Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  Angelo was helping clean the breakfast dishes at the community house when Mouse came to say good-bye. “Tonight, we’ll tell Ngara and the others that we’re leaving, right?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” she said, leaning in to kiss him.

  “Be careful.”

  “You, too.”

  “I love you.”

  “Miluji tě,” she answered back in Czech. It was their ritual good-bye, a talisman of protection while they were away from each other.

  Late that afternoon, Mouse got back to the outstation first. It was quiet, no children running free from shed to shed. Even the dogs seemed to be hiding.

  She headed to the clinic to drop off the medical equipment she’d taken with her and to work on inventory. As she turned the corner of the small shed, she realized the door was ajar. She stepped cautiously over the threshold, and then she stopped.

  There was a man sitting at her desk in the corner, his back to her. The fan was running. At every turn, it lifted the long locks of his white hair.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mouse knew him by his smell. She watched him swiveling the desk chair gently from left to right, waiting, his back to the door. She could kill him with a word. He’d always been such a fool.

  “What the hell happened to your hair, Jack?”

  She sauntered into the clinic like she’d been expecting him. Fear ran over her like icy water, threatening to paralyze her, but she wouldn’t let Jack see it. She needed to learn what she could from him while there was time. She wasn’t really afraid of him—he was just a harbinger. She was scared of what would come in his wake. And of what she would have to do when it did.

  He spun around in the chair, startled, and then stammered, “Hello, Dr. Em.” He cocked his head and added, “Or whatever your name is.”

  Last time Mouse had seen Jack, he’d been sent by some mysterious benefactor to sniff around, looking for secrets about the Devil’s Bible. Jack knew “Dr. Em” to be a typical, if enigmatic, college history professor who had information he needed. He’d tracked her to Nashville, then got caught in the nasty backwash when Mouse’s father came looking for her. Mouse was sure that Jack had put the pieces together and figured out that she wasn’t what she seemed, but before she could confirm her suspicions, she’d been forced to run. She hadn’t given him much thought until she’d met Bishop Sebastian, Jack’s presumed benefactor. She figured Jack knew everything the Bishop knew. And now he’d found them.

  “Is this your first time in the outback?” she asked as she put the medical supplies she’d been carrying on the examination table.

  He chuckled but didn’t answer.

  Mouse was considering her options. She could command him to go back to wherever he’d come from and forget he’d ever been here. She could make him forget his own name. She could send him walking out into the desert, and no one would ever see him again. But in the brutal and tender confrontation with her father at Megiddo, Mouse had finally accepted that she had the power to choose what she wanted to be. Until then, she’d always thought herself a victim of her birth, of her bloodline. She’d let others define her as her father’s daughter. But no more. And in accepting her power to choose, Mouse swore she would never take that power away from anyone else—not even to protect Angelo. She would not compel Jack to do anything against his will.

  “What brings you all the way out here?” she asked.

  “You.”

  “Where’s the Bishop?” She was trying to untangle another knot that was troubling her—how had the Novus Rishi found them? It seemed too much of a coincidence that Jack would show up only a day after Angelo claimed he hadn’t called Bishop Sebastian, but Mouse didn’t like where that thread took her.

  “The Bishop?”

  “No need to play games. I know your benefactor—Bishop Sebastian.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows, and a smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Bishop Sebastian’s busy in Rome.”

  “I would have thought he’d be eager to see Angelo.” She was trying to interpret Jack’s odd demeanor—there was something here she hadn’t figured out.

  “Who’s Angelo?” Jack’s heartbeat, still racing a little from Mouse surprising him, stayed steady; he honestly didn’t know who Angelo was.

  The game shifted instantly.

  If he didn’t know about Angelo, Mouse had another play at hand, one that would keep Angelo safe. She could just leave with Jack now, before Angelo got back. She’d left Angelo behind once before to keep him safe, when she’d gone to face her father at Megiddo. Angelo had made her swear she would never do it again. If she broke that promise, she might lose him—but at least he’d be safe.

