Blood of the Lamb

by Sam Cabot

  And in a dark, far corner of his mind was a tiny stabbing pain he was trying desperately to ignore. But like a sliver of glass in his shoe, though minute it was agonizing and unremitting: the unspeakable possibility that he was wide awake and it was all true. In which case Lorenzo deserved his help even less, and needed it much more.

  The door opened. Thomas stepped back involuntarily at the sight of Livia Pietro. “Don’t touch me!”

  “No, Father,” she said quietly. “Of course not.” After a moment she moved back into the foyer, holding the door wide. “Will you come in?”

  Thomas found he couldn’t cross the threshold, could not enter that house. They stood in silence, regarding each other. Pietro’s green eyes seemed kind, even concerned, but Thomas was not going to be taken in again. “You’re a monster,” he rasped.

  She shook her head. “I’m a person. Like you, but different from you.”

  A person? This creature was claiming to exist in the image of the Lord? He felt the calm that his new theory had brought him begin to slip away. “No!” he barked. “A creature with no soul.” Pietro just gazed at him sadly; for some reason that pitying look enraged him more. “You sold your soul for a promise of eternal life. But what you’ve bought isn’t that. It’s never-ending corruption. Everlasting decay!” He could feel the heat in his skin, could hear his voice rising, he knew he sounded wild but he couldn’t stop himself. “Your bargain is worthless. Worthless! Your false prophet will abandon you. The End of Days will come, even for you, and—”

  Pietro held up her hand. Thomas’s cheeks burned; he trembled with rage. But looking at her pale face, her long dark hair—staring into her ocean-green eyes—he felt his flood of accusatory words abate. What was the point? The choice Livia Pietro and the others like her had made couldn’t be undone. The sin they’d committed couldn’t be confessed, expiated, forgiven. His knotted shoulders fell. Helplessness and sorrow flooded through him where, moments before, righteous anger had blazed.

  “Father,” Pietro said. “You left here, and I understand. What you’re saying is wrong, but many think as you do. But you’ve come back. Why?”

  No, he couldn’t do this. Without the heat of his fury he felt cold and clammy, and his breathing caught just standing here in front of her. He couldn’t go into that house. Blood in the vase.

  “Father Kelly? Are you all right?”

  “No! How could I be all right? Your . . . your ‘people’ . . .”

  “Father.” Now she spoke decisively, commandingly. “Come inside. Or leave.”

  Lord, Thomas prayed. Father, help me. He stood on the threshold another moment, a few more seconds in the cobblestoned, scooter-buzzed, sunny morning, and then he went in.

  24

  Livia led Thomas Kelly in silence up to Spencer’s study. In the doorway, the priest stopped and peered apprehensively into the room.

  “Where is he?”

  “I asked Spencer to give us some time alone.”

  Livia sensed his relief, but he straightened and said, “I have no reason to be alone with you.”

  “Would you rather Spencer were here? Come in and sit down. Please.”

  She sat first, to appear as unthreatening as she could manage. Thomas Kelly chose a chair in the farthest corner and barely perched on it. He continued to look around uneasily.

  “Spencer removed the vase, too,” she said. “Why have you come back?”

  He snapped his eyes to her like a nervous cat. After a moment: “Cardinal Cossa. The Vatican Librarian.”

  “And Archivist. I know who he is. What about him?”

  “I got a call. Some of your . . . ‘people’ have abducted him.”

  “What?” She sat forward. As she did, he drew back.

  “They’ll make him one of you.” The priest swallowed, then set his jaw and went on. “Unless I bring them the Concordat.”

  “I don’t understand,” Livia said. “This is— Who are they?”

  “I have no idea. They said to come back here and help you. They’ll contact me. Once I have the Concordat I have to give it to them.”

  Once you have it? Livia thought, but only said, “When did this happen?”

  “I just got the call. Not fifteen minutes ago, that’s how long it took me to get here.” Kelly took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his sweating face. “The abduction must have happened within the hour. I was with him until then. The Cardinal. He told me— He told me—”

  “He told you about the Concordat. And about us. The Noantri.”

  Kelly nodded, looking sick.

  “Father,” she said gently, “what you’ve been told—”

  “Your people promised to raise Martin the Fifth to the papacy,” he blurted. “If he agreed to stop exterminating you as the Church had always done. If he allowed you to exist and proliferate and defile the world!”

  “No, that—”

  “And worse: Martin agreed not only to permit you to continue, but to provide you with blood from Catholic hospitals for your filthy rites. Innocent blood!”

  “Father,” she said firmly. “As far as they go, your facts are correct, but the motivations you ascribe are wrong. As is your characterization of my people. And you’re leaving out a great deal. I suppose you haven’t been told the whole truth.”

  “What I was told—”

  “What you were told is what most of the Unchanged believe.”

  “‘Unchanged’?”

  “People like you. Please. Wait here a moment. There’s something I have to do, urgently. But I want very much to discuss this with you. To tell you—”

  “What? Your side? Life from the demon’s point of view?”

