by Tal Bauer
Which put his crotch directly at eye level with the young halberdier, sitting in a rickety folding chair now that it was clear. Cristoph pursed his lips, eyebrows arching and disappearing entirely beneath his beret’s rim.
“Sorry.” Alain slid sideways, escaping back to the safety of his desk. His face burned. An echo of Cristoph’s moan sounded in the back of his mind.
Adjusting his suit jacket, Alain dropped into his chair with a sigh. “Good morning,” he said, forcing cheer into his voice and a smile to his face. His cheeks strained, and he had the sudden image of himself looking like one of the patently fake toothpaste adverts. He dropped the smile. “How are you doing, Halberdier Hasse?”
Cristoph winced. “It’s Cristoph,” he said, looking away.
“It’s supposed to be ‘halberdier’, as that is your rank.” Alain watched Cristoph’s jaw clench again. “But you may call me Alain. How have your first two days gone?”
Cristoph shrugged.
“That’s it?” Alain crossed his arms on the desk. He frowned. “You do remember applying for this position, yes? You do remember you had to ask to be here?”
Cristoph’s gaze darted to Alain. His eyes were dark, roiling with thunderclouds, lightning ready to strike. “It’s not what I thought this would be.”
“It never is.” Alain gestured to his cramped, closet-sized office. “Do you imagine I expected this is where I would end up when I took my oath?”
Silence.
“I was in your shoes once. Trying to understand what I had just signed up for. Time passed… and now I am here.” Alain tried to smile. He failed. And now he was here, indeed. “Look, do you want to leave?”
He watched Cristoph, looking for any sign, any reaction. He’d closed down entirely. The man was like a statue and just as expressionless. The Mona Lisa showed more emotion. Alain caught the edge of a tongue, peeking out as he licked his lips. The edge of one lip, being bit. His eyes tracked the line of Cristoph’s teeth and the furrow left in his pink skin.
“What is after the Swiss Guard if you were to leave tomorrow?” Leaving without finishing his term of enlistment was a quick way to a stalled career. No matter whether Cristoph wanted to continue in the military or move into the private sector, a dismissal from the Guard would haunt the rest of his days. “Where would you go?”
Cristoph shook his head.
“If you leave now, that’s all anyone will ever see.” Alain tried to catch his gaze. “If you stay, if you beat whatever is troubling you, then you will at least have the satisfaction of victory.”
Finally, a reaction. Cristoph frowned at him as if he were a puzzle piece out of place. “You’re not going to tell me to submit? To accept that everyone above me knows better?” His eyes narrowed. “Aren’t I supposed to recite Psalm Forty? ‘I delight to do your will, O my God. Your law is within my heart.’”
Alain let the breath in his lungs slowly pour from him. As he inhaled, he caught Cristoph’s scent—sunshine, green grass, and gunpowder. He coughed, his throat clenching.
“Submission,” he started. He stopped. Clearly, Chaplain Weimers had already gotten to Cristoph during recruit training. It was the standard preaching—submission to authority as a mimicry of submission to God. “That’s a good Psalm. Submission takes many forms— There can be freedom in submission, when you give yourself to the right purpose. To the right—” His voice stuttered. Died.
He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t say the words, talk about faith and God and purpose. He just couldn’t. “But… submission for the sake of submission robs us of our freedom. Of our souls.”
How many pacts with dark creatures had he seen based off a human’s submission and their belief they would emerge from the deal with something to gain? How many times had a man given in when he should have stood strong? “Never once,” he finished, “has it ever been wrong to stand true to yourself.”
Cristoph stared at him, the silence of the room suddenly visceral, suddenly a tangible, weighty presence. His office was set off from the rest of the officers and the NCOs of the Swiss Guard, down a long, dark hallway. It was normally quiet as a graveyard, but never this heavy. Never this claustrophobic. He could feel Cristoph’s eyes boring into him, seeking something beneath his rank, beneath his duties.
