by Tal Bauer
“That’s a load of shit,” he said, looking at Cristoph. “You know that. I know you do.”
Cristoph snorted, but congestion in his nose made it snotty.
“What do you have to prove?” Alain tried to catch his eye.
“Oh come off it!” Cristoph snapped. He glared at Alain, his eyes no longer dark, but red-rimmed and furious. “I know exactly what they think of me here! I know exactly what it is they see in me! I mean, come on!” He threw his arm out, gesturing around Alain’s closet of an office, unkempt and bursting with ancient manuscripts and coffee-stained printouts. “Look where they dumped me! Instead of being paired up with one of the real officers as a mentor, they gave me to you.”
Alain arched a single eyebrow.
“So I look at you. Is this my future? Am I being told that if I stay, I’ll just end up just like you? Did you just give in this crap? Despite your ‘always be yourself’ speech? How can you sit here, taking this?” Snarling, Cristoph stared at Alain, a heavy darkness in his eyes masking a brief flash of something that looked like anguish.
Alain’s voice dropped, going frigid. “My reasons for staying are my own. And you came here with a chip on your shoulder. What did you expect?”
Cristoph leaped to his feet. “I expect to not be treated like a leper! To not be shoved out of the way and ignored, like they’ve clearly done with you! I expected this to mean something! To matter!” He slammed the espresso cup down on the desk, bitter liquid sloshing over the edges and staining a folder with the dead priest’s autopsy. “But nothing does. Not even you. What are you, their pet faggot?”
Silence. Pipes creaked in the walls, groaning as someone turned the faucet on the second floor. Boots clip-clapped on worn wood, and the electronic whine of a printer scratched through the air, far away in the main garrison offices.
His dreams seemed so far removed from the present moment, his dream Cristoph of laughing eyes and sweet looks totally incompatible with the furious, hardened man before him. The muscles in his jaw quivered as he forcibly held back from lashing out. Twelve hard years had taught him temperance, at least.
“Bad time?” Lotario slouched against the doorframe, his eyebrows raised and a smirk stretching his lips. He had a box, sealed with evidence tape, under one arm.
“Jesus Christ,” Alain muttered, exhaling. His fists slowly uncurled. He glared at Cristoph. “Get out.”
Cristoph stormed off, barely avoiding soaking Lotario as he edged past. Lotario seemed to revel in Cristoph’s ire as he strode into Alain’s office.
“Sounds like you made a new friend.” Lotario swapped the box for Alain’s abandoned espresso, chugging it down as he tapped his fingers on the box lid.
Alain ground his teeth, molars scrapping. Push it all away. “This our priest’s effects?”
“Mm.” Lotario polished off Alain’s espresso with one last swallow and set the cup on top of Alain’s boxy computer monitor. “Let’s get inside him, shall we?”
Scissors sliced through the gendarmerie’s tape. Lotario flipped the lid and pulled out the last of their dead priest’s worldly possessions. It wasn’t much, not even enough to fill the bottom of the box. A spare suit and a Roman collar. A crucifix. A Bible. A rosary, well worn. A picture of a middle-aged woman, signed on the back, “Love, Mom.”
Lotario tossed the Bible back into the box, crumpling the Roman collar. “Well, that was a fat lot of nothing.”
“This is where we’re supposed to find a piece of evidence.” Alain hung his head between his shoulders. “That’s how this script is supposed to work.”
“Yeah, well, I think you’d have more luck getting that soaking wet guard to grab a beer with you than find anything more in this case. We’re out of road on this one.”
Alain fingered the signed picture. “And the mom?”
“Dead. Breast cancer. Five years ago.”
“Let’s get this back to the dorm.” Lotario eyeballed Alain. “What?” Alain groaned.
“What was up with your little friend? Pretty strong words getting thrown around for a Tuesday morning. And here, no less.” Lotario whistled as he made a show of inspecting the office and the barracks hallway. “You lot give ‘prude’ a new definition.”
