She rolled over onto her back in the white salt-sand and stared up at the countless stars and laughed. She gave thanks. She played the image of him in his tux over and over again until the shock and wonder started to wane.
But even as she sat up and sheathed the now quiet bone shard, eager to return to the theater, the questions came. Angelo was with the Reverend. Why? Another question eroded the first with a terrible force: How? How was he alive?
And why had he not tried to find her? Maybe he thought she was dead—just as she had been sure he was. The joy came flooding back as she imagined his face when she showed up and surprised him. Her laugh ran like strings of light along the fissures and into the dark outback.
She pushed herself to her knees and took the edge of her cloak, ready to bring Angelo the joy he’d just given her. All the long days they would spend together spilled out in Mouse’s mind. But as she glanced down on the place where she had watched Angelo’s bright, beautiful soul start to leave his body, where she herself had died knowing she would live again, the question bloomed once more. How had Angelo survived?
And the word she spoke that day with the last of her breath echoed again out over the lake. “Father.” But why would her father save Angelo? And why not tell her? Was he just using the two of them as pieces in some game? Her temper rising, Mouse snatched the cloak up around her.
The chalet at Innsbruck was dark—her father and Luc must have stayed for the second act of The Nutcracker. She sat in the den. The lights on the Christmas tree cast a magical glow over the room. They’d left the Christmas music playing. The “Bogoroditse Devo” from Rachmaninov’s Vespers rolled like a river through the house.
Mouse waited.
Luc threw himself into her arms an hour later. “You broke your promise—you didn’t come back for the rest of the show.”
Mouse hugged him close. “I couldn’t. Something happened and I needed to leave.”
“Was it the people on the stairs I saw you with? You seemed really mad at them.”
“They aren’t nice people, and I was mad at them. Too mad. I needed to go somewhere.”
“Where you could count things until you were better?” Luc looked up at her, his eyes full of understanding.
“That’s right.” She tucked a bit of hair behind his ear. “And I came home after because I thought you’d be here to help me. I didn’t think our father would want you to be at the theater with those people you saw me with.” She turned to look at her father.
“He was safe with me. And anyway, your friends all left after your little reunion.” He tossed his cloak on the couch. “It was Luc who insisted on staying. He wanted to make sure the Mouse King was okay.”
“And he was!” Luc exclaimed. “Just like you said. He came out and bowed. I clapped for him.” His mouth stretched in a big yawn.
Mouse smiled. “Let’s get you to bed. It’s Christmas tomorrow.” She pulled him up into her arms and carried him up the stairs. At the landing, she turned back to her father. “Don’t go anywhere. I have questions for you.”
“Ooh, what do you need to ask Father?” Luc said.
The high, clear sounds of a boys’ choir rang out from the speakers. They were singing “Silent Night.”
“Never you mind,” Mouse said softly. “It might be about presents.”
“We get to open them tomorrow, right?”
“First thing in the morning, if you want.” Mouse hoped to give herself a present, too. She hoped to get the answers she needed from her father, and then go bring Angelo home.
All is calm, all is bright, the angelic voices sang up the stairs.
“Yes, please.” Luc laid his head down on her shoulder. “I’m glad the Mouse King came back. I’m glad you came back.”
“Me, too.” She lowered him to his bed. Sleep in heavenly peace. A pair of pajamas covered in pictures of puppies with candy canes in their mouths lay folded at the end of the bed. “Get changed and I’ll come back and read you a story. Okay?”
“Can Mercy sleep with me tonight? It’s Christmas.” He’d crawled over to kneel in front of the dog’s crate. She was licking his hand through the bars.
“Sure. I’ll be back in just a minute.”
“I love you, Mouse.”
She paused at the threshold. “I love you, too, Luc.”
Her father was stretched out in the recliner when she got back downstairs.
Shepherds quake at the sight.
“Why?” she asked. She’d had an hour to wrestle with the chaos of emotions slamming into each other—joy, rage, wonder, fear—and knowing that Luc was in the house, she worked to tamp them all down, safely under her control.
“Which why?” her father asked, tucking his arm under his head.
“Why did you save Angelo?” She stood by the Christmas tree, watching the lights blink and change colors—red, green, blue, white. Luc had picked them out.
“Wasn’t it what you wanted when you called for me that day?”
Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia.
“Yes. But I asked why you did it. Surely you didn’t do it just for me?”
He sighed. She looked at him. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I saw him lying there, your hands covering his mouth and trying so desperately to hold the life inside him.” He shrugged. “I just did it.”
Mouse had all her senses tuned for a lie, but he was telling the truth. “Then why not tell me when I woke?” Her heartbreak at the grief she’d suffered cracked her voice despite her efforts.
Silent night. Holy night.
“That’s easier. I didn’t want you to go after him. I wanted you to stay with me and Luc.”
“You let me suffer. You let me—”
The music swelled, the children’s voices singing Love’s pure light and the descant hovering above the melody like a wavering star. Tears were running down Mouse’s face.
“You let me lose myself, let everything I ever wanted to be get burned to ash in the fire of my vengeance. You let me kill. You let me—”
“I did none of those things, Mouse. You did them. They were your choices.”
