“This thing belongs to me now. I don’t care who shows up to take it.”
Angelo sat up. He could feel the change in the air before the Reverend even started to pry the top. He’d felt this kind of energy before—with Mouse at the ruins of Podlažice and in the Onstad church with the Devil’s Bible.
He started to reach his hand toward the box, but the Reverend tugged and a tiny wisp of air escaped through the broken seal.
The Reverend screamed.
He either would not or could not let go of the box. The lamps around the room crackled and popped with raw energy, and the flatscreen flashed a blinding light. The voices of the commentators exploded into the room as the volume surged.
Angelo snatched the box from the Reverend’s frozen grip and the surface of the flatscreen shattered and went dark, the room quiet and still.
Kitty was crying. The maid brought in a candle. The Reverend had fallen back against the couch, his great round belly erupting from his bathrobe, which lay limp on either side of him.
“You okay?” Angelo asked as he touched Kitty’s hand.
She jerked it back like she’d been bitten and looked up at him with wide, tear-filled eyes.
“I’m so blessed,” she said softly and then started sobbing again.
An hour later, Angelo found the Reverend sitting out on the balcony smoking a cigar. They had put Kitty to bed.
“So, what do you need?” the Reverend asked gruffly, not looking at Angelo.
“A place where I can control the conditions, someplace fairly isolated. I need to work alone. And, assuming I get to open the box and read the book, access to a theological library would be helpful. I’ll need to be able to translate and contextualize what I read.”
“I know a place.”
“Okay.” Angelo looked out over the dark expanse, dotted with a few lights from the nearby village. The last of the summer insects were singing. They sounded sad. Maybe it was the touch of fall in the cool air.
“Anything else?” the Reverend asked.
“What happened to Khalid?”
“Heard he had an accident. He’s dead.”
Angelo could hear the monks still singing as he stepped off the boat on the shore near the Ascension Chapel of Valaam Monastery. Thin clouds drifted over the moon. He tasted rain in the air.
He followed his lamp-holding guide up a pebble path to the main buildings of the Gethsemane skete—a tiny complex for monks seeking a deeper isolation than the main monastery offered. Angelo could make out the spiked towers of the small church in the sketchy moonlight, but the low building where Angelo would be staying erupted from the darkness without warning. He stumbled against his guide, his crutches clanking, but he recovered his footing as the man stepped down into a narrow doorway and light tumbled out from the hall inside.
The Reverend’s helicopter had dropped Angelo off at the main complex of the Valaam Monastery just hours earlier. He had joined the Vespers service, staying at the back as dozens of black-clad Orthodox monks had led a small procession of locals and pilgrims into the ornate Saviour Transfiguration Chapel. The monks’ voices ran in two threads—a rich melody dancing along the ison, which droned underneath and anchored the music to its ancient predecessors. Angelo wondered if this had been the soundtrack of Mouse’s childhood growing up at Teplá Abbey centuries ago. Though the music drew him in, he held himself apart from the worshippers. The gilded dome decked out with brilliant mosaics of hundreds of saints bore down on him. He sensed judgment in their porcelain eyes.
Khalid’s death weighed heavily on Angelo. He wondered what his soul would look like to Mouse now—surely not nearly as bright or as full. He’d forfeited too much of it for this alliance with the Reverend and Kitty. But to stop would mean no vindication for Mouse. Khalid would have died in vain. At least that’s what Angelo had told himself when he’d climbed into the helicopter and let Kitty kiss him good-bye on the cheek. He had something he needed to do, he kept reminding himself. He was a soldier on a mission. The words now tasted like empty excuses in his mouth.
Angelo’s guide gave him the oil lamp and wordlessly directed him down a hall lined with monastic cells. Angelo’s was the last door on the left.
