain.
Fuck it. He’d endured worse. Cristoph set off, walking on his broken foot and cast, heaving Alain alongside his slow, halting steps.
Alain’s moans masked Cristoph’s pained grunts. He moved as fast as he could, trying to get Alain to safety and to get off his damn broken foot. He held Alain tight, fingers digging into Alain’s side, but he loosened his grip when he realized the slick wetness on his fingers wasn’t the unexplained water drenching Alain. It was blood, seeping from a ragged slash around Alain’s side and over his back, pouring into Cristoph’s hand. He shifted his hold.
Alain’s head lolled against Cristoph’s shoulder. His eyes closed.
They managed to get into the back door of Alain’s barracks. Cristoph stumbled in the narrow hallway, trying not to lose his foot
ing or hurt Alain and managing to do neither. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead as his cast clanked on the linoleum. Blessedly, they were alone. Thank God. He couldn’t deal with anyone’s staring or their questions.
Not when he didn’t know what the hell was going on.
The ancient elevator loomed. He shoved them both through the narrow opening and slammed the brass gate closed. He elbowed the lever up for the fourth floor, to Alain’s apartment. The gears squealed, motors whirred. The elevator lurched upward.
“What happened?” Cristoph breathed into Alain’s soaked hair. He swallowed, looking down at his bloody palm. “Fuck, Alain. I really need to call emergency services.”
“No. They can’t help me.” One bloody hand gripped Cristoph’s shirt. “Just get me home.” Alain’s breaths burned Cristoph’s neck. He was almost hyperventilating.
Cristoph stayed silent, staring at Alain’s blood smeared on his fingers. More dripped on the elevator floor, a slow, steady flow that formed a star beneath their bodies.
The elevator lurched to a stop at the fourth floor. Cristoph shoved the brass gate back and hauled Alain through. He set his jaw, forcing away the throbbing in his foot as he dragged Alain down the hallway to his apartment.
Cristoph glared Major Bader’s door. Don’t come out, don’t come out, don’t come out.
His blood-soaked hand slipped on Alain’s doorknob. Alain, inexplicably, locked his apartment. No one locked their doors in the Vatican, or in the barracks. There were no looters, no robbers, not here.
He threw his shoulder into the door, holding on to Alain. The simple lock snapped, and they barreled through together, crashing into Alain’s entryway. His broken foot twisted inside his cast, and he screamed behind clenched teeth.
As Cristoph tried to breathe through the agony ripping his foot apart, Alain pushed out of his arms. He pulled at the buttons of his shirt and tugged at his torn clothes as he tried to strip.
“Here.” Cristoph grabbed the hem and ripped it over Alain’s head, helping him get free of the black priest’s shirt. He froze, staring at the mess of Alain’s body. It was so much worse than he’d thought. Alain looked like he’d been filleted, like his back had been cut through to ribbons, and one deep, jagged slash curled around his side, crossing through the other gashes, deeper than the rest. Blood was everywhere, pouring down his skin. He saw the edges of scars beneath the blood. It looked like Alain had been to war.
Alain’s hands dropped to his belt. He fumbled as he worked the leather through the buckle. A few kicks, and he left his pants behind in a tangle, one leg catching on his black boot and trailing behind him as he stumbled for the kitchen.
“Jesus! Alain!” Cristoph limped after him. “Where are you going? You need stitches. And antibiotics. You’re fucked up!” He dug in his pants for his cell phone again, hobbling after Alain into his cramped kitchen.
He froze.
Weapons hung on every inch of the walls, assault rifles and sawed-off shotguns and pistols and honest-to-God swords of every length, from heavy broadswords to lithe daggers and lean sabers. Dried herbs tied to twine bobbed in front of a dirty window, and more were pressed between heavy books, poking out from between pages. Jars filled with thick ruby liquid lined the walls along the floor. Was that blood? Blood in hundreds of glass jars surrounding Alain’s kitchen?
A wooden chest sat in the corner. Alain made a beeline for it, falling to his knees as he wheezed. He collapsed on top of the chest, pressing his bloodied cheek to the wood as he exhaled.
“Alain!” Cristoph dropped to his knees, pulling him back. He cradled him against his chest, searching for a pulse. Christ, that had sounded like a death rattle, like the last exhale Alain would ever make.
Fighting his hold, Alain reached for the chest with shaking hands and flipped it open.
Bowls of split skulls and black stone rested next to curved knives and scythes and blades made of carved bones and teeth from creatures long extinct. Runic tablets and charred stones and bits of wood burned with sigils sat next to bags of herbs wrapped in linen and tied with twine. Phials of oil and water sparked with lightning sat in a row, each stoppered and coated with a wax seal emblazoned with a sigil. More blood-filled jars lined the bottom, labeled sigils messily drawn on the outside of the glass in what looked like the same blood within.
Cristoph went still behind Alain as he stared at a bowl carved from a human skull. He’d seen this before. Magic, wrapped in fire and smoke and wreathed in darkness. He’d seen this all before, down in the blood-soaked jungles of Africa.
