“Get to the point,” Mouse said coldly.
“You were born of a human mother, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“But not of a human father.” The Bishop came to stand beside her and propped the book on the table’s edge. “God, my Father, sits on one side, the side of peace and good.” He laid the book open on the table. “Your father sits at the other, the source of evil and death. This is your father, is it not?”
Mouse desperately wanted not to look at the picture he slid toward her, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d spent hours hunched over the original in the barren cell of a Bohemian monastery hundreds of years ago. It was the picture that had given her book its popular title: the Devil’s Bible. Mouse had often imagined her father’s glee at such a twist, her attempt at redemption usurped by the thrill of fear he evoked. She cringed, not at the familiar image, but at having her secret splayed on a stranger’s table.
“God produced a son, pure and holy, to redeem mankind. Your father produced you. For what end, my dear?”
“I don’t understand.” Mouse couldn’t stop shaking.
“Surely you aren’t so naïve as to think he loves you?” He looked at her doubtfully. “Why do you think your father made you?”
“He didn’t make me. I was an accident—” Then Mouse remembered something her father had said at Podlažice when she asked about her mother: My only interest in her was what I could get from her. Had Mouse been conceived for a reason?
“God had a purpose for his son, too. He was losing the war to influence the souls of men, you understand. Law and consequences are rarely enough to persuade a man to change his life. God needed something more . . . dramatic, something closer to the hearts of men. But how could a god truly understand the heart of a man?”
The Bishop watched her, waiting until he saw some flicker of understanding in her eyes.
“Yes. That’s right. God needed a bridge. Something divine but also human. Something, someone who could do the things God couldn’t, who could see into the hearts of man and touch the multitudes. If this is why God made his son, then why—”
“No. Yours is just one story. Not everyone believes—” Her heart was jumping, trying to find a way around the Bishop’s logic.
“Come now, you said you were raised Catholic. I think you underestimate yourself. Surely you know you are not normal. What can you do?” His eyes narrowed as he asked the question like someone prepared to test his subject, to dissect her in every way until he got the answers he wanted. He lowered his hand toward her face again, but she pushed herself back.
“You’re wrong. My father doesn’t need me for anything. He’s the one with the power. My father didn’t even care to find me until—” The image of the ten thousand strewn across Marchfeld silenced her. Her father had only wanted her after he saw what she could do.
She had run from her father out of fear of becoming like him. She had thought he wanted her for the same reason he wanted everything: to own her, because she was his, because he could. She had never imagined that she possessed some power that her father did not, that he actually needed her for something.
Bishop Sebastian saw the doubt in Mouse’s face. “So I was right. You’re running from your father, aren’t you? But you have no clue what he means to do with you. That changes things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like you, I thought the path forward was clear.” He reached out and touched the bandage on her wrist. “Now it seems we have choices, you and I.” He leaned back.
“Something is changing out there—have you noticed?” he asked. “More of your kind have been coming here in the past year—nearly twice as many as in all the years past—as if they are testing us. But not just here. Around the world in remote places, among discarded people, in the places where no one is watching and where there is easy prey—we hear stories about dark things creeping out of the shadows, about people being possessed and doing unnatural, evil things to each other.” He put his hands together, like he was praying. “Something is happening. Your father and his kind are preparing for war. Despite the deaf ears of the Church’s leaders, we must also be prepared.”
He looked up at her slowly. “And here you are, the enemy’s prized weapon, delivered at my doorstep in my hour of need. But what’s our next move?” He cocked his head. “Will you willingly join my side to become a warrior for the good? Or will you be your father’s daughter? So many decisions to make—both for you and for me.” He looked up quickly at the sound of the doorknob rattling. “But here is Angelo back.” Mouse took off for the door with the Bishop on her heels. It was already swinging open when she reached it.
“What’s wrong?” Angelo asked, the whiteness of her face alarming him. “What happened?”
“I need to go. I’m . . . I’m ill.” The words were clipped; she kept her eyes on the floor.
“What happened?” This time Angelo directed his question to the Bishop who stood in the doorway, but he got no answer.
Mouse knew the Bishop couldn’t keep her here against her will—he’d said so himself. Their spells of protection might identify what she was, but they had no power to stop her. Not yet anyway. But she still needed to get out of there fast. She couldn’t stand the idea of waiting there in the hall while the Bishop spewed all her dark secrets out into the open for Angelo to see. She was sure he’d learn it all soon enough. But not here. Not while she was watching. Mouse threw herself into the wheelchair that Angelo left in the hall. “Angelo, I need to go. Now.”
“What did you say to her?” Angelo flung the question at Bishop Sebastian.
“Angelo, please.” Mouse let desperation fill her voice, hoping Angelo would hear it. It worked.
The Bishop did not stay to watch them wheel down the hall. He closed and locked the door and moved to one of the tables at the far end of the room. So many pieces were suddenly in play. He needed a plan. Now.