Despite himself, Alain chuckled. This from a priest who skirted the blurry boundaries of decency and decorum. “That was Cristoph, one of the new recruits. My assigned mentee.” And my new depravity. Something my dark soul has seized onto. His dreams crowded into his waking moments, the warm body he imagined sinking into every night, and the throaty moans and heart-melting smiles his dreams bequeathed him.
This must be it. Must be the first sign of madness. His grip on reality was slipping. His sanity would all come apart with one blond recruit.
He was damned. So very damned.
Grabbing the box, Lotario tossed Alain a wink and a smile. “Looks like it’s going just swimmingly.”
* * *
“Sergeant? Do you have a moment?”
It was Commandant Best who brought the bad news a few days later. From the look on his face, Alain knew whatever he was about to say had to do with Cristoph. That cringe, the tightening around his eyes. The purse of his lips.
He sighed. “Of course, Commandant.” Alain pushed aside his mountain of files and invited him in.
“How are your duties coming?”
“We’ve had a spate of risings recently. Evidence of dark pacts and corpses turning after death. A few revenants. A wraith. We haven’t been able to tie them together, and we haven’t been able to figure out what has been attracting the increase in risings. Or why some of our fresh corpses have turned.”
“Payoff of a Faustian bargain?”
A deal with the Devil or, in actuality, some form of lesser dark creature. The Devil himself never appeared. “It’s always the number one suspicion. We had a revenant rise from a corpse that was made to look like a suicide but was really a murder. Murder by melusine.” He slid a file across the desk with the dead priest’s second autopsy photos inside. Their autopsy. “See the purple ligature marks around the thigh? He’d been drowned in the Tiber as he was torn apart by the melusine.”
“Was this one recently?”
Alain nodded. “Few weeks ago. He broke out of his cemetery days after his burial. We’ve put him down. His soul is gone.”
Best bowed his head and closed his eyes. He muttered a soft prayer under his breath. Alain waited. He didn’t pray with Best. It was never easy to banish a soul, to shatter a human’s existence into nothing. But the alternative was to let a newborn demon linger in the world, and that always led to more death. All creatures of darkness—all of them—were eliminated. Always.
“Sergeant, there’s something else I’d like to speak with you about.” Best shifted in his seat as he crossed his legs. “It’s about your young halberdier.”
Alain tried not to grimace. Hot shame licked up his spine.
Best chuckled. “He’s a trying young man. Fighting something, it seems.”
“The world, I think.”
“Well, he’s gone and put himself in a serious jam. Major Bader found him returning to the barracks this morning. He’d been out all night, apparently.”
“And it had to be Luca who found him?”
“It gets better.” Best shook his head. “He is sporting a rather impressive hickey just above his uniform collar line.”
A chill settled over Alain. “Jesus Christ.” Best shot him a lean glare. “Sorry.” He pressed his lips together, covered his mouth with his hand, and looked down.
He hadn’t had a dream about Cristoph last night. No nighttime visits from his subconscious fantasy lover. A pang of jealously ripped apart his twisting guts, and his heart slid down his ribs, a hot, pounding mess, settling rancid in his belly. Push it all away.
Best waited.
“Tell me. What did Luca do?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t hear it, even all the way in here. He may have sprained his vocal chords.”
He plastered on a fake grin. “I bet that’s not all he’s sprained.”
“I’m sure.” Best’s tight smile disappeared. “Alain, Halberdier Hasse is headed for expulsion. I don’t want to do that. Cristoph is a good man. He’s meant to be here, I know he is.”
Alain frowned. What was the commandant talking about? Cristoph hated the Guard and resented being there. He’d come to the Vatican for the wrong reasons, clearly, and he didn’t belong. It would be a miracle if he lasted a single year, let alone his full enlistment.
And he was stuck with Alain, the worst possible mentor, and a depraved, desperate one as well.
“I need you to save him.”
Groaning, Alain flopped back in his chair. “Commandant, that’s not my line of work. At all.”
“Alain—”
“In fact, I’m in the exact opposite kind of spiritual warfare.”
“Sergeant, I want Halberdier Hasse to remain and I know you are the man for the job.” He paused. “You need each other.”
