“If you stay and play with me, I’ll let you win.”
Mouse looked down at him through the mask’s eyeholes. It was the first time she’d heard him willing to give up something for someone else. She knelt and took his hand. “That’s very kind of you, Luc. And I will come back just as soon as I can, and we’ll play then.”
“Please, don’t go.”
Mouse stood and grabbed the edge of her cloak. “I’ll bring you something when I come back.” And then she was gone.
The rotting remains of a storefront were all that was left of Rosenfeld. The moon hung overhead like a broken fingernail in the Texas sky. Mouse took off toward the low hills where she knew she’d find the compound. She could already hear the deep rumble of generators.
A few minutes later, she dropped down against the hilltop looking over a shallow valley. The compound seemed deserted. No lights. No movement. But Mouse knew not to trust the appearance of a thing. She could hear the heartbeats of at least twenty people. All but one seemed to pulse in the slow rhythm of sleep.
A sign on the gate of the razor-wire fence read THE ARMY OF GOD.
Mouse assumed that the compound would be equipped with motion detectors, so she couldn’t just waltz in and take what she wanted. Well, she could actually. She could kill them all with a word, be done with it and back home playing with Luc in a matter of minutes. But it would not satisfy her hunger. She needed to see the men afraid, needed to feel their lives in her hands before she claimed each one in payment for the life they had taken.
Mouse wrapped her hand around the bone the Seven Sisters had gifted her. She prowled the border of the compound slowly, sniffing out her prey. Citrus. Musk. Bay rum. Cedar. She found them clustered together in a barracks at the back of the compound—maybe they were all part of the same unit. She pulled her cloak tightly around her, focused her mind, and instantly found herself leaning against the wall of the barracks. She waited a moment for alarms. In the answering silence, she moved around the corner of the building.
Someone had left a window open to the cool night air. Mouse climbed through like a shadow. Her nostrils flared. Citrus was in the far corner. Musk and Bay Rum were in the beds on either side of her. Cedar was near the front door.
She pulled the bone out of the sheath.
Point it at those who have wronged you, and the bone will do the work, Ngara had said.
Mouse pointed the bone at Musk.
Nothing happened.
What else had the old woman said? Be kurdaitcha. Be the vengeance seeker. It was all a matter of intent. The bone held the magic. The bone did the work. But the vengeance seeker had to fuel it with a desire for revenge. Mouse had to want these men to die. And she did—in her head. She needed to feel it in her heart.
She gritted her teeth and pulled up the memory of Lake Disappointment. She let it come, strong and real, adrenaline flooding through her. In her mind, she zeroed in on Angelo, past the flying debris and the roar of the helicopters and the whipping wind and the wails of the men being eaten by the demons.
She heard Angelo begging for his life and hers—We surrender.
She slowed down the bullet that would first shatter his rib cage and come shooting out of his backpack. She followed the trajectory of that first bullet, followed it to the man who had fired the shot. He half hung off the fuselage of the lead helicopter. He stared at Angelo’s raised hands. Mouse watched the man’s face for any sign of compassion or regret. There was none. Not even a pause as he pulled the trigger.
In her perfect memory, Mouse isolated the man’s scent. Bay Rum.
She turned to her left. The bone began to glow and grew warm in her hand. Her mind held the image of Angelo pleading, his body shredded by bullets, his glowing soul seeping out between her fingers and down into the desert sand as he left her. But when she started to point the bone at her first quarry, her hand shook violently.
I beg you, do not turn your back on what is right and good.
Mouse hissed. She thought she had purged Father Lucas’s ghostly counsel, but he was with her still. She realized with disgust that she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill a sleeping man in cold blood—not yet, anyway. Her temper flared at her failure. Without warning, the bone surged with a brilliant blue as it had when she and Angelo had found it in the cave. It vibrated in her hand, full of the vengeance Mouse had already fed it.
And Bay Rum’s heart stopped. Just like that.