  She stood and saw him recoil. “The news you’ve brought is troubling. I must discuss it with . . . the people whose instructions I’m to carry out. I won’t be long.”

  “And what am I supposed to do? Just sit here?”

  “I’m asking you to wait for me. But you’re not a prisoner here. You can stay or go.”

  She walked past him out the study door, leaving him pale and staring.

  Livia found Spencer where he’d said he’d be, in the drawing room on the next floor. “Well?” Spencer looked up, slipping a bookmark into the volume in his hands. “How is he, your young priest? Has he returned to drive stakes into our hearts? Has he brought his pistol and his silver bullets?”

  “He’s frightened half to death. You really didn’t need to break out the Grand Guignol, Spencer.”

  “Of course I did. He wasn’t believing a word you were calmly saying. He thought you and I were both mad. Two batty people sharing a folie à deux.”

  “I could have convinced him.”

  “Let me remind you that although you and I have all the time in the world, your priest grows older every minute. By the time your gentle rationality persuaded him, he’d have been too doddering to be of any use. Furthermore, unless I’m wrong, ageless though we may be, we still have a deadline to meet.”

  Livia dropped into a chair. “You’re right. And things just got worse.” She told Spencer the news Father Kelly had brought.

  Spencer lifted his eyebrows. “An interesting development.”

  “You’re certainly calm about it.”

  “The abduction of a cardinal is not an event that disquiets me.”

  “Under these circumstances? This cardinal? It’s intensely disquieting, I think.” She took out her cell phone. “I have to tell the Conclave. They may not know.” She pressed the number and lifted her phone to her ear.

  After a moment: “Salve.” Her call, as she expected, was answered by Filippo Croce, the Pontifex’s personal secretary. This man, sober, trustworthy, and devoted, had been the channel for communications to the Conclave since the media for contacting that august body had been quill pen and parchment.

  “Salve. Sum L
ivia Pietro. Quid agis?” Automatically, as her people had for centuries, Livia inquired into the state of the Community before introducing her own affairs.

  “Hic nobis omnibus bene est. Quomodo auxilium vobis dare possumus?” All is well here, came the response. How may we be of service?

  The brief ritual completed, Livia switched to Italian and asked to speak to the Pontifex, or, failing that, to Rosa Cartelli. She wasn’t asked her mission; clearly she’d been given a priority with the Conclave that, flattering as it was, she’d have preferred not to need. She was assured the Pontifex would speak with her in short order. A brief silence, then the music of Carlo Gesualdo. As with the art hung at the Conclave offices—the paintings of artists such as Ivan Nikitin and Romualdo Locatelli—the music played, even over the phone, was the work of Noantri. Livia had always been uncomfortable with this kind of self-conscious Noantri pride; to her it bordered on separatism. As an art historian, she argued that good art was good and bad art bad, regardless of who produced it. If the paintings of Noantri artists could hang in museums and galleries around the world, as, unbeknownst to Unchanged curators and collectors, they indeed did, then Noantri could have on their walls the work of the best of their own people, and equally, the best of the Unchanged. And better music than Gesualdo’s could pour from the Conclave’s office phone. She rolled her eyes at Spencer. “I’m on hold.”

  Spencer sighed, and took the opportunity to ask, “Whom do you suppose is behind it? This abduction?”

  Livia shrugged. “There are other factions, other people besides Jonah who’re impatient to Unveil. Any one of them might want to force the issue the same way Jonah does.”

  Spencer looked skeptical. “To take this action and make this threat—to send the priest back here to us—they’d have to know what you’ve been told to do and why the priest is in Rome at all.”

  “Father Thomas Kelly,” Livia told Spencer, waiting for the Pontifex to come on the line. “That’s his name.”

  25

  It was all Thomas could do to force himself to stay seated. He had to, though. If he stood, he knew he’d run again from this house, and this time he’d keep going. How long should he give her? Half of him hoped she’d never come back. The other half feared the mortal danger—no, the immortal, the eternal danger!—to Lorenzo was becoming more real with every passing second.

  This was a terror he’d never encountered before. The late-night seminary arguments and wine-fueled graduate school debates about free will had never covered this territory: the possibility that a man could lose his soul not through his own choices but through the actions of another. Confession, penance, and absolution: these were central to Thomas’s faith. Any man, until his dying breath, could repent and be forgiven, could enter into the presence of God though he had denied him all his life. But redemption and God’s grace, lost forever because a monster chose to make you a monster, also—neither Thomas nor any of his classmates had for a moment considered this. Their sophistic deliberations of free will had swirled around well-worn issues of the Lord’s omnipotence and omniscience, threadbare questions of paradox with the answers always the same: God, in his omnipotence, gives us our own power; in his omniscience he grants us knowledge, in order that we make our own choices. He does this from hope and boundless love, to give each of us the privilege of coming to him freely, of choosing to put our souls into his care.

  When this nightmare ended—this drug coma, this hallucination, yes, of course it was that—Thomas hoped he’d remember the foolish naïveté and philosophical bankruptcy of his now-blasted, ever-so-clever theology.

