Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “Put your pretty face on,” Mouse shot back.

  Her father walked back toward her, little flecks of shimmering blackness falling all around him as he transformed into his human visage, pale skin framed with dark hair that was thick and carefully messy, a scruffy goatee setting off his eyes, which were so black they looked pupil-less. “Satisfied?” he asked.

  She nodded. “It’s a start,” she said and fiddled with the edge of her cloak. But she had one more dig to get in. “You say you want him to know the real you—are you going to show him the real you on the inside, too? Because that’s the part that’s likely to scare him off. Are you going to tell him about all the things you’ve done?”

  “Someday.”

  “I bet,” she scoffed. “Why would you?”

  “Because I need him to trust me. And trust is built on truth. But all in good time.”

  A tickle of warning played at the edge of Mouse’s indifference, but she didn’t care enough to chase it. She hopped off the table. “Let’s give this another go.”

  “Focus on what you want.” He put his hands on her shoulders as she bowed her head.

  Mouse’s frame had started to fill out again, but she still looked starved of light and care, and she had shaved her head—nothing soft belonged to her. She was a furnace full of ashes, dead and cold except when Luc’s words stoked her rage. She used them now to fuel her want and her power. Make them sorry for what they did.

  She pulled the cloak around her once more and let the words drive out everything else. When she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

  The white salt-sand of Lake Disappointment stretched out around her, tiny sparks twinkling like diamonds under the rising moon that hung low in the sky. There was no sign of the attack—no bullet casings, no crimson stains, no charred remains of the helicopter that had been pulled down. All was as it had been, as it should be. Her father said it had been over a year. For her, it felt like only days or a handful of weeks since she was last here.

  Mouse knelt on the little rise that had sheltered her and Angelo. She let her eyes slip out of focus, and her perfect memory played out the scene. She fought the urge to duck and cover her head. She swallowed the bitter taste of adrenaline. She let herself feel it all for the first time—the fear and the guilt about what she could have done differently, about all the things she might have done to save Angelo. She let the emotions come, but she would not allow her body to react to them. No racing heart. No jolt of the body when she remembered too perfectly the sound of the bullets firing.

  No tears when Angelo fell.

  She let all that raw emotion build until she thought she would rupture, flinging pieces of her among the salt crystals, and then Mouse fed it all to her rage as she replayed the scene once more in her mind. She focused on the faces of the soldiers, slowed down the action so she could keep count of who had died at the hands of the demons and who had lived.

  Four men.

  They went on a list in her mind. She closed her eyes and filtered through the smells—fuel and oil from the helicopters, the dry saltiness of the swirling soil, a sulfuric rottenness from the demons, the metallic twang of the flying bullets, her sweat, Angelo’s—and she pushed them all aside until she could zero in on the unique scents of the four surviving soldiers.

  Citrus. Musk. Bay rum. Cedar.

  Then she added another name to her list. She didn’t need to smell him. His face stayed in her mind always. It had driven out even Angelo’s. She focused on that face behind the windshield of the helicopter and read the words as his lips formed them. She’d repeated them so often they’d drowned out Angelo’s last pleas of surrender.

  “Take the girl down. The priest doesn’t matter. Kill him,” the Reverend had said.

  The Reverend.

  He made five. Five targets . . . for a start.

  Mouse stood, the outback wind whipping her cloak behind her, and she looked up to the massive spread of star-filled sky. All her life she had craved the light.

  Andílek, remember that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Through seven hundred years and beyond the grave, Father Lucas could still call to her conscience. He had fed her on the idea that she could be the light in the darkness. Mouse had chased that dream like a moth, incessantly fluttering around the flame that would inevitably sear away the gossamer wings and send it crashing down into the fire.

  Just as it had her father. Just as it had her.

  She would chase the light no more, she swore. She would exorcise her conscience. She would sacrifice her soul—completely, irrevocably. And she knew the first step for such a ritual. Like the medieval Christians of her childhood, she would undertake a pilgrimage, an unholy pilgrimage to strangle what was left of her hope and goodness so she could do what she needed to do.