“Oh no.” Alain scooted back, waving his hands in front of him, trying to forestall the commandant’s words. Flashes of his dreams sparked behind his eyes. Heat rose in his bones. “No, no, no. I won’t accept this meddling in my life, especially not from you.”
“You need a friend for God’s sake, Alain. There are days you don’t speak a single word to another living soul. And that priest of yours does not count. One of these days, you’re liable to be as off as he is if you don’t try to rejoin the world of the living.”
“I talk to all sorts of things regularly. Revenants. Wraiths.” He gestured to the autopsy records. “Corpses.”
“That’s what I mean.” Best glared. “Alain, I’ve been there. I know the path you’re on. Don’t forget who put you in your position.”
“Thank you for that, by the way.”
“You don’t have to do this alone. Your stubborn insistence on this matter—”
“Commandant, I’m very busy. Can we continue this another time?”
Heaving a sigh, Best stared at Alain, shaking his head. “I don’t want to bury you, too,” he finally breathed.
Alain looked away.
“Please look in on our young Halberdier Hasse.” The commandant stood, straightening his suit. Unlike the halberdiers, he and the other officers wore a regular suit every day. “I believe you can find him shredding old uniforms and cleaning the cobblestones as part of his punishment duties. For now, ‘until the end of time,’ according to Major Bader.”
“I’ll check on him. But I make no promises.”
“You aren’t alone, Alain.”
“Good day, Commandant.”
With a sigh, Best left Alain’s office, marching down the dark hallway away from Alain’s shadowed dungeon and back to the real world of living people and human interaction.
Alain’s eyes traveled from the Malleus Maleficarum, still propping open his door, to the ground corpse bone sitting in a glass vial on the edge of his desk, and then over to the extracted vampire fangs he’d salvaged from an autopsy years before. Half of a centuries-old skull, missing the jaw, scrawled with incantations in a dead language. Papers on the demonic, rituals in Latin, and runes carved into the edge of his desk. Calculations and tables of weights, charts of correspondences, figures for balancing magical circles. Above the door, sigils to ward off black magic and dark creatures. Beneath the rug under his feet, a demon’s trap was painted into the stone.
No matter what Commandant Best tried to say, the chasm between Alain and the rest of the world was only getting bigger.
Chapter Five
Fury rolled off Cristoph. Alain could feel the force of it even before he pulled open the creaking door closing Cristoph inside the dank cellar the Guard used as a punishment closet. Inside, two bare bulbs stuck out from the walls just below the ceiling, wires piped in along the stone walls and snaking to a heavy breaker box. The bulbs hummed, a soft pulse hovering just behind Alain’s ears.
Cristoph crouched in front of a worn wooden block, an ancient executioner’s stand. He held an axe blade in one hand and stretched a faded Swiss Guard uniform across the block with the other. With a grunt, he slammed the axe blade down on the old uniform, cutting it into ragged squares, each cut smaller than his palm.
Uniforms no longer fit for wear were shredded by hand, chopped into squares and then burned. It was a precaution against an outsider getting a hold of one of the uniforms and using it to penetrate the deepest recesses of the Vatican. It was also the Guards’ oldest punishment detail for recalcitrant halberdiers. For hundreds of years, deviant guardsmen had pulled punishment duties in the stone cell, a hollow of bitten-off curses and sweat-stained stones scarred from centuries of manual labor.
The cut pieces of cloth slid off the block, landing in piles beside Cristoph’s feet.
Though the cellar was cool, Cristoph was sweating, and his shirt was soaked down his back and beneath his arms. A bead of perspiration dripped down his temple, his cheek. Alain’s eyes followed it, his gaze dragging across the jut of Cristoph’s jaw. Cristoph shook his head, the ends of his hair curling with his sweat.
Alain swallowed. Looked down, for a moment. He folded his arms and leaned against the doorway, watching. Cristoph spared him one quick glance before sliding the destroyed uniform around for another swing of his axe.
Above his neckline, a purple bruise stained Cristoph’s pale skin. Clearly, an overly passionate pair of lips. His jeans hung low on his hips, and Alain peeked, wondering if there were finger marks stretched over his hipbones. That slippery slide of jealousy reared within Alain again, but he stamped it out. There was no place for that. No reason for him to be jealous. His deranged fantasies were his own. Cristoph was his own man. He could do whatever—whomever—he wanted.
