She knew it had been the happiest two weeks Angelo had spent during that year of relentless running. Compassion, understanding, harmony, she could hear him say in her head—his priestly idea of God’s vision for the world and what he thought the community at the Forte strived to achieve. He said it gave him hope.
Mouse had come here to purge Angelo’s hope from her head. He was dead. And she had no use for hope anymore. She gripped the little wooden mouse in her hand so hard it cut into her palm as she shoved it into her pocket, and then she wove herself into the crowd.
“Dance with me,” she said to a man standing beside her, her power pressing easily against each word like it belonged there. Oh, andílek, the ghost of Father Lucas chastised her as the stranger turned his back on his partner and stepped close to Mouse. A spicy, rich butterscotch smell from the beer in his hand encircled her as he leaned down and asked her name.
“Mouse,” she said, her chin lifted defiantly.
His mouth curled into a crooked grin, but he said nothing as his eyes slid over her body. He put his free hand around her waist and they swayed and bounced to the hypnotic rhythm of the music.
Mouse looked into the stranger’s face, but as the neon lights flashed from pinks and reds to yellows and oranges, her mind twisted the man’s features into Angelo’s, morphed the sweetness of his cologne into the smells of coffee and linen and olive oil—Angelo’s scent.
She shook her head angrily and pulled away from the strange arm holding her. The man kept dancing beside her. She turned to the woman on her left.
“Dance with me,” Mouse said.
The woman ran her hand over Mouse’s shaved head and down her neck as she rolled her hips, her other arm raised and twisting in time to the beats playing against the tinny thwang of an oud. Her breasts bobbed up and down. Mouse waited for the music to penetrate her, to fill her mind. The beat was hard, strong. But it wasn’t enough.
For my sake, little andílek, be strong and believe in your goodness as I do, Father Lucas whispered.
“Louder,” she cried out to the band.
The drum machines and synthesizers surged, pounding the walls and low ceiling.
Mouse waited. She felt Angelo’s lips on her neck, his hand at the small of her back, and she turned, a smile almost pulling at her mouth until she saw the stranger bent over her.
“Louder!” she commanded, the smile twisting to a sneer. “Dance harder,” she said to the man and woman. Their faces lost any signs of life. They stared back, blank and empty, as they moved frantically to the music.
Come now, another voice echoed in her mind. You’re playing dress up—wearing dark clothes, torching your toys, fondling one or two souls. Mouse could feel her father chuckle in her head. If you’re really trying to cauterize your conscience and sear away those virtuous voices, it takes more than a sizzle. It takes an inferno.
People at the back of the pub were covering their ears and complaining about the noise, and some started to leave. Mouse shoved her way through the crowd.
“Stay. Dance,” she ordered, her voice quiet, but the fierceness of her intent drove the command outward. The people dropped their hands from their ears and started to dance.
Mouse used a chair to step up onto the bar so she could look down on the scene. The lights flashed, the movie ran fast-forward—images of a clown and conjoined twins and little people blurring into one another. Legless, armless torsos. Bald, childlike giants. Mouse closed her eyes.
There was no Angelo. No vision of him in her head, no remembered smells or touch. He was finally gone.
With a sigh of relief, she opened her eyes.
I beg you, andílek, do not turn your back on what is right and good.
Mouse growled and sucked in a breath. Father Lucas was with her still. Always Father Lucas. She threw her hands up to her shaved head, squeezing at the sides as if she would crush it—anything to rid herself of his tender voice.
“Louder!” she yelled. The repetitive synthesizer notes now screamed like air-raid sirens, the heavy base dropping on the crowd like bombs and sending a concussive wave shuddering through the tunnel. Mouse felt her eardrum pop, needles of pain shooting into her head and down her neck. Some of the people screamed and pulled at their ears.
“Dance!” she yelled.
And they did—frantic, erratic movements no longer connected to the music, which was now only noise.
Mouse waited a heartbeat and a breath. No voices came to her. No visions of the dead. No pangs of conscience. No ache of remorse. Her mind and soul were void.
Coldly, she looked down on the writhing people, some with thin threads of blood trickling down bare necks. She put her hand in her pocket, pulled out the little wooden mouse, and flung it into the crowd.
“Stop dancing. Stop playing,” she said impassively.
The room went quiet and still. She stood in the silence, nodding to herself. She was finally ready for the hunt. Mouse had people to kill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ready or not, here I come!” Luc called out.
Mouse held her breath and braced herself against the branches inside the yew tree. Luc was on the other side of the yard, turning around the corner of the Austrian chalet that had just become their new home. They’d moved a few days after Mouse had come back from her pilgrimage. Loosed from the anchors to her humanity, Mouse had found herself antsy, unsettled. The eerie stillness of her father’s house had felt claustrophobic. Playing on her promise to “fix” Luc, she had convinced her father that the boy needed a change of scenery and some fresh air and sunshine.
There had been nothing fresh or sunny about her father’s house—if it was a house. It felt like another world or no place at all, a pocket stitched into that shadowy no-man’s-land between time and space that Mouse had learned to travel. Maybe it was hell. But it was no place for a Pinocchio boy trying to be human.