She spun toward Musk and then moved across to Citrus. She felt them die at the moment her eyes rested on them. Panicking at the loss of control, she held the bone shard away from her, letting it roll passively in her palms, but it still glowed with the cold blue light. She heard Cedar cough. Instinctively, she turned to him and took a step closer. He was clutching at his chest, his eyes wide when he saw Mouse. She watched his pupils grow large—then empty.
Shocked at the suddenness of death, she looked down at her hands, horrified, as the bone’s light died, too. I will not kill anyone today. The words came against her will. They had been the foundation of her humanity for seven hundred years. Her last thread to anything good in her. And she had just cut herself loose from it. What did that make her?
She kept blinking, trying to clear the fuzziness from her sight. It was only when she tasted the salt that she realized she was crying. Even as she acknowledged the tears and the shock at what she’d done, she couldn’t feel anything but rage.
And that made her even angrier.
She snatched her cloak around her and caught her breath at the sudden change in the air. The cool Texas night evaporated instantly in the dry heat of the outback afternoon at the Martu outstation. Mouse heard a child scream behind her, but she didn’t care to look. She stormed through the community house door. Ngara’s art room was bare. No canvas or paint. No cot crammed into the corner.
Mouse had come to scream at the old woman, to demand to know who or what had twisted fate this way and set Mouse and Angelo on such a dark path. She wanted to know where they were so she could bring the fight to them, too. But Ngara was gone, and Mouse’s rage swelled, nearly blinding her.
“What are you?” the Martu child asked as Mouse staggered back through the open door.
“Gone,” she said.
She wasn’t thinking of a destination when she swirled the cloak around her. Her anger drove her toward a target like a loosed arrow. Her feet slammed against the ground, and she crouched to balance herself. She knew where she was by the smells—different and yet still the same. The minerals lifted into the air from the steam drifting up off the river. The linden trees were in bloom.
Mouse had come home again to Teplá but not to the cemetery this time. She’d come to the root of her failure—to the abbey where her struggle with goodness had begun.
But it was all wrong. The trees were thinned out, the gardens gone. The abbey buildings sprawled out in different places, the Teplá River dammed. The stones of the church wall in front of her were too smooth and the scale of it all too grand.
Yet, here she was, in the same place where she’d spent her childhood—on the outside of the Church of the Annunciation of the Lord at Teplá. Always on the outside looking in, Mouse had spent her childhood wanting to belong to those who did not want her—the righteous, the blessed, the good. Why couldn’t she turn her back on them the way they had always shunned her?
Mouse slammed her fist against the wall over and over, trying to beat out the residue of her longing until her knuckles shattered underneath her black glove. She leaned heavily into the stone, weeping as she slid down to her knees. She pulled the cloak up to hide her face but was surprised to find herself falling through the dark planes her father had taught her to use. She felt something pull at her like a magnet, and she landed softly on a cold stone floor.
She shook her head, sobbing, and curled her arms over her head. She never would have come here of her own will. Not now. This was not a place to feed her anger. This place conjured old yearnings.
&n
bsp; Midmorning light bounced around cave walls still covered in Mouse’s paintings. A fading image of a wolf took up much of the back wall. Bohdan. Her salvation when she’d gone wandering in the darkness once before. Bohdan had believed in her goodness and taught her to hope for it, too. He had guided her back to the light.
Mouse spun around and ran outside. “Not this time!” she yelled at the heavens. “I don’t care anymore. Not about goodness. Not about my soul. Sure as hell not about you!” Her voice echoed around the mountains. “I have nothing! You keep taking it. You break me, over and over again. And then expect me to pull myself up and be your good little girl? Well fuck you!” Spit flew from her mouth.
She sank onto the ground where she’d once watched the sun rise and set over the mountains beside her gentle Bohdan, her hand sunk into his thick, warm fur, the weight of his head in her lap. Together they had watched the sometimes soft, sometimes radiant colors of the sky play along the still waters of the lake below like living art. And Mouse had believed again in the mercy and glory of a loving God.
