The Book of Blood and Shadow (51 page)

We reached a crumbling turret, its uneven parapet like a mouthful of broken teeth. A sparse graveyard spread across the church grounds, several stories beneath us. Dawn was breaking over brown countryside that stretched to the horizon. Small towns crawled up rolling hills, and in the distance, Gothic spires poked through the fog. “Down,” Max said, and, in case I didn’t get it, shoved me to the ground, kicking the wooden door shut behind us. It was a tight space, room for little more than him, me, the
Lumen Dei
, and the gun. The latter of which I could have lunged for and, with luck, capitalized on the element of surprise to turn it on him and pull the trigger without hesitation or ricochet. But
the flip side of that bright idea was a bullet in my head, or a long, fast trip down.

I couldn’t shoot him.

“I gave up everything for this. I did everything they told me to do. I found the
vyvolená
! Don’t I deserve this?”

“Max, listen to me. There is no ‘this.’ You saw what happened down there. The
Lumen Dei
is a joke. Or a weapon. Whatever. It’s not what you think it is.”

He raised the gun to my temple. “Tell me I’m worthy,” he said.

Why couldn’t I just let him die?

“He didn’t use enough,” Max said. “That was his mistake.”

“Enough what?”

In response, Max yanked me toward the
Lumen Dei
and, producing a knife out of nowhere, slashed my wrist, a single, deep cut running lengthwise up my forearm. Somewhere far away, there was pain. But I was transfixed by the blood seeping from the wound, a river of it, pouring out of me and into the machine.

The door thudded and shook with the force of pummeled fists.

Behind it, Eli shouted my name.

Adriane screamed.

The door held.

The blood flowed.

“You’re killing us both,” I told him. “For a fantasy.”

The spots were back in front of my eyes, though this time they were more like stars, bright pinpricks dancing across Max’s face.

“Tell me I’m worthy,” he said again.

“What the hell do you care? It was a lie, Max. It’s all a lie.” Except it couldn’t
all
be a lie, because the man had melted, right in front of me, burned from within by some kind of unholy fire. Because I had withheld my blessing? The machine was no joke. The idea that I could control it, that I had any power at all—that
was the joke. I had no power over Max. “Please, Max. This isn’t you.”

“You don’t know me. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

“No one is that good a liar,” I said. “You don’t have to do what they say anymore. You can choose for yourself.”

“Nora.” He brushed his knuckles against my cheek, so gentle, so familiar, and despite everything, against my will, my body relaxed to his touch, for one brief second fooled all over again. Elizabeth would forgive him, I thought. She believed in God, in love, in penance and redemption. But he wasn’t seeking redemption. “I have chosen. I chose a long time ago. You say you know me. So then you know—I’m worthy. Tell me.”

“If I do, will you let me go?”

He cupped my chin and tipped my face toward his. “I need your blood. All of it, if that’s what it takes. God will love you for your sacrifice. I will love you.”

I spit in his face.

His knuckles reared back and his next touch was far from gentle. My head slammed hard against the stone ledge. “Tell me,” he roared.

Sirens in the distance. The battered door shaking on its hinges. Adriane, still screaming, screaming. Blood, pumped by a heart that betrayed me with every beat, spurting from the wound. And Max, who I’d mourned twice, who I’d given too much, Max, the cockroach, who still lived when Chris was dead, asking me for the one thing he truly deserved.

I could feel the blood leaking out of me, bones and muscles desiccating in its wake, my head heavy on my shoulders, my free arm weak, the arm he held pulsing with draining life and at the same time dead, a pale, fleshy stick that might as well have belonged to someone else. I had waited too long to grab for the gun. But I didn’t need it.

I was not the
vyvolená
. I was not Elizabeth. Some things I could not forgive.

“You’re worthy,” I told Max as Eli threw himself through the door and Adriane tumbled after him.

“I love you,” Max said, to someone.

He pulled the lever.

27

He was right about the blood.

More blood, more power.

