by Lincoln Cole
Abigail was silent for a minute. They went out of the lobby into to the parking lot and the cold air washed over them. Abigail made a noise and pulled her coat tighter, using the collar to block her face.
“Why did you have to pick a job that was somewhere so cold?”
Frieda chuckled as they climbed into the car and got on the road. Adrenaline coursed through her veins as well as a little bit of nervousness. No matter how many times she told herself this would be an easy cake-walk mission, she couldn’t tamp down her excitement.
They arrived at the bakery with about twenty minutes to spare. She pulled to a stop in an alley that overlooked the bakery and then parked.
A minute passed.
“So … now what?” Abigail asked.
“No clue,” Frieda said.
“Can you turn the heat on?”
“I don’t want to waste the gas.”
Abigail mumbled something under her breath. Frieda ignored her. She stayed in the car until they heard from Mikael.
“He didn’t tell you why we were coming here?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He just said the bakery and an hour and then hung up.”
“Oh.”
Another minute passed in silence.
“You didn’t think to ask him why?”
“He didn’t give me the chance. I told you, he just hung up.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Mmhmm, what?”
“Maybe you were too slow in responding.”
“It was right away. First, he said the bakery’s name and then he immediately hung up. I couldn’t have possibly responded.”
“Sure.”
“Sure?”
“Maybe his phone died.”
“I doubt it. Some people just do that.”
“Yeah,” Abigail said. “Like you?”
“That’s different.”
“Oh.”
Another few minutes of silence. Frieda rubbed her hands together as the cold air seeped into the car.
“So … we’re just waiting for him to get here?”
“Yeah.”
“Why not inside?’
“You ask a lot of questions,” Frieda said.
“You don’t have many answers, though.”
“One would think you’d stop asking.”
“Just trying to get the facts.”
“Mmhmm.”
The back-right door of the car suddenly opened up, letting in a strong gust of wind, and someone climbed in. Frieda panicked. She shifted in her seat, grabbing the grip of the pistol tucked in her waistband and pulling at it. It got caught on her coat pocket, and it took her an extra couple of seconds to shake it loose.
Enough time that if the person in the backseat of her car wanted them dead, they would be. Gun free, she spun in the seat and leveled it at the man in the back.
Sitting in the back seat was Mikael, a bemused expression on his face as she struggled.
“Would you like some help?” he asked, tone devoid of all sarcasm. If anything, that made the verbal jab worse.
“You scared the crap out of me,” Frieda said, sheepishly sliding her gun away.
“I can see that.”
“Proving a point?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Why are we here?”
“Every day, like clockwork, our target comes here for lunch.”
“So, you think this is a good place to grab him?”
“This is a good place to show you something,” the man corrected. “You were wrong: Curtis is dangerous.”
Frieda sighed. “He isn’t dangerous, though. He’s only an empath. He can read emotions by touching people, but little else.”
“Watch.”
He pointed over her shoulder toward the small bakery across the street. Tolson’s was also a restaurant, and the place was getting busy with the lunch hour rush. They mostly did cold sandwiches, though, which she didn’t much care for.
“What am I watching for?”
Mikael didn’t answer. A few seconds passed and then Curtis walked up the sidewalk from the south. He weaved around pedestrians and then headed right into the bakery.
Curtis went up to the counter, and the man working there greeted him with a huge smile. They talked for a second, the kid passed over a couple of bills, and then he went off to find a seat.
“He bought food,” Frieda said dryly. “Is that what you wanted me to see?”
“Watch closer.”
She sighed. Curtis was very friendly, talking to various patrons in the restaurant. He touched them on the shoulders and arms and shook a lot of hands. It was as a politician moving through the crowd.
“He’s outgoing. So what?”
The man sighed. “I can’t make it any clearer. You said he’s an empath and can read emotions. Clearly, he can also implant them.”
“What?”
“He is creating happiness in these people for his own uses.”
Frieda wasn’t convinced. “Just because he’s talkative doesn’t mean he can create feelings in people. Maybe he’s just reading them to get a sense of their mood. Knowing that could help him know how to navigate conversations with them.”
“No. I thought so as well the first few times a saw it, but it is too consistent, and he does it regularly. Every day he comes here for lunch and he always gets discounts on his meal. Then he goes to various other places of business and creates similar effects on the proprietors for different purposes. He’s dangerous.”
Frieda hesitated. “Maybe he can enhance someone’s emotions. But that doesn’t change our mission. We still have to bring him in.”
“No. I agree: it doesn’t change anything. It just means we need to tread carefully when we move in to apprehend him.”
“We could grab him right now,” Frieda offered. “We’re already here.”
“It is too risky and there are too many people around.”
Frieda paused. “What if he kills someone?”
“He won’t.”
“You can’t know that for certain.”
“He’s made no indication that such would be his intent.”
“What if there is no indication until he actually does it? If he kills someone, and we could have stopped him today and didn’t, then we are responsible for it.”