“But I wouldn’t have done any of it if I knew that Angelo still lived.”
“Does that matter?”
Mouse sank back against the wall. She despised him, but he wasn’t wrong; it was her fault. She’d masked herself in sorrow and revenge and used it as an excuse to turn her back on everything she knew to be good and true. It was easier than mercy.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, kid. It’s only human. You all have lofty ideals that you wrap in pretty words—love and forgiveness and compassion.” The choir had come back to repeat the first verse, and he joined in, his voice as high and clear as theirs as they sang All is calm, all is bright for a last time. Mouse wondered at the beauty in his voice, truly the sound of angels.
He stopped abruptly, the choir moving on without him. “But you don’t act on those pretty words, do you? You act out of anger or desire—everything comes back to what you want, what you deserve, what’s yours. You know why? Because there’s no such thing as love. It’s a lie told by my old master to—wait for it—get what he wants.”
“Mouse?” Luc called down from his room.
“Be just a minute, Luc.” She turned back to her father. “I don’t think you believe any of that. I’ve seen your face when you watch him.” She pointed upstairs. “You may not know it, but that warm burning that fills your chest and crawls up your throat and stings your eyes is love.”
Her father slammed down the footrest on the recliner, then stood up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Creatures far older and with infinite knowledge tried to make me believe in love. They failed. Because I saw the truth—every day, in every person whose worthiness I judged, whose goodness I was sent to test. They failed—every one.” He stood, stiff-legged, angry. “I wanted to love like you do. I wanted them to love me. But they didn’t. And I couldn’t.” His shoulders sagged. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” She took a step toward him.
He backed away. “You’ll learn, too. And here’s your first lesson. The man you think loves you so much, your Angelo, whom you think to be full of compassion, has been working with the man who hunted you down and killed you. He’s been living with the fat slob and his plastic wife ever since. He’s been gathering up old books—ones that might have spells in them to come after me or you or Luc.”
Mouse shook her head. “He thinks I’m dead.”
“Does he? Why would he? He saw you after I had my way with you at Megiddo—you can’t get much more dead than that. He watched your resurrection with his own eyes. And you think he really believes you were killed with bullets?”
“Maybe he—” But the worming doubt she’d been shoving back under the dirt all night erupted and slithered into her head.
“You know I’m right,” her father said. “It’s why you waited here for me instead of rushing off to find the beloved I returned to you. You don’t trust him—and for good reason.”
“Good King Wenceslas” droned out from the speakers now, still in the voices of a children’s choir.
“Mouse.” Luc sounded impatient. Mercy was whining.
Her father kept talking. “But there’s more at stake than just your feelings.” He sneered. “He’s woken the Book of the Just.”
“What?” Mouse asked, her body suddenly taut with alarm. She knew all about the Book of the Just. She and Father Lucas had spent hours talking about it—tempted by the power it would give her to protect herself from her father, to maybe even defeat him. A thousand times during her seven hundred years of running, Mouse had thought about looking for the book. But she remembered Father Lucas’s warnings. The Book of the Just, woken and used, would mean the end of humanity.
“Why does Angelo have it?”
“Why else? To use it for its final purpose. To wipe out all the evil in the world—which means wiping out everything. And everyone.”
“How do you know he has it?”
“I can feel it.” He shrugged. “It used to be mine, you know.”
“What?”
But her father didn’t get a chance to answer. The shrill, panicked scream of a child rang out over the Christmas music.
Mouse took off running, her father following behind, but she fell in the hall outside Luc’s room. Her legs wouldn’t work, her body felt too heavy to move. She reached forward, digging her fingers against the hardwood floor, dragging herself through the doorway trying to get to Luc. Her father jumped over her, but he stopped short at the bed, looking down on his son.
Mouse could see Luc writhing on the bed, Mercy whimpering and turning in circles beside him. It was then she felt the pain. She saw the skin on her hands and wrists, boiling and bubbling, flakes of it peeling and lifting into the air. The breath in her lungs was hot, too, and just before her vision was blinded with heat, she saw her father wrap his cloak around himself and disappear.
The last thing Mouse knew before the darkness took her was Luc screaming and the lines of the carol echoing through the house—
Sire, the night is darker now
And the wind blows stronger
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer.
They rode in silence from Moscow to the farm. Angelo watched the Reverend and Kitty, trying to see them as Mouse would, searching for some sign of their intentions, looking for a weakness. His general impression was that they were both inordinately pleased about something.
The Reverend maintained a smug smile as he scrolled through his phone, though there were moments when Angelo caught a cloud pass over the rotund face. At one point, the Reverend slid his massive body forward to look out the windshield at the stretch of empty road ahead, but then he settled back with his phone once more. Kitty was literally trembling with what her eyes suggested was pure joy, like a child anticipating a much-longed-for present. Angelo didn’t take their happiness as a good sign.
And he didn’t understand what had happened at the ballet—why Bishop Sebastian and Jack Gray had been there, why the Reverend and Kitty were bringing them all back to the house. None of it made sense.
