Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  Everything was quiet in the room for a moment, and then Birhan let out a gasp of air. “What—”

  “I don’t know.” Angelo kept his hands gripped around the box. All but two of the plates had fallen out onto the bed. “It feels heavier than it should.”

  “Something is in there?” Birhan’s eyes grew wide.

  Angelo nodded. “Why don’t you go out—”

  “No.”

  “It might be—”

  “Open it.” Birhan stepped close to the bed.

  Angelo knew he had no choice. He held the bottom in one hand and lifted the top. The two remaining plates clinked out against the others on the bed. Their heads almost touching, Birhan and Angelo bent over the box.

  “Is another book,” the boy said as he sat down beside Angelo.

  Angelo tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. The black ash with silvery swirls was gone. In its place was a small, tattered book about the size of Angelo’s hand. He had the sense that the book was very old, older than any book he had ever seen, including the Devil’s Bible. There was faint, silvery writing across the front, but it did not look like any language Angelo knew. He could not read it.

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s . . . the Book of the Just,” Angelo answered. He was shaking. He reached out with his finger and touched the book’s cover, half expecting it to disintegrate into ash again. It felt almost like leather, but softer. Several times he started to slide his fingers around the spine and pull the book out of the box, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He remembered Mouse talking about a book with impossible-to-read writing that she’d discovered when she was at the abbey. An ancient book, one she’d called the Book of the Angels, a book that had released a swarm of malevolent spiders to attack her.

  Angelo snatched his hand back. The power rolling off the book felt much like the Devil’s Bible had when Mouse opened it in the church in Norway. He was scared. This book. Aaron’s rod. These things belonged to Mouse’s world, not his. A world of gods and angels and demons and immortals.

  “Are you going to read it?” Birhan was whispering.

  Angelo whispered back, “No.” If the poem made the Book of the Just whole, the book might make Aaron’s rod whole, and even if he couldn’t read a word of it, he knew well enough that an object with that kind of power could make itself understood. All Angelo might need to do is lay his eyes on the words to set in motion . . . what?

  Until he knew the answer, he had no intention of even opening the book. But time had run out for asking questions.

  “We need to go. Your flight to Rome leaves in a couple of hours.” And Kitty’s was arriving not long after.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Birhan pointed to the black book in the box.

  The Book of the Just changed everything. Angelo had meant to send the ashes with Birhan to Rome, keep the pieces of the rod hidden in his crutches, and hand the gold book over to Kitty in the hopes it would satisfy her questions about what he’d been doing and regain her trust so he could find out if she was indeed hunting Mouse’s little brother. Angelo’s stomach churned at the thought of sending the power-laced book with Birhan, but his fear of what might happen if Kitty and the Reverend discovered the book and rod together overran everything else.

  “You have to take it,” he said as he finally closed his hand around the spine and pulled the book out of the box. He looked up at Birhan. “Are you okay with that?”

  “I will keep it safe.”

  “You understand how dangerous it is?”

  “Yes. I can feel it.” He was whispering again.

  “You must not open it. No one can open it.”

  “We must hide it.”

  Angelo nodded, then shoved his hand in his backpack and pulled out his journal. He tore out a thick stack of pages from the center and inserted the ancient black book. The elastic strap that held the journal closed snapped back in place. From the outside, it looked like a plain journal. He held it out to Birhan, who took it with trembling hands and slid it into his own bag among rolled socks and snack wrappers.

  “You look terrible,” Kitty said as her high heels clicked to a stop in front of Angelo’s table at the coffee shop near the airport exit. He’d just sat down, his coffee still hot, after seeing Birhan off on his first leg to Rome.

  “I was very ill in Eritrea,” Angelo answered as he half stood and pulled out a chair for her. “It’s partially why I was out of contact for so long.”

  “Partially?”

  Angelo took a sip of coffee. “Can I get you something?”

  “I need sleep. You’ve had me on quite the chase these last few days. But you were saying?”

  “In deciphering the text of the gold book at Valaam, I realized we were missing a plate—at least one. I thought I had enough clues to know where to start looking.”

  “Africa?”

  “Eritrea, yes.”

  “Why not tell us?”

  “I wanted to find it on my own. This is my quest, my calling, not yours or the Reverend’s.” He was using reasoning he knew she would understand.

  “We just want to help you. I think we all have the same goal.”

  “Do we? I’m not sure anymore. Not after what happened to Khalid.” Mouse had taught him that a hard truth masked a million lies.

  Kitty sat back in her chair. “I thought that might be the problem. I told the Reverend he shouldn’t have—”

  “I’m not comfortable with killing.”

  Kitty barked out a laugh. “What do you think you’re going to do when you come face-to-face with your sworn enemy?”

  “Khalid wasn’t my enemy. Or yours.”

  “How do you know? He was a man interested in money, and he had information on the Reverend that would be worth a great deal to many of the Reverend’s enemies. How do you think it would look if the Reverend were caught buying illegal artifacts on the black market?”

  “You don’t kill someone because they might be a threat.”

