“Welcome back, little one,” she said as the goat scrambled to its feet, its mouth moving in silent bleats, its eyes as wide as the hole in its throat.
“What have you done?” Father Lucas whispered hoarsely.
She started to answer, but then the sound of whimpering came from the outer edge where the wood of the fort sank into the dirt. Mouse took a candle and peered into the dark, expecting to see the shadows take shape and the space to flood with the hollow-eyed children. She saw claws instead, digging at the dirt. The wolves were trying to get in.
“Where are the children?” she asked, turning to Father Lucas, confused.
“How long have you known you could do this, andílek?” He still held his arms against his chest tightly and looked at her with a face full of fear, but he was clearly working to accept this new gift of hers. His pulse calmed as he took slow, even breaths.
Mouse told him the story of the squirrel and the visit from the dark creatures, and then, teeth gritted and hands balled, she told him about Lady Harrach’s baby. “He lives because of me,” she said boldly, defiantly.
“But, Mouse, God gives life. God takes it away. It is his will to do, not yours.”
“I thought of that, but he tells us to heal the sick, tend the wounded. And if he gave me this gift, is it not his will that I use it?”
“Oh, Mouse.” The sadness in his voice frightened her; he acted like he had more to say, but he laced his hands together and raised them to his head, turning away from her.
Mouse chewed at her lip and stepped into the pentagram, kneeling near the fissure and looking over the edge into the abyss. She could see nothing. Smell nothing. Hear nothing.
“Why will they not come?” she asked again, pushing herself up.
“They want you to teach them this new gift, yes?” He joined her near the pit.
She nodded.
“The squirrel was your first resurrection and they came to you, but they did not follow you to Prague until you . . . until the baby.” Father Lucas sighed. “They will want something more than a goat to draw them here.”
Mouse froze as she saw the conclusion he was drawing.
“I will not,” she said.
“You must.”
They both jumped at the bone-rattling bellow as the bear joined the wolves to paw at the dirt and wood.
“Mouse, think about what those things are doing in Prague. Right now they could be leading a mother into the river, making her think she is saving a drowning child. Or tricking a child into the flames of a fire like that baker. Or tormenting your young King until his mind breaks.” Fervor laced his words and brightened his eyes as the spiritual warrior in him overpowered his worry about her ability to resurrect the dead. “You must do what is necessary to draw the corruptors here so we can seal them in the pit where they belong.”
Mouse ran her hands through her hair, which had been torn loose from her braid in the journey through the woods. “But I cannot do it. I love you.”
“More than all those innocents suffering even now in the city?”
“Yes.”
“And what of the King? What of Ottakar?”
“Do not make me choose,” she begged. “I will not.”
“Then I have failed you. I meant to teach you Christ’s love so that you might learn to sacrifice for the good, even when it goes against your own wishes.”
“And I have, Father.” Mouse was weeping now. “I would die for them. I would claim their suffering. But how can I take your life? You alone, who have loved me?” She lifted her hands to cover her face.
“Then I will do it myself.”
“No!” She was beside him instantly, stilling his hand as it reached for the knife at his waist. “If you take your own life, you might go someplace where I could not call you back, and if I failed, you would be lost forever.” Her mind was too full of Ottakar’s anguish over his mother; she would not let Father Lucas take such a risk.
“Then you must do it, andílek. To protect my soul.”
Mouse nodded and lifted her face, smeared with tears and the goat’s blood that had been on her hands. She kissed him on the cheek and then took him by the hand and led him to the top of the pentagram where she had slaughtered the goat.
They both knelt facing each other, and then Father Lucas lifted his chin so she might slit his throat.
“No, not the throat.” She looked over at the goat, which stood at the edge of the circle of light farthest from Mouse; its mouth was still working to bleat, but a wet gurgling noise was the only sound it made. Fresh blood trickled from the wound in its neck.
Mouse ripped strips of cloth from her underskirt and dug needle and thread out of the bag at her waist. “To tend your wounds—after,” she explained. Then she rolled back the sleeves of his habit. As she slid the blade into the skin at his wrist and sliced the flesh up the forearm, she thought again of Ottakar’s mother. When she had finished both arms, Father Lucas turned to let the blood flow onto the pentagram. Again it slipped perfectly along the scratched lines until the pentagram glistened red in the candlelight.
The blood poured out of him. “I am afraid,” Father Lucas said as he slumped forward.
Mouse caught him, laying his head in her lap. “I am here, Father. I will save you. I promise.” She tried to sound confident, comforting, but she was sobbing as she spoke.
“Child, there is something I would tell you,” he said weakly, his face graying. “Before I—”
Mouse brushed strands of his hair from his face. “Not now, Father,” she said, swallowing hard so she could speak. “Wait until later. After I . . . after you come back to me.”
“It is about your . . .” He took a shuddering breath. “Your father.”
“You can tell me later.” She laid her fingers against his lips. She wanted him to keep his secrets as a promise that he would not leave her. She saw his eyes start to cloud.
“I love you, Father.” She kissed his forehead, leaving her lips against his skin until she heard his heart stop.