He could feel the Bishop’s eyes on him the whole ride, but Angelo would not look at him. When Kitty had brought the Bishop and Jack to the car where the Reverend and Angelo were waiting, he’d caught his mentor’s eye for just a moment. The look had been full of accusation and betrayal. Angelo didn’t have time to deal with that now.
Jack Gray just looked out the window at the passing countryside.
When the car crunched and spat the gravel of the drive as they pulled up in front of the castle, Kitty finally spoke. “Sorry we had to miss the second act.” One of the bodyguards came around to open the door of the car. “But I have plenty of sweets for everyone here. You won’t miss any of that sugary decadence that rewards dear Clara for killing the Mouse King.”
Angelo caught the Bishop’s quick turn of the head at Kitty’s words. His face, lit by the gas lamps in the courtyard, creased with some dark expression Angelo couldn’t understand. He assumed that the Bishop and Jack were involved in the Reverend’s plan, that it was somehow part of the Novus Rishi’s mandate to prepare for a battle of Armageddon—a battle they meant to win at any cost. But the Bishop’s demeanor suggested that maybe something had changed.
Kitty led the men into the spacious den. The curtains were pulled back, framing a wonderland of evergreens and falling snow. She turned on a lamp near the bar against the far wall. “I’ll have one of the girls bring in some goodies for you. Make yourselves at home.”
The Reverend lingered in the foyer, speaking to one of his bodyguards, then came and dropped into a deep leather chair near the fire. He kept his eyes on the window. Kitty sat down on the arm of the chair, leaning close to the Reverend, her breast brushing his cheek. She whispered to him, but not so low that Angelo couldn’t hear: “Stop worrying. It won’t take long now.” She bounced back up. “I’ll leave you men to talk business. Merry Christmas!” And she disappeared through the foyer down the hall to the kitchen.
Angelo heard muffled speaking, and then a door closed. Moments later, a woman came in carrying a tray of cakes and cookies.
“Would anyone like coffee?” she asked, her English thick with a Russian accent.
“What I want is over here.” Jack walked to the bar. Angelo wandered over to the window.
The Reverend had pulled out his phone again.
The Bishop slipped up behind Angelo near the window. “I thought you were dead.”
Angelo had been distracted watching Kitty Ayres shuffle down a path freshly covered with snow toward a low outbuilding just visible at the edge of light cast from the house.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say.
“Why?” the Bishop asked, his voice heavy with hurt.
“I didn’t know who to trust.”
“You truly believe I could have had anything to do with what happened in Australia?”
Angelo shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It does, very much. You need to—”
“What I need is a cup of that coffee. Excuse me.” Angelo turned on his heel and headed toward the kitchen. He’d seen a light come on in the outbuilding. What was Kitty doing out there? And what did it have to do with the Reverend’s nervousness?
Angelo gave the maids in the kitchen a small nod and stepped out the door onto the side patio. It was full of bodyguards.
“Where are you going?” one of them barked at Angelo.
“Mrs. Ayres asked me to come down and help her.” He pointed in the direction of the outbuilding, though it wasn’t visible at this angle.
The bodyguard looked down at Angelo’s crutches, then nodded and turned back to the other men.
Angelo pivoted around the corner of the house and took a diagonal path across the huge back lawn toward the tree line. He was careful to stay in the shadows outside the house li
ghts. He didn’t want to be seen by anyone who might be watching at the den window. He stepped through the high drifts piled against the tree trunks into the cover of the woods and made his way toward the outbuilding.
There were no windows, only one door. The building looked as old as the renovated manor. Thick stone walls ran up to meet a slate roof. Angelo circled the building slowly, but he couldn’t hear anything inside. He pushed his crutches onto the path where Kitty’s footprints were filling up with new snow, and he nudged open the door.
A single, large room spilled out in front of him, twenty feet wide and at least twice as long. Most of it looked old—short walls made of weathered stone divided one side into what must have once been stalls. Huge, dark beams of wood, hand-hewn and uneven, crisscrossed the roof. But the floor was smooth concrete, and modern lighting illuminated the space.
Kitty glanced up from a long metal table at the back of the room. She had a vial of something in one hand and held a spoon against the side of a ceramic bowl with the other. The table was scattered with bottles and herbs. In the center, a sack of salt lay on its side, a handful of crystals trailing in a line from its open mouth and glistening in the light.
“Working on a spell?” Angelo asked.
Kitty’s face had gone from the shock of unexpected discovery to a feverish thrill. “Yes.”
“Need any help?”
“I think I can do this one myself. I’ve been practicing.”
She gestured at something hidden from Angelo’s view by the table. He shuffled over to the side where he saw a trapdoor propped open by an iron bar. Angelo caught a glimpse of some paintings on the wall of the room below, but his eyes were drawn to something on the floor beside the door. A four-foot-wide dark circle, quartered by a cross, marked the smooth concrete and glistened in the light. Freshly crafted, still wet—Kitty’s spell.
“A binding spell?” he asked.
“Yes.” She squeezed tiny drops out of the vial. They fell silently against the ceramic sides of the bowl.
Book of the Just Page 27