“You’re argument is flawed.”
“How so?”
“What if by doing as you want and grabbing him we provoke him into killing someone? If we go in while we are unprepared and lacking intelligence on the situation, we could spark this innocent boy to act out in a dangerous fashion he might not otherwise have. Then, such a decision and its consequences would likewise be upon us.”
“What would he do? He’s an empath. By your own admission the worst he could do is plant depressive emotions in someone. Making someone sad isn’t dangerous.”
“Sad enough to commit suicide?”
“Not likely.”
“Not impossible, either. Until we know more, we cannot take the risk of confronting him. We will continue to monitor until we are prepared to deal with him.”
“How long will that be?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“So, you brought us out here just to say we aren’t going to do anything today?”
“I brought you here to show you this because I was worried you would do something rash and thereby jeopardize the mission.”
“Fine. We will keep watching and waiting. We won’t do anything.”
“Good.”
She turned her car back on, letting the heat wash over here. “We’re going back to our hotel. You’d best get out unless you want to come along for a ride.”
“No, thank you.”
He opened the rear door and slid back out into the cold, and she immediately pulled back onto the roadway. Inside the diner, Curtis was still finishing his lunch, talking to a few people. He had a crowd around him, excited and happy.
It wasn’t too crazy of an occurrence to have
happy people around an enigmatic teenage kid, but there was some truth in what Mikael had told them. It was possible that Curtis could implant emotions.
So what? That didn’t change their mission. She didn’t even think it increased their risk. He couldn’t throw cars or destroy minds the way some of the more dangerous children could.
Arthur could be brash and impatient, and he made a lot of mistakes, but at least he didn’t sit back and second-guess himself at every turn. Curtis would have been caught and handed over to the church by now.
Or, maybe dead.
That was the old Arthur though. He used to be cold and heartless, a dog on a chain that she could set loose against their enemies. All of that culminated in West Virginia when he murdered those cultists. That had terrified her in ways she had never even imagined. She experienced a lot of dark and twisted things in her life, but when Arthur killed those people she saw a side of him she’d never even imagined.
That anger and brutality…
Then, he had changed. He saw the world in a new light and interact with everything differently. He had gone from a heartless killer to something else.
Frieda would never admit it to him, but when he first suggested adopting Abigail after West Virginia, she had been the one to raise objections to the Council and stop the adoption. She thought it was to replace the daughter he had lost back in Ohio, and that a broken man like him had no place raising a child.
But, over the last few months, and particularly the last few weeks, he had shown himself to be a changed man. He had sworn off killing, and she prayed his newfound mercy would last.
She also prayed, however, that it wouldn’t get him killed.
In their world, however, that was a nearly impossible tradeoff: demons and other horrors that inhabited their nightmares didn’t know mercy.
Chapter 10
Niccolo settled back into the ugly yellow arm chair in their cheap hotel room just inside of Akron. Outside the window was the brown and unforgiving landscape of Ohio in winter. It was doubtless quite beautiful in the spring, but in the bleak winter it was entirely uninviting.
He was exhausted and rundown by their lack of progress. Jeremy was a murderer, and even at fifteen years old he was willing to commit atrocities in the name of his misguided beliefs. What would he be capable of when he was an adult? He had been indoctrinated by Leopold Glasser to do horrible things.
The reason it was so hard for Niccolo to come to terms with what Jeremy had become was because they might not be able to save him. Niccolo had spent his entire life with one unshakable belief: no one was beyond salvation.
Yet, what Jeremy had done went beyond the pale, and he was wholly unrepentant in his actions. Even if Jeremy fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness, he wouldn’t deserve it.
If Jeremy was beyond redemption, then so was Niccolo.
He had murdered a Bishop. That, alone, was a fact that he could live with. After all, the Bishop had given him no other choice: one of them was going to die.
The problem, however, was that part of him was relieved by it. The Bishop died, and with him went the threat of everything he stood for. That was the reason Niccolo knew he was beyond redemption.
Part of Niccolo was happy with what he’d done.
The irony was that Arthur didn’t even know the true extent of Niccolo’s flaws: Arthur thought Niccolo’s depression stemmed from the murder, not the intent. He saw pity in the Hunter’s eyes every time they were together.
Such pity was entirely misplaced: Niccolo wasn’t ashamed of what he had done, he was ashamed of who he had become. Or, it was who he always was. He was a murderer and he had enjoyed taking the man’s life.
Circumstances, context, they meant nothing when weighed against the value of his soul. With such a consideration, Niccolo fell far short of salvation.
He wasn’t giving up on life or his service to the church. He still had a duty to the faith, and further a duty to the human race. He had taken on this burden when he joined Arthur in hunting the Bishop down, and he would see it through to the end before he returned to the Vatican to confess his crimes and receive his punishment.
