The Devil's Poetry

by Louise Cole

  Don’t slip.

  After a minute the ground evened out. I was in clear sight of the farmhouse. A shout went up, and a crowd started to gather at the doorway. Bodies started to spill from the different parts of the building, massing in front as I walked down to meet them.

  Showtime.

  Chapter 20

  Henry and the professor were dragged to their feet and bundled outside.

  “Be ready,” muttered Henry to Professor McKenna. “Take any opportunity to run.”

  The big one called Cyrus pulled him by the ear until he was standing with his back to the wall next to the professor. The old, smelly one they always consulted cackled and leaped about like a child.

  “Daddy’s girl,” he sang. “Daddy’s girl is coming with her book. She loves you this much.” He stretched his arms wide and giggled manically.

  “She is indeed.” Scarman drew a blade and stepped toward them.

  Henry could see the child walking down the hill, a hundred feet away now. He tensed, drawing a deep breath. Please God, let me, let me. I owe it to her mother.

  And, as Scarman swung the blade in a vicious arc toward Professor McKenna, Henry Campbell threw himself in front of it.

  ***

  The knife scythed toward my father, and I screamed. The priest launched himself between them, seeming to catch the blade in midair and lurch forward onto my father’s shoulder. For one awful moment, their faces were close enough for a kiss, before the priest slid heavily to the ground, his head lolling forward, and the gap between his shoulders and neck widening like a bloody river bed.

  A shot rang out, and the scarred one crumpled before he could react. A scream went up from the Cadaveri. One bounded up the hill toward me, blade whirling like a dervish. I was going to read, but there was no time before he was on me, his blade dancing high in the sunlight.

  He dropped. I didn’t even hear the second shot, but I could see the spreading stain across his back.

  I did what Richie had told me and hit the grass fast, crawling back up the hill. Behind me, smoke billowed from the farmhouse as the soldiers lobbed Molotov cocktails through windows. Flash-bangs hit the ground, and I squeezed my eyes shut as I wriggled away. Pollen and dust from the knee-high grass made my eyes stream. I wiped them furiously and looked back for my father, but he had gone. Cadaveri ran, screaming. Many headed for the trees. Bullets tore through their backs and their heads. I remembered what I had said to Miles. “Well, kill them for me.” Like it was nothing.

  It wasn’t nothing. I loathed these creatures, but, even now, it wasn’t nothing.

  ***

  The sniper was mildly irritated. He didn’t get angry. Anger clouded the judgment. He’d had the girl in his sights, and then that fool with the sword had come bounding up to her. Who tried to kill someone with a sword, for Christ’s sake?

  Now he’d lost her in the long grass. He took a breath and watched for movement.

  The truck cut a crazy swath through the field.

  “Get in.” Richie leaped from the passenger seat and pulled me to my feet. I ran to the rear door. My father huddled in the back seat, his clothes and face wet with blood. I had hardly swung myself inside before Richie yelled, “Go! Go!”

  Jace plunged the truck into reverse. I heard the shot this time. It hit Richie’s neck in a burst of red. I screamed, and my father grabbed me and lay on top of me in the back of the vehicle.

  Miles pulled Richie’s body onto his lap, clamping his hands to the wound, but quickly stopped. I could smell leather and blood. I lay there, watching the blood drip lazily from Richie’s neck, down his dangling arm and off his index finger onto the carpet, like it had all the time in the world.

  ***

  Back at Dad’s cottage, Jace poured drinks for everyone. Not celebratory drinks. Solemn, hard drinks which tasted like medicine. Perhaps it was. I suspect we only went back there because it had alcohol. He’d made a call, and they had laid Richie’s body in the front room with his jacket over his face. Neither Jace nor Miles said anything, but their faces were closed and hard. I tried so hard not to think about those little girls captured in plastic in his wallet. Maybe one day, someone would tell them their daddy was a hero. Maybe it should be me. I hadn’t created the situation, but I was the one who’d insisted he go to his death.

