Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by hearing.
The last rites.
Eli leaned his head to mine. I bucked against him, struggling in his grip. If this was going to happen, it wouldn’t be while I lay helplessly on the ground and tolerated his pathetic apologies. He squeezed tighter. The priest chanted.
“Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per odorátum. Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per gustum.”
I was actually going to die.
“Get ready,” Eli whispered.
I would not lie still; I would not close my eyes.
Please. My mouth formed the word, but I didn’t speak it. I would not beg.
The sacrament drew to its inevitable end.
“Now,” Eli whispered.
I held my breath, and he let go.
And lunged at the priest.
And tackled him to the ground.
And a gunshot cracked.
And I was on my feet, and running, up the stairs, out the door, down the alley, away, unbloodied, alive, free.
And the shot echoed in my ears, and I wondered.
I didn’t look back.
17
I had to go back to the hostel.
I couldn’t go back to the hostel.
I had to warn Adriane.
I couldn’t lead them to Adriane.
I warred with myself—but all the while, I was running, and when I stopped, I found myself in front of the Golden Lion, because there was no other choice.
The room was empty.
I should have stayed with her, I thought. For a million reasons, I should have stayed.
I shouldn’t have acted like I was alone.
Because now I was.
18
“That other girl left this for you,” said the mulleted guy at the front desk, twisting his nose ring with one hand and holding out a torn slip of paper in the other. “She said I shouldn’t give it to anyone but you.”
She’d taken her chances with him after all.
She was safe.
They came looking for you. I hid. Meet you @ 9
the last place we were us. Ditch Eli. Stay safe. A
The last place we were us: It was in a different country, a different life. But I knew what she meant, and she knew I was the only one who would. The restaurant where we’d had our last dinner, where we’d had our last night with Max, and maybe she’d chosen it because it was convenient and easily alluded to and at the forefront of her mind, but maybe she needed to go back—to remember, one last time, being us, or to vanquish the ghosts—before we fled to the airport and never looked back. Maybe we both did.
But nine p.m. was hours away, and I couldn’t stay where they could find me. They could find me anywhere.
So I got lost.
19
The sky was bleached of color. Fog shrouded the city; spires bled into smoky sky. Cobblestones shimmered, slick with rain. I walked aimlessly, my shoes skidding on wet stone. Fat drops splattered on saints and clocks and hunched shoulders and crumpled wrappers and spits of meat. Still, from the tip of every tower, bright flashes, cameras like lightning bugs, tourists watching the rain fall and the city skitter.
Always, in Prague, someone watching.
My father had taught me about palimpsests, age-stained manuscripts that had been written over again and again, one layer of meaning peeking out from beneath another, and another beneath that. Nothing is ever erased, he had told me once, not long before Andy was. There are always traces; there are always signs.
That was Prague: a palimpsest. Dead eras like onion skins, one atop another, post-Communist on Communist on art nouveau on baroque on Renaissance on late medieval on early medieval and on back to the original settlement, the angry Bohemians and their warrior queen. Graffiti sprayed on Gothic churches, cubist facades on Renaissance palazzi, Lady Gaga tracks spurting from tiny speakers at the base of a baroque storefront housing a selection of nineteenth-century-style marionettes probably manufactured in China. It was a Picasso version of a city, all noses and elbows and foreheads jutting out at impossible angles, oil layered over newsprint layered over canvas, beautiful and terrifying at once.
It wasn’t just the buildings; it was the people. History moved too fast here, washing over the city like a high tide that receded, day after day, each wave leaving its own distinctive detritus behind: the Nazis, the Soviets, the West. Imagine going to sleep in one city and waking up in another, still in the same bed, still in the same house, but with new laws, new uniforms, a new day outside your window. The old men who hoisted their grandchildren on their shoulders, the stooped women who collected tickets, they had been children in a city that spied on itself, that hid from secret police, that lost its jobs for speaking up or poached its jobs for telling tales, that was interrogated, that was locked away, that hid in dark rooms scanning for illegal radio broadcasts, that danced in the street as tanks rolled past, that spoke Russian and hated the taste of it on their tongues, that expected every day to be like the next … until one day, it wasn’t. These men, these women, did they envy the generation of willful amnesiacs who had been born into capitalism and freedom and plenty and preferred to believe life had always been this way? It was easy to imagine, because it was what I would have wished for myself. The capacity to forget. To wash in, fresh and smooth, with every new tide, no yesterday, no tomorrow. You couldn’t erase the layers; you could only hope to ignore them.
I shoved my hands into my coat against the cold, and my fingers closed against a scrap of paper in the pocket, in Max’s pocket. Wait for me, it read, inexplicably, in Max’s hand. I dropped it in the gutter and watched his words dissolve in the rain.
Time passed, rain fell, I walked. There was nowhere to be but lost. Without meaning to, I found my way to the cemetery.
