He had written that story, his story, for Mouse to include in the Devil’s Bible. They were the last pages he’d done for her. He’d been different those days he was working on it, cocky and aloof. And when he handed them over to her, finished, he’d been like a cat toying with its prey—confident in its ability to claim its victim but bored enough, arrogant enough, to give the measly mouse a fighting chance.
Her father had made her read those pages over and over again, as if he expected her to find something more than words and story in them. Bread crumbs should you ever lose your way, he’d said when he gave them to her. She’d found nothing but plain words and a dull story so she’d not thought of them since. But Mouse was certain he’d put something in those pages, something that might give her a fighting chance. She just had to find them first. They’d been stolen centuries ago—the mysterious missing pages from the Devil’s Bible that Jack Gray had talked about in his lecture. No one knew where they were. But Mouse thought she might, and she was eager to start looking.
“Come on, Angelo, wake up!”
But he was already fully awake, thanks to the Bishop’s message. It was a reply to the last one Angelo had sent him telling him that Mouse didn’t want any help: “Remind her that even St. Joan needed help. ‘And the angel said to her: I will aid thee.’” Angelo took it as a sign.
“Where are we going?” he asked Mouse.
Part Two
Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.
—Paradise Lost, Book II, Lines 432–33
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mouse and Angelo had left for the train station shortly after midnight, but they weren’t the only ones out and about. There had been a man outside Angelo’s flat. He had been standing in the dark across the street, almost invisible, but Mouse had seen him. It made sense that the Bishop would have someone watching. She wondered how many he had in his group of Armageddon warriors or demon hunters or whatever the hell they were.
The man had stayed with them as they entered the station. Mouse looked around as she and Angelo got ready to board. There weren’t many people on the platform for such an early train, so she was fairly certain their tagalong wasn’t among them. To be safe, she lifted her head, nostrils flaring as she sifted through the soup of perfumes, aftershave, and the sour twang of axle grease, searching for the man’s scent. But there was no sign of him.
As Angelo dropped onto a seat in their compartment, his phone buzzed. The train lurched forward and Mouse braced herself against the doorframe as he held the phone up so she could read the Bishop’s latest text: GOOD MORNING, SON. LUNCH TODAY? DR. LUCAS IS MORE THAN WELCOME TO COME AS WELL.
Mouse had to give Bishop Sebastian credit for his cleverness. She assumed that the little shadow he’d set on them had reported that she and Angelo had gotten on a train. But by sending an invitation he knew Angelo would have to refuse, the Bishop would “learn” that they’d left town from Angelo himself. Bishop Sebastian would use his prodigal son to keep tabs on Mouse. She would need to be careful about what she told Angelo because she had no control over what he told the Bishop.
But Bishop Sebastian’s subterfuge also proved that Mouse’s instinct was right—Angelo wasn’t colluding with his mentor. He was as much in the dark as Mouse was, even more so. He hadn’t seen the man outside his flat. Angelo didn’t know that the Bishop was watching them. Mouse didn’t think he would like it.
The coded message also made it clear that, for reasons Mouse didn’t yet understand, the Bishop did not want his secrets revealed to Angelo any more than Mouse did hers. It was a tricky game they were playing. Neither could expose the other without also exposing themselves. At least for the time being, Bishop Sebastian had to tread as carefully as she did.
“What should I tell him?” Angelo asked.
Mouse needed to be clever, too. Bishop Sebastian wouldn’t know that she’d seen his spy. Telling him what he already knew—that they were leaving town—would make it seem like they were being forthright. It might buy them some time.
“Well, we won’t be back in time for lunch.” Mouse laughed. “But I’d rather keep our plan just between us, for now at least. So why not tell him we needed some air to clear our heads so we could make good decisions—and that we’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“Will we? Be back in a couple of days?” Angelo asked as he keyed in the text.
It was a heavier question than he realized. Mouse let it hang in the air because she couldn’t answer him. And because she didn’t want to think about it. Right now, for the first time in a long time, Mouse felt like her old self again—the kind of girl who conquered demons. She didn’t want to let worry take that away from her.
“I mean, I don’t even know where we’re going,” Angelo added.
She had made them pack so quickly that Angelo had had no time to ask his questions. Mouse had had no time to think about how she was going to answer them either.
“Vienna,” she said.
“Thanks, Sherlock. I had that one figured out for myself.”
Mouse kicked at him playfully as she paced the tiny compartment and then laughed as he grabbed her hand and pulled her onto the seat beside him. She shifted sideways on the seat so she could see him better, and Angelo dropped his arm over her knee. To anyone else, the contact would have meant nothing, but not for Mouse. It wasn’t his physical touch this time that took her breath away. She’d grown used to that over the past days, but his comfort with her, the feel of intimacy with another person after so many years of being alone, was like a tether pulling her to him.
“Now tell me where we’re going!” He grabbed her knee with a mock squeeze.