Even with the Bishop dead, though the struggle wasn’t over with: Jeremy was still a danger to everything that the church stood for. He was powerful, too, and capturing him would be difficult. Arthur worried about that, though the man didn’t admit as much aloud.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Arthur asked suddenly.
The voice startled Niccolo and he jumped a little bit in his chair. He had been so wrapped up in his mind that he’d forgotten Arthur was even there.
Arthur was lying on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. His legs hung over the side and he had his fingers folded across his chest.
Desiree was at the local Akron library searching for any references to the Bishop’s storied history in this town. She hadn’t found anything back in Athens, Ohio, but now that they had a cleaner idea of where to look she was making more progress. They had narrowed the search region, now scanning through countless news articles going back dozens of years.
Thus far, she had determined that he had been here and she found links to him serving over Saint Thomas Church some forty years earlier. She was incredibly good at research and kept meticulous notes. Niccolo was very impressed and glad to have her along helping them out. He would have been out at the church assisting her, but right now was no good to anyone. He was simply too distracted.
“Nothing in particular.”
“Really? You seemed pretty focused there for a minute.”
“Nothing I can fix,” Niccolo corrected, shifting in the chair. “I can’t get my mind to relax for even a moment, but the thoughts do no good. I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels.”
“Thinking about the shipyard?”
“Constantly.”
That moment haunted him whenever he closed his eyes: Leopold’s face, shredded and bloody from where Niccolo had shot him. He was lying on the floor and Niccolo stood over him with a gun. All he saw was that moment.
The moment when Niccolo had murdered him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Arthur continued. “There was no other choice.”
“There is always another choice.”
“That other choice would have been for you to die instead of him. How could that have been better?”
“There could have been another way. A way in which neither of us died.”
“Maybe,” Arthur conceded. “But, maybe not. Thinking about ‘what if’ scenarios for that moment isn’t going to do you any good. All we can do now is focus on what comes next.”
“What does come next?” Niccolo asked. He genuinely wanted to know, because right now he couldn’t see any future where he moved forward with what he’d done. “I’m a murderer. That is an unforgivable crime. There is no redemption for that. I am beyond God’s love.”
“Nothing is beyond forgiveness.”
“Not for a murderer, and certainly not for a priest-turned-murderer. What I did was wholly and absolutely unforgivable.”
“Life doesn’t exist in absolutes,” Arthur argued. “What if we had let Leopold escape? What if we weren’t able to catch him or bring him to justice? What if he was able to continue kidnapping Vatican Children and enacting his agenda? Think of all of the children who would still suffer because of your inaction.”
“I didn’t say stopping him wasn’t the right thing to do. I said that my choice of how to stop him makes me a killer.”
Arthur was quiet for a long minute, before finally continuing. “Have you ever read the Bhagavad Gita?”
“No.”
“In it, a soldier attempts to throw down his weapons and do his duty as a soldier because doing so meant he would have to kill people and he knew it was unforgivable. However, his God tells him that he must fight because it is his duty and purpose in life to be a soldier, and such duty outweighs the impetus of his religion not to kill.”
“I’m not Hindu. Last I checked
, neither were you?”
“That isn’t the point,” Arthur said. “It isn’t about religion or theology, it’s about the lesson in the story. My point is that your duty is what matters. Let’s say in this argument you are right. Let’s say that in killing the Bishop you have damned yourself to an eternity in hell, but, by killing him you saved the lives of many people, including children. Would you still do it?”
Niccolo hesitated. “My duty wasn’t to kill him, it was to bring him in.”
“We tried that. We did our best and everything we could and it still wasn’t enough to bring him in alive. There was no other recourse than to murder him. So, would you take it back and let the Bishop walk free if it meant your soul was safe?”
Niccolo rubbed his hands across his face and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” Arthur said. “Just like I do every single time I take a life. I don’t enjoy killing people, but if it needs to be done I also don’t hate myself for it. I can’t imagine for one second that you would put your own life above those of the children the Bishop was terrorizing and manipulating.”
“Maybe…”
“It isn’t in you to just let other people suffer so that your life is easier. If that was the case, you never would have become a priest, nor an exorcist, and you sure as hell wouldn’t have come with me to hunt the Bishop at that shipyard.”
“And, maybe that is the problem. Maybe the fact that we can sit here in this hotel and justify murdering someone is why we will never be allowed redemption. Maybe you’re right and there was no other way. But, maybe you’re wrong, too.”
“I’m wrong about a lot of things, but this isn’t one of them. You’ve stepped out of your cozy life and into another world, and you have a purpose now that extends beyond your ten commandments or your simple life as a Vatican priest. You have a duty to protect the unprotected and defend the innocent. If you’re going to get caught up on little details each time—”
“Someone is coming,” Niccolo interrupted, leaning forward in his chair and squinting out the window. It was gray and foggy outside, but he was certain that his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
Two men had gotten out of a car and were walking toward the entrance to the hotel. Both were carrying shotguns.