The cemetery was closed, safe from the twilight behind its stone walls, but there was some comfort in knowing it was there, the weathered gravestones and sighing trees a few feet from where I sat on wet ground, legs crossed, back pressed to stone, straining to hear a faint chant or melody or prayer leaking from the nearby evening worship but hearing only bells, distant churches chiming yet another hour. I listened and breathed and assured myself that I was still alive, and I sat there watching the sky darken, without knowing why. Maybe I was waiting for him.
And eventually that was where he found me.
20
“You wanted to know if I was sorry,” Eli said.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t run. Instead, I let him lower himself beside me. I didn’t want to look at him, but I spared a sideways glance. He’d wrapped a bandage around his left hand, and he winced as he shifted his weight onto his right leg. I didn’t see any bullet holes.
“I am sorry.”
“So you followed me. Again.”
He shook his head. “I figured you’d be here. You have a thing for cemeteries.”
It was the worst thing he could have said. Like he was inside my head, worming his way into the places I’d thought were secure.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s like the sixth or seventh place I looked. It was luck.”
I wondered what he’d read on my face, that he knew.
“Is this where you warn me not to scream?” I said.
“You’ve got nothing to fear from me.”
I forced a laugh.
“Did you miss the part where I saved your life?”
I ignored him. With the synagogue museums locked down for the night, Josefov had cleared out. The rain had tapered off, but a gloom hung over the empty street. It couldn’t have been more than five or six, but it felt like the dead of night.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to—” He stopped, and lowered his head to his hands. They were trembling. But when he raised his head again, his face betrayed not
hing. “Will you listen to me? No more secrets. I’ll answer anything. Just hear me out first.”
“The truth,” I said, the word a joke.
“The truth,” he said, like he meant it.
More likely more lies, I thought, and I’d had enough of those. But what if they weren’t?
“So talk.”
“It wasn’t all a lie,” he said. “Everything I told you about my family, the way I was raised, that’s true. My parents are Czech—but they’re also Fidei. Like their parents, and their parents before that. Et cetera. We’re born to the oath and the sword—that’s what they believe, and that’s what they taught me. Absolute faith, absolute obedience. The Church disavowed the Fidei centuries ago. It’s only survived by enforcing an insane level of discipline. You do what you’re told. You don’t ask questions. Like my parents didn’t ask questions when the Fidei sent them to America.”
“Just following orders,” I muttered.
“It’s not like that. The Fidei Defensor have pledged their lives to protecting the soul of the world. They truly believe the Lumen Dei could destroy us all. Whether by bringing down the wrath of God for trespassing our human bounds—or by blowing us all up when people like the Hledači get their hands on the fuse. They’ll do anything to stop it.”
“Including shoot random American teenagers.”
He stiffened. “I told you I understood, about wanting a normal life. My parents were just pretending to be normal, to fit in. But I wanted it. You don’t know how much. College, a life, everything. And this year I finally talked them into it. I got out. Met people who didn’t have their destinies prescribed for them in the 1600s. People who’d been watching TV and getting drunk while I was memorizing the pressure points that would incapacitate enemies of the faith. I was going to do it. Tell my father I wanted out for good, that it was all crazy.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted out—to do what? Who would you be, if you weren’t Eli Kapek, demented warrior of the faith?”
He looked blank. “I …” He laughed sourly. “I have no idea. Pathetic, isn’t it? I like Stephen King. I like kickboxing. I like doing my laundry. Not exactly a recipe for a full and happy life. There’s no dream deferred, Nora. There’s nothing but what my parents gave me, which was no choice. About anything. From day one. I was done. And I was finally going to tell them. That’s when we got the call.”
“About me?”
“About Chris. The Hledači watch Voynich scholars. We watch the Hledači. Your professor’s attack was a warning sign. The murder was confirmation. And because the only people who knew anything were a bunch of teenagers …”
“They sent you.”
“It was supposed to be an honor,” he said bitterly. “I was supposed to thank them for it. Screw that.”
“But you did what you were told.”
“Yeah. Like a good little soldier of the faith.”
“And you used Chris’s memory to get me to trust you. Which is disgusting.”
“I did lose a cousin I barely knew to the Hledači. That was true.”
“But it wasn’t Chris.”
“No. It wasn’t Chris.”
All the things I’d told him, the stories of us—and the things I’d told him about Andy, about me. Things I didn’t tell anyone. For a moment, I wanted him dead. Not out of anger, or revenge, but because it was the only way to erase what he knew. To turn secrets back into secrets.
“And Chris’s parents?”
“They’re safe, like I told you. They think we’re the FBI, and they’re hiding out from the Mob.”
“So you were there to find the Hledači or something? That’s why you have all those files on Max?”
“Sort of.”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“By the time I got there, Max was long gone. We knew that. They didn’t send me to Chapman for him.” He stopped.
“They sent you for me.”
“Yes.”
“Because of this vyvolená crap.”
“Because they knew the Hledači would be back for you, and that would draw them out.”