  Miles downed his drink in a single swallow and left to collect Ella.

  I crept into the front room and knelt by Richie, to hold his hand, just for a moment. His fingers were warm against mine. I wondered if those Cadaveri were still warm. I moved the jacket from his face, and the awful finality of death hit me like a punch in the stomach. I’d never seen my mother’s body. I could still see Gavin’s body bouncing on that concrete, but I couldn’t put it together with my funny, quirky friend. But Richie. He was gone, somehow. People always say that: He’s gone. But it isn’t until you look at a dead body you knew in life that you realize what they mean. This body was empty. Not that Richie was dead but that Richie wasn’t here anymore. Just this empty slack-jawed thing.

  Tears made hot trails down my cheeks. My eyes burned with them. Sorrow and guilt and shame. I’d caused this. I’d been so casual about killing, but this is what it looked like. This is what it did.

  I pulled the jacket back over Richie’s face and quietly left the room. I stopped by the bathroom and washed my face at the sink before I looked for my dad.

  Dad and Jace sat at the table. One of Dad’s hands gripped a glass of whiskey, his fingers looking like old parchment in the reflection of the warm gold. The glass shook slightly. I placed my hand over the top of his.

  “That priest—Henry—saved my life,” he whispered.

  “I saw.”

  “I heard his last words. ‘Thy will be done.’”

  “Maybe one day, he’ll be seen as one of the saints you’re always studying.”

  My father gave a sad smile. “You are so like your mother.” He took another swig of the burning amber in his glass. “I’ve been saved three times. By your mother, by Henry, and then by you.”

  I didn’t like to ask how Mum had saved him. Maybe he meant the memory of her love or something.

  “I should show you something,” he said. He got up and rummaged in an old box that had sat on a shelf in his study for ages. From it, he pulled out a journal. “When Henry turned up, I was so incensed. I was beyond rage. He was in here, you see. In her journal. I don’t know what role he played in it all, but he was there. I was so angry already that I didn’t feel them coming.

  “Your mother helped me. ‘Think of what matters, and don’t let it go.’ That’s what she taught me. So I didn’t.” He sat back down at the head of the table and took a picture from his pocket, creased and worn.

  “Mum?” I breathed, taking it from his outstretched hand.

  But it wasn’t. It was a photograph of me.

  One thick, worn hand came up over mine and held on tight. And I saw that in his own way that was what he had been doing ever since she’d died. Just holding on tight.

  ***

  Later, I slumped over a counter in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. I suspected Dad had had enough whiskey by now to last him a lifetime of dominoes matches.

  “Jace?” I said. He came over and stood so near me I could feel his body heat. “Who shot Richie?”

  “We don’t know. But whoever he is, he’s after you.”

  “Me?” It was no surprise that I was the target, but I hated what it meant. Those children had no father because of me. His wife’s true love died instead of me. “How do you know for sure?”

  “That shot that saved you on the hill? It wasn’t one of us.” Jace rubbed my hand before taking out his phone and walking into the garden.

  Chapter 21

  “Did you know Mum was a Reader?” It felt strange to be asking Dad questions like this.

  “No. I knew nothing about it then. I was so angry with her about that once she was gone.” He looked pained at the memory, but his hand patted t
he journal again. “She wrote it all down. I found it once she was—afterward.”

  Jace wandered back to us and sat next to me at the table. “Miles will take you somewhere safe to stay,” he said to my dad. “Wherever you want.”

  “What about Richie?” I asked.

  “We arranged for a military transport from a US airbase.”

  “Won’t there be questions?”

  “Nothing the Order can’t handle. He was a veteran, shot on a private security detail. We look after our own.” We. I knew he meant the military and not just the Order.

  “What about that poor priest?”

  “We’ve left an anonymous message at the Bishopric telling them where they can find him. I assume someone there will connect the dots.”

  “I was telling Callie about her mother,” said Dad, stroking the cover with his thumb.