With trembling hands, Mouse threaded the needle and bent over first one wrist and then the other, stitching together the interior flesh and then the skin; she had to remind herself to breathe. She stole glances at the still chest, the dead eyes, which she would not close. When at last she had finished her stitches and tied the linen to bind his wounds, she leaned down to his ear, her forehead pressing against the limestone.
“Come back to me,” she whispered. “Live.” She turned his head so she could watch his opened eyes for signs of life.
Mouse watched and waited.
“Live, Father,” she said more forcefully. She buried her face in his hair which spilled out onto the floor.
She strained to listen for a first breath, a first beat of his heart.
Nothing.
“Oh, God, what have I done? Please let him live, please. I swear I will never do it again, not after this. Never kill, never give life to the dead, never compel another person. I swear it! I understand now—those are for you to do or not. Please, God, let him live.”
She sat up and straddled Father Lucas, grabbing him on either side of his head, lifting it from the floor. “Live, I say!” she screamed at him. She let his head fall back as she put her ear down to his chest, listening.
Silence.
Whimpering with panic, she tried to think what to do. She had been angry when she had brought the baby back, angry with God and herself. She let that fury fill her again now. She put her face inches over Father Lucas’s, her tears and snot splattering him.
“I command you to live.” The voice was not hers. She felt it shredding her throat, tasted the blood in her mouth. She tried to hold back the guttural scream, but it would not stop and tore through her chest, leaving her gasping for air.
She fell to the side of Father Lucas’s body. And then he sat up. His mouth opened and shut, like a fish out of water, until finally he sucked in a wheezy breath. Mouse laid a hand on his back, but he jerked away from h
er, holding his hand up as she tried to come near him again.
“Please, Father. I need to see that you are well.” It was a half lie. She could hear his heart and lungs, steady and strong. But she needed him to talk to her so that she could be sure that he was fine, normal, her Father Lucas come back to her.
“Father?” she said tentatively as she walked toward him again.
She was pleased to see his face beginning to color, but still he did not speak, and he looked past her as if she weren’t there.
“Father?”
He pointed. She turned.
The shadows were growing.
“They are coming! Father, please, we do not have much time.” Mouse moved to the top of the pentagram again, ready to recite the words of the spell. A single, gaunt, hollow-eyed child took a step from the deep shadows to the edge of the light. Mouse clenched her fists and reached out, snatching Father Lucas’s arm and pulling him behind her.
“Ready to play?” the child-thing asked.
“Where are your friends?” Mouse asked in turn.
“They are busy having fun with the others. They will come when I call.”
“Call them now.”
“You will teach us your game?” The child-thing shifted its gaze to Father Lucas.
“Yes, when the others get here.”
It smiled and clapped its hands. The shadows at the edge of the fort rippled until dozens of empty eyes were staring out at her from the dark.
“We have come to play,” they said as one.
“The secret is down there.” Mouse pointed at the pit.
They craned their heads toward the fissure but not one of them took a step.
“You have to go down there to learn how to play my game,” she said again.
The child-things turned to look at the one who had come first, the one brave enough to stand nearest the light. It cocked its head at Mouse. “You first.”
Mouse had known it might come to this. She took a step toward the pit.
“No.” Father Lucas grabbed her hand.
“You know I must.” She held out the end of a length of rope to him; she had cut down a piece hanging from the net over the fort’s courtyard. The other end she tied around her waist.
Mouse sat down, her feet disappearing into the dark fissure. Small arms circled around her neck from behind as the child-thing climbed onto her back.
“I will come with you.” It spoke into her face but she felt no breath brush her cheek.
“What about the others?” For the plan to work, she needed all of them to go into the pit.
“We travel in the dark. They will meet us there.” And as Mouse watched, the child-things pulled back into the shadows and disappeared. She turned, lifting the nearly weightless burden on her back, and held herself against the edge with the sharp rock cutting into her fingers, her feet feeling for purchase against the wall of stone, the rope growing taut and pressing on her ribs.
With a last look at Father Lucas, Mouse lowered herself into the mouth of Hell.
SEVENTEEN
The darkness was absolute. Not even a flicker of candlelight from above filtered into the crevice. But what unnerved Mouse was the absence of sound.
She knew Father Lucas would have started reciting the spell she taught him, the words encoded in the book that would seal the gateway and trap the creatures in the pit, but she could not hear him, not even a mutter, even with her heightened senses. She knew that the hollow-eyed children were here in the dark with her, but she could not hear them. When she realized she could not even hear her own breath or heartbeat, she pulled her hands away from the rock and pressed them against her chest. Her body spun as the rope took her weight. She sighed when she felt the regular rhythm of her heart, but still she held a hand to her nose and mouth so she could feel the air pulled in, the breath pushed out.
She swallowed the bile rising in her throat and fought the urge to tug on the rope, to scramble back up into the light. She made herself turn back to the rock face, groping until she found foot- and handholds. She inched farther into the abyss; it seemed to go on forever.
The thing on her back buried its face in her hair.