  “A mutual friend the Bishop and I share,” she answered.

  “And he’s here?” Jack looked nervously past her shoulder.

  “No. It’s just me.” Mouse chewed at her lip. Something here didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t the Bishop tell Jack about Angelo? The answer came quick on the heels of the question. Someone else must have sent Jack. “How about you? You got a traveling buddy?”

  Jack smirked and shrugged his shoulders. But Mouse read the truth all over him.

  “It was stupid to come here alone, Jack.”

  He held the smile but shifted in his seat, and Mouse heard his heart jump. He was scared of her. She played with the moment, stretching and leaning against the table, but she kept her eyes on Jack. The fan flipped his hair.

  “What happened to you?” she asked again, leaning forward and tugging at a lock as it lifted in the blown air.

  He flinched at the movement and pushed his chair back a little, but he never stopped smiling. “Do you like it?”

  She shrugged. “Makes you look older.”

  “I guess you’d know, huh?”

  She laughed. So he had learned some things in Nashville. But how much did he know? And if the Bishop wasn’t his source, Mouse needed to know who was. “Did you figure that out all on your own? I mean, you were never the best student—”

  “I knew there was something wrong about you when I left Nashville.” He cocked his head and waited a beat. “The Rabbi filled in most of the rest.”

  Mouse took his bait. “The Rabbi?”

  Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees and chin in hand, his face dripping with smugness. “My benefactor.”

  “Ah,” she said. She lifted her eyebrows and then shrugged. “You got me. Even the worst students do something right now and then. So, is that why you’re here? Did the Rabbi send you to find me again?”

  Jack looked down at something he held in his hand. “It wasn’t easy.”

  “How’d you do it?”

  “We’ve been looking for over a year.”

  “Why? I don’t have any secret notes on the Devil’s Bible. I’m happy to talk to your Rabbi about my theories, but—”

  He looked up and smirked. “You said no games, Dr. Em. You know I’m not here about the Devil’s Bible.”

  Mouse sighed and nodded. There was nothing to gain from playing dumb about the Novus Rishi—Jack had been the first one to tell her about them, even if he hadn’t called them by name. “Okay. So you’re working with the Novus Rishi, and they sent you to find me. How’d you do it?”

  “Hard work and sacrifice, as any good research project demands, just like you taught me.” He leaned back in his chair. “Don’t you want to sit down?”

  “Don’t you want to tell me about your hard work and sacrifice?”

  “I do, actually. But I want you to be comfortable.”

  “You think you have the upper hand here, Jack, but you don’t. Your masters sent you out here by yourself, and they clearly didn’t arm you well with all the information you need. I know you’re a little scared of me, but a little scared isn’t nearly enough.”

  He held her gaze, but she could hear the blood rushing through his veins and see the goose bumps rise on his skin.

  “Knowing how I found you
isn’t going to help you, Dr. Em,” he said and crossed his arms. “I’ll skip over the boring parts, but just know I did my groundwork. You’d be proud of my research—a year’s worth of tedium, panning through so much shit while I was looking for gold. But then I found it—silver, not gold—in the Golem’s attic of the old synagogue in Prague.”

  “What did you find?”

  “An amulet.”

  “With a spell inside?”

  “The professor gets an A.”

  “The spell was to give the Golem life?” Mouse, of course, knew the story well.

  Jack laughed. “Uh-oh. Lost a point on that one. I thought the same thing. But turns out, it was a locator spell so the rabbi who made the Golem—”

  “Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel,” Mouse said.

  “No one cares how smart you are.”

  Mouse snapped her eyes toward him. He didn’t sound like himself.

  “Anyway, the spell was so the rabbi could find the Golem if he lost control of it and it ran away,” Jack said, his voice suddenly light and conversational again.

