The Mediator #4: Darkest Hour

by Jenny Carroll

  Well, I'd tried to stop him. Paul was, after all, probably my only way out of there. But I can't say I really minded when I heard the sound of nasal cartilage tearing.

  Paul was pretty much a baby about the whole thing. He started cursing and saying stuff like, "You broke my nose! I can't believe you broke my nose!"

  "I'll break more than your nose," Jesse declared, clutching Paul by his shirt collar and waving his blood-smeared fist in front of his eyes, "if you don't tell us how to get out of here now."

  How Paul might have responded to this interesting threat I never did find out. That's because I heard a sweetly familiar voice call my name. I turned around, and there, running toward me through the mist, was Jack.

  Around his waist was a rope.

  "Suze," he called. "Come quick! That mean lady ghost you warned me about, she cut your rope, and now she and that other one are beating up Father Dominic!" Then he stopped running, took in the sight of Jesse still clutching a bloody-faced Paul, and said, curiously, "Paul? What are you doing here?"

  A moment passed. A heartbeat, really – if I'd had one, which, of course, I didn't. No one moved. No one breathed. No one bunked.

  Then Paul looked up at Jesse and said, "You'll regret this. Do you understand? I'll make you sorry."

  Jesse just laughed, without the slightest trace of humor, and said, "You're welcome to try."

  Then he tossed Paul aside as if he were a used tissue, strode forward, seized my wrist, and dragged me toward Jack.

  "Take us to them," he said to the little boy.

  And Jack, slipping his hand into mine, did so, without looking back at his brother. Not even once.

  Which told me, I realized, just about everything – except what I really wanted to know:

  Just who – or, more aptly, what – was Paul Slater?

  But I didn't have time to stay and find out. Father Dominic's watch gave me a minute to return to my body, or be placed in the difficult position of not having one … which was going to make starting the eleventh grade in the fall a real problem.

  Fortunately, the hole was not far from where we'd been standing. When we got to it and I looked down, I couldn't see Father Dominic anywhere. I could hear the sounds of a struggle, though – breaking glass, heavy objects hitting the floor, wood splintering.

  And I could see my body, stretched out beneath me as if I were sleeping, and sleeping so deeply I wasn't stirring at the sound of all that racket. Not a twitch.

  Somehow, it seemed a much longer way down than it had climbing up.

  I turned to look at Jack. "You should go first," I said. "We'll lower you with the rope – "

  But both he and Jesse shouted, "No!" at the same time.

  And the next thing I knew, I was falling. Really. Down and down I tumbled, and while I couldn't see much as I fell, I could see what I was about to land on, and let me tell you, I did not relish crushing my own …

  But I didn't. Just like in dreams I've had where I've been falling, I opened my eyes at the moment of impact, and found myself blinking up at Jesse's and Jack's faces, peering down at me over the rim of the hole Father Dom had created with his chanting.

  I was inside myself again. And I was in one piece. I could tell as I reached down to make sure my legs were still there. They were. Everything was functional. Even the bruise on my head hurt again.

  And when, a second later, a statue of the Virgin Mary – the one Adam had told me had wept blood – landed across my stomach, well, that really hurt, too.

  "There she is," Maria de Silva cried. "Get her!"

  I have to tell you, I am getting really tired of people – particularly dead people – trying to kill me. Paul is right: I am a do-gooder. I do nothing but try to help people, and what do I get for my efforts? Virgin Mary statues in the midriff. It isn't fair.

  To show just how unfair I thought it all was, I heaved the statue off me, scrambled to my feet, and grabbed Maria by the back of her skirt. Apparently, recalling her last incident with me, she decided to make a run for it. Too late, though.

  "You know, Maria," I said conversationally as I reeled her in by her flounces, the way a fisherman reels in a really big trout. "Girls like you really irritate me. I mean, it's not just that you get guys to do your dirty work for you, instead of doing it yourself. It's this whole I'm-so-much-better-than-you-because-I'm-a-de-Silva thing that really bugs me. Because this is America." I reached out and grabbed a fistful of her glossy black curls. "And in America, we're all created equal, whether our last name is de Silva or Simon."