Alain knocked over phials and bottles and a blade of ebony as he reached into the chest. He pulled out a bag of ash and a long fang, and then rooted around until he pulled out a green glass bottle at the bottom of the chest. A bowl made from black basalt and carved with golden sigils around the rim followed.
Ancient tarot cards, bloodstained, fluttered from the chest, sliding across the kitchen floor.
“What is this shit?” Cristoph breathed. “Alain, what the fuck is all this?”
Alain shoved the basalt bowl in Cristoph’s hands. He reached for the bag of ashes and missed, but grabbed it on the next reach.
Blood pooled on the ground between their bodies, bleeding out of Alain.
He dumped all of the ash into the bowl and then grabbed the milk-white fang. Gasping, Alain ground the fang into the side of the bowl, sweeping it in a circle through the ash three times. Next, he grabbed the green bottle, peering at the label as he blinked hard. Breaking the wax seal with his teeth, Alain poured the entire contents into the bowl.
It was blood.
“Oh shit…” Cristoph balked, turning his head away. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to breathe through his mouth as the stench of copper and moss hit him hard.
“Spit,” Alain grunted, blinking up at Cristoph through his swollen and bloody eye.
“What?”
“Spit! Now!” Alain waved his hand toward the black basalt bowl and the mess of ash, blood, and fang.
Cristoph spat slowly. “You’ve fucking lost it, man. I have to get you to hospital.”
Or maybe, fuck the hospital. He should run the fuck away. Every one of the warnings he’d ignored from Muller, Zeigler, and even Chaplain Weimers pounded inside his brain. Everyone had warned him. Everyone.
Alain reached for the blades in the chest, discarding one after another until he found a curved, silver sickle.
He grabbed Cristoph’s hand. Without a word, he rolled the blade across Cristoph’s palm, opening his skin. Blood welled, and Alain turned his palm over, squeezing it into the basalt bowl.
“What the fuck!” Cristoph jerked his hand back.
Alain dripped the blade into the bowl, stirring the mush of blood, ash, and fang together as he chanted under his breath in Latin.
The hairs on the back of Cristoph’s neck shot straight up, electrified as something pulsed through the air. The lights flickered. A bulb popped in its socket. He whipped around. The air around them seemed to tremble, seemed to quake.
Finally, Alain stopped chanting. He dropped the blade, let it clatter to the floor. “Smear this on my cuts.” He turned his torn face toward Cristoph. “Everywhere.”
“Fuck no.” Cristoph stared at the bowl. “That will infect you. You can’t put this shit on open wounds. I can’t—”
“Do it!” Alain gasped. “Now! Put it on me!” His eyes slid closed as he weaved to the side, almost slumping. “Please…”
He’d been in Africa during the Ebloa outbreaks, and that had taught him to never, ever fuck around with someone else’s blood, with any blood outside of anyone’s body, ever. He glared at Alain.
He scooped up a palmful of blood, cursing Alain, cursing the Swiss Guards, cursing the day he decided to come to the Vatican, no, even further back. Cursing the day he was born.
Warm electricity tingled his skin. Shocks zipped up his arm, spiraling straight down his spine.
He didn’t think. If he stopped for a sing
le moment, he’d run as far as he could, as fast as he could. He slapped the warm, ashy blood onto Alain’s chest, smearing the mess into his still-bleeding gashes.
Alain leaned back, exhaling as Cristoph rubbed the paste over his chest, his arms, his shoulders, and his back. Slowly, he worked up Alain’s neck, and, after a moment, patted his bloody palms into the open wounds across half of Alain’s face. Alain shuddered, closing his eyes, as though some of the pain slipped from him.
Looking down, Cristoph saw Alain’s legs for the first time. Below his briefs, angry purple ligature marks snaked around his thighs, some weeping blood. “The hell? What happened to you?”
“Melusine,” Alain breathed. “Had to fight my way out of the river.”
“The river…” Cristoph frowned. “The Tiber? What were you doing in the Tiber? And what the fuck is a melusine?”
Alain slumped against the kitchen wall and shook his head. He didn’t answer Cristoph’s questions.
He held up his blood-covered hands. “Does this go on those, too?”
“No,” Alain breathed. “That’s for vampires. It should work on the Demon Fire, too.”
“Vampires. And Demon Fire.” Cristoph stared at him. Blood-soaked jungle leaves flashed in his mind. “Fuck, you need to go to hospital.”
“Take me to bed,” Alain said instead.
“Alain.”
Alain reached for Cristoph’s cheek as if to cup it. He missed, almost poking Cristoph in the eye. Even though half of Alain’s face, his body, was covered in blood and ash, the light in his eyes was brighter than it had been before, and it seemed like the old Alain was fighting his way back.
“Shit,” Alain suddenly said, reaching for his pants. Whatever he’d been about to say was gone, as was the moment. “Where’s my phone? God, Lotario…”
Silently, Cristoph passed his own phone over to Alain, struggling with his pants and gripping his empty pockets. Wherever Alain’s phone had ended up, it wasn’t with him. Alain grabbed Cristoph’s phone and punched in Lotario’s number by heart.
The cranky older priest’s voicemail message blared from the phone’s speaker. The phone didn’t even ring.