  Like the fan in the corner, Mouse’s mind swiveled from one problem to the next. She worked to estimate Angelo’s return and set a mental clock ticking down the minutes—less than an hour, she guessed. She was also trying to anticipate the Novus Rishi’s next move. Were they on the way? How would Jack have contacted them from out here to let them know he’d found her? Was he supposed to bring Mouse back alone? How did he think he would manage that? And what the hell was wrong with him? She needed him to keep talking.

  “Why would a location spell turn your hair white?” she asked.

  “It didn’t. The curse the rabbi laid on the amulet did.”

  Mouse nodded. “That way, the rabbi would know if someone else was trying to find the Golem, to steal it or use it for their own purpose.”

  “The Reverend said it was like the dye pack that explodes if someone steals money from a bank.”

  “The Reverend?”

  Mouse’s heightened senses were focused on reading Jack. He’d intentionally mentioned the Rabbi earlier to show Mouse she didn’t understand the game at play, trying to make her second-guess her options. But this name-dropping had been a mistake—just the mention of the Reverend sent Jack’s heart skipping. He was terrified.

  “We have a Bishop, a Rabbi, and now a Reverend. Sounds like you’re setting me up for a joke, Jack.”

  “Yeah, well this one’s not funny,” he spat back.

  Mouse studied him. Jack had always been arrogant and cowardly, but now he seemed erratic, swinging from overt confidence to palpable fear like he was hanging on by a thread. He clearly wasn’t himself. “This isn’t funny to me either,” she said softly. “You seem like you’re in trouble. Let me help you.”

  He burst out laughing. “I think you’re the one in trouble, Dr. Em. Me? I’m golden. I found you.”

  “Let’s finish that story. You got zapped by a curse but discovered a locator spell for your trouble. That wouldn’t have been enough to find me. Spells don’t work just because someone reads them out loud.”

  He stood up. “God, it’s hot in here!” He put the thing he was holding down on the desk and tugged at the sleeve of his jacket, peeling it off and exposing a sweat-soaked T-shirt underneath.

  “Maybe wearing all black in the middle of the desert wasn’t a great idea,” Mouse said, but she was looking at the thing he dropped on the desk. It was rolling gently back and forth.

  “Shows off the hair,” Jack replied as he reached over and closed his hand around the tiny wooden mouse on the desk.

  “That’s mine,” she said.

  Angelo had given it to her in the airport in Prague. She’d carried it with her when she’d gone to confront her father at Megiddo. She’d pulled it out of her pocket and clung to it when she was dying. She had been alone and wanted a reminder that someone in the world loved her, thought her good. She’d assumed that the tiny, battered mouse still lay among the rubble of a millennium’s worth of human destruction atop the place many believed would be the site of the final war, of Armageddon. To know that her little mouse was in enemy hands ignited her anger.

  “I want it back.”

  “Sure. I don’t need it now.” Jack tossed it to her and leaned his forearms against the back of the chair.

  As she caught it, Mouse saw that it was stained with her blood, and her anger shifted to fear as the pieces fell into place. A spell to locate something. Her blood. There was only one element missing—power to fuel the spell. She reached out with her uncanny senses, searching.

  “What’s in your pocket?” she asked, already knowing.

  “The last part of the puzzle you’re trying to work out.” He looked over at her, grinning, his eyes alive with something that didn’t belong to him. “My treasure—and I had to sift through actual rubble for this one-of-a-kind nugget.”

  As he pulled it from his pocket, Mouse shuddered. He held a shard of stone between his middle finger and thumb, the point of it driving into the rounded flesh of his fingertips. It was dull and flaky on one side, but the other was vividly painted with a piece of a portrait.

  Mouse knew the source. She was looking at a rendering of her own brilliant, green eye, with just the beginning curve of her nose at the edge where the stone had broken. It was her father’s work, a shattered remnant of his portrait of her from the walls of her cell in the monastery at Podlažice. And it was charged with his power just as it had been when that power had poured into her, tempting her with all her wants, filling her with desire, searing her with ambition until she thought she would explode.