Alain slapped his hand down on the desk, trying to break the moment. Beneath his black collar, his skin burned hot, itching where his duties lay across his shoulders. “My job is to get you through your enlistment. You have seven hundred and twenty-eight days left. It goes fast, faster than you can believe. I know it doesn’t seem like that now—”
Cristoph interrupted him. “I have duty in ten minutes.” He stood, scraping the chair against the rough wood floor.
Alain jumped to his feet. “Next time, come earlier.”
Cristoph nodded once, never meeting Alain’s eyes, and stormed out the door.
“And fix your beret!” Alain shouted at his retreating back.
* * *
The dead priest’s remains were in forty pieces.
Nothing fit back together. Some parts were liquefied. Others were simply gone. Angelo stood back while Lotario and Alain tried to lay out the former priest’s body in some semblance of a human shape on the gurney Angelo had brought them.
The priest’s chest was missing. His lungs, which proved he’d drowned, were gone. His shoulders ended with a ragged tear, and then his body picked up again where his hips began, a frayed edge of skin and muscle covering his hip bones and leading down to his legs. His spine was intact through it all, a slinking chain of chipped vertebrae and cracked bones and broken shafts where ribs had once extended. One arm was crushed, the hand torn off. Half his face was missing, the other frozen in a rictus of anguish.
“That can’t have been from the revenant.” Angelo stayed back, but he peered over Lotario’s skinny shoulders.
The cigarette bounced between Lotario’s lips as he spoke. Smoke drifted above the gurney, mixing with the smell of putrescence and river rot. “No, no,” he mumbled. “That’s from his death.”
“Doesn’t look like much like a suicide.” Alain rolled the priest’s head sideways, covering the missing half. He tried to imagine the full face, screaming in pain. “Doesn’t look like a man who chose to drown of his own free will.”
Lotario snorted. The cigarette glowed, embers flashing as ash fell from the tip, scattering on the priest’s naked thighs. “Check this out,” he growled. Lotario flipped the priest’s hips and thighs onto the side, manhandling the corpse’s pieces until it was mostly on its front. Slime and putrefaction oozed out of the shorn pelvic cavity, smearing on the gurney.
Alain peered at the rotten thighs. Bruises marred the back, purple lines, a snaking pattern of tendrils and wisps crisscrossing his dead skin. Ligature marks. “Melusine.”
Plucking the cigarette from his lips, Lotario blew his smoke away from Alain’s face. He tapped the ash over the priest’s shoulder. The embers landed in the hollow of his shattered cheek. “Yeah, melusine. He didn’t kill himself. The river killed him.”
Melusine were river spirits, deadly, damned, and demonic creatures who swam in the murky depths of the Tiber. Filaments of muscle dragged an unsuspecting person down into their razor-sharp fangs. They only fed while their prey was alive. After they’d drowned, the melusine released their prey, but by then, it was too late.
“But who hops in the Tiber for a swim these days?” Angelo, still standing far away, asked. “No one just goes for a jump in that filthy river.”
“And with his suit on.” The priest had died in his clerical suit. Alain fingered the bag of his river-soaked belongings, his shredded black suit and his torn Roman collar. “From the outside, it must have looked like a clean suicide.”
“’Cept not.” Lotario dropped the priest’s hips back to the table. The corpse landed with a squelch, a slimy, slick slap of dead flesh against sterile metal. Alain cringed and stepped back, but ooze splashed onto his suit pants. He glared at Lotar
io.
Lotario kept talking, still sucking down his cigarette. “Someone threw him in the river. Someone who knew what he’d face down there. If this were a human killing, they’d have shot him first, or held him under in shallow water until he drowned.”
“Think he was targeted by something?” Alain brushed at his pants.
Lotario shrugged, plucking the nub of his cigarette from his mouth. He extinguished the remnants on the back of the corpse’s hand, the embers hissing out of existence, charring the rotten flesh around the burn. “Dunno. We can’t check for sulfur. The water would have gotten rid of all traces of dealings with a demon. But something wanted him dead. And not just dead. They wanted it to hurt. Wanted him to suffer.”
Alain sighed. “Get back to the Vatican and pull his records. We’ll have to talk to his supervisors. See what sorts of projects he was working on in the archives.”
