Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “No, Father. Please help us. We need sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary?” the man said from the doorway, leaning out and looking up and down the lane. “From what? It’s Christmas.”

  “Yes, Father. It’s Christmas. Please, we have nowhere else to go.”

  The man’s sight had cleared of sleep, and he looked at them sharply. He made the sign of the cross and then stretched his arms out, touching Mouse gently on the shoulders and drawing her in. “Come inside, child, where it is warm. You will be safe here.”

  An hour later and no questions asked, Brother Josef—no Fathers at Teplá, all were Brothers, he explained—had settled Mouse and Luc in the gardener’s cottage at the edge of the monastery grounds. The abbey was between gardeners, so the house had been empty for weeks.

  “It will be wanting people for Christmas to make it warm and happy,” Brother Josef said as he stoked the fire he’d built in the wood stove. There was a pot of water warming on top. Luc lay curled under blankets on the small, low bed against the back of the room. Mouse sat beside him, her hand clenched in his. A stack of clothes and linens sat propped against the wall at the end of the bed.

  Brother Josef had perused the cabinets and found an assortment of canned goods. “Enough if you are hungry now. Later, I will bring fresh food from town.” He walked toward the door but paused. “We eat Christmas dinner after Mass. You are most welcome to come if you are feeling up to it.” His eyes lingered softly on Luc and then met Mouse’s gaze. His was sad. Hers was despondent.

  “Thank you, Brother Josef.”

  As soon as he closed the door, Mouse was up and searching for a kitchen knife.

  “I’m going to do some spells like I showed you—to protect us,” she said, desperate to draw Luc out, to hear him speak, to know that he would be okay. “Do you remember, Luc?”

  The swelling in her hands had gone down enough to grab a hilt—she was healing, but much more slowly than normal. She didn’t understand why but thought it might be because the damage had been done by her own power.

  “Do you remember the words? Do you want to say them with me?” She sliced into the flesh of her forearm. “No? That’s okay. I can do it.” She moved around the perimeter of the cottage, casting protection spells.

  “Those will keep us safe,” she said as she finally sank onto the bed beside Luc, faint from the loss of blood, fatigue taking over now that the adrenaline was gone.

  “You don’t believe that. I can hear it in your voice.” He was quiet, monotone, but Mouse nearly broke with relief.

  “You’re right. I won’t lie to you. I don’t know for sure if the spells can stop . . . her. But I think they might.” Mouse had used every spell she’d ever learned, fueled them with her own power-rich blood and the fierceness of her love. It would be enough to stop someone or something from coming in, but there was another worry that hung on Mouse. “Can you tell me what happened? Did she—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” His voice went high with panic, and she could hear his little heart running.

  “No. Of course not.” She had wanted to ask if Kitty had taken more blood than she’d used on the spells in the trunk. If Kitty had more of Luc’s blood, she could take him again. Mouse didn’t know of any spell that could stop her. But Mouse wouldn’t push Luc—not now. He’d suffered enough.

  “Can you sit up so we can get you washed off? Brother Josef left a shirt you can use to sleep in.”

  “I want my own pajamas.” He started crying softly.

  Mouse worked hard to keep her voice steady and calm, just like he needed, but the effort burned her eyes and throat. “The ones you were wearing are gone, honey. The ones with the—”

  Luc sat up suddenly. “Mercy! I forgot Mercy! Mouse, can you go get her? Please? She’s all alone. She might have been hurt when . . . when the burning started. And she’s with . . . she’s with him. He might—oh, please, Mouse. Please go get her.” He was sobbing so hard now that he was breathing in gulps.

  Mouse didn’t want to leave him here alone, even for the few minutes it would take, and she was so tired, she wasn’t sure she could travel through the between space. “Honey, can we wait a few hours? I can get Brother Josef to sit with you and—”

  “No! I want Mercy! Please.” He curled in a ball again, the blankets tangled under him, exposing his blood-smeared little body.