Valaam Monastery provided exactly what he needed to begin his exploration of whatever was waiting for him inside the stone box. Isolated on an island in the middle of Lake Ladoga on the border between Russia and Finland, the monastery saw only a few monks and a handful of locals who worked at the monastery farm. Valaam had also been the recent beneficiary of a wealthy patron and so had undergone sweeping renovations and updates. There was an extensive library and, in addition to the main complex, a dozen smaller churches with tiny communities of monks scattered among the little islands and inlets. Angelo had chosen to stay at the one they called Gethsemane.
He startled as the guide-monk closed the door behind him, shutting out the night and leaving Angelo alone. He had the skete to himself. The oil in the lamp swished as he swung his crutch forward. A sense of déjà vu pressed against Angelo as he made his way down the hall to his room. After a few steps, he realized why the place felt familiar—it was like the hall of doors he’d seen in the ruins of Podlažice with Mouse.
A sense of calm chased away his foreboding. This was as it should be. Mouse had come to a place like this to pay penance for causing the deaths of thousands of soldiers—an accident, but dead by her command all the same. She had crafted the Devil’s Bible to carry her guilt. Now Angelo would unlock the secrets of the Book of the Just as penance for his part in Khalid’s death. Mouse had put a book together; he would take one apart.
With a new assurance, Angelo turned the knob on the door to his cell. The room fit a single cot against the side wall and a desk at the window. There was a picture of Jesus over the bed. On the bed was the rest of Angelo’s luggage, including a new satchel, which he unzipped and flipped open to reveal an assortment of tools he would need to examine the book. Everything was at the ready. Almost.
Angelo grabbed a scalpel from the satchel and reached into his carry-on to pull out a bag of salts. He scattered them in a circle around the perimeter of the room and then quartered it with a cross. He pulled the blade across his forearm, let the blood drip at each end of the cross, and said the words of the spell. Just like Mouse taught him. He imagined her voice saying them, and for a precious moment, he felt her near. Then the moment was gone.
He wrapped his arm with the gauze he’d brought and pulled the stone box out of the bag that hung at his hip. He set it on the table in the glow of the lamp, put on a pair of archive gloves, and pried at the corner the Reverend had already loosened. And then he worked on another corner and another. There was no pop or buzz of overrun electricity like before, just the soft sound of rain falling against the window. He wiggled the stone lid gently until it finally slipped free of the lower box with a last hiss of air.
Angelo held the top carefully still against the bottom and waited. He looked out the window. Turned to look behind him. He listened.
But there was nothing. Where was the angel to tell him to stop as it had the girl in the cave and the tempted son, Angelo wondered, a little disappointed. He sat back as a thought came to him for the first time. The spell of protection he cast would keep out creatures of evil intent. What if the angels in the young man’s story were really demons, emissaries from Mouse’s father and not heavenly ones? It would explain how the supposed angel had known his name. It would also mean that whatever was in the box was most likely a trap.
Angelo stared at the loose lid on the stone box in the glow of the lantern. The rain fell harder. What choice did he have? He held the base of the box in one hand and slowly lifted the lid. His heart beat like a drum in his head.
His eyes narrowed and eyebrows pinched together as he worked to make sense of what he was seeing. The box was filled with ebony ash, but it wasn’t like any ash Angelo had seen—blacker than normal, powdery but with a shimmer, and with strange threads of silvery whi
te ash snaking through the dark.
His heart sank as his worst fears lay splayed out in the lamplight. The book—or whatever it was—had been in the box, jostled on horseback or camelback across thousands of miles in the worst heat, stored God-only-knows-where in a Bedouin tent over hundreds of years. It would be a miracle for such a thing to survive. Angelo had been foolish to hope.
He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he let out a little sigh. The tiny burst of air sent the ash nearest him dancing, and underneath he caught the glint of gold. His eyes widened, and he turned to grab a feathered brush from the satchel on his bed. Angelo leaned close and gently pushed the ash to either side of the box as if he were a painstakingly precise street sweeper clearing a road of brilliant gold. Not a particle of ash left the box.
It took hours. His back screaming at him, he finally pulled up, stretching, his eyes blurred and his mind so languid with a need for sleep that he barely registered the soft light of dawn tapping at the window.