Lotario nodded. He clicked off the brakes on the gurney and started to wheel the corpse out. Down the hallway, in the bunker Angelo had given them, a concrete room with a circle of melted silver poured into the floor waited. A pile of charred ash and bone sat in the center.
“Do you need help with the remains?”
Alain always offered.
“Nope.” Lotario grabbed a bucket of salt and a can of lighter fluid from the metal shelves against the wall, piling the supplies in the dead priest’s empty chest cavity.
Lotario never accepted.
Chapter Four
Mentoring went from bad to worse.
Alain missed his next appointment with Cristoph thanks to a hungry wraith and Angelo’s predawn phone call. He and Lotario drove out to Tivoli and managed to shatter the wraith’s energies and dispatch the darkness. Still, he didn’t get back to the Vatican until late afternoon, well after his appointment with Cristoph.
He didn’t know if he should be thankful or frustrated at that.
The dreams hadn’t left.
He dreamed about his long-gone lover once, maybe twice, a year. A quick handjob in the shower or a rut against the mattress and he’d be over it. It had been years since those memories had haunted his footsteps and his waking moments. Years since he’d seen his lover in the shadows or reached out for him in a moment of weakness, only to meet dead, empty air.
Now, Cristoph starred in his dreams almost nightly. Cristoph’s furious blue eyes, turned soft. His blond hair, just slightly too long. Enough to get his fingers tangled in. Enough to grab, and arch Cristoph’s neck—
Push it all away.
Of course, he’d heard all about his missed appointment from Luca, who’d regaled him with the tale of Cristoph standing at attention outside his office door for a full hour under Luca’s hawk-like gaze.
Luca only let Cristoph leave when he was three minutes away from his shift at the Bronze Doors.
He should just let the whole thing shrivel and die. He should let his ill-suited mentorship duties atrophy and fall away. He should let Cristoph turn his resentment toward him, nurture a hatred of Alain instead of Luca, instead of the Guard. That should be his gift to Cristoph.
He shouldn’t watch for Cristoph’s blond hair striding across the courtyard, shouldn’t picture those frigid blue eyes warming, turning soft in Alain’s direction. He shouldn’t get involved. Any more involved.
His shouldn’ts shadowed him like ghosts, chasing after him in whispers as he trudged into the Guards’ canteen. Their communal eating hall was a dark and dreary place, grim in the dull light of dusty chandeliers. Heavy wooden beams latticed the ceiling, as if trying to replicate the atmosphere of the 1500’s. The barracks had been updated and modernized to keep with the times, but the canteen stubbornly held on to its dubious medieval charms. Murals along the walls tried to recreate the splendor of the knights of their heyday, medieval Switzerland’s famed knights of renown, feared across all of Europe.
It was hard to look at the murals. Alain knew the truth about those knights of old.
And, sitting a literal stone’s throw from St. Peter’s, the mural’s loose and wild brushings seemed almost cartoonish, a child’s finger-painting beside Michelangelo’s crowning glory.
He took a step into the gloomy canteen. Halberdiers milled, some getting ready to go on their shifts, others coming off. A television was on in the corner, tuned to a football game from northern Italy. Three guards watched, sipping their beers. A low din carried through the room, conversation mixed with sighs and stretches, silverware scraping on plates and metal trays, guards relaxing or readying themselves. Laughter, the sound of life.
Everything stopped dead as the guards spotted Alain at the door. Like a wave receding from shore, pulling further and further away, silence spread, jaws snapping shut, silverware freezing. Beer glasses setting down.
In the back, one guard stood, glaring at Alain.
He knew. God, he knew. He wasn’t welcome here.
Still, he sought out Cristoph. Through the crowd, through the mass of wary, silent humanity, his own comrades arrayed against him.
Cristoph was the only one not looking at him. He glared down at his plate, picking at his pasta as he sat alone at a table separated from everyone else. Sullen rage pulsed off of him, loud as a scream.