  "Yes?" Maria cried, lashing out with her knife. She'd apparently gotten it back. "Well, do you want to know what irritates me about you? You think that just because you are a mediator, you are better than me."

  I have to tell you, that one cracked me up.

  "Now that's not true," I said, ducking as she took a swipe at me with her blade. "I don't think I'm better than you because I'm a mediator, Maria. I think I'm better than you because I do not go around agreeing to marry guys I'm not in love with."

  In a flash, I had her arm pinned behind her waist again. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter. "And even if I did," I went on, "I wouldn't have them murdered just so I could marry somebody else. Because" – keeping a firm grip on her hair with my other hand, I steered her toward the altar rail – "I believe the key to a successful relationship is communication. If you had simply communicated with Jesse better, none of this would be happening now. I mean, that's your real problem right there, Maria. Communication goes two ways. Somebody has to talk. And somebody has to listen."

  Seeing what I was about to do, Maria shrieked, "Diego!"

  But it was too late. I had already rammed her face, hard, into the altar rail.

  "The thing is," I explained as I pulled her head back from the rail to examine the extent of the damage, "you won't listen, either, will you? I mean, I told you not to mess with me. And" – I leaned forward to whisper her in her ear – "I think I specified that you not mess with my boyfriend, either. But did you listen? No . . . you . . . did … not."

  I accompanied each of those last four words with a blow to Maria's face. Cruel, I know, but let's face it: she totally deserved it. The bitch had tried to kill me, not once, but twice.

  Not that I'm counting or anything.

  Here's the thing about chicks who were brought up in the nineteenth century: they're sneaky. I'll give them that. They have the whole back-stabbing, attacking people while they're asleep thing down pretty pat.

  But as far as actual hand-to-hand combat goes? Yeah, not so good at that. I broke her neck pretty easily just by stomping on it. In Prada slides, too!

  It was a shame her neck wouldn't stay broken for long.

  But while I had her nicely subdued, I looked around to see if Jack had made it down okay....

  And the news was not good. Oh, Jack was fine. It was just that he was hunched over Father Dominic, who was far from it. He was lying in a crumpled heap to one side of the altar, looking way worse for wear. I climbed over the altar rail and went to him.

  "Oh, Suze," Jack wailed. "I can't wake him up! I think he's – "

  But even as he was speaking, Father Dom, his bifocals askew on his face, let out a moan.

  "Father D?" I lifted his head and set it down gently in my lap. "Father D, it's me, Suze. Can you hear me?"

  Father D just moaned some more. But his eyelids fluttered, which I knew was a good sign.

  "Jack," I said. "Run over there to that gold box beneath the crucifix – see it? – and pull out the decanter of wine you'll find there."

  Jack hurried to do as I had asked. I put my face close to Father Dominic's and whispered, "You'll be okay. Hang on, Father D. Keep it together."

  A very loud splintering crash distracted me, and I glanced around the rest of the church with a sudden sinking feeling. Diego. He was here somewhere, I'd forgotten all about him –

  But Jesse hadn't.

  I don't know why, but I had simply assumed tha
t Jesse had stayed up there in that creepy shadowland. He hadn't. He had slipped back into this world – the real world – without, apparently, much thought as to what he might be giving up in doing so.

  On the other hand, down here he was getting to beat the crap out of the guy who killed him, so maybe he wasn't giving up all that much. In fact, he looked pretty intent on returning the favor – you know, killing the guy who'd killed him – except, of course, that he couldn't, since Diego was already dead.

  Still, I had never seen anybody go after someone with such single-minded purpose. Jesse, I was convinced, wasn't going to be satisfied merely with breaking Felix Diego's neck. No, I think he wanted to rip off the guy's head.

  And he was doing a pretty job of it, too. Diego was bigger than Jesse, but he was also older, and not as quick on his feet. Plus, I think Jesse just plain wanted it more. To see his opponent decapitated, I mean. At least, if the energy with which he was swinging a jagged-edged piece of pew at Felix Diego's head was any indication.