  The cuts had been bone deep, but they were only scratches now. Mouse wasn’t worried about the physical harm—like her, Luc would always heal. But what must it do to a child just learning to love to have someone rip him from his bed on Christmas Eve, to have his father abandon him in the moment of his terror, to be tortured by a stranger and to not understand why?

  Her mind filled with her own young self, ripped apart by despair and brought back to life by the unconditional love of a wolf who taught her to trust again. Mercy’s love would heal Luc much faster than Mouse ever could.

  “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll go.”

  He nodded, still crying.

  As she stood and lifted the tattered cloak from the bed, he said, “There’s something under my pillow, too. Will you bring it?”

  She bent and kissed him on the forehead. “Of course. You stay here, just where you are.” She pulled the blankets back up around him and then took a step away, the edge of the cloak in her hand. “And, Luc. If anything happens . . .” She swallowed against a surge of fear. “If she, or anyone, if they . . . you use your power. Do you understand? It’s okay to do anything you have to do to protect yourself.”

  He nodded again and she folded herself into the dark.

  The puppy was waiting, curled up in the middle of Luc’s bed. Christmas music was still playing—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” sang out through the house. There was no sign of her father.

  Mercy whimpered and cowered until Mouse spoke. “You have a little boy who needs you.”

  The puppy stood, stretched, and wagged her tail.

  Mouse reached into a drawer beside the bed and pulled out a pair of pajamas and a set of clean clothes for Luc. She wouldn’t take the time to bother with her own things—she was anxious to get back to him, and besides, she had lifetimes’ worth of practice leaving everything behind. She started to pick up the puppy, but then remembered the something under Luc’s pillow.

  She assumed it was a book or a stuffed animal and so was surprised when her hand made contact with something hard. Her fingers painted the picture of what it was before she saw it. She tucked it in with the clothes as she bent and gathered Mercy in her arms and leaned into the black space of her cloak and stepped out onto the worn, wooden floor of the gardener’s cottage at Teplá Abbey.

  The dog was already squirming to get free before Mouse’s second foot settled.

  “Mercy!” Luc’s arms opened and the puppy sprang into them, licking his face and whining with joy. Mouse saw a smile spread across Luc’s face, all the way up to his eyes, driving out the dead, dark clouds that had hung there since she’d pulled him out of the trunk. As a healer, she knew it took time to recover from such wounds. She knew there would be nightmares. There’d be anger and fear. The clouds would surely come back again. But, hopefully, Mercy and Mouse would be there to drive them back once more.

  While Luc soaked in Mercy’s love, Mouse sank wearily into a chair between the wood stove and the bed. She put the clothes beside the linens Brother Josef had left. She held the thing from under Luc’s pillow in her hands, rubbing her thumb over the smooth wood, following the grain that ran like locks of hair along the baby’s head.

  But for the first time since she’d carved it seven hundred years ago, it was the mother that held Mouse’s focus. The mother nursing her son. The mother’s soft face, smiling. The mother singing. The mother full of goodness, feeding her son on joy.

  It had been Mouse’s dream to be all those things—soft, a force for good, full of joy, a healer. But she’d turned her back on all of it after Lake Disappointment. The Mouse etched in the centuries-old w
ood in her hands was dead. She’d let vengeance suck out all the goodness, like a vampire draining its victim, and all that was left was a bitter, brittle shell.

  “Are you mad?”

  Mouse startled and looked up at Luc. She realized her face had gone hard and cold again. She tried to soften it. “Why would I be?”

  “Because I stole it.”

  “I threw it on a pile of what I considered worthless trash.” The tears stung her eyes without warning, rolling down her face and dropping on the statue. “The best parts of me—the joy, the love, the light—I tossed them away like they were nothing. I set fire to them and the memory of the people who’d given me those gifts.” Her voice broke as she looked at the scorch marks along the bottom of the statue. “You didn’t steal it, honey. You saved it—from me.”

  She handed it out to him.

  “But it’s yours,” Luc said.

