The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  She lowered her bag, squatting as she unzipped it. Carefully holding the bloody clothes against the side of the bag, she pulled out the leather sack of salts, her wallet, passport, and—after a moment of doubt—the christening angel. Dark streaks that looked like slash marks in the dim light cut across the angel’s body and face.

  Angelo closed his hand around the figure.

  Tears stung Mouse’s eyes. “I told you I wasn’t what you thought I was.” She pulled the broken, stained statue from him and shoved it to the bottom of the bag on his shoulder.

  Angelo dropped his head against her hair, talking softly. “You saved me, Mouse. That’s what you are to me.”

  Mouse couldn’t speak. She wiped her hand across her eyes and pushed the canvas bag into the trash can.

  Angelo put his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go to Stockholm.”

  The attendant at the CSA counter handed Mouse’s credit card back after a second scan. “I am sorry. Your card is declined. I can try again if you like.”

  Mouse had been using the card in Italy and Prague with no problems. Confused, she looked to see if the magnetic strip was smeared with blood or damaged somehow.

  “Try mine.” Angelo pulled out his wallet.

  They watched as the attendant slid Angelo’s card through the scanner again and again. “I’m sorry, sir. It is not accepting your card either.”

  Mouse’s chest tightened with growing anxiety and a sudden awareness.

  “Come on.” She pulled on Angelo’s sleeve as he reached out for his card. They wove through the sparse string of travelers to a tiny restaurant. Sweet Home, it promised. It was nearly empty.

  They moved to the outside terrace and sat at a table where Mouse could watch the door.

  “May I see your phone?” She held out her hand.

  She turned it on. There were over a hundred texts. Most were straightforward. Others used clever quotes and allusions. Some were veiled threats. All of them said the same thing: CALL ME NOW OR COME HOME. Apparently Jonah’s three days were up. Bishop Sebastian and his Novus Rishi were in full pursuit.

  “Have you answered him?” she asked as she handed back the phone.

  “No,” Angelo said defensively.

  Mouse started loosening the bloody tissues wrapped around his hand. She pulled a tiny first-aid kit from an outside pocket of his bag. “I’m not accusing you, Angelo. It just explains the credit cards. And it means we have to worry about your bishop as well as my father.”

  Angelo winced as she began cleaning his wound. It wasn’t deep but it was still oozing blood. “I don’t think Bishop Sebastian would . . .”

  Mouse shrugged. “He’s already told us his group—this Novus Rishi—has power and influence. What better way to make you call him than to strand us here? He takes away our means of keeping on the move. Maybe he thinks we’ll have to ask for his help.”

  Angelo pushed down on the bandages Mouse had stuck across the gash in his hand. “What do we do?”

  “You could stay here, and I could—”

  “No. And don’t start, Mouse. I’m going with you to Stockholm.”

  She sighed and watched the airplanes lining up on the tarmac like winged ants.

  “Hand me my wallet.”

  She unsnapped it and lifted the edge to her mouth, chewing at the threads along the seam until there was a hole big enough for her to put her finger in. She yanked the leather away from the lining, held it upside down, and shook. A passport, driver’s license, and credit cards fell to the table.

  She bit at her lip as Angelo flipped open the passport, revealing a version of herself with short, blond hair and the name Emmie Bohdan. Mouse was waiting for the questions or the judgment.

  “Now those are some ears, Emmie,” he said.

  Mouse grabbed the passport and whacked him on the shoulder, both of them laughing.

  They went to the Air France counter this time and had their tickets to Stockholm within minutes, just under an hour before their flight. Mouse didn’t want to be an easy target sitting at a gate, so she kept them moving in erratic patterns along the concourse, constantly doubling back to scan the crowds for unwanted tagalongs, whether the Bishop’s or her father’s.

  As she was about to have them wind back to their departure gate, Angelo pulled them into a toy shop. The small space was crammed with stuffed animals and trains, and dozens of marionettes hanging from the ceiling. Mouse and Angelo moved through them and emerged from the curtain of dangling feet into a wonderland. A tiny Bohemian village was laid out—a church with a cemetery, shops, houses nestled against each other with the dips and rises of roofs, even a water mill—all intricately carved out of linden wood. But Mouse was drawn to the farmhouse, which sat a little apart from the rest. In the kitchen, the dollhouse family gathered around the table. The details were breathtaking, the wood floor even had tiny knots etched in, but it was the simplicity of the people that captured Mouse. Each had smooth round heads and featureless faces, only their size and clothes gave them identity as mother or father or child. Otherwise, they could be anyone. They could be Mouse.

  When she looked up, Angelo was gone. Mouse scanned the store looking for him. He wasn’t there. She darted through the marionettes, sending them clacking like branches breaking against each other in a storm.

  Mouse stepped out into the flow of people moving along the transit corridor, pushing her way through, hoping to catch a glimpse of Angelo and straining her ears to weed through mumbled conversations for any sound of him. What she saw instead were dozens of men stationed at each gate and shop like sentries. They were dressed like private taxi-service drivers, but they kept looking down at pieces of paper and then squinting as they surveyed the faces of passing travelers.