Angelo stood, holding the back of the chair for balance, and looked down on the exposed treasure. A rectangle of gold, embossed with symbols and script, some of which seemed familiar, lay framed in the shimmery ash. Two gold rings pierced the short end of the gold leaf and circled back to disappear in the ash. Angelo was sure they promised more gold leaves under the first.
The box didn’t hold a lost scroll after all. It was a book of gold plates. A book with writing. A book for him.
He knew he needed sleep or he was likely to make mistakes. He bent forward and picked up the lid and carefully placed it back on top of its base, enclosing the ash and gold. Was this the lost Book of the Just?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the dark hours of the morning, a day later and after hours of meticulous work clearing the rest of the plates, Angelo laid the gold book down on the desk, free from the ash and stone box for the first time in centuries. He waited once more for an angel to come with a warning. Or a blessing. But there was nothing.
The book shimmered like a Roman breastplate of ages gone. There were six plates altogether. Cautiously, he lifted one and then another, easing them down the golden rings that bound them. Each was covered with raised writing. He thought it was a variation of Hebrew, perhaps an earlier form than what he’d learned at seminary. He could guess at some of the words, but any real work would have to wait until daylight, when he could go to the library at the main complex.
His eyes turned instinctively to the low cot covered in disheveled linens. He hadn’t slept well, and his body was begging for another chance, but as soon as his focus shifted from the book, his mind filled again with the dream that had woken him, that had tormented him in the few hours he’d tried to sleep. It had come again and again when he’d let himself drift off, until he’d finally given up and gone back to work on the book.
The dream was like the ones he’d had at the outstation, too vivid, leaving his senses splayed and overrun. He woke wanting Mouse—to sing to him, to calm him, to pull him out of his fear. She had been there, in a way, but not as comfort. Mouse was the thing haunting him in his dream.
He’d seen her—not Kitty’s image of Mouse but not a memory of his own, either. She was wearing her father’s cloak. Her head was shaved. She was standing over a sleeping man, in the midst of men, and she had the bone from the Seven Sisters. She was wearing the mask Angelo had seen her wear in his dream at the outstation, its wild feathers and crazy patterns making her look like a monster. The bone shard was lit up, eerie blue, like when they’d found it in the cave, only brighter. Angelo even thought he could smell something—cedar, maybe.
The sleeping man woke, grabbing at his chest, panicking as he stared at Mouse, his pupils huge as they drank in the light. Then they turned to icy terror—but only for a moment. Angelo and the dream-Mouse watched the life slide slowly out of the man’s eyes. Angelo had never seen a man die before. Mouse was crying. Angelo had woken reaching out for her, the faint scent of cedar still in his nose, his hair damp with tears.
That had been hours ago. His work on the book had driven back his grief, but he could feel it stalking him like a cat. He grabbed his coat, hanging on a hook in the wall, and wandered out into the wee hours of the morning. Angelo left the door open as he walked down the path toward the lake, the bit of scattered light all he needed with the bright, full moon not yet set. He watched the chill breeze play with the water, listened to the gentle slap of it against the shore. The air had turned cold; winter was coming.
Angelo shoved one of his crutches under his arm and bent to pick up a stone. He threw it across the surface of the water. It bounced along a clear path until it sank. He looked out to the far shore where the lights of another skete twinkled in the gentle sway of the pine boughs. Angelo thought he remembered someone telling him it was called Resurrection. Here he was in the dark hours of loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane facing the light of the risen in Resurrection—did that make the lake Calvary?
He took a step closer to the edge of the shore, the water easing up under his sole. A louder clap against the surface of the lake startled him from his reverie, and he looked up to see a boat emerging from one of the hidden inlets. At first Angelo thought a monk stood at the bow of the boat. But it floated into a wash of moonlight, revealing a white tunic—not Orthodox black—tousled by the wind, and a man with no beard.
Angelo squinted, trying to make out the man’s face. He had tattoos inked along his neck. Just like the man in Angelo’s dream. Just like the “angel” in the little girl’s story.