  “Yes, you do. If you want to win. And it’s all for the greater good—to make the world a safe and wholesome place again.” She smiled at him. “But no matter. What’s done is done, right?”

  Angelo just looked at her.

  “You ran off because you were mad and you wanted to find the thing on your own,” she said. “And then you got sick and then you got stuck, which is when you called me. Have I got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you couldn’t find it on your own, after all.”

  “No.”

  “Speaking of which, where is your friend—the one I had to help?”

  “Thank you for that. You probably saved his life.” Angelo swallowed the bite of irony to keep his voice sincere. “He’s gone on somewhere to join family, I think.”

  “I had hoped to meet him. Oh, well.” She yawned. “So where is this thing you found, and why didn’t you wait for me in Ethiopia?”

  “I needed a good library to translate the new text,” Angelo lied. “And the closest one was here in Cairo. I knew if I took the next flight out, I could get here and do the research I needed before you even landed so we could get back to the Reverend more quickly. I thought you’d want that.”

  “I do. We actually have tickets to the Bolshoi Nutcracker day after tomorrow. For you, too, if you’ll come.”

  “Sure,” Angelo stammered, trying to understand the sudden shift in conversation. He’d forgotten it was almost Christmas.

  “The Reverend will be pleased.” She pulled her phone out, texting. “Now tell me what you found.”

  “It’s the last plate of the book.”

  “The Book of the Just?”

  “If it is, it doesn’t have what we were hoping for.”

  “No spells of victory?”

  “Not that I’ve found. But I’ve only just translated it. I need to be able to read it in context with the others. My first impression is that this last plate just completes the story—one we’re familiar with in Reve
lation and the War Scroll—but I am convinced that this is the prototype, the earliest draft of those others.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons—it’s lyrical, like poetry, whereas other apocalyptic texts are more like battle plans or play-by-plays.”

  “If I’m going to war, I’d rather have the battle plan than a poem.”

  “Sure, but it’s like reading the details of the Battle of the Bulge without understanding the context of World War Two. We need story to do that, to really capture what’s at stake, what sacrifices are required and why. To understand what we’re fighting for.”

  “We’re fighting to win.”

  “It’s not that easy, Kitty. What if the battle is over a single child—your side wants to save it and the other wants to kill it. Say you win the battle because you know how to wage war, you’re good at it, but then you find out after it’s all over that the child is dead at the epicenter of your victory. Did you win?”

  Kitty narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t understand your gibberish. If my side takes the field, we win. It’s that simple.” She put her phone down on the table. “You said there were two reasons you thought this one came first?”

  “You won’t like the other reason.”

  “I probably won’t care. What I want to know is if there’s something in that book to help us do what we want to do.”

  “Bring about the end of the world?”

  “Wipe it all away and start with a clean slate. Like Noah’s flood. Then we can rebuild it as it was meant to be.”

  “That’s why you won’t like what the end of the book says. It’s about forgiveness, especially about the writer forgiving himself for wanting vengeance. It’s about not looking at each other to judge, but working to love regardless of what we’ve done or what’s been done to us. It’s—”

  “It sounds like someone who lost his nerve and is trying to justify his weakness.” Her phone lit up with a text. “Is that what’s happening to you, Angelo? Have you lost your nerve?”

  “No.”

  “Can this book help us or not?”

  “I’ll need to double check my translation,” Angelo replied, “but there’s a passage that suggests that the bearer of the book is protected from evil.” It was true, though of course the book in reference was the one Angelo had sent with Birhan—the real Book of the Just. The gold book was just a man’s story and a now useless map.

  Kitty’s eyes lit up for real, and the smile spreading across her face was genuine and joyful. “Well done, Angelo.” She reached her hand across the table and stroked his cheek. “Now let’s get you back home, where we can get you healthy and strong again. The pilot just texted that the plane is refueled and waiting on us.”

  Once they’d taken off, Kitty curled up on the couch and slept. Angelo stared out at the stars. He could see the Pleiades in the sky just beyond the wing’s tip. He thought of them now as Mouse’s Pleiades and imagined another bright spot in their midst, another sister gained.

  The tears came without warning. They weren’t sad or angry. They were a quiet good-bye, a final acceptance that nothing he did would bring Mouse back. He could not avenge her. He could only live to honor her—saving brothers and raising brothers. Mouse had all her long life refused to be a warrior. She lived to love. He would, too.

  Angelo pulled at the collar of his tux. The tie was cutting into his throat. The discordant sounds of the symphony warming up rolled out from the auditorium into the lobby of the Bolshoi Theatre. He didn’t want to be here. Kitty had insisted. Which put him on edge. Why did it matter to her if he came to the ballet with them or not?

  Everything had felt wrong since they’d landed at Moscow the day before yesterday. The Reverend had been waiting for them when they drove up the chalky lane to the farm house out in the empty Russian countryside. A deep blanket of snow had stretched out between soft hills and glittered in the moonlight.

  “Good flight?” he’d asked.

  “Slept like a baby,” Kitty had answered as she leaned into his massive belly, reaching up to kiss his cheek.

  “Nice to have you home, Angelo.”

  “Reverend.”