  Mouse opened her senses, feeling for any taint on them, but these puppets seemed to belong to Angelo’s Father, not hers. As the one nearest her looked up, she spun around and headed in the other direction. He followed, and she saw another start moving toward her from the far side of the corridor.

  Mouse had started to run when she saw Angelo down a side hall off the main corridor. He was against the wall, someone in a suit standing in front of him, too close. Mouse cut across the corridor, but just as she reached them, the man handed something to Angelo and walked away.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, grabbing Angelo’s arm.

  Angelo nodded as he watched the man turn the corner toward the main terminal. The men who’d been following Mouse trailed behind him. “It’s okay. He just wanted to talk.”

  “Who was that?” she asked as she took his hand and headed toward their departure gate.

  “A friend of the Bishop’s.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was bringing the mountain to Mohammed and told me that the Bishop only wanted to know that I was well and to be sure I knew I could come home again. It was all very polite. And he gave me this.” Angelo held up an envelope.

  “What is it?”

  Angelo unfastened the clasp. He pulled out a credit card and a cell phone. “It’s in my name,” he said as he handed Mouse the card, and then the phone buzzed with a text: IN CASE YOU LOST YOUR OTHER ONE, PRODIGAL.

  Angelo slid the phone and credit card back into the envelope. Mouse took it and tossed it in the trash can near their gate as they boarded.

  “Your bishop likes short strings,” Mouse said as she dropped into her seat on the plane.

  “Sometimes strings can be lifelines, Mouse.”

  “Not in my experience.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

  “I got you something.” Angelo reached up and turned on the overhead light. “Open your hand.”

  “What’s this?” She looked down at a bundle of tissue paper.

  “It was in the house with the family.”

  As she unrolled it, a small wooden figure dropped into her palm. It had a leather tail and ears, but the rest of it was carved simply in linden wood like the farm folk had been.

>   It was a mouse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  By the time their plane landed in Stockholm two hours later, Mouse and Angelo had come up with a plan for gaining access to the Devil’s Bible, which was carefully guarded in the National Library of Sweden. Thanks to her stints as a graduate student and professor, Mouse was familiar with the stringent protocol for accessing Special Collections in a research library. Typically, a visit would take weeks to schedule, but they didn’t have that kind of time. They would have to bluff their way in. Mouse certainly knew how to lie about who she was. A little fake paperwork, some new clothes so they looked the part, and a lot of luck might open the doors they needed to walk through to get to the Devil’s Bible. It would take a day to prepare.

  The moment they checked into their hotel room, Angelo sank onto the bed.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Mouse said as she leaned over him, pulling on his shoulders trying to get him up again. “We need to rehearse who’s doing what tomorrow.”

  He wrapped his arm around her waist and flipped her onto her back beside him on the bed. “It’s today already, which means we have at most three hours to sleep.” He let the last word drawl out slowly and closed his eyes. Mouse started to get up. He rolled toward her, his body half on hers, and put his arm across her. “You sleep, too.”

  Mouse tried to reach the lamp to turn it off, but she couldn’t move under Angelo’s weight. He was already asleep. She closed her eyes, too, and tried to lose herself in the silent rhythm of his breathing, but it kept tickling the hair just behind her ear, making her think about things besides sleeping. With a sigh, she opened her eyes; Mouse had her own decisions to make about what would happen at the library. The shadows cast by the lamplight seemed to be moving, shaping themselves into hooded bishops and crouching Molochs that oozed into the blackness.

  She still held the little wooden mouse in her hand and rubbed it gently with her thumb, like it was a worry stone with the magic power to carry away all her troubles.

  After showers, a quick breakfast, and a stop at the hotel ATM, they went their separate ways. Mouse went to buy clothes; Angelo went to buy cameras. They would meet again that afternoon. Mouse never asked God for anything, but that day, her mind trickled with the words of a thousand memorized prayers to keep Angelo safe.

  Her part of the mission was to outfit them like people sanctioned from the Vatican. Angelo was to be an official sent on a task from the Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which meant he needed to look comfortably wealthy, like any good Roman citizen—expensive suit, shirt and tie, all silk. Mouse would play his assistant and so opted for a more conservative, tailored suit in appropriately British black.

  Costumes in order, she headed for a ProCenter in Stureplan where she could edit and print the materials for Angelo’s fake portfolio. The forged letter from Bishop Sebastian made her the most nervous. She had tried to get Angelo to think of someone else they could use for the necessary reference, but Angelo had argued that they had the best chance of forging documents and a signature from someone he actually knew. Mouse didn’t want to think about what might happen if the library staff actually called to confirm Angelo’s credentials; she couldn’t afford to have this go wrong. If she had any hope of stopping her father and preventing this war Bishop Sebastian thought was coming, she needed the rest of the spell in the Devil’s Bible.

  Trying to shake a growing sense of foreboding, Mouse sank herself into the fun of culling through Angelo’s work. He had given her his password to access the pictures he stored on his laptop. She loved getting to play editor and to build a collection of photos she thought genuinely captured Angelo as an artist. The last file in the folder held the pictures from Monster Park.