He opened the table drawer, pulled out a cell phone, and dialed. “Shalom, Brother. You will need to contact the others. All those times you teased me about my white whale, my chimera? Well, I’ve found her.” Bishop Sebastian shook his head still trying to believe it himself.
Mouse held herself tightly to keep from slipping on the slick leather of the wheelchair as Angelo wove between the crowds of tourists just beyond Bishop Sebastian’s hallway.
They entered the space before Mouse realized where they were. The Sistine Chapel. Helpless, she looked up to see Michelangelo’s frustrated masterpiece hovering over her and breaking her with what she knew she could never have. She had left Podlažice lice ridden, emaciated, and blind in any light stronger than a candle, but she had clung to the dream of penance and the hope of Father Lucas’s psalm. Bishop Sebastian’s understanding of God’s world and her place in it shredded that hope.
Then Mouse heard them screaming at her, penetrating the din of hundreds of tourists.
“Malus. Monstrum. Abominatio,” the sibyls shrieked over and over again. Evil. Monster. Abomination. They named her for what she was.
Mouse jerked her head up at the shrill voices and saw the painted mouths of the women twisted and snarled. She expected the tourists to run screaming for the exits, but the people continued to jostle each other for a better view of the frescoes and craned their heads back to wonder at the ceiling. No one but Mouse could hear the sibyls’ curses, clearly another of Bishop Sebastian’s spells.
“Malus. Monstrum. Abominatio.”
Mouse bit into her bottom lip and clamped her hands over her ears trying to shut the noise out.
“Malus. Monstrum. Abominatio.”
Angelo concentrated on maneuvering the wheelchair through the crowd and didn’t notice Mouse folding in on herself, shaking her head against the wailing women. When they reached the relative quiet of the entryway, she had recovered herself enough to stand, but she wrapped her arms tightly around her chest.
Within a few seconds, the two of them sat in the silence of a cab windin
g through the traffic jams of Rome. Angelo dug a folded tissue from his pocket and turned to Mouse, who was still shaking.
“You’ve got blood on your chin.” He dabbed at her face, but she wouldn’t look at him.
PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,
BOHEMIA
1278
Mouse expected her father to be lying in wait outside the monastery walls to catch her at her escape. She took no satisfaction in the silence and solitude that told her he had believed her lies. She felt cut off from her self, insubstantial like a spirit exorcised from a body, and in her daze, she wondered a little at the footprints she left in the shallow snow as she walked ghostlike toward the village near Podlažice.
She waited at the bridge in Chrudim as a procession of girls, wearing crowns of candles and dressed in white with bloodred sashes wrapped around their waists, crossed the river and headed toward the church at the center of town. The bells were ringing in the bitter air.
“Darkness shall take flight soon,” the girls sang as they passed.
It was the festival of St. Lucy, the longest night of the year.
How goes the work?
Distracted, Mouse had lowered her mask of numbers and names. Her father’s voice flooded her head without warning, his voice sharp like the cold. She stumbled on the uneven stone of the bridge and caught herself on the shallow wall, cutting her hands on the rock.
Something is wrong.
Her teeth were chattering as she stepped up to the stone wall of the bridge and looked at the dark waters below. She had done her thinking in the monastery. Her father wanted Nicholas as bait. If Mouse was not there to be lured, he had no motivation to torture her son. In fact, her father would want to keep Nicholas safe to use against her when he finally caught her. So Mouse needed to disappear—in body and mind. Her surest and quickest physical escape was the river below: It would carry her to its mouth at Elbe.
Wait for me.
As she stepped into the air, she grasped for something to fill her mind.
“God willed, and heaven, earth, water, air, fire, the angels, and darkness came into being from nothing.” It came from the Book of the Bee, the first book Mouse had copied in the scriptorium at Teplá with Father Lucas. “Darkness is a self-existent nature. Others say that it is the shadow of bodies.”
The frigid water stole her breath and drove icy nails into her body until she grew numb and hollow like a shadow as the water and the darkness carried her away.
I am coming.
He sounded far away again, an echo bouncing against the wall in her mind.
Mouse had survived rivers and being frozen once before. She knew she would survive again. She would live to hide, live to run from her father.
The chase had begun.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mouse went into Angelo’s bathroom, grabbed her things, and headed back to the living room to finish packing. Angelo shadowed her, but she still couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“What did he say to you?” Anger and fear drained the warmth from his voice.
“Nothing.”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her around to face him.
“Don’t.” She would have to manage more than single words at some point, but Mouse was working hard to get even one syllable out. She was feeling too much—rage and fear and such a bitter sadness at having to leave Angelo this way. She was terrified she was going to lose control. She pulled herself free of him and headed toward the kitchen—and the door out.
“Where are you going?”
She kept her head down.
“I deserve to know.”
She slung her canvas bag over her shoulder.
Angelo got to the door before her. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to . . .” But Mouse couldn’t answer him because she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her instincts were running the game—fight or flight, full out. In the Bishop’s office she’d been focused on sparring with him, but here, in Angelo’s apartment, there was no fight to be had, just an overwhelming instinct to run.