  I reached my hand toward the little journal, a question forming on my lips, but Jace caught my hand in his own and shook his head.

  “She wanted me to protect you, I know that,” said Dad. “But how do you protect someone from this? At times, I thought she’d gone mad, invented it all, and that’s why . . . and then last night, when Henry came, and I felt those things, I think I began to understand.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dad. This was all my fault.”

  “No. No, Callie. It’s not your fault. As far as I can see, you and your mother are victims in this,” he said. He sounded tired but firm. “No one had any business involving her in the first place.” He looked up sharply at Jace.

  “Dad, it’s not Jace’s fault. He’s saved me more than once.” It was at least part of the truth. But I didn’t like being cast as a victim. My mother’s role—and my role—was more than that.

  Jace addressed my dad. “You’re right.” I looked up in horror. “I don’t think we should ever have involved your daughter. I’m sorry.”

  I shook it off. Jace’s views didn’t matter anymore. I had made a deal. He’d heard me. I’d promised to read if they saved my father.

  Dad had fixed Jace’s stare with his own. His voice was unexpectedly fierce. “Yet you have. Will you protect her? Better than I could?”

  “I’ll protect her. You have my word.”

  One small part of me was getting more than a little ticked off by this exchange of manly views. Was anyone going to include me in this conversation? Actually, Dad, I’m proud that Mum was a Reader. I’m glad I got to learn who she was.

  I didn’t say it. There was no point.

  I suddenly realized that Jace hadn’t heard Ella’s threat in the cottage before we’d left. He didn’t know she had threatened everyone I cared about. I doubted he would believe it if I told him. Not because Jace thought me a liar, but because he was a good person. He was an honorable person. Believing his own side would do something like that would crush him. And he would try to protect us from the Order. The only way I knew to protect the people I loved from the Order was to do what Ella wanted.

  So I kept quiet. I had promised to read anyway, so it made no difference. He never had to know just how ruthless Ella was.

  This wasn’t their business, Jace’s or my dad’s. It was mine. I made a vow to myself, right then and there, that I’d decide how this played out. Not Ella, not Jace. Not anyone else.

  “The Cardinal said something to me. Tried to warn me about this book.” Dad was still addressing Jace. “He said it exacted a terrible price.”

  Amber had mentioned a price, too. Was it one of the things Ella had decided I didn’t need to know? I watched Jace’s face, flickering with shadow. Eventually, he met my father’s eyes.

  “You already knew that, didn’t you?” said Dad.

  “Is anyone going to explain this to me?” I asked.

  “I will. I promise,” Jace replied, his eyes never leaving my father’s face.

  “You were telling me about Mum.” It came out more direct, more commanding, than I’d intended. Dad fumbled in the study and then returned with photos of my mother. Some I had seen before, but others were new to me. Images of her as a young student, head wrapped in a scarf, reading. On the beach with gaudy towels, and myself a fat, squidgy baby sitting in the sand. She looked happy but intent. In every photo, there was a book never far from her hand. In many, her features were obscured by the omnipresent volumes.

  Dad smiled sadly. “Sarah was so full of love, so kind. So pretty.” He looked at me then, direct, appraising. I felt as though it was the first time he had really looked at me in years. “She was always reading. books came alive for her. You could see it in her face. Like the words were building a new world in her head, bright and vibrant. She could never let things be, you know. Could never simply enjoy things for what they were. She always had to know what they meant.” His fingers traced her face on the grainy Polaroid. “I guess that’s what killed her, in the end.”

  Was this why he had lied to me? Because of the book? Or because he couldn’t bring himself to choose either word: suicide or murder?

  The kitchen tilted around me. I felt too exhausted to hear any more. An epiphany about one parent was enough for one day. Two might snap me like a twig underfoot. As I shut my eyes, I felt Jace take my hand, firmly and unobtrusively, under the table. He was right. I couldn’t stop now.

  “What exactly happened, Dad? Do you know?”