  Mouse lifted her face to stare boldly up at the heavens once more. But her eyes weren’t drawn to the stars this time. Instead, she drank in the empty darkness between the light.

  Mouse lifted her eyes to the chandelier. The empty sockets of a hundred human skulls stared back at her. Rows of femurs dangled below twisted vertebrae like ashen pendalogues. She imagined the heavy clunk they would make in a breeze—such a dull contrast to the delicate tinkling of their more traditional crystal counterparts.

  The flash of a camera blinded her for a second, and she spun toward the handful of tourists gawking at the bone chandelier or oohing and aahing at the skull bunting draped between rafters in the Sedlec Ossuary.

  “The church is closed. Get out,” Mouse commanded with a flick of her hand.

  The tourists turned on their heels and walked without a word to the large oak doors, bent their heads against the bright sunlight, and left Mouse alone in the bone church.

  A feather of guilt tickled at Mouse’s conscience. But that would be gone soon enough, she thought as she looked down at the items clutched against her chest. Despite having lived so long, Mouse had little to show for it. A woman on the run couldn’t carry much. She’d learned a long time ago to let go of things. Most things.

  Through all her comings and goings, she had held tight to the stone angel Father Lucas had given her as a christening gift when she was a little girl, full of hope. She had left it with Angelo before Megiddo, a token for him to remember her by when she was so sure she would never come back. But Mouse had kept a handful of other objects, too, items binding her to people she had loved, people who had loved her. She had always thought of them as anchors to her humanity, to all that had been right in her life—all that had been good in her.

  She had no use for any of that now.

  Her boots clacked against the stone floor in the empty church as she marched toward one of four large pyramids built from a thousand bones. She knelt at the iron gate that kept visitors an arm’s length from the pyramid, and she unburdened herself of the objects she was carrying. The Sedlec Ossuary wasn’t her first stop. It was her last.

  Mouse had gone to her conventional hidey-holes first—a smattering of the world’s oldest and most secure banks, places she hadn’t even taken Angelo. She had gathered up all her nests of false identities, closing off her escape routes into a new life. Mouse was done pretending to be something she wasn’t. She knew, now, what she really was. Not good. Not a teacher. Not a healer. Not a girl, nor a woman either. Not human. Not loved. She was her father’s daughter, immortal, a demon. And the world could accept her or not—she didn’t care anymore.

  She’d also gone to the mountaintops around Devil’s Lake in the Sumava forest in Bohemia—Czechia, she reminded herself. A giant sycamore stood in the place where once another had been. The remembered one had been struck by lightning and carved by a young Mouse into the angel Raphael more than seven hundred years ago. Mouse had burned that statue as it held the body of her beloved Bohdan when she sent him to heaven, where he belonged. Another sycamore had grown from the ashes of the dead one. Even the new one was old and sick now.

  Mouse had no sorrow
to shed for it.

  She had knelt at the base of the tree, taken a nearby fallen branch, and gouged it into her palm, tearing at the flesh. She whispered the words of a revealing spell as her blood dripped against the weathered, peeling bark of the tree. The dirt around the trunk had bubbled and buckled, as if a large mole were tunneling upward, and then a small glass jar rolled to the surface. The glass was a beautiful, deep lapis blue with an intricate overlay of silver scrollwork. Inside, distorted by the old, wavy glass, was a tuft of wolf’s fur.

  Mouse had snatched the jar and pulled the cloak around her once more.

  When she’d stepped out of the dark a second time, Mouse had still been surrounded by trees, but the earthy scents of the mountain spruce gave way to the sweeter linden tree and the sharp twang of wildflowers. They grew hip high and twisted in and about the dozens of headstones scattered around Mouse. The sun was in the same low spot against the horizon—Teplá wasn’t far from the Sumava.

  Many of the markers were broken and overgrown, but Mouse wasn’t looking for names or a date. She knew where she needed to go. At the far back, nearest the tree line that inched ever closer to the neglected cemetery, were the oldest graves. Mother Kazi, the woman who had helped to raise Mouse at the abbey in Teplá, the woman who had trained Mouse as a healer, the woman who was the closest Mouse ever had to a real mother, lay buried under seven centuries of dirt at Mouse’s feet. An obscure nun with no family beyond her Norbertine brothers and sisters, Mother Kazi was remembered by no one except Mouse. She had only a flat stone to mark her remains—a stone carved with a bellflower that Mouse had laid herself as she wept for her lost Mother.