  "Here," Jack said breathlessly as he brought the wine, in its crystal decanter, to me.

  "Good," I said. It wasn't whisky – isn't that what you're supposed to give unconscious people to rouse them? – but it had alcohol in it. "Father D," I said, raising his head and putting the un-stoppered decanter to his lips. "Drink some of this."

  Only it didn't work. Wine just dribbled down his chin and dripped onto his chest.

  Meanwhile, Maria had begun to moan. Her broken neck was snapping back into place already. That's the thing about ghosts. They bounce back, and way too fast.

  Jack glared at her as she tried to raise herself to her knees.

  "Too bad we can't exorcise her," he said, darkly.

  I looked at him. "Why can't we?" I asked.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. "I don't know. We don't have the chicken blood anymore."

  "We don't need the chicken blood," I said. "We have that." I nodded toward the circle of candles. Miraculously, in spite of all the fighting going on, they had remained standing.

  "But we don't have a picture of her," Jack said. "Don't we need a picture of her?"

  "Not," I said, gently putting Father D's head back on the floor, "if we don't have to summon her. And we don't. She's right here. Come on and help me move her."

  Jack took her feet. I took her torso. She moaned and fought us the whole way, but when we laid her on the choir robes, she must have felt as I did – that it was pretty darn comfortable – since she stopped struggling and just lay there. Above her head, the circle Father Dom had opened remained open, smoke – or fog, as I knew it was now – curling down from its outer edges in misty tendrils.

  "How do we make it suck her in?" Jack wanted to know.

  "I don't know." I glanced at Jesse and Diego. They were still engaged in what appeared to be mortal combat. If I had thought Jesse had lost the upper hand, I'd have gone over and helped, but it appeared he was doing fine.

  Besides, the guy had killed him. I figured it was payback time, and for that, Jesse did not need my help.

  "The book!" I said, brightening. "Father Dom read from a book. Look around. Do you see it?"

  Jack found the small, black, leather-bound volume beneath the first pew. When he flipped through the pages, however, his face fell.

  "Suze," he said. "It's not even in English."

  "That's okay," I said, and I took it from him and turned to the page Father Dominic had marked. "Here it is."

  And I began to read.

  I'm not going to pretend I know Latin. I don't. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was saying.

  But I guess pronunciation doesn't count when you are summoning the forces of darkness, since, as I spoke, those misty tendrils began to grow longer and longer, until finally they spilled out onto the floor and began to curl around Maria's limbs.

  She didn't even seem to mind, either. It was like she was enjoying the way they felt around her wrists and ankles.

  Well, the chick was kind of dominatrixy, if you asked me.

  She didn't even struggle when, as I read further, the slack on the smoky tendrils tightened, and slowly, the fog began elevating her off the floor.

  "Hey," Jack said in an indignant voice. "How come it didn't do that for you? How come you had to climb into the hole?"

  I was afraid to reply, however. Who knew what would happen if I stopped reading?

  So I kept on. And Maria soared higher and higher, until …

  With a strangled cry, Diego broke away from Jesse and came racing toward us.

  "You bitch!" he bellowed at me as he stared in horror at his wife's body, dangling in the air above us. "Bring her down!"

  Jesse, panting, his shirt torn down the middle and a thin ribbon of blood running down the side of his face from a cut in his forehead, came up behind Diego and said, "You want your wife so badly, then why don't you go to her?"

  And he shoved Felix Diego into the center of the ring of candles.

  A second later, tendrils of smoke shot down to curl around him, too.

  Diego didn't take his exorcism as quietly as his wife. He did not appear to be enjoying himself one bit. He kicked and screamed and said quite a lot of stuff in Spanish that I didn't understand, but which Jesse surely did.

  Still, Jesse's expression did not change, not even once. Every so often I looked up from what I was reading and checked. He watched the two lovers – the one who had killed him and the one who had ordered his death – disappear into the same hole we'd just climbed from.

  Until finally, after I'd uttered a last "Amen," they disappeared.