The boat floated out over the lake, eerily silent, and then stopped dead in the water.
“Who are you?” Angelo called out. The man made the sign of the cross and the benediction.
“I have the Book of the Just.” Angelo’s voice was thick with the cold and fear. “Why did you want me to have it? I am not a just man.”
“Peace be unto you,” the man said. His voice was mesmerizing, soft like water easing over river stones but vibrant and haunting, too, like wind whipping through a forest. Angelo stood hypnotized, trembling, until the little boat disappeared behind a copse of trees into another masked inlet.
“Wait!” Angelo cried. “Will you help me?” But there was no answer.
In the wake of silence, Angelo felt very alone. He needed to unburden his guilt about Khalid and his worry that he wouldn’t be able to translate the text on the gold book, but most of all, he needed Mouse.
Angelo swallowed at the thick longing in his throat. He turned and made his way slowly back up the path, but he didn’t turn in toward the low building where he was staying. Instead he followed the trail, which grew narrower and darker as the old-growth evergreens crowded near, until they opened like a hand to reveal a clearing and a tiny church—the one whose steeple he’d seen on the first night. Angelo climbed the few steps and opened the door to the chapel. The rich smell of polished wood washed over him as the trapped air ran out into the night. He made his way toward the iconostasis at the back of the room. Faint moonlight shone through the windows and slid over the carved wood, lighting up the raised places, the arches and crosses, but deepening the dark in the dips and valleys.
“I’m in the valley,” Angelo whispered to the painted saints before the altar. “Help me.” He gripped his crutches and eased himself onto his knees, and he prayed. It was the first time since Lake Disappointment.
The clang of bells ringing over his head announced the dawn as Angelo stiffly pushed himself upright. The monk who’d been set to guide and watch over Angelo met him at the stairs of the church, coming down from the bell tower.
“I need to go to the library,” Angelo said, his voice still raspy from the cold air. “Can you help me?”
The monk nodded.
“Let me grab some things from my room first, okay?”
The monk nodded again and pointed down the path toward the lake. Angelo understood—he’d be waiting at the boat. Back in his room, Angelo wrapped the gold book in w
hat was left of the gauze and slid it into his bag. The ash-filled box was closed and nestled in the corner of the desk against the wall of his cell.
He started back down the path toward the lake when his phone buzzed—a text from Kitty: ANY CREATURES? ANY NEWS?
He wasn’t sure what had visited him on the lake—angel or demon or his own mind giving him something he thought he needed—but a sense of urgency ran through him now. He felt like a clock was ticking somewhere, but counting down to what, he didn’t know. His hour of prayer in the church had not quieted that urgency, but it had driven back some of his despair. He felt sure he was on the right track.
Angelo wasn’t about to share any of that with Kitty. ON THE WAY TO THE LIBRARY NOW. MORE TOMORROW MAYBE, he texted instead.
The boat rocked violently as Angelo stepped in and took a seat. The monk used a pole to push them away from the shore and toward the tall spires of the Saviour Transfiguration Chapel. The brilliant blue domes seemed to dangle above the trees like pieces of fallen sky.
A handful of monks were in the library. They looked up as Angelo entered. He wondered again at the strings the Reverend must have pulled to get the Orthodox Russians to admit a onetime Roman Catholic priest among them.
Angelo found a Hebrew primer to refresh his sketchy study of the language. He kept the gold book hidden in his bag. He read all day, through Vespers, until his co-habitant at Gethsemane came to tap him on the shoulder. Angelo took some of the books with him. When he got back to his cell, he pulled out the gold plates and the books of Hebrew and worked until his body betrayed him and demanded sleep.
The first snow fell a couple of days later. Kitty texted again. Angelo was no closer to uncovering the secrets of the book. He could read most of the words now, after deciphering ancient forms of the Hebrew letters and recognizing some of their antecedents. It was like undoing a puzzle only to reconfigure the pieces into something different. It took time.
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