  Mouse had no more tears to give.

  The stone had sunk beneath the onslaught of time, but Mouse knew it was there, waiting for her. She stretched her hand wide to open the wound so the blood would flow again. When she called to the stone, the stone rose to answer her. Beneath it, wrapped in the gauzy glow of Mouse’s protection spell, was Mother Kazi’s old satchel, filled with the tools of her healer’s trade. Tools she had passed down to Mouse. Tools Mouse had treasured as a reminder that she was a healer before she was her father’s daughter.

  Mouse pulled the satchel free of the spell and the invading roots and held it to her chest. Then she tugged at the cloak again.

  The air had become instantly musty and thick at her third destination, and her eyes had needed a moment to adjust to the dim light. She had peered out of a small square window that looked down to the Vltava River. Tourists milled about the base of the tower, but no one was allowed into the seven-hundred-year-old structure. Mouse spun on her heel and up the aged stone steps, higher and higher, past landings with doors that opened onto rounded rooms. They were empty now, but in her memory, she saw them as they were when she lived here at Rozemberk Castle.

  Those had been dark days but for the singular shining joy of her son, Nicholas. As she had rounded the last of the steps and entered the top room nestled under the cone roof, Mouse had sunk to her knees, no longer able to keep the ghosts at bay. She had shared this room with her son centuries ago, though she could still smell the flowers they had gathered together in the gardens, could hear the happy crackle of a fire in the hearth. She could feel the weight of her baby’s head resting on her shoulder as she sang to him, could hear his coos and cries in her mind as if they were real again.

  Joy and loss burned in her chest, but Mouse would not grant them release.

  She squeezed her fists until her nails cut into her skin. She walked the width of the room to a bracing rafter that swept up from the stone wall to join the beams of the roof. Her hand was already bleeding. She laid it against the dusty wood and whispered the words of her spell, her voice throaty and dark from fighting the growing sorrow. A panel of wood slid back to expose a hidden compartment that held a wooden statue of a mother holding her infant son, nursing him as she sang the words of a lullaby carved at the base: You are loved, little one, you are loved.

  Mouse had gripped the statue like a club. She had closed her eyes, too weak in her newborn indifference to withstand the powerful feelings this place evoked. She couldn’t pull the cloak around her quickly enough.

  And now she’d come to the last and holiest place of her pilgrimage: the monastery where Father Lucas had died protecting her, where she had washed his tortured body, where she had been good and kind and left him dead, in peace, on the stone table and then watched the monks take his body and boil the flesh from his bones so they could use them in their grisly sanctuary.

  Mouse knelt beside her reclaimed treasures in the Sedlec Ossuary and looked up at the mountain of bones before her. Lost among the thousands were those of Father Lucas. But she hadn’t come for bones. Mouse had come for her soul.

  She gripped the iron bars of the gate and started climbing. As she reached the opening at the top, a stripe of sunlight crawled across the floor under the chandelier as someone opened the door.

  “I said get out!” Mouse ordered, her power filling the words with her will.

  The door snapped shut, and Mouse climbed over the top railing and dropped down to the platform beside the bone pyramid. She crouched near an opening on the facing wall. Dozens of coins from different countries lay scattered among the skulls at the opening. Tourists had tossed tokens to the dead. For what? Mouse wondered. What fortune did they expect from a wishing well of dismantled skeletons?

  She thrust her hand into the opening, her palm still oozing blood, and said her spell. The book dropped from somewhere higher on the inside of the bone structure. She caught it and pulled it out. Her hand was shaking. The small leather book felt like the weight of the world to Mouse.

  Father Lucas’s breviary.