  “That’s not treasure, Jack. It’s a bomb.”

  He laughed again. “I’ve had this for weeks. Nothing’s happened.”

  “It has. It’s changed you.”

  “Made me stronger maybe, but—”

  “Do you remember what you felt when you touched the Devil’s Bible?”

  “Exactly—power. And now I have a piece of it all my own.”

  The same energy that her father had poured into the Devil’s Bible had fueled the traps he’d left for Mouse in the ruins of the monastery. Echoes of it dusted the piece of stone in Jack’s hand. That malevolent energy twisted a person’s mind, made them do things.

  “You don’t want that, Jack,” she said, her voice filled with the concern of a teacher for her student.

  “The hell I don’t.”

  “Did you ever read about what happened to some of the people who worked with the Devil’s Bible? They went mad.” She shook her head. “Please, I know . . . I know what it can do to you. It feels good at first, but then it claims you, twists your mind—”

  “You scared I might use it against you?”

  Mouse couldn’t stop a laugh from barking out and bouncing around the tiny clinic, but it made her feel sick. “Do you even know why the Novus Rishi sent you to find me?”

  “The Rabbi wants you dead.”

  Mouse paused. It was new information but not that surprising. The Bishop had made it clear that if she would not fight for the Novus Rishi, they would do whatever they had to do to take her out of the game.

  “Why does he want me dead? What am I to the Novus Rishi?” She already knew, but she wanted to make Jack understand.

  “A threat.”

  “Exactly. Have you asked yourself why?”

  He just looked at her.

  “Because I’m dangerous, Jack. The power you hold in your palm can do nothing to me. Its source is my source. That same power runs through my veins but a hundred times stronger than your little sliver of it.”

  She took a step toward him. He clenched his fist around the stone in his hand and shoved himself back into his chair. And then Mouse heard what she’d been waiting for—the distant whine of an engine, one she knew. Angelo was home.

  She rammed the chair back against the wall, the wooden legs squealing against the concrete floor. Jack threw his hands up, instinctively, and Mouse’s painted eye fell to
the floor, staring up at her. She scooped it up with one hand and grabbed Jack’s wrist with the other as she rushed up beside him, twisting his arm to his side and up his back. She shoved him out of the chair and pressed the sharp point of the shard against his carotid artery.

  “You’re alive because I want you that way, Jack,” she said, her voice cool and matter-of-fact. “You fight me, and the sharp edge of your treasure gets jammed into your artery and you die.”

  She sounded convincing even to her own ears, though she knew she would never kill him. Mouse meant for there to be no more deaths weighing on her soul.

  “We’re going out the door and across the yard,” she continued. “You’re probably thinking about how much bigger you are, how easy it would be to take me. Just remember—your friends know I’m so dangerous they want me dead.”

  She pushed him through the still-open door and out into the torrid heat toward the community house. She saw Jack’s four-wheel drive parked behind the long, low building. The caterpillar cloud of dust signaling Angelo’s return moved steadily closer along the horizon. Ngara and several other women came out of the community house carrying hunting spears and circled around Mouse and Jack.

  “This is not your friend,” Ngara said. “He lies.”

  Mouse let loose of Jack’s arm and kicked him at the back of the knees, making him drop into the dirt as the women closed ranks, dozens of spearheads pointing at his head and chest.

  She pocketed the piece of painting and stepped back to speak to Ngara. “Angelo and I need to leave.”

  “Where will you go, little one?”

  The tenderness of Ngara’s voice pulled at a sharp thread of sadness running through Mouse’s fear and anger. She didn’t want to say good-bye this way. “I don’t want to tell you anything that might put you and the others in more danger. I’ve already brought you much trouble. This man is only the lightning strike, Ngara. The bush fire is coming.”

  “How soon?” The old woman squinted as she scanned the land behind the community house.