Still, Alain’s gaze lingered on Cristoph’s hips, his trim waist, his broad shoulders.
Another slam of the blade. The axe ground against the fabric and the executioner’s block. The uniform and the wood frayed, pieces of one tangling with the other. Cristoph tugged the scraps to the floor and grabbed another fistful of old fabric from a basket by his feet.
“Are you pleased with yourself?” Alain finally asked. “Did you get what you wanted?”
Cristoph slammed the axe down again, harder than before.
“I hear you’re on uniform punishment until the end of time.”
“I won’t be here that long.”
Alain pursed his lips. “You’re lucky you’re here at all.”
Swinging the axe, Cristoph left the blade embedded in the wood before turning the full force of his fury to Alain. “Here to gloat? Tell me to pack my bags and head back to Switzerland?”
“I would never gloat over your punishment.” Alain shook his head. “And no one is sending you home. At least not today.”
Cristoph snorted.
“Did you come here on a mission?” Alain pushed off the wall. He stood before Cristoph, legs spread, arms crossed, chin held high. “Did you come here to make a spectacle? Flaunt yourself? Launch some kind of visibility campaign for gay rights?”
Shaking his head, Cristoph’s glower darkened. “No,” he hissed. Silence stretched long as Cristoph fingered the edge of the blade. “I thought you said I should be true to myself.”
“I did. But there is a big difference between being yourself and purposely being an asshole. Or at least there should be.”
Cristoph looked down.
“You know you’re not the only gay man in the Vatican, right? You’re not completely alone.” Alain cocked his head, watching Cristoph’s profile. A muscle twitched in his cheek.
Ah. Struck a nerve.
“And I don’t mean just me. One third of the Vatican is gay, give or take a nervous breakdown or ten.”
Wide blue eyes swung around, staring at Alain.
“Haven’t you wondered why there are so many bathhouses in Rome?” Alain arched his eyebrows, a wry grin curving his lips. “The Vatican rents out
apartments for priests above one of the busiest gay neighborhoods in Old Town. The Vatican is stuffed full of gay men. Mostly priests. Some of them are celibate, but others aren’t. They all find ways to live their lives, be who they are.”
“But their vows—”
“That’s for them to figure out.” Alain held up his hands. “Call them crazy for being here. Call me crazy for choosing to be here. I have my reasons. And I am not one to judge another human being for theirs.”
Cristoph’s look called Alain a liar.
Alain almost grinned. “I don’t judge you, though you seem to think I’m just waiting to pounce on all of your faults. I want you to succeed here, Cristoph. And I want to help you figure that out.”
A long moment passed. Cristoph didn’t move. He stared at Alain, wide-eyed and stiff-jawed. Finally, his head drooped forward. He braced his elbows on the tattered cutting block.
“I don’t know if I made a mistake coming here or not,” Cristoph said. His voice had lost some of that hard bitterness, the edge Alain had always heard. “And I don’t know what to do now.” The admission, the words, seemed almost painful, dragged out against his will and pulled from his soul. He kept his eyes down, glaring at the ground.
“You can start by not trying so hard to push every single person away.” Moving forward, Alain leaned against the other end of the cutting block. “You could make friends here, but everyone is afraid you’ll wrap them up in your wrath and your career suicide.”
“They all look at me like I’m—”
“They all look at you like you’re an angry, bitter man.” Alain cut Cristoph off. “I’m sure you have your reasons for that, but you’re slowly killing yourself here with this rage.” Alain stared Cristoph down. The hum of the overhead bulbs stretched on, droning above their heads in the stuffy closet. “You’re not the only gay guardsman, if that’s what this is about. If you’re… lonely.” He shrugged. “Two of the guards have Italian boyfriends they want to marry. One man spent a month in Miami and came back with a broken heart. A week later, he had six new men.” Alain chuckled at Cristoph’s snort. “You’re so convinced you’re hated for reasons only you are worrying about. You’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.