  Mouse clicked rapidly through the string of images. She was stunned at what she saw. She hadn’t realized that Angelo had taken pictures of her. He’d said he wasn’t good with people, but he was wrong. Mouse knew she didn’t really look the way his pictures made her look—the last of the sunlight shining in her hair, her eyes less dark, the green in them sparkling and alive. What she saw had to be a trick of the light.

  “I love that one.”

  Mouse jumped at his voice, banging her shoulder into his chin. She had been studying a photo of herself reaching toward the stone face of Echidna, the mother of monsters, and she hadn’t heard the door open.

  “Ouch.” Angelo rubbed his jaw.

  “Sorry.”

  “Me, too.” He nodded at the computer screen. “I didn’t exactly ask permission, but look at you shine. You’re beautiful.”

  Even Mouse could see the light glowing around her in the picture.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “That’s not me. That’s you—it’s like you’re lit up from within. I could see it when I turned my lens on you. I couldn’t help but take the pictures.” Her stillness made him worry that he’d crossed a line. “Mouse?”

  What could she tell him? That what he called a shine looked just like the glow she saw in people but could never find in herself? That his picture captured her in a way she had never believed possible? That she was seeing herself for the first time?

  “Really, it’s fine.” She shut down the computer.

  “Well, come on then.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she lowered her new backpack onto the floorboard of the car Angelo had rented. She had told him it was impractical to lug the camera equipment onto mass transit, but Mouse had other reasons for needing the car.

  “I asked the guy in the camera shop for a nice place to eat. Last meal before prison, you know.” Angelo’s nervous playfulness was contagious.

  They spent hours over dinner, Angelo laughing as Mouse quietly told stories about the more ridiculous things she’d had to do or wear over the years. Finally, overfull on stuffed dumplings and too much wine, they headed upstairs to the restaurant’s club, their eyes and smiles a little too bright, both of them holding fast to the joy of the night as they worked to keep their fears about tomorrow at bay. After claiming a corner table, Angelo left to get them a couple of beers from the bar. Mouse was tapping her feet when he got back.

  His lips tickled her ear when he spoke. “You’re seeming more like a girl than an ancient these days. Dollhouses and dancing feet.”

  He smiled and pulled her out to the floor just as the music slowed. Mouse’s pulse quickened when she felt the muscles in his arm flex as he turned her in a slow circle. He bent his head toward her shoulder and his body pressed into hers.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him softly.

  “I thought I was dancing. What are you doing?” His mouth brushed the skin at her neck.

  “I think you’re a little drunk.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t get drunk.”

  He pulled back and looked into her eyes. She saw his desire and couldn’t stop from pushing herself up and closing her lips lightly over his. His hand clenched her shirt at the small of her back, but when she pulled away to look at him, trying to figure out where this was going, she saw the indecision in his face.

  Mouse pushed against him gently, giving him a little more space.

  “You’ve had too much to drink, Angelo. This doesn’t mean anything.”

  “This is my choice to make, not yours.”

  “Then what do you want?” She knew what she wanted him to say, but she wasn’t prepared for an answer.

  “Damn it, Mouse. I don’t know.”

  She paused, then pulled away. “Well, I do,” she said. “I want to leave.”

  Angelo led them out of the club. As they headed for the car, he reached for her hand, but Mouse wrapped her arms around herself against the chill.

  When they got back to the hotel, Mouse crawled into her side of the bed and pulled her body as close to the edge as possible. She willed herself not to move and forced herself to sleep. She was determined to make this as easy as possible for both of them.

  Angelo never said a word.<
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  They woke early, nervous about the uncertainty of the day. They took extra time dressing, as if the new clothes might work like camouflage, transforming them into the people they were pretending to be. Before they left the hotel, Mouse tucked a leather pouch into the inside pocket of Angelo’s jacket.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Protection if things go badly,” she said.

  “Like the fish spell?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  They tossed their bags into the rental car at the hotel parking garage and walked to the library. Angelo wheeled the large case of camera equipment behind him. As they neared the entrance, Mouse saw a man leaning against the corner of the building smoking a cigarette. He nodded, and the woman with him turned to watch as Mouse and Angelo wrestled the case up the stairs. The couple reeked of her father’s touch. Mouse had known he would have someone waiting for her. Even though Moloch had gotten the pages back, her father had no way of knowing whether or not Mouse had already found the spell in them. If she had, then her father knew her next move would be getting the rest of the spell out of the Devil’s Bible. This blank-faced couple was his insurance policy.

  Her neck prickled in anticipation as she saw them come through the library doors moments later. The two of them paused near the restrooms just down from the information desk where Mouse and Angelo had stopped and asked to speak to the research librarian in charge of Special Collections.

  Smiling and breathing in the soft mustiness of the library, Mouse suddenly realized she had another problem, something she hadn’t anticipated. She shuddered as she felt a powerful presence snake its way up her spine. She could only guess it came from the Devil’s Bible.