  Angelo had spent the night feeding lies to the Reverend’s questions about where he’d been, what he’d been doing, who had helped him, what they knew. Like Kitty, the Reverend’s enthusiasm had peaked when Angelo mentioned that the bearer of the book was protected from evil. He’d demanded that Angelo hand over the gold plates.

  “I still need to read the last against the others so I can see if there’s a spell like Kitty wants.” Angelo had counted on buying some time with pretending to do more research—time he needed to figure out what Kitty was up to with the stone angel, what she knew about Mouse’s brother, and what his own next move should be.

  “You’ve had your chance. Maybe it’ll reveal its secrets to someone else,” the Reverend had said as he stretched his hand out, waiting.

  Angelo had no options. He had pulled the Petra statue out of his bag and laid it on the chair beside him. The Reverend had walked across the room to take it.

  “Wait,” Angelo had said as he peeled the backing away and tipped out the stone box, empty now of ash but still holding the gold plates. “I want to keep the Petra statue, if that’s okay?” He knew it was sentimental, but for him, the cheap tourist trinket was as meaningful as the ancient text. He might work to forgive himself for his part in Khalid’s death, but he would not let himself forget.

  “You didn’t get much for your trouble or travel, did you, son?”

  Angelo had lowered his head. He didn’t think he could hide the slight grin at knowing that the Reverend was the one walking away empty-handed. Angelo was the one who had cleared the table. He had Aaron’s rod and the Book of the Just. And, perhaps more importantly, he had his soul back, too.

  But he didn’t know how long he’d have his life. Kitty and the Reverend had left him alone the next day; their absence rang like a siren in Angelo’s chest. They had everything they needed from him—or at least they thought they did—which made him, like Khalid, a dangerous loose thread. The real question was why they were still leaving him hanging.

  And why they wanted him at the ballet. The second bell rang, signaling the end of intermission, and many of the people in the corridor headed back to their seats. Angelo hung back, meaning to wait until the show started again and then slip out to catch a taxi and go back out to the farm—alone. He’d search the house for the angel and any sign of what Kitty had been up to, and then he’d leave before they got home. He’d disappear. He had some cash left, but he’d need real money to pay Mouse's friend to put together a new identity. He knew of only one other source for getting that kind of money.

  With a sigh, he pulled out the burner phone and punched in a number he hadn’t called in over two years. He had no idea what he would say to Bishop Sebastian. According to Kitty, his old mentor thought him dead, and Angelo had consented to leave it that way. How would he explain that to a man who had likely grieved for him?

  But now Angelo could see no other way. He pushed the call button.

  Leaning his weight onto his crutches, he brought the phone to his ear and cleared his throat. The bright, brassy bark of Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” rang out somewhere in the lobby, grating against the sounds of the orchestra and the shuffling feet of the patrons. Angelo lifted his head, searching the crowd, his phone dangling from his hand. The dusty brush drums and muted slide of trumpets filtered through the emptying foyer. It seemed to be coming from above.

  His chest tightened as if all the air had been squeezed out. It couldn’t be coincidence—that song had always been the ringtone for Bishop Sebastian’s phone. Angelo took a step toward the stairs leading to the upper lobby. “Let’s fly away,” it beckoned and then was gone.

  PART FOUR

  The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much.

  —Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter


  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Angelo was alive. It was all Mouse could think in the moment. He was impossibly, incredibly, miraculously alive.

  The Bishop’s phone was blaring from the landing above, and Mouse watched as Angelo took a step toward the stairs, but suddenly the Reverend was there, clapping his arm around Angelo and steering him away, back down a hall. Instinctively, Mouse took a couple of hurried steps out from behind the stairs to follow, but she was shaking and had to lay her hand against the balustrade to steady herself. Shock ran through her like a live current—Angelo is alive. She closed her eyes, trying to calm herself so she could run to him, so she could touch him and make herself believe it was real.

  But she couldn’t stop shaking, and the bone shard still radiated an electric blue glow.

  An odd, delicate pinging filled the air. Mouse looked up and saw the chandelier trembling, all the crystal teardrops tinkling against each other. The flowers in the vase against the wall quivered and bounced. She felt the floor under her boots start to shiver.

  “What is this?” she heard someone in the crowd say, a note of panic rising in his voice. “Is it an earthquake?”

  Mouse knew better. It was her—her power building off the sudden, euphoric joy and leaking out around her. She couldn’t stop it. She could feel it surging. She had to get out of here. The walls or the ceiling would start to shake and crumble next. Or, fueled by her power, the shard would start claiming victims. Casting a last, frantic look down the hall where Angelo had disappeared, she wrapped her cloak around her and was gone.

  It was no surprise when she sucked in the arid heat of the Australian desert once more and stared out over the dark expanse of Lake Disappointment. She hadn’t been thinking about where to go, but Mouse supposed this place would always be an event horizon for her, the place where everything had changed, where the black hole of despair had eaten all the goodness in her life. But it was joy that dropped her to her knees now and bent her down and pulled the tears from her eyes. Joy that set her power ricocheting out into a hundred shallow fissures along the surface of the dry lake.