As the
Lumen Dei
whirred into action, the light gushed into him, and he released a small sigh. I might have imagined the words he breathed out, the whispered thank-you, before the flames burst from his body and the world caught fire.

Heat seared my throat as I sucked in lungfuls of black smoke. Tears streamed from my burning eyes. Adriane’s hair was a conflagration of dancing orange flames. The smoke carried a cloyingly sweet, rotting stench that could only be burning flesh. Eli shouted my name, and then his arms were around me and I reached for Adriane, who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max, that somehow still breathed and stood and howled though he was nothing now but flame, a golem of fire that lived only because he’d forgotten how to die.

Blood still flowed from my wrist, but there was enough strength left in me for Adriane, and I broke the human chain, pulled her away from him, as Eli tore off his shirt and smothered the flames swirling around her head.

“Run,” he said, and this time she obeyed, flying through the doorway and down the ladder. I was halfway down when my legs gave way.

Eli caught me.

“That’s two you owe me,” he said as we reached the upper chapel. Coughs racked his body. Smoke billowed from the turret. He wrapped his singed shirt around my wrist, tight, and we both watched a stain of blood bloom across the white cotton. “We have to get out of here.”

“I’m just waiting for you,” I said, or tried to say, then sank to the floor.

He carried me down the stairwell, my legs hanging over his arm, my head lolling on his chest, and as we raced the flames past pyres of bones and fallen soldiers of God,
Hledači
and
Fidei
blood smeared together across the floor, he whispered to me, a litany of comfort, but it wasn’t his voice I heard. It was Max’s. It was his hoarse, whispered screams as he burned from within. It was his final goodbye. It was gratitude; it was accusation.

It was soundless, when it happened, when we emerged from the church and were rushed by cops and paramedics, and, as Eli reluctantly handed me off to them, as hands laid me flat on a stretcher, strapped me down, the end returning to the beginning, I could only look up at the tower that had become a column of fire, at the Max-shaped flames that launched themselves over the stone ledge and tumbled down and down, fire streaming behind him like the tail of a comet. There was no final scream. Just the blazing fall, and the spreading flames.

28

When we returned to the church two days later, the cops insisted on escorting us. I was surprised they’d let us go at all, but then, they had been remarkably accommodating from the start, agreeing to wait before alerting the international authorities until they’d put us on a plane back to the States. The cops wouldn’t
trouble us much there, either, Eli claimed, and I was experimenting with trusting him, at least a little. The
Fidei Defensor
had a long reach, and they owed us one.

With the
Lumen Dei
destroyed once and for all, I posed no further threat to the
Fidei Defensor
, or the soul of the world, and Eli had convinced them that both Adriane and I knew better than to think anyone would believe our story. The cops would get a different story, neatly packaged with a perfect fall guy. The
Hledači
—who, along with most of the
Fidei
, had escaped as soon as the cops had shown up, none of them ever expecting that one of their own would resort to secular authorities—were broken and purposeless, and presumably I was the least of their concerns. It was over. We would go back to the States, back to our families and our lives, and we would …

Well, that was a problem the
Fidei
couldn’t solve.

I needed to see it one last time. The crumbling remains of the church, its plague bones laid bare to the elements, its graveyard heaped with ashes. It was the bones that had saved us. The bones, and Elizabeth. She’d written of the
Hledači
—or whatever came before it—taking her to a church that smelled of decaying skulls, a church by the Vrchlice River. Somehow, bleary and concussed and nearly trampled by a crowd in patriotic frenzy, Eli had put the pieces together and persuaded the
Fidei Defensor
to join him at Sedlec Ossuary, outside the town of Kutná Hora, by the banks of the Vrchlice River—Sedlec Ossuary, repository of the bones of seventy thousand plague victims, six hundred years old, and now a heap of rubble. It had only been a guess, he said. We had been lucky.

It didn’t feel that way.

“How did you know what would happen?” Adriane asked softly. Other than the yes and no answers she’d given to the police,
it was the first thing she’d said since the fire. Mostly, she cried. I didn’t try to comfort her; I didn’t want to know if she was crying for Max.