“Okay, okay.” She unclamped his hand. “We’re headed to a place just outside of Vienna.” There were only a handful of places her father would hide those pages if he meant for her to find them—the places he knew were special to Mouse, for good or ill. Marchfeld was the most obvious because it was important to them both. Important to her for all she’d lost and to him for what he found. So that’s where she wanted to look first. The battlefield was less than an hour out of Vienna.
If she struck out there, she’d head to the castle at Prague or the ruins of Podlažice, if there were any ruins to find. And if she hadn’t discovered the pages by then, she could try the abbey at Teplá and maybe her son’s grave in Brno. Beyond that, Mouse had no idea where to look. If the pages weren’t in any of those places, then either her father still had them or they’d been burned to ash a long time ago.
“And what are we looking for?” Angelo asked.
This was the only part of the question Mouse had figured out how to answer. Her memory-dream had given it to her.
“You said something about ambitious people making mistakes in their past because they’re so focused on the goals they’re chasing,” she explained. “Well, my father’s not going to screw up like that, but he does like to play games, and he’s arrogant enough to assume he’ll always win.” Mouse didn’t want to think about how often he did.
“I think he started a game with me a long time ago, but I didn’t know it. It’s in something he wrote. Kind of like a puzzle. But I couldn’t figure it out at the time.”
“You think we can solve it now?”
Mouse shrugged. “I hope so. When he showed it to me the first time, I didn’t understand what it was. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be playing a game. And I didn’t have much time to study it.”
At Podlažice she had read the pages of her father’s manuscript—the dull story of his epic battle with God—but she had found nothing out of the ordinary. No blasphemy, no corrupted lines, nothing profane. So she’d slipped her father’s story beside the Rules of St. Benedict in the Devil’s Bible and handed it all over to Bishop Andreas. And then Mouse ran.
“How will solving it help beat your dad?”
“I won’t know until I’ve figured out the puzzle. But it must be a game I can win.”
&nb
sp; Angelo laughed. “Well, that’s confidence for you.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.” She pushed at him playfully. “It’s something else he said—that he was curious to see if I’d play by the rules or do anything to win.” Specifically, her father had wondered if she’d be more like Cain or Abel. Would she be willing to kill in order to get what she wanted? For the first time, Mouse found herself seriously wondering if she was powerful enough to kill her father. Bishop Sebastian seemed to think so.
“Based on what you’ve said, I’m guessing your father would like it better if you played dirty.”
“Absolutely.” It would make Mouse more like him. She put her fingers to her lips, thinking. Maybe that was the point of all this—to test her, to corrupt her. Well, Mouse might have to play the game, but she didn’t have to play by anyone’s rules but her own. Not her father’s and not Bishop Sebastian’s.
“This thing your dad wrote is in Austria?” Angelo asked as he laid his head back against the seat.
“Maybe,” Mouse said as she bit at her lip.
The truth was that no one knew where those pages were. After Bishop Andreas had died, the monks at Podlažice had traded the Devil’s Bible for money and a bit of prestige from Rome. A handful of pages including her father’s story were stolen a few years later. Mouse had first learned about the missing pages when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II took the book to Prague, obsessed with learning its secrets. He had gone mad, like Bishop Andreas before him. By then, only Mouse and her father knew what those missing pages contained.
Mouse didn’t know what had happened to them or why anyone would damage a book that, at the time, was considered a national treasure, an eighth wonder of the world. And why steal only those pages? Why not take the portrait of Satan that gave the book its value? She had long suspected that her father was the culprit, but she couldn’t understand why. Until now. It was more proof that whatever he’d hidden in his story made him vulnerable. He must have gotten scared that someone else would discover the secret, so he took the pages. Mouse only hoped that he hadn’t destroyed them, that he still wanted to play whatever game he’d crafted for her, and that he’d left the pages someplace where only she would be able to find them.
“Why would it be in Austria?” Angelo asked, yawning as he spoke.
“It’s just a guess, but I thought if he meant me to play the game, he’d follow rules I could figure out. If I’m right, he will have hidden the pages or left clues in places that were important to me.”
“Why is this place in Austria important?”
“I lost someone I loved there.” Mouse thought the explanation both true and conventional.
“Who?” He seemed very awake now.
“A man. And . . . and something else.”
“What?” There was an edge in Angelo’s voice.
She paused, trying to find a way to give him the truth without really answering his question. “My innocence.” And in her mind, Mouse saw the thousands of dead men and horses scattered around her with Ottakar’s body at her feet.
She expected the vagueness of her answer to irritate Angelo and spark more questions, so his silence and the thin line of his lips confused her. In the quiet, she felt the familiar melancholy of Marchfeld close in on her, but she refused to give in to it this time. Mouse wanted to take risks, not pick at old scabs.
“I’m . . .” She held her breath a moment. “You asked me, back at the apartment, if I was an artist, if I took pictures or painted or . . .” All the words were tumbling out at odd angles. “Well I do . . . I mean, I am an artist. I’m a sculptor. I sculpt.” She spoke fast, kept her eyes down, and played with her hands. “Well, I used to. So anyway . . .” She trailed off, unsure of what more to say and a little stunned at having called herself an artist. She hadn’t done that since Marchfeld.