The round white marble room that she had come to think of as hers had opened into a seemingly endless string of other rooms in her father’s house, mostly empty but for a few exceptions. Luc’s room had a bed but no toys, no books. There was a sparse bathroom that stank of soured urine and a room that seemed to be covered in blood splatter—some of it black and cracking with age, some still moist and thick like glue. Another room might have been a display in a museum, various devices set up around the walls—a Judas chair still encrusted with evidence of its victims, a rack, and a table lined with smaller torture tools like the Pear of Anguish. Shoved back against the side wall was a small metal box with a tiny slot closed off by an iron grille. Mouse’s first love, Ottakar, had nearly lost his life and his mind in such a box. Wearing her new indifference, she had shrugged off the memory and moved on.
The adjacent room had been covered with mirrors, every inch of the wall and ceiling glistening with reflective glass, some old and wavy, some perfectly clear. Four ornate, freestanding floor-length mirrors stood in the corners. Even the floor was a polished silver. Mirrors inside mirrors inside mirrors, and all of them showing her herself. Mouse hadn’t gone back in that room.
The most ordinary room Mouse had found in her father’s abode held a discordant collection of furniture—a few couches, ranging in style from Victorian to art deco, along with chairs, a wicker bird cage filled with dried flowers and the desiccated remains of a blue bird, and a tin lantern with punched holes in the shape of a rainbow between clouds, the candle inside still burning. Mouse had moved a couple of couches into a larger, open space to create a makeshift family room where they had spent most of their time—when she wasn’t out hunting.
Even with her efforts to make it more human for Luc, her father’s home still felt like a place crafted outside of time. Or a prison. Mouse had found no windows and no way out. There were no sounds of birdsong or traffic or wind or rain. She also never found her father’s room.
Despite the inhuman surroundings, Mouse’s influence had evoked dramatic changes in Luc. Though he never said anything about it, he was clearly mo
re relaxed when his father wore his human form. Luc stood taller himself and walked with more natural ease. His father noticed, so when Mouse had suggested that Luc needed room to run and play in order to be less demon and more boy, her father had whisked them to this little village just outside Innsbruck, Austria, to the chalet, which was warm and cozy and everything normal, everything her father’s place was not.
The afternoon sun now filtered down from a sky that was robin’s-egg blue. Luc paused at the backyard swings, the mountains sitting like waiting giants behind him. The boy lowered his head a moment and then lifted it, smiling, and walked in a direct line toward the yew tree and Mouse.
“Found you!” He reached in and grabbed her leg.
An image of herself hugging him and laughing at his cleverness darted into her mind. Some remnant of the old Mouse knew it was what she ought to do, what she wanted to do, but the void inside her now swallowed it up before it could take hold. “How’d you find me so quickly?” she asked vacantly as she climbed down.
“I listened like you taught me. I heard your heartbeat.”
“Well done. Now it’s your turn to hide.”
His face beamed with joy. “I like this game. I’m good at it.”
“I’ll count to a hundred.”
“No peeking!”
“I promise.”
Mouse sat in the swing and closed her eyes. She’d been spending most of her days with Luc, teaching him, playing with him, listening to him. But she spent her nights searching for the first four people on her list—citrus, musk, bay rum, and cedar.
She didn’t sleep.
“Ready or not, here I come.” Despite the change in location and the cozy comfort of the new home her father filled with the trappings of a normal life, despite the bright sun on her face, Mouse still felt like a stranger to herself, her voice dull and dead like sounds underwater.
She walked barefoot through the grass, listening for a breath or a heartbeat or a giggle. Luc had given himself away more than once because he couldn’t stop laughing when she got close. He didn’t seem bothered by Mouse’s robotic nature. He liked her anyway.
She cocked her head, listening harder, but there was no sound of him. Mouse walked around the corner toward the front of the house. She searched the front yard, all the trees and the bushes. She went back into the house.
“Luc!” she called. The house was empty. Her father was gone.
Mouse walked out onto the patio. “Luc! You win. Come out now!”
Her mouth went dry. She strained her ears, filtering out the hum of the ski lift a mile or so behind the house. A copse of evergreens stood between the house and ski slope. Mouse took off for the trees, calling, “Luc!”
As she broke through into the shadows and saw the thick underbrush, she recognized a twinge of panic. She couldn’t hear him or see him anywhere. She closed her eyes and used her power, searching for a glow. But Mouse had never bothered to check to see if Luc had the soft wash of light that she’d come to understand was a person’s soul. She had only ever seen a flicker of her own, once, when she was dying at Megiddo. Would Luc have one?
A murky darkness playing against the back of her eyelids seemed to be her answer until she saw a faint shimmer deep in the thicket at the base of a giant sequoia. Mouse ran.
He wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t beating. But as she came closer, the glow of him grew fuller and brighter. Luc’s collarbone jutted up like a knot under the skin above the neck of his tangled shirt, and he had sequoia needles in his hair.
She dropped down beside his little body. “Breathe,” she commanded.