And then Bohdan had been taken from her. And Ottakar. And Nicholas. And all those men at Marchfeld. And seven hundred years of any gentle touch or friendship or love. Until Angelo. And now he had been taken, too.
“I can’t do it this time.”
She pushed herself upright, no tears left. She went to wipe the snot and saliva from her chin and saw her torn leather glove, bits of her own skin and blood peeking out along the knuckles. Mouse stood, unnaturally calm now. She walked slowly along the familiar path that wasn’t really a path anymore, eaten by brush and mountain grass, down to the lake. She knelt at its edge and leaned over the water like the pine and spruce trees that circled the shore. She plunged her hands into the cold water, gloves and all, until the blood was gone and the sting of her broken knuckles was soothed. She sat back, cross-legged, and looked out over the lake that glinted in the morning light like a pane of glass.
She felt sure something had drawn her here—God or the Seven Sisters or some unnamed thing playing with her fate. She didn’t care to know anymore. She didn’t care what their plan was or what they wanted from her, so she gave them an impossible ultimatum: “You give me Angelo back and I’ll believe in goodness again. Until then, leave me alone.”
She threw a stone into the lake and watched the ripples dance against the shore, and then Mouse drew the cloak around her and left the Sumava woods for the last time.
“Oh, I love her!” Luc squealed as Mouse put the puppy down on the kitchen floor.
“I told you I’d bring you something.” She looked up to see her father standing stiffly in the hallway. “You okay with this?”
He shrugged. “I understand a person can learn a lot from having a dog.”
“A person learns from the dog—not from having it. A dog can teach you unconditional love.”
“Surely not me,” her father said, his eyebrow raised.
“I meant ‘you’ universally.”
“I see. How was Texas?”
Mouse looked down at Luc. She hadn’t told her father where she was going or what her big-picture plan was, but then, she’d never been able to keep secrets from him. She didn’t care to anymore, but she didn’t want Luc to know.
Luc was letting the puppy lick his face. “Isn’t she cute?”
“You might want to take her in the backyard. She might need to go to the bathroom.”
Luc scooped up the puppy and ran out the patio doors.
“You haven’t said anything to him, have you?” Mouse asked her father. “About what I’m doing when I’m gone?”
He pulled out a stool and sat down. “I didn’t think you cared. About anything anymore.”
“I don’t. Tell him if you want. What I’ve done can’t begin to compare to your sins.”
“Well, everyone has to start somewhere.” Her father picked at a bit of puppy hair on the cuff of his pants. “It went well, I take it?”
“Yeah.”
He chuckled. “Then why is your face covered in shame?”
“Same reason yours is covered in scars. When we fall, we fall slow.”
Luc came running back into the kitchen, the puppy at his heels.
“What are you going to name her?” Mouse asked.
“Mine.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After Mouse’s mission to Texas, her father left for several days, entrusting Luc to her care. She spent her days playing and her nights preparing. She wanted her next hunt to be consummate and clinical. While Luc slept, Mouse sat stone still on the patio in the growing chill and imagined herself killing the Rabbi and the Reverend and the Bishop in a thousand possible ways. She conditioned her mind and body to act without thought or hesitation, allowing no chance for haunting whispers from Father Lucas to sabotage her revenge.
That pent-up fury burned hot behind her eyes when she finally went back to her father’s realm to see Jack. He was looking worse for wear, strung out on the couch, his leg draped over the back. He was singing “Jingle Bells.”
“Christmas is two months away,” Mouse said.
He squealed in fright and jumped behind the couch, then made an attempt at bravery. “How the hell would I know? I don’t even know what day of the week it is.”
“Thursday.”
“I don’t know any other songs anyway.”
“You only know one song and it’s ‘Jingle Bells’?”