  The backs of the pages of his most cherished psalms were covered with his notes. Mouse had read them many times over the years before she had decided it wasn’t safe to carry her treasures with her and had hidden them. She hadn’t seen the familiar sweep and scroll of his handwriting with her own eyes in hundreds of years. She knew the words of his notes by heart, not only because of her perfect memory but because she had heard them so many times, read them so many times, recited them to herself in times of darkness.

  His notes were for her. They spoke of goodness and perseverance. They spoke of mercy and forgiveness. They spoke of love.

  Mouse hardened herself like armor against each of them.

  She slid the book into the waistband at her back and climbed out of the enclosure. She gathered up the souvenirs of her journey and wrapped the cloak around her a final time.

  “Where’ve you been?” Luc asked as she materialized beside the table in the circular white marble room of her father’s house.

  “Were you waiting on me?”

  “Yes. I cut my thumb.” The boy was sitting in the doorway holding up a bandaged finger.

  “Do you need for me to look at it?” she asked as she put her things on the table.

  “You were gone so long it’s all better now.” He stood and came close to the table. “What are those things?”

  “Things that don’t belong to me anymore.” She walked to the rounded wall behind the table where she still slept on the floor, her backpack a pillow, and dug her hand into the front pocket of the bag. She turned back to the table.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Luc was eyeing the pile of papers, jar, satchel, statue, and book as any child might—with a gleam of desire.

  As answer to his question, Mouse put her hand over the pile. “Burn,” she commanded.

  The papers and passports took fire immediately, as did Father Lucas’s breviary. A tiny ghost of her little-girl-self cried out as she watched the leather shrivel and melt—Oh, God, what have I done.

  The new, hard Mouse eviscerated that ancient, naïve one with the other truth she knew was tucked into the binding at the back of the breviary—a letter written just before Father Lucas’s death, telling Mouse who her real father was. Mouse had worked hard all her life to believe as Father Luc
as believed—that she was not simply her father’s daughter. That she had the same capacity for goodness and evil as any person. That she had the power to choose.

  But Mouse didn’t want to choose anymore. Not what she ate or where she slept or what she wore or whether or not she lived. The only choice that mattered was the one that had peeled her up off the floor and gave her a singular purpose—vengeance. And she didn’t care if it was right or wrong. She didn’t care if she was good or not.

  She bent her head as Father Lucas’s voice filled her mind, unwanted. You turn the knife on those who hurt you. But I have taught you to do better.

  Mouse gritted her teeth against the memory and held her hand out over the flame to drop a last object on the funeral pyre of her old self. It was all she had left of the life she’d lived before Lake Disappointment. She told her hand to open and drop the little wooden mouse in the fire. Her hand trembled but held tight to the last remaining bit of her life with Angelo. Mouse held her arm over the flame until the heat started to blister her skin, bubbling at the wrist. She looked up to see Luc watching her, his face full of wonder.

  Furious at her weakness, she pivoted away from him, pulling the cloak around her as she spun.

  The music was loud, but not loud enough for Mouse. She needed to drive out what was left of the voices in her head.

  She wove between people on the crowded dance floor to get closer to the band. The walls of the underground tunnel flashed with neon pink and red lights. Grainy images of an old Tod Browning movie about carnival sideshow performers flickered against the curved roof of the tunnel. Posters for the headlining techno group plastered the wall behind them, declaring WE’RE ALL FREAKS HERE! The pub at Forte Prenestino was known for attracting the best of the fringe bands.

  Mouse and Angelo had lived at the Forte for a couple of weeks during their wandering year after fleeing Israel. Coming back to Rome had been Mouse’s idea—a strategic one. She’d figured Rome would be the last place Bishop Sebastian would think to look for his prodigal son on the run. They had returned to the city in the back of a cargo truck and come to the Forte—an actual military fort abandoned decades earlier and co-opted by the counterculture, many of them members of the local arts community, many young, all of them people who had been shunned by the wealthier pockets of Rome. They had repurposed the buildings, turned underground barracks into homes for the homeless and the tunnels and courtyards into event spaces where they hosted festivals and concerts to raise money to support the growing community of people living off the grid. Mouse and Angelo had only been two more in the midst of hundreds of displaced people.