  “Not anymore.” She thought about all that she’d lost, all that she’d given away, all of it ash now—Mother Kazi’s satchel of healing tools, Bodhan’s lock of fur, Father Lucas’s breviary, her own soul. She couldn’t get any of it back. It was too late. She’d done too much, gone too far. “I don’t deserve it.”

  Luc nudged through her arms and climbed into her lap, holding the statue. “Is this you?”

  “It was.”

  “It is.”

  “Not anymore. I gave that girl away.”

  “It looks like you.” He twisted in her lap and laid his hands on her face, gently pulling her cheeks back to make her smile, running his hand lightly over her forehead, easing out the furrows.

  “Not really, not on the inside, and that’s the part that matters.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Don’t, Luc. Don’t look, please.”

  She was an echo of her father atop Megiddo, when she’d used her gift to look inside him, searching for and finding the tiny flicker of a soul. She couldn’t stand the idea that Luc, who also had this gift, would see the empty darkness inside. The soul she’d finally seen inside herself at Megiddo, a lightness and joy Angelo had seen in his pictures—it had surely drowned in her hatred and vengeance.

  “I don’t know what you looked like inside back then,” he said in a faraway voice.

  “Please, Luc.”

  “But I see a bright, golden glow that fills you up and spills out around you.” He lifted his hand as if he were playing with something invisible. “It’s dancing all around me. It’s beautiful, Mouse.”

  She pulled him to her, kissing him on top of the head, holding him as she shed silent tears.

  His finger traced over the words Mouse had carved into the statue so long ago. “This is French. You taught me French. I read the words, over and over again, but I didn’t know it was a song until you sang it to me when . . . when you found me.”

  “Yes.” She reached over and pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around them. Luc had started shivering again. “My mother sang it to me, just once, before she died.”

  “Will you sing it again?”

  “You are loved, little one, you are loved. By God in heaven, you are loved. You are loved, little one, you are loved. By your mother, forever, you are loved.”

  “Mouse?” Luc interrupted as she started the verse again.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t have a little boy anymore, do you?” He was fingering the baby on the statue now.

  “No. He lived and died a long time ago.” The knot in her throat burned.

  He was quiet a moment. The wood in the stove popped and snapped in the silence.

  “What will happen to me now?” he finally asked. “I don’t want to go back with Father. I don’t want anyone to snatch me away again.” He was crying.

  “You don’t have to. And I won’t let them.”

  “Can I be your little boy and you be my mother?”

  “If . . . if you want me.”

  “We can stay together?”

  “Always.”

  He sighed and settled against her chest again. Soon his breathing grew slow and his body relaxed into sleep. She held him a little while longer, still singing, and then settled him into the bed, curling up beside him.

  They spent Christmas Day eating canned soup and crackers. Brother Josef brought them leftovers from the abbey’s Christmas dinner late in the day, along with some milk and bread and eggs. Mouse and Luc slept for hard, heavy hours at a time, until one or the other woke from dreams filled with horrors. Mercy was there to lick the nearest face. Later, Mouse found some rope to make a leash for the dog. She’d forgotten to get Luc any shoes, so she carried him on her back around the abbey grounds, telling him stories of her childhood and revisiting the ghosts of her past.

  The next day, they started planning. Brother Josef had said they could stay at the cottage until spring, when the new gardener arrived. Luc liked the idea of being in the place where Mouse had been a child. He loved hearing her stories and seeing the place as it had been seven hundred years ago. But Mouse was already ready to run. And yet, underneath her instinct and drive to keep him safe, she also wanted Luc to have a normal childhood—as normal as he could, anyway. Soon enough, his immortality would make him a wanderer. Where could she go that would keep them off the Novus Rishi’s radar? Lurking in that question was another problem Mouse had no answer for—if Kitty had Luc’s blood, how could Mouse ever keep him safe?