  “She was puzzling over a manuscript. She told me it was old, but she struggled to date it. A professor had given it to her. Rawlins he was called. She was trying to interpret it, write a paper on it. She told me it was defeating her. I’d never seen her look so . . . out of her depth before.” He slid his hand over his face. Even now, this was hard for him to remember.

  “I said it didn’t matter—it was merely a book. I don’t think she had ever been beaten before. I honestly don’t think she had ever tried to understand something she couldn’t handle. I didn’t realize, of course, that the book in question belonged to this Order, that she had been recruited by them as a Reader.

  “She wanted to be a mother to you so badly,” he murmured, and then he paused for so long I wondered if he’d lost track of the conversation entirely.

  “Dad?” I prompted.

  “I don’t understand all of it even now,” he blurted, as though he’d never stopped. “I only know what she recorded.” He passed his hands over his face as if he could hide from the truth. “I should have protected her, Callie, but I didn’t know. Even with you, where I knew the possibility, how could I protect you? I know I did it all wrong, but I would have done anything. I never encouraged you, never praised you for your skill, your intelligence. I would have kept you illiterate and married you to a peasant if I thought it would keep you from this. But nothing did.”

  “Dad.” I slid my fingers toward his across the table. “I need to know.”

  He sighed heavily. “She had driven to a barn on the Marchbanks’ farm. They found her car the next day, almost eighteen hours after I had reported her missing. She had hanged herself. Or those creatures had done it for her.” He looked questioningly at Jace, but Jace shook his head sadly.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  I could feel myself sitting at the table, feel my feet on the smooth wooden rung of the stool, feel Jace’s fingers squeezing tight now against my limp palm . . . but I wasn’t there. I was standing in the wide barn, mud and straw sticking to my boots, watching my mother’s body swing like a pendulum from the rafters, her head cocked at a curious angle and her boots not quite touching each other as they swung. I had been there. She had been there with me.

  “Callie.” It was a command, not a question. “Look at me.” Jace took my chin and forced my gaze to meet his eyes, flinty and searching. “Here, right now.” It was an instruction and a statement. I understood and wrenched my thoughts back to the kitchen, squeezing back on his hand.

  “I’m so sorry I failed you both,” my father said to me. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to do my best,” I said. “I promised.�
�� I broke away from Jace’s gaze.

  “Do you understand it?” Dad asked. “This book? It was the last thing your mother wrote in her journal: ‘I understand the book now. Rawlins is no help, but I understand it. May I have the courage to do what is right.’” He rested his head in his hands. “I’ve often wondered what she meant.”

  Jace interrupted the silence. “If you are intending to read, Callie, we need to leave for London. I’ll go and check the car.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him in question, and he mimed a bomb going off with his hands. Luckily, my father didn’t see. “Oh,” I said. “Good thinking.”

  Dad stood up and kissed my forehead. He looked so tired.

  “You’ll let Miles take you somewhere safe?” I asked him.

  “Of course. Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “There’s so much more I want to ask you.”

  “We’ll have time. When you’re safe.”

  I grabbed a bag and threw in some clean clothes and toiletries then walked to the car. Dad followed as far as the front door. Jace paused for a moment and said something close to my father’s ear. He listened and then, waving once, closed the door.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” Jace leaned across and opened the passenger door for me. I clambered in and slumped in the seat. I was emotionally wiped, like a tape that’s been recorded over too often. I could feel parts of myself degenerating into static.

  Jace started the engine and rolled smoothly down the lane away from Dad’s house, but he pulled over almost straight away.

  “So?” I prompted. “Are you going to explain?”

  He shifted to face me and stroked my hair back from my face. “In a minute. You look like you’ve had just about enough.”

  “Yeah. No. I’m OK.”

  “Really?”

  I shrugged both shoulders heavily. “I don’t know how I do this, Jace. If I survive the Cadaveri and the sniper, I still won’t know what to do. How to read this damn thing. Then there’s this price that Dad and Amber feel so sure I’ll have to pay.”