He shrugged. “Never saw the point to music.” He took another step away from her, his courage growing with the distance. “Until now. When I’m stuck here with nothing else to do.” He raked his fingers through his greasy hair. “And where’s the shampoo? Or a goddamn toothbrush? I’ve only got shitty chips and packaged crackers to eat, and my clothes stink.” He pulled at the sleeve of his shirt, sniffing it and wrinkling his nose. “Where is this place anyway?”
“You’re in Hell, Jack, not a hotel.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” He flung his arms out to the side. Bits of crumbs sprinkled onto the floor, which was littered with empty water bottles.
“Your comfort should be the least of your worries.” Mouse slapped the mask dangling from her hand against her thigh.
“Please just let me go, Dr. Em.”
Mouse’s eyes snapped up to his. She didn’t realize she’d been avoiding looking at his face until now. He didn’t look like the student she remembered—this cowering, white-haired man with a week’s patch of stubble along his jaw, his normally posh clothes unkempt, his eyes devoid of their usual swagger. The swelling in his nose had gone down, but a wash of black and purple swept out under his eyes. What was she teaching him now?
The guilt lasted only a second before her rage ate it. It was getting easier for her.
“Where can I find the Rabbi?” she asked.
Jack leaned forward on the back of the couch, his head in his hands. “If I tell you where to find them all, all the members of the inner council of the Novus Rishi, will you let me go?”
“I only asked for the Rabbi, Jack. I want to do this right—a nice, orderly progression. One at a time. And you will give me the answers I need when I ask for them. And only when I ask. Do you understand?”
When he looked up, his face was wet with tears. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I am what I was made to be. Now, the Rabbi?”
“His name is Rabbi Asher Ben-Yair and his yeshiva is near the Old City in Jerusalem.”
“Good boy. I’ll bring you some figs when I come back.”
Mouse roamed the empty campus of Rabbi Asher Ben-Yair’s yeshiva, the bone shard at her hip and her mask dangling from her hand. At the third locked door, her wariness rose. It was the middle of the day, and the campus was empty, though the sounds of the busy city filtered in between the buildings and covered roads.
As she turned a last corner, about to give up the search and go back to get the Rabbi’s home address from Jack, a young man came out of one of the doors.
“I am lookin
g for Rabbi Asher Ben-Yair,” she said in Hebrew as she whisked the mask behind her.
The man studied her a moment, taking in her black clothes and cloak. “Go down to this intersection,” he pointed. “Turn right. His home is two streets over, a couple of houses back. You will see the people coming and going.” He turned to leave but paused and said, “May God console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Mouse fastened the mask to the belt loop at her back and let the cloak fall over it like a curtain. She walked the two streets with a cold assurance, knowing what she’d find, but she needed to see for herself.
The young man had been right—the people led her to the door. She fell in behind an old man wearing a black vest that was ripped on the right front, below another basted tear. She followed him up two flights of stairs and past a steady stream of mourners.
“The Master of Mercy will protect him forever, from behind the hiding of his wings, and will tie his soul with the rope of life,” she heard from the inner room. She could see an older woman sitting on a low stool, but she couldn’t see the singer of the mourning prayer. Mouse stood against the wall, head down, waiting for the afternoon prayers to end. She followed the bustle of people leaving and on the landing of the stairs reached out to grab the arm of a woman, who looked up, surprised.
“Do I know you?”
“Tell me how the Rabbi died,” Mouse said with quiet command.
She pushed past her cloak into the room of her father’s house once more and swept over the couch, where Jack was sprawled out again, munching chips.
“Did you bring me my—?” He cried out as Mouse suddenly pressed her knee down on his gut.
“The Rabbi was already dead.”
“What?” He gasped, spewing chips from his mouth, and pushed against her knee so he could breathe.
“Did you know?”
“No!”
She listened for the lie, but he was telling the truth.
“He was old and in ill health,” Jack said. “But I thought—”
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