“I didn’t.” The three of us stood before the police tape, safe distance between us. Our police escort waited in the car. “Elizabeth said the
Lumen Dei
had the power to end the world. I think she meant her world. I think she meant Thomas.”

Tears welled again, but she managed the ghost of a smile. “Dead-girl letters save the day.” She cradled her bandaged hand, then played her fingers idly across her shorn scalp. It was disconcerting to see Adriane without her perfect hair. It would grow back, but she wouldn’t be the same. “I thought I loved him,” she said, staring rigidly at the remains of the church, away from me. “He wasn’t like anyone I’ve ever met. And he treated me like …” Whatever it was, she swallowed it.

“Just tell me when. Before Chris died, or …”

“Before. Does that make it better? Or worse?”

I didn’t owe her an answer; I didn’t have one.

“Why?” I said, because it was all I could.

“Chris was yours. He was always yours. I thought …”

“You thought what?”

“I thought that made it okay. That Max was mine. I thought in the end I was doing us all a favor.”

“Chris loved you,” I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain.

She wouldn’t look at me. “No, he didn’t. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you. Then where would I have been?”

“Not here.”

“I wanted to tell you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Max said we should wait.”

“Max said a lot of things.”

“Honestly? I didn’t think you’d be surprised,” she said. “I know what you think of me.”

“I thought you were my friend,” I said.

“No, you didn’t.”

Adriane noticed everything, I reminded myself, even when she was pretending not to. I’d thought she was spoiled and selfish and an excellent liar; she’d lived down to my expectations.

She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “He promised me he could save us. I believed him.”

She wasn’t the only one, I could have reminded her. I could have held her, and given her permission to cry.

I couldn’t touch her.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” she added. “I wish I’d killed him myself.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t.”

She turned away. Her shoulders shook.

“We should go,” Eli said. “It’s a couple hours back to the city. We don’t want to miss the plane.”

“You don’t have to come with us,” I told him. “You said the
Fidei
would take care of the cops.”

“It’s not like I have somewhere else to be.”

My parents would be waiting for me at the airport. Like a firing squad, maybe, stiff and cold and—I could only imagine, had imagined too vividly—accusing me of breaking them, when they had been held together with little but Scotch tape and scotch on the rocks for so long. Or they would be warm, as warm as they allowed themselves to be, and I would let myself believe I’d underestimated them, that they were back and wouldn’t disappear again, but then there would be awkward hugs and hovering and that glassy look in my mother’s eyes, and the stench of
desperation hovering around my father as he yearned to go back into hiding. They would fade away—and I would be left alone to face the people at school, and the reporters, and Adriane, and all the places where Max had taken my hand or breathed in my ear or told me he loved me, and the emptiness that used to be Chris.

But at least my parents would be waiting.

“I never really thanked you,” I said.

“I’m waiting.”

He smiled.

“Right. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Are you sorry?” I asked.

“About saving your life? Twice?”

“About”—I swept my hand across the wreckage—“this. All of it.”

“I wonder about it,” he said. “The
Lumen Dei
. What it could really do.”

“I told you what it could do. You should be glad you didn’t see it.”

“But maybe you were right. Maybe they weren’t worthy. And if—”

“No,” I said. “No. It’s gone. It’s over.”

“Someone will try to rebuild it,” he said, and there was something in his voice, some hint of curiosity, that made me afraid.
Kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo starý
. “Knowing God, touching the ultimate … that’s not easy to walk away from.”

“That’s not your problem anymore,” I said, and willed it to be true, for both of us. “You’re free. To live a normal life, remember? Kickboxing. Laundry. Whatever.”

“It was never about being normal,” he said. “Not really. I just wanted it to be my life. I wanted to choose.”

“And you did.”

“I did,” he said.

Then he took my hand. His fingers were callused; his palm was warm. He squeezed, once, a question. I tightened my grip, only for a second, only slightly, but enough for an answer. A yes.