“So I was bait.” I waited for fury to overtake me, but either I couldn’t be bothered to make the effort or some part of me knew I didn’t have much right to feel surprised, much less betrayed, as if he had owed me anything, much less truth. I’d been very clear that he couldn’t be trusted, and eventually, clear that he wasn’t who he said he was. If I’d failed to reach the final conclusion, it wasn’t because he hadn’t left enough bread crumbs.
“I told them we should get you out of the country once we had Max. That it was enough.”
“Apparently you don’t carry much weight with the Fidei Defensor high command.”
“You didn’t want to leave,” he reminded me. “You wanted to win. So I tried—”
“The torn letter. That was you.”
He nodded.
“You stole the other half, to stop us from finding anything, and then—what? Changed your mind?”
“I went against the oath. And then … what I did today.”
I realized it wasn’t just his hands that were shaking. Faint tremors ran along his jawline, as if every muscle was straining to suppress some explosion from within. His skin, pale on the best of days, had turned a sickly paper white. His hands had receded into his cuffs, fingertips poking out like he was a kid who’d stolen his older brother’s sweatshirt, and his expression matched the crime, guilty and watchful. It was the face of a boy waiting to be punished.
“Father Hájek, he was, like, your boss or something?”
“You could say that.”
“And I’m guessing today isn’t going to get you employee of the month.”
His lips trembled more when he tried to smile. He didn’t volunteer any details about what condition he’d left the priest in.
He swallowed hard. “So that’s the story. Questions?”
“Why?” I asked. “Why help me?”
“What was I supposed to do, let him shoot you?”
“No, not today. I mean, yes, today. But when you changed your mind about hiding the last letter. And even before that. That first day in the church when you were arguing with Father Hájek. You were trying to help, weren’t you? Get them to lay off?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Maybe I don’t believe everything I’m supposed to believe,” he said. “Maybe I haven’t in a long time.”
“So do you believe I’m the vyvolená?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at first.”
I groaned. “Come on.”
“It was when you told me about your brother.”
“That’s why you weirded out,” I said.
“It’s a coincidence. Your brother; Elizabeth’s brother. But it’s more the connection between the two of you. I can feel it. I know you do.”
“I never said—”
“You didn’t have to. It’s the way you talk about her. The way you treat the letters. The way you won’t give up on her. How sure you were in the crypt.”
“I came here for Max,” I said. “I kept going for Chris. And to save myself. It’s got nothing to do with Elizabeth Weston, or some imaginary connection between the two of us.”
“You don’t feel any connection to her at all?”
I didn’t want to feel it; I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. So I forced myself to laugh, then held up my hand. “God is not guiding this. I think I’d know.”
“If you say so.” He stood up, brushing off the grime and, at the same time, any indication of vulnerability. “We have to get you out of here. Out of the country. Tonight. They’re not going to stop coming after you, and neither are the Hledači. And I am not going to let them hurt you.”
I got to my feet. “Adriane’s waiting for me. I have to make sure she’s safe.”
“Oh. Adriane.”
“What ‘oh’?
”
“We have to talk about that, too.”
“Careful, Eli.”
“She told you to meet her somewhere, didn’t she?”
“Because your crazy friends came after her. What else was she supposed to do?”
“I bet she told you not to bring me along.”
“She doesn’t trust you,” I said. “Shocking, I know.”
I couldn’t have this conversation, because this conversation meant feeling something, it meant thinking about Max and doubting Adriane, and it meant pain. More of it. I was too tired.
Adriane was waiting for me, and my only priority was finding her, making sure she was safe, and taking her home.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, and it’s nothing. Either way, I’m coming with you. And I’m staying with you until we get you out of here.”
I didn’t argue. As long as he was with me, I could be sure of what he was doing, if not why.
It had nothing to do with wanting his protection.
It had nothing to do with wanting him around.
“I have one more question,” I said as we walked.
“Ask.”
“What happens now? I mean, to you? After what you did?”
“What do you care?” he asked, in a low voice.
“You said anything I wanted to know. That’s what I want to know.”
The bridge loomed before us, a crush of people. I pulled Max’s coat tighter around myself, digging my fingers into the rough wool. A blast of cold wind gusted from the east.
“I broke my oath,” Eli said softly. “It’s not a sin they forgive. My parents were always very clear on that.”
“But they’re your family.”
He nodded, but not in agreement. It was more like he’d lost the will to hold his head up. “Yeah. They were.”
21
He had, after all, saved my life. So I humored him. Adriane was expecting to meet me at nine; we arrived at eight. The empty plaza that bordered the restaurant offered few places to hide, but Eli deemed a couple large Dumpsters tucked beneath a stone archway good enough, and so, feeling like an idiot, I crouched with him behind the brown plastic bins and waited. The perch afforded us a clear view of the plaza and the mouth of the alley leading down to the restaurant, and faint snatches of conversation floated toward us as the occasional diners made their way toward the scent of food. But at this hour, there weren’t many of them. And there was, unsurprisingly, no sign of Adriane, who had never been early in her life.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 35