Angelo cocked his head toward her, a slight twitch of his eyebrows the only sign that he was holding back a laugh at the odd turn of conversation. It was the first time Mouse had told him something about herself without him having to ask. When it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, he asked: “Wood or stone or—?”
“Wood, mostly, though I’ve worked with clay, too.” She sighed. She thought of the years in the Sumava forest with her fingers calloused from hours of working the slivers of bone she used as gouges to shape the wood. Mouse had left hundreds of totems scattered throughout the wild woods.
“I took a class once. We used clay,” Angelo said.
“Let me guess. You were the next Rodin,” she teased.
“Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you?” He moved quickly before she saw it coming. He grabbed her wrists in his grip and pushed her back onto the seat, tickling her under the ribs with his other hand. She couldn’t breathe for laughing. She finally got her foot onto his chest and pushed back, pinning him against the wall.
“I give!” he said, and as Mouse sat up, he watched her wipe the tears from her face, full of joy. This was a different Mouse.
“Any favorite artists?” he asked when they’d finally caught their breath.
They talked about art, and then Angelo quizzed her about other favorites—music, food, places. She’d had to answer him carefully about the places she’d been because she realized what she knew about them had more to do with when she was there. Despite Angelo’s confidence that he could accept the not-normal, Mouse very much doubted he was ready to hear that she was seven hundred years old.
“Favorite Beatles song?” he asked.
“Um . . .”
“Please tell me you know who the Beatles are,” he pleaded.
“Sure, I know them.” She rattled off song titles in their exact album order by release date.
“Okay, okay—so you’re a Beatles fan. But no favorite song?”
Mouse used music like numbers or texts for keeping her head full of white noise, and that left little room for actually enjoying it. She might know all the facts but she didn’t have a favorite song because she’d listened without ever really hearing. “What’s your favorite?” she asked instead.
“Oh, man. It has to be ‘Let It Be,’ right?”
“Yeah. I love that one, too,” she said as she played it in her perfect memory, letting the simple piano chords and the words seep into her, savoring them for the first time. And she heard Father Lucas, as if he were sitting beside her, leaning close to whisper in her ear: “There is always hope in the darkness.” Smiling, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes against the tears as she let the song play out in her mind.
Mouse didn’t see how carefully Angelo studied her as occasional flickers of light illuminated the cabin. “Did you make that little angel in your bag?” he asked softly.
“No.” Her answer was sharp and final. She scooted back on the seat, away from him so they were no longer touching.
“Then who—?”
Her head snapped up. “Nobody.”
Angelo shook his head, frustrated as he watched her start to shut down. “I guess old habits die hard.”
Mouse started to laugh.
“I don’t think it’s funny. You’re never going to really trust me, are you, Mouse?”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” She sighed. “I’ve spent my life alone. I know you think you have, too, and you have. Without family, at least, and not many friends. But I mean really alone. No friends at all. I’ve spent months when the only living thing I talked to was my cat.”
“But you said a man you loved died at this place we’re going,” he said accusingly.
“I did love him, but he didn’t really know me. He knew me as a girl before I knew . . . who I was. And I’m not sure he ever really loved me.” Mouse was beginning to see her relationship with Ottakar differently—maybe because of Angelo, maybe because as she sought to give him truths, she was discovering some for herself. “He traded me for his ambition. Would someone do that if they loved you?” She asked the question as she considered it for the first time.
<
br /> He was quiet a moment before he answered. “No.”
“Angelo, I could tell you what happened at Marchfeld,” Mouse said. “But it would change everything.”
“I’ve already told you I don’t see the world in the same way as everyone else. My understanding of how things work was changed long before I met you.” He sounded belligerent.
She couldn’t tell Angelo about the angel in her bag, so she gave him what she could: another piece of herself.
“Strawberries,” Mouse said. “When I was little, I loved strawberries with really cold, fresh cream.” She let herself drift into the memory, her mouth full of sweetness.
But Angelo stayed silent.
Mouse never knew if he slept on the train; she hadn’t. She guessed by the dark circles under his eyes that he hadn’t either. The only words they’d exchanged since the conversation last night came as they walked away from the rental-car counter.
“So you speak fluent German?” Angelo asked. The words felt like another accusation of yet one more thing he didn’t know about her. Mouse ignored him.
Half an hour out of Vienna, Angelo finally broke the silence again though he still sounded tense. “I suppose you know where we’re going?”
“It’s not much farther. Maybe fifteen minutes?”
As they crested the small hill, she saw the field covered in purple lupin. A jagged piece of rock jutted from the ground, engraved with a knight and horse rearing, banner flying—a monument for the thousands who had died here. A marker for the men Mouse had killed.
They pulled over and parked. She leaned heavily against the car door and looked out over the site for the first time since the bloody battle. She’d always imagined this place as the epicenter of what her life had become. There was before Marchfeld. And after. Mouse hadn’t anticipated how tough it would be to walk the fault line again, but now that she was here, she couldn’t make herself take the first step.
The Devil's Bible Page 18
