The Book of Blood and Shadow (11 page)

Beside me, Max was paging through his dictionary, eyes slit in concentration, shaggy hair wild. I poked his arm, lightly enough to convince me that he was solid and still there.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I was tired of this game, comparing myself to a dead girl. I didn’t want to think about the meaning behind the words anymore, what it felt like, what was left behind. “Just, hi.”

“Hi.” Max brushed a strand of hair out of my face and let his hand linger at my temple, just above the skin. His smile was equal parts irritated and bemused. “Can I go back to work now?”

“Go.”

I watched him work. Then shuffled my papers, flipped through my notebook, pantomimed productivity, watched him some more.

Elizabeth was silent for weeks. When she did write again, it was only to ask after her brother’s health or his studies, everything about his life, nothing about hers. Nothing about Thomas, or about the “machine” and what she was planning to do with it. Nothing until the letter I’d already read, the one that led to the hidden pages in Petrarch. After that, over the course of more than a year, there were only a few scraps of correspondence, colorless descriptions of legal matters and a perfunctory report of what would come next.

Johannes Leo has promised patience and agreed that the wedding will be at least two years hence. It defies my imagination that there can be happiness left in the world, and yet Johannes Leo’s face fills with light in my presence. I know our Mother will derive great joy from the security of our union. Perhaps you will as well. As for me, I have learned to tolerate the scent of lilacs, as I will learn to tolerate the touch of his hand. I have discovered what fills the vacuum left by love. It is called necessity, and it will not be denied
.

This time, when I nudged Max, he didn’t look up.

23

I saved the final letter until I was alone. It had been a long time since I’d come to the church by myself at night. Max didn’t like me going without him. He didn’t have to say why. We never talked about the night of the bloody broken window, but neither of us had forgotten it. The protectiveness was sweet, if worth more in theory than in practice; he couldn’t take even a fake punch without wincing.

Fortunately, I could take care of myself.

The lamplight sheathed the office in a soft orange glow, and a steady hiss of heat issued from the clanking pipes. Though frost crusted the windows, the office was warm. I’d told myself that I just wanted to say goodbye to her on my own, a silly sentimental gesture toward the girl who, in a way, had brought Max and me together. But the truth was, I’d seen Elizabeth’s bio. I knew where her story ended.

E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother
, it began, as they all had.

You once said you would grant me anything, and now I ask that you grant your forgiveness for my long silence. In turn
,
I grant you my forgiveness, for yours. The answers you crave await you in Prague, as does the
Lumen Dei
itself. It is your birthright, and I wish it to poison my life no longer
.

This is a lie. I wish it a part of me forever. But I must be done with it, if I am to survive. Johannes talks of children, although, dry and empty, I have no more to give. But I cannot deprive him, even if he allowed me to do so. And if there are to be children, I must let this die before they can live
.

Three by three is where you’ll find me
.

I double-checked my translation of the last line, but I hadn’t made a mistake—it just made no sense. Neither did the strange stanzas of poetry that followed. Elizabeth had sent her brother examples of her work before, but her poems were rigorous in rhyme and meter, and coherent in content, evoking the poetry of classical Rome, not open-mike night at the local coffeehouse slam. This was different.

Winters know the shadows in that word
.

Unless the dark law too should seek the thief

And the good law obtain your city

For those outside the word
.

Throughout our epoch, He that is below

Ignorantly deserves an abject prayer

O my guardian spirit

O when the unmixed nectar of the faithless lives with you
.

My law is a tepid standard

Thus I surrendered the hound to the dark

Revive your soul at my house

The sun will foretell all things in this way
.

Remember the lessons our Father taught us beneath the linden tree, and you will know where to begin
.

Then the words broke off, leaving several inches of empty space. When she began again, it was in a darker ink, with a shakier hand.

My dearest brother. My most loving brother. My brother. I was set to post my letter when yours arrived. Your letter, unfinished, with the postscript appended by your schoolmaster
.

I see now that I lied before, as I cannot forgive your silence, not when I know its cause
.

I write as if you can still hear me, because writing to you has become my sustenance, and my hand continues along the page though my soul knows there is no use. You are the only one who penetrated beyond my words and saw what was real. Having lost you, I wonder, have I lost what little is left of myself?

Your health, always so fragile, nonetheless seemed as if it would hold forever, because it must. We have been connected all our lives, and now, that connection severed, I float free. I should float away, and yet I am sinking
.

You loved Prague this time of year, the ice on the Vltava, children stumbling and dancing through the snow, as we once did. You promised you would return and we would walk the Stone Bridge together. You have never before broken your promise
.

You are with the Lord now, and He will give you your reward, our Mother says. That faith protects her. But I have no reserves of faith to see me through, and no confidence that God will reward you better in death than He has in life
.

I think often of our first journey together, when, barely old enough to understand, we were torn from our native land and
carried to Bohemia, our new father terrifying with his dark cloak and forbidding black eyes. You would not remember, as I will not forget, the night we set camp outside Erfurt, and there by the fire, you spilled your blood and mine, and swore an oath to protect me always. Blood hot and sticky between our palms, you swore you would never leave me
.

I can forgive you almost anything, my brother. But I cannot forgive this
.