Moments later, the rock beneath her hands grew soft; it squirmed under her grip. At first she thought it was the hollow-eyed children, but then she felt the spindly legs and fat bodies.
Spiders. Swarming along the crevice walls. It was too dark to see, but she imagined larger versions of what had poured out of the book and attacked her in the garden.
Mouse jerked her hands away, which sent her spinning on the rope again. She slammed into the rock with her back. Frantically, she turned and planted her feet against the wall, and then, convinced she could feel them crawling up her legs, she swung one leg free, shaking it violently and then the other. The creature slapped at the spiders crawling on it as it pulled itself around to Mouse’s chest.
Mouse squirmed and spun, imagining thousands of them scurrying along the walls around her. She shook her head, ran her hand through her hair, sure they had dropped onto her from above.
She kept up the battle against the unseen spiders for what felt like hours until her heart thrummed and her muscles quivered with fatigue. Surely Father Lucas must have finished the spell. Why had he left her down here in the dark? Exhausted, she wept as she bounced limply against the rock face, forfeiting herself to the swarm.
When she reached out to steady herself, she realized that the rock was just rock once more.
“No more tricks!” she hissed into the face of the creature, their foreheads touching, though she could see none of it, not even a glint of wetness at the eyes.
She wasn’t sure if it heard her, but then it crammed its mouth against her ear. “Not me. This place,” it said, the words barely whispers by the time her mind registered them. It wrapped cold hands around Mouse’s face; it sounded tired, too. “Teach us your game and let us go.”
They must have been in the pit for hours, maybe days. She couldn’t understand why Father Lucas hadn’t pulled her up yet. Had something happened to him? Had the life she summoned to resurrect him fled once she went in the pit? She craned her head trying to see the surface. It was all darkness.
“Teach us and let us go back,” the creature said again, laying its head against her chest.
Mouse was beginning to have doubts about imprisoning the child-things in such a place. They seemed so frightened; how could she shut them up forever in the dark?
“I cannot teach you what I did because I do not know how I did it.” She had not meant to tell them the truth, but she would not condemn them without first trying to reason with them.
The black nothing ate the snarl before the teeth sank into Mouse’s cheek.
“You tricked us!” it screamed, spitting blood in her face.
“I am sorry,” she said tightly, trying not to move the torn flesh as she spoke.
She heard a hiss come near and then another and another, and she tensed, waiting for the others to bite or tear at her, too, but nothing happened.
Mouse was shocked when the creature instead took her hand and laid it gently against its chest. “We forgive you if you forgive us,” it said. “Just give us what you gave the others.” It tapped a rhythm softly against her hand: a heartbeat.
Mouse understood. The hollow-eyed children wanted to live. They had been abandoned in a world that had no place for them, and they longed to be human.
Just like her.
Mouse could give them what they wanted, but at what cost? Maybe they would be like normal children, and she could love and care for them. Or maybe they would use the life she gave them to move in light as well as darkness so they could torment more people, grow more powerful.
“Please,” the child-thing whispered at her ear.
Sorrow and hope and fear welled up in her; in an act of faith, she leaned her head down and laid her torn cheek against the cold, dead cheek of the creature. Her eye caught an odd glow of light below her. For the first time
she could see how the pit grew the deeper it went; still she could not see the bottom. A heavy mist, glowing in the eerie light, rose slowly toward them.
The air grew frigid, so cold it burned her skin. The inside of Mouse’s nose hardened and cracked with the cold, dry air; it licked at the moisture in her eyes until every blink felt like sand scraping under her lids.
Mouse looked up again, hoping to see the opening of the pit and Father Lucas’s silhouette. But it was all darkness above her and the icy mist coming from below. When Mouse finally saw what was behind the icy cloud, she screamed, but the silence swallowed it.
They looked mostly human but they were misshapen—arms disjointed, flesh bulging in places and pulled tight against bones in others, skin a bluish white and hairless. They moved wrong, scuttling along the wall in jerky motions, legs bending in the wrong places. They were huge, and like the hollow-eyed children, their mouths were full of jutting, ragged teeth. These must be Enoch’s begotten giants, the Anakim, the consequence of the Watchers’ lust for the daughters of man.
Mouse felt frozen, unable to move, unable to look away. Time froze, too. What felt like years passed as she waited, in horror, for the monsters to reach her. When they did, they feasted. In the ghostly blue glow, Mouse watched as they snatched one hollow-eyed child after another. They sank their teeth into bellies and sucked as the children arched their backs, screaming—not alive enough to die but living enough to feel the pain of being eaten.
It was her fault. She had lured them here, had misunderstood their want as malevolence. And she would die for it. The brutal truth settled in her like cold stone: She was trapped in the pit with the hollow-eyed children and would never get out. Her secrets—her willingness to kill, her ability to resurrect—would die in here with her.
Mouse closed her eyes and looked inside herself. It was all darkness.
EIGHTEEN
Mouse waited as the monsters moved closer; they were horribly slow and purposeful as they gorged themselves on body after body. Her mind grew numb from the violence, everything emptied by the hopelessness until all she wanted was for it to be over.
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