“Look at me and tell me you’re not going to do whatever you were trying to do in the church. Look at me, Mouse.” It was a command as compelling as any she could have given.
“I have to go.” Mouse raised her eyes to his.
As she made for the door, she tried to anticipate how Angelo would move, but she couldn’t read him. She pulled to his left, but he wouldn’t let go of her hand, and she tripped against him, her weight throwing him the last step into the door. Angelo trapped her against his chest, wrapping his arms around her.
“Tell me what Bishop Sebastian said, Mouse.” The nearness of him as he pressed into her, his smell, his voice at her ear, broke against her in waves.
“He said . . . he thinks I might . . . interfere with you.” She wanted to say anything that would make him let her go.
“Interfere how?”
“My god, Angelo, you’re a man about to be a priest, and I’m a woman living in your flat. What the hell do you think he thinks?”
Mouse felt his arms drop slightly as he wrestled with his own confusion. She used the opportunity to pull free of him and bent to grab her bag.
“No.” His hand was on hers again. “There has to be more to it than that. You’re scared. Did he threaten you?”
“Let me go.”
“I’m not letting you go until I know that you’re going to be okay.”
But Mouse was never going to be okay. Not if what the Bishop said was true. Not if she’d been made to be some kind of Armageddon weapon. It changed everything. Her father would never stop looking for her, and now the Bishop and his people would be hunting her, too. Mouse had more enemies than she knew. And the Bishop had said that her father was massing his army, testing his troops. He said war was coming soon.
War. The remembered sounds of screaming men and horses, the stench of emptied bowels and sour mud, the visions of the dead at Marchfeld ran through her body like she was there. Mouse could not go to war again. Whatever the cost.
Instinctively she inched toward the door, but Angelo wouldn’t let go of her hand.
“Mouse, let’s figure out where you’re going first. That’s all I’m asking, okay?”
The rational part of her mind knew he was right—she needed a plan. She would be easy prey for her father in the state she was in, and she had no idea what Bishop Sebastian and his fanatics were capable of. Her next move needed to be calculated and strategic, not driven out of panic and fear. She blew out a sigh, looked up at Angelo, and nodded, her mind already racing through her options for getting out of Rome unnoticed.
Angelo’s pocket buzzed. He pulled out his phone. The look on his face told her who it was.
“Should I answer it?” He was still pressed against the door.
Mouse waited a beat for the panic to kick in again, for her hand to snatch the phone away. She wasn’t prepared for the undertow of sadness that gripped her instead. There was nothing she could do to stop the Bishop from telling Angelo what she was. She might as well let him do it now. And then Angelo would be glad to see her leave.
“Answer it,” she said, walking down the hall to Angelo’s room. She couldn’t stay and listen as the Bishop stripped away every good thing Angelo thought about her. As Mouse closed the door, she heard Angelo ask, “What did you say to her, Father?”
Mouse imagined the father-daughter portrait that Bishop Sebastian would paint for Angelo—her father as a forked-tongue, clawed beast and her as a weapon to be used in some stalemated battle between good and evil. There would certainly be nothing left of the girl Angelo thought he’d rescued at the church, nothing of the fellow orphan loved secondhand, nothing of the woman he’d swapped secrets with at Monster Park. Nothing left of the twinkle of possibility she’d seen in his eyes when he looked at her.
There would be nothing left of that Mouse for her either. She’d have to go back to the shut-down, isolated version of Mouse she’d been ever since she
crawled out of her cell at Podlažice seven hundred years ago. She didn’t know if she was strong enough to do it all over again. But she had to try.
She grabbed Angelo’s laptop off his desk and sat down on the bed. As she scrolled through train and plane schedules, Mouse whispered passages from The Book of Bees, letting each word drive her emotions down into nothingness like bricks as she built her walls again, as she worked to become an inclusus once more. “When the soul goes forth from the body, the angels go with it: then the hosts of darkness come forth to meet it, seeking to seize and examine it, to see if there be anything of theirs in it,” she mumbled. Mouse felt the tears she was holding back start to burn behind her eyes. “Then the angels do not fight with the hosts of darkness, but those deeds which the soul has wrought protect it and guard it. If its deeds be victorious, then the angels sing praises before it until it meets God with joy.”
By the time Angelo knocked at the door, Mouse had lost herself so well that she hadn’t heard him coming. She startled at the sound.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“It’s your room.”
She didn’t look up when he came in, too afraid to see the truth in his eyes. Surely Bishop Sebastian had told his protégé everything.
“Don’t you want to know what he said?” Angelo leaned against the wall.
“Not really.” Her stomach clenched.
“He said you were dangerous.”
Mouse’s heart stopped as she waited to hear him name her father.
“At first I thought I knew what he meant. Dangerous for me, as a man, for my vows. But then he said the people who might be looking for you were even more dangerous. He meant to put me on my guard.”
The Devil's Bible Page 16