23 December 1600 Prague
.

After what happened to Andy, there’d been a therapist. At the third appointment, after I’d spent an hour on her patchwork-quilted couch, box of tissues in my lap, refusing or unable to speak, she’d given me a homework assignment: Write a letter to my dead brother. She wanted me to tell Andy I loved him, or hated him, or that I blamed him for dying, or, for all I know, that I’d borrowed his Patriots sweatshirt without telling him and accidentally left it on the bus. I didn’t write the letter; I didn’t go back.

But sometimes, I talked to him. Lying in bed in the dark, on his birthday or the anniversary of his death, or sometimes just a day like any other, while our mother, now just my mother, slept at her office and my father slept in his and I moved through the house like a ghost. I talked to him, one ghost to another, and it made me feel … not better, exactly. It made me feel whole. But not because I thought he could actually hear me. I never fooled myself into believing that. There was no Andy anymore.

Gone is gone.

Those conversations in the dark were a secret. And if I’d written the letter, that would have been secret, too. Not meant for my therapist, nor for my parents—not even for him. It would have been for me. As this letter was for Elizabeth.

Death meant the end of privacy. I knew that. Had understood when my parents tore apart Andy’s room, scavenging through drawers and closets he’d locked away from them, reading emails, picking and choosing the pieces of him they wanted to claim, throwing out the rest. They left him with nothing, and maybe he deserved it, because he was nothing, too. But that didn’t make it right. And it didn’t make Elizabeth’s letter public property, no matter how many centuries had passed. I remembered what the Hoff had said about publication, and how Elizabeth’s letters were part of a precious historical legacy, an invaluable public record.

You are the only one who penetrated beyond my words and saw what was real
.

Maybe those were good reasons to do what I did next, but I came up with them after the fact. When it happened, I didn’t rationalize, I didn’t justify, and I didn’t worry about how much this precious historical legacy was worth or what would happen if anyone realized it was gone.

I just folded it up and slipped it into my notebook. Then I zipped the notebook into my backpack, turned out the lights, and went home.

24

I am a thief
.

The drumbeat thudded in my head all night long, and the next day and the one after that. I didn’t know how much the letter was worth, but it was four hundred years old, so presumably … a lot. If anyone found out I’d taken it, how would I explain myself? What college would let me in with grand larceny on my permanent record? Forget college: Chapman Prep would kick me out, and I’d end up back at the public high school, dodging stink
bombs, skirting blood spatter, enjoying the periodic schoolwide drug tests (and concomitant black market for untainted “samples”).

But I didn’t regret taking it.

And I didn’t want to give it back.

I stayed away from the church, from the Hoff, and most of all, from Max, because I was sure he’d take one look and see exactly what I’d done.

He wouldn’t understand.

Three days had passed when the phone rang Saturday morning. I almost screened it, like I’d screened his other calls, offering in response only a feeble text that I was getting the flu and had lost my voice. But I couldn’t avoid him forever, so I picked up the phone, remembering to cough.

“Where are you?” He sounded frantic.

“Home.” I coughed again. “I’m not—”

“You have to get down to the office,” he said. There was a high, quavering note in his voice that I’d never heard before.

“What’s wrong?”

“I found—I saw—I don’t know—” He was hyperventilating.

“Max!”

“Just come,” he said. “Please. They’re making me hang up, I have to go.… I was the one who found him.”

Dial tone.

25

Flashing lights.

I spotted them from a block away, lighting the stone church with a rhythmic
red, red, red
. I pedaled faster, dumped my bike in the grass—and that’s when I saw the stretcher.

There were cops. There were EMTs. There was the obligatory crowd of gawking students, though only the handful who
weren’t still in bed sleeping off a hangover. And there was Max, one arm around Adriane’s shoulder, the other gesticulating wildly as he explained something to a cop. Max and Adriane, but no Chris.

I could get back on the bike and ride away, I thought. Escape before it—whatever it was—became real.

Instead: “What happened?”

Max dropped his arm and Adriane flinched away from him. They were both pale.

“Someone broke in,” Max said. He took my hand, squeezed it. “I came in this morning and found him on the floor.…”

The stretcher had disappeared into the ambulance. Sirens blaring, it tore down the street. Sirens were good, I thought. Corpses were never in a hurry.

“Found who?”

Max opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“The Hoff,” Adriane said.

After, I hated myself for it, but in that first moment, all I felt was relief.

Adriane shuddered. “He was just … lying there. We thought he was dead, but then he was, like,
twitching
.”

The cop cleared his throat. With his thick glasses and the deep worry lines engraved in his forehead, he looked a little like my father, except for the shock of red hair threaded with gray. “You were explaining to me what you were doing here, Mr. Lewis?”

“I’m Professor Hoffpauer’s research assistant,” Max said. He nodded to me. “We both are.”

The cop turned to Adriane. “And you …?”

“I was looking for my boyfriend,” she said.

My chest tightened again. “You don’t know where he is?”

“He’s in our room, asleep,” Max said, a note of suspicion
entering his voice. “Why would you come looking for him
here
? You don’t belong here.”

“Excuse me,” Adriane snapped. “He wasn’t answering his phone, and I needed to talk to him.”

Max glared at her. “About what?”

“It’s private.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. He stiffened, but didn’t shrug me off. “It doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “As long as he’s safe.” As long as we all were. “Is the Hoff—Professor Hoffpauer—going to be okay?”

The cop’s frown deepened. “Looks like he had a stroke. That can go either way.”

“So he wasn’t … attacked?”

“Do you have some reason for thinking he would be?”