  Of course, if this was just a hallucination, and the Noantri didn’t exist, then the stealing of one’s soul couldn’t happen, and all could go back to the way it had been before. Oh, this was marvelous! If he woke, he wouldn’t need to remember what he’d just learned, because it would be useless.

  And if he didn’t wake, he wouldn’t need to remember it, because he’d never be able to forget it.

  He started when the door opened, but this time he was prepared. The silver crucifix that usually hung around his neck was gripped in his hand. He thrust it out as Livia Pietro stepped back into the room. She stopped, stared, and shook her head. “Put that away.” Crossing the carpet, she sat again. “The Church has always been our enemy, Father Kelly, but we haven’t been yours. To think that the sight of a cross will have any effect on me—I’m sorry, but it’s narcissistic.”

  Thomas slowly lowered his arm as she went crisply on.

  “I’ve relayed your news to the Conclave. It caused a good deal of unease. The situation was already serious. Now it’s much worse. That Cardinal Cossa’s fate should be dependent on the revelation of the Concordat—this problem is of great concern to our Noantri leaders.”

  Thomas had to search for his voice, but he found it. “You’ll forgive me if I withhold my thanks.”

  She stared levelly, then continued. “The Conclave is not without resources. They’re attempting to find out what they can about what’s happened and to intervene if possible.”

  “No!” Thomas jumped up. “Any interference could jeopardize the Cardinal further!”

  “According to your thinking, his position is already dire. We disagree with your characterization of us, but it’s one of our First Laws that no Mortal is made Noantri against his will. It’s a condition of the Concordat. That document you despise.”

  She glanced pointedly at his chair. Thomas, not sure he had the strength to stand in any case, sank back down.

  “A brief history lesson for you, Father. First: although the Noantri did help Martin the Fifth to achieve the papacy, we weren’t the central agents of his rise. He had widespread support in the Church—that is, among your people. We aided him because Martin was able to understand the mutual advantages the Concordat would bring to the Noantri and to the Unchanged. His rivals, the Popes of the Avignon line, were blind to these benefits. The Concordat, in essence, obligates the Catholic Church to, as you say, cease trying to annihilate us. And yes, to provide us blood from Catholic hospitals. Blood is our sustenance, Father Kelly. This is not a choice we’ve made, it’s a simple fact. In return, we will make no one Noantri without his consent—no, more than consent: his request—and the consent of the Conclave.” She glanced away as she said that and was silent for a moment. Then she brought her gaze back to him and resumed. “We also, for our part, agree to remain hidden, not revealing our true natures. Not so hidden as we once were, though: we live in Community now, with our own kind, in cities around the world. This is a great comfort to us—just to be together. Because our nourishment is assured, we have no need of stealth, of violence—or of guilt. We’re no longer the feral, furtive, degraded people of the past. The Concordat has given us that.”

  “You still say ‘people.’ You are not people.”

  “We are. Each of us started as you are today. As a Mortal man or woman. ‘Unchanged’ is the word we use. The Change comes about through a micro-organism introduced into the blood. It alters the structure of our DNA.” She gave a slight smile. “You look surprised.”

  “To hear you speak of a devil’s bargain in such cold and scientific terms.”

  “It is science—it’s not supernatural. The devil, whether he exists or not, has nothing to do with this. A microbe mutated in the blood of a small number of early humans. Possibly, at first, only one. It causes a need, and a great thirst, for human blood, and grants DNA the ability to rapidly repair cells. Our cells don’t deteriorate. So we don’t die. That’s it.”

  Thomas drew a breath. “I’ll remind you that the very essence of evil is to be subtle. Do you really think that because your unnatural bargain was made with a microbe and not a man with horns and a tail, it’s any less the work of Satan?” Who, until today, Thomas might have been willing to argue was only a metaphor, an externalized manifestation of the human capacity for cruelty. Or, alternately, a distilled an
d focused expression of the evil that did exist in the Universe, brought into being by, and purposefully in contradistinction to, the goodness of God. Right now, though, if Satan walked through the door wearing his horns and tail, Thomas wouldn’t blink.

  “Couldn’t your God have created this microbe?” Pietro asked. “In fact, in your view, how else could it have gotten here?”

  “The Lord also created knives and guns. He gives us the privilege of choosing whether to use them.” On firmer ground now that he was engaged in theological debate, Thomas added, “People were not meant to live on this earth forever. Only through death can man achieve eternal life.”

  “Really, Father? Do you say that to the doctors at your hospitals? The ones who stop people from dying every day? Some of whom are Noantri, by the way.”

  Thomas felt the firm ground slipping. “The doctors?”

  “And the lawyers, and the cabdrivers. And”—Pietro pointed to herself—“the university professors. You’ve lived beside us and known us all your life, Father Kelly.”

  “No. That can’t be true.”

  “It is. The Noantri came into being long ago. Before your Church, before the religions and belief systems from which your Church sprang. Before written history began. We’ve been here since the start of humankind.”

  “So has evil.”

  “True but irrelevant.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Even if your explanation is correct, the microbe itself was clearly sent by Satan.”