  The worry drove her outside for fresh air near sunset, when Luc had fallen asleep—his little body worked so hard to recover from the trauma that he ran out of energy often. It would get better, she told herself, but there was only one way she could think of making sure it didn’t happen again. Here at the abbey, with Father Lucas so near and so far away, and now that Luc had restored her hope, Mouse didn’t want to add any more names to the list of lives she had already taken. Not if there was any other way.

  She was not surprised to find her father waiting at the threshold of the cottage door as she opened it.

  “Seems I’m not welcome here,” he said as he toed the bloody line of her spell.

  “What do you want?”

  “To check on my son.”

  “The one you abandoned?”

  “I knew you’d save him.”

  “Go away.” Mouse picked Mercy back up and turned toward the door again.

  “Wait. There’s something you need to know. Your little friend—”

  “Angelo. And he’s not my friend anymore.”

  Mouse couldn’t deal with the bitterness of Angelo’s betrayal and give Luc the love he needed right now. She pushed Angelo down and away, into the cage she’d once saved for the power that coursed through her. She’d considered it a curse. Now Angelo held that title.

  “Well, at least we agree on that. He’s awoken the Book of the Just.”

  Mouse remembered that her father had told her this just before the summoning spell tore her and Luc away.

  “And now he’s put the rod together.”

  Her uncanny intellect and seven hundred years of religious study made the connection quickly. “Aaron’s rod? What does Angelo want with—”

  “Technically, it’s my rod. I had it first,” her father said.

  “What?”

  “The Book and the rod, they were the tools of my trade. I was the Accuser.” Her father said it dramatically, like a commentator announcing a competitor entering the arena. “I was supposed to test the worthiness of humanity. The boss believed that his clay puppets were good at heart, selfless, trusting, kind, and faithful. Not all of us agreed.” He shrugged. “I was sent to challenge them. You know, like Job? I kept a catalog of my . . . clients. Who was tested and how. Who failed and why. Evidentiary notes to make my case against humanity.”

  “Why would that make the Book of the Just dangerous?”

  “I scribbled down the spells I used to expose their—well, you might call it evil. The boss called it corruption and blamed it on those of us who’d come down to hang out with the humans even though
he’d told us not to. But as I argued then, if they were infected with greed and lust and selfishness, he had only himself to blame—it wasn’t my fault that I could see it in them, that I could pull it out of them. They were what they were. You can’t expect a child to transcend its origins.”

  “Yes, you can.” Mouse looked him in the eye. “It’s called free will. It’s called choice.”

  “Oh, you want to talk about the choices you’ve been making?”

  “I have to deal with the consequences of my choices, and they’re none of your business. But you might want to think about the consequences of some of your own.” She nodded back to the cottage where Luc lay sleeping.

  “How is he?”

  “He doesn’t want to see you.”

  “He’ll get over it. You did.”

  “You’re such a fool. You have a chance at redemption, at love, and you can’t even see it.”

  “Love is a myth humans cling to in order to make themselves feel better about their pathetic existence. How’s it gone for you so far?” he smirked.

  Mouse wouldn’t take the bait. Her wounds were her own to heal. “The Book has dangerous spells—I already knew that. But no one can use them without a power source, right?” Something clicked even as she said it and before her father could answer. “That’s what the rod’s for.”

  “Yup.”

  “How powerful is it?”

  “Unfathomable—far beyond what even you can do. It fueled the spells I used to bring disasters on people.”

  Mouse shivered at the foreboding pricking at her skin, but something here didn’t feel right. “Why do you care? Sounds like the spells are against people, not demons. I thought it was supposed to wipe out evil.”

  “That’s the whole point, dearest. Evil is everywhere. And though you’re right—me and mine won’t be in the first wave of victims—my old adversary left the playing field on one condition: that the game was played fair. I gave up my Book and the rod, which meant I could influence only one person at a time. I could plant my seeds, one by one, but I had to let them grow as they would on their own.” He smiled. “I think my garden’s done well, and, as I told you, I have every confidence that Armageddon will be won in the beat of a single heart—the last one I claim as my own.”