  When the last echo of Diego's vengeful cries died away, silence filled the church. It was so pervasive a silence, it was actually a little overwhelming. I myself was reluctant to break it. But I felt like I had to.

  "Jesse," I said, softly.

  But not softly enough. My whisper, in the stillness of the church, after all that violence, sounded like a scream.

  Jesse tore his gaze from the hole through which Maria and Diego had disappeared and looked at me questioningly.

  I nodded toward the hole. "If you want to go back," I said, though each word tasted, I was sure, like those beetles Dopey had accidentally poured into his mouth, "now is the time, before it closes up again."

  Jesse looked up at the hole, and then at me, and then back at the hole.

  And then back at me.

  "No, thank you, querida," he said, casually. "I think I want to stay and see how it all ends."

  C H A P T E R

  17

  How it all ended that day was with Jack and Jesse and me helping Father Dominic, when he finally came around, to a phone, so that he could call the police and report that he'd stumbled across a pair of thieves looting the place.

  A lie, yes. But how else was he going to explain all the damage Maria and Diego had done? Not to mention the bump on his noggin.

  Then, once we were sure the police and an ambulance were on their way, Jesse and I left Father Dominic and waited with Jack for the cab we'd called, carefully not talking about the one thing I'm pretty sure we were all thinking: Paul.

  Not that I didn't try to get Jack to tell me what was up with his brother and all. Basically, the conversation went like this:

  Me: "So, Jack. What is up with your brother?"

  Jack: (scowling) "I don't want to talk about it."

  Me: "I can fully appreciate that. However, he appears to be able to move freely between the realms of the living and the dead, and I find this alarming. Do you think it is possible that he is the son of Satan?"

  Jesse: "Susannah."

  Me: "I mean that in the nicest possible way."

  Jack: "I said I don't want to talk about it."

  Me: "Which is perfectly understandable. But did you know before now that Paul is a mediator, too? Or were you as surprised as we were? Because you didn't seem very surprised when you ran into him, you know, up there."

  Jack: "I really don't want to talk about this right now."
/>   Jesse: "He doesn't want to talk about it, Susannah. Leave the boy alone."

  Which was easy for Jesse to say. Jesse didn't know what I did. Which was that Paul and Maria and Diego . . . they had all been in cahoots. It had taken me a while to realize it, but now that I had, I could have kicked myself for not seeing it before: Paul's keeping me occupied at Friday's while Maria had Jack perform the exorcism on Jesse. Paul's remark – "It's easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar." Hadn't Maria said the exact same thing to me, not a few hours later?

  The three of them – Paul, Maria, and Diego – had formed an unholy trinity, bound, apparently by a common hatred of one person: Jesse.

  But what possible reason could Paul, who'd never even met Jesse until that moment in purgatory, have to hate him? Now, of course, his dislike was understandable: Jesse had done him a very great bodily injury, something for which Paul has sworn to repay him next time he saw him. I'm sure Jesse wasn't taking it too seriously, but I was worried. I mean, I'd just gone to a lot of trouble to get Jesse out of one sticky situation. I wasn't too enthused about seeing him plunge straight into another one.

  But it was no good. Jack wouldn't talk. The kid was traumatized. Well, sort of. He actually seemed like he'd had a pretty good time. He just didn't want to talk about his brother.

  Which bummed me out. Because I had a lot of questions. For instance, if Paul was a mediator – and he had to be; how else could he have been walking around up there? – why hadn't he helped his little brother out with the whole I see dead people thing, said a few words of encouragement, assured the poor kid he wasn't crazy?

  But if I'd hoped to get any answers out of Jack on that account, I was sadly disappointed.

  I guess if I'd had a brother like Paul, I probably wouldn't have wanted to talk about it, either.

  Once Jack had been safely dropped off at the hotel, Jesse and I began the long walk home (I didn't have enough money on me for a ride from the hotel back to my house).

  You might wonder what we talked about during that two-mile trek. A lot, surely, might have been discussed.

  And yet, to tell you the truth, I can't remember. I don't think we really talked about anything important. What was there to say, really?