Nothing happened.
Mouse lowered her mouth to his and pushed her own air into his lungs. She pressed down on his chest, pumping his heart. It only took a little encouragement for it to start beating again on its own. Luc sucked in a gaspy breath and then screamed in pain.
Resurrecting her healer’s skills, Mouse quickly set the bone back in place, bent his arm at the elbow, and held it still as she helped him sit up. “I know it hurts, Luc. But we need to get back to the house so I can wrap your arm to keep it stable. It will hurt less then, and it will all be well by tomorrow. I promise. Can you stand?”
He nodded and let her lift him up to his feet.
“I can carry you, but I’m afraid it will jostle the bone you’ve broken and make it hurt worse. Can you walk?”
“I think so,” he said through his tears.
Back in the chalet, Mouse took only minutes to wrap his arm and settle him with pillows and a fuzzy blanket on the couch watching cartoons. She sat with his feet in her lap. He liked having his feet rubbed.
The moment of panic gone, Mouse felt herself fall back into the empty chasm she’d built. “Can you tell me what happened, Luc?”
“I climbed the tree, like you did. And I held my breath, but I knew you’d hear my heartbeat just like I did yours. So I told my heart to be still and quiet. I watched you walk to the front of the house, and I almost laughed, but then everything went blurry and I was falling.” His eyes grew wide. “And then you were there.”
“I’m sorry, Luc.” She sounded anesthetized, remote.
“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
“I should have been more careful. I should have warned you not to try to make your heart stop. I did it once, too.”
“What happened?”
“Like you, I passed out and fell, but I was only hiding behind a wall. I just hit my head on a stone.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Nothing like yours. You were very brave.”
He smiled and looked past her toward the television, but then asked, “Did someone help you?”
“Yes.” She had to make herself breathe.
“Who?”
“No one important.”
“I can tell you’re lying. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Just someone who . . . loved me. But that was a long time ago.”
“Can I meet him?”
“He’s dead.”
“You couldn’t fix him?”
“No.” She closed her eyes. She needed him to stop asking questions.
“But he fixed you?”
She nodded.
“What was his name?”
“Father Lucas.”
“Thank you, Mouse.”
“For?” She rubbed at his foot.
“Fixing me.”
Something stirred softly in Mouse’s chest. She counted the grains in the wood of the fireplace mantel until it grew silent once more.
Hours later, after her father had come back and night had fallen, Mouse took up her cloak and went hunting. On previous outings, she’d gone looking for the four men at Port Hedland, where she assumed they had been recruited by the Reverend. She’d moved from there to various military sites around Australia, but she’d had no luck.
Tonight, she meant to try a different strategy—rather than hunt prey, Mouse would look for bread crumbs. She held the place she meant to go in her mind as she pulled the cloak around her, but then she paused. Part of her didn’t want to go there at all. She had to let the part of her that was hungry for revenge consume her doubt before the rush of air sent her spiraling through black emptiness and deposited her on familiar ground. She heard the crack and pop of the fire and smelled the roasting lizard, and she let her cloak fall away to reveal the Martu outstation.
The Martu were gathered around the fire, but no one had seen her arrive. She was a black shadow against a black night, with only the glint of the bone shard strapped to her thigh to give her away. She picked her way through heartbeats until she found the one she wanted, surprisingly not at the fire with the others but shut away in the community house. Silently, Mouse made her way across the dirt courtyard, her cloak hanging loose around her ankles.
She found Ngara huddled under blankets on a low bed shoved against the back wall of the room she painted in, canvas and paints still scattered about the middle of the floor.
“Ah, fina
lly you have come, little one.” The old woman’s voice was weak.
“I am not your little one.”
“As I see,” Ngara said.
“You are sick?” Mouse asked. If she was sad, she didn’t let herself feel it.
“Old, is what I am. And ready. But I have been waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“You have a question for me and I have a gift for you.”
“What?”
“Ask me your question.”
“Where did they go? The men who came after us.”
“They were all gone by the time we came out of hiding. All but one.”
Mouse’s skin prickled. “Who?”
“The white-haired man.”
“Jack’s alive.” Mouse had wondered if he’d been collateral damage or if the Reverend might have considered him a loose end to be rid of, but no, Jack lived. A sneer pulled at the corner of Mouse’s mouth. She’d found her first bread crumb. “Anything else?”
“He took water and drove away.”
“Thank you.” Mouse turned to leave.
“Now you take my gift.”
“I don’t need anything from you.”
The old woman grunted with pain but kept working her way over to the edge of the cot until she could snake her arm out of the blankets and grasp at something hiding in the dark under the bed. At first, Mouse thought it was one of the Martu’s woven baskets, but as Ngara pulled it free, Mouse could see it was a mask. The base was made of braided spinifex grass, with loose strands erupting from the top like hair and long, wedgetail eagle feathers sticking up like a crown. Smaller, brilliant blue bee-eater feathers, wound in grass tethers, dangled from the sides of the mask. The woven spinifex stretched across the face, pulling the features down as if they were melting.
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