He should apologize, but if he crossed the canteen, if he actually sat with Cristoph, everyone there would connect the two of them. His corruption would seep from him to Cristoph, right there in front of everyone’s eyes, and as bad as Cristoph might have it now—isolated, cut off, and pissed at the world—how much worse would it be for him if Alain walked to him right now? If he sat with him?
It would be a kindness to walk away.
It would be a kindness to leave Cristoph alone. Let their… whatever it was die.
He turned and left. Fifty pairs of eyeballs drilled into his back as he walked out.
Was one of those Cristoph’s?
* * *
Lotario ran into a dead end with the dead priest’s supervisors at the Vatican archives. He had been a quiet man with few friends. The priest hadn’t been working on anything extraordinary. His tasks had been mundane, boring even. They didn’t remember his name until Lotario reminded them.
Alain cringed at that.
“He was doing some research on the first garrison of Swiss Guards at the Vatican, back in 1506,” Lotario grumbled over the phone line. Alain could almost smell the cigarette smoke as he heard Lotario exhale and sift through papers. “Some boring art restoration notes… Looks like he was cataloging Michelangelo’s Vatican pieces. That’s it.”
“Where are we on his personal effects?”
“The dormitory is trying to find the box now. They cleared his room and boxed everything up.” Another exhale. “It was brought to the basement, and now it’s just a bunch of finger pointing.”
“Hopefully we can find something in his stuff. We’re running out of leads.”
“I think you mean we’re out of leads.” A loud cough. “I’ll bring his effects by your office when they find it.”
* * *
Lotario’s timing, as always, couldn’t have been worse.
A week had passed since Alain missed his appointment with Cristoph. Seven hours had passed since Alain’s last dream of Cristoph. He’d woken with Cristoph’s name on his lips and his hips rutting into the mattress like a horny teenager. He’d given up on his sheets. He’d do laundry after this sexual madness had passed.
And it would pass. He would get over whatever imagined fantasy his twisted subconscious had seized on. Nothing would happen between him and Cristoph. Not a thing.
It couldn’t. Not ever. Never again.
He’d purposely cleared his schedule for Cristoph, staying in his office with the warped door propped open by a thick copy of the worthless Malleus Maleficarum. Rain thundered from the sky, drenching the Vatican and all of Rome. The creaky old buildings were waterlogged in moments, and shivering drafts crept through ancient cracks. Alain clutched a fresh cup of espresso as he reviewed all of his notes on the
Tiber melusine.
A soggy, dripping mess brought a swirl of cold air to his doorway. Papers fluttered on the desk as Cristoph, soaked to the bone and trailing water on the stone floor, appeared. His boots squished with every step, and his brilliantly striped uniform was drenched, hanging limply from his body. His beret was plastered to his pale face. His lips had gone plum from the cold. They pressed together, trying to hide his chattering. Dark hollows hung beneath his eyes.
“Halberdier!” Alain shot to his feet. “How long were you out in this weather? Do you not have a cover? Where is your cape?” When it rained, the guardsmen were supposed to don navy wool capes, covering their uniforms and keeping them warm. They were also supposed to stand in the rain shelter.
“Been at my post all night,” Cristoph managed through chattering teeth.
Alain slid his espresso across the desk. Cristoph grabbed it in both hands and huddled over the cup as he sat. “Why didn’t you stand at your post inside the shelter?” No matter where a guard was stationed, there was always an inclement weather shelter.
Dark eyes met Alain’s. Cristoph’s lip curled up. “Because Corporal Gruber ordered me to stand outside.”
He bit down hard on his tongue. Corporal Gruber was a close mentee of Luca’s. “What did he say?” Alain asked slowly.
“He ordered me out in the fucking rain! Said it was something any true guard would do! And that going into the shelter would be weak. Something only a soft man would do!” Cristoph glared at the wall, trying—and failing—for a stony mask of indifference.
There were some in the Guard who would stand in the rain all night long. It filled their sense of masculine glory and hit their buttons for sacrifice and punishment. It was a strop of good old Germanic discipline and good for the character, they said. Mix that with a healthy dose of hazing and a man who made himself a target through his sullen, shitty attitude, and one drenched, pissed-off guardsman was the result.