He sat on the stool next to hers and nodded to the television over the bar. “Who’s winning?”
“It’s top of the seventh. Sox down three to two. Yanks with two in scoring position. One out. Three-one count on the hitter,” she said.
“You a fan?”
“No.”
In addition to the announcer’s play-by-play, Mouse could have repeated the healthcare stats one of the talking heads had just rattled off on the flat screen at the back of the pub. She could have also told him that two professors from the art department sitting at the table behind her were refinancing their house. Mouse knew the names of the loan officers they were considering, the appraisals they’d gotten, the interest rates, the mortgage payments—everything. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop; her brain just worked that way. She heard everything, saw everything.
It was exhausting, but Mouse had no control over most of her inherited abilities—the perfect memory, heightened senses, and acute perception were just part of her, like the color of her eyes. She couldn’t turn them off any more than she could tell her heart to stop beating. But Mouse had other, darker powers, too, that were part of her father’s legacy. Powers that scared her. Powers she lulled to sleep by keeping herself emotionally flat, like a self-inflicted lobotomy. The counting usually helped. But not tonight.
Jack pulled his stool closer to hers and gave her an appreciative once-over. “My God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“You neither.” Mouse didn’t like the awe she heard in his voice or the flare of temper it evoked in her.
“No, I’ve got a bit of gray coming up in the stubble now, but you, my God . . .” He whistled, soft and low. “Did you know I had a massive crush on you back then?” He laughed. “It wasn’t just me. All the guys, even some of the girls, thought you were—”
“What do you want, Jack?”
“Still as cold as ever, I see.” He took a long swig from his beer. “Maybe I want you to go back to my hotel with me.”
Mouse listened for a lie, some skip of his heart or catch in his breath, but she heard none. “You came all the way to Nashville to get me in bed?” she scoffed.
“God, no. I came to sell books.” This time, Mouse heard something—not quite a lie, but certainly not the whole truth. “Did you read it?” He nodded at Mouse’s copy of Who Wrote the Devil’s Bible? on the bar.
“Of course.” Mouse had read the book while she waited out the lecture and reception; three hundred pages in an hour came easily to her. His ideas were sound, but the computer process he used on the script was too theoretical, and his other research was surprisingly shoddy. No one would take him seriously. And he’d made no mention of her. Mouse had nothing to worry about from his book. Jack himself was a different matter, however. Something wasn’t right with him.
“What’d you think?” he asked, his words starting to slur. He’d clearly had plenty to drink at the post-lecture reception.
“Too much conjecture,” Mouse answered.
“Glad Cambridge Press didn’t agree with you.” His voice dripped with booze and disdain.
“How’d you manage to convince them to give you a book deal?” Mouse kept her question casual, biting back an urge she hadn’t felt for a long time—the desire to make him tell her what she wanted to know.
She could do it. She had compelled people before—another “gift” from her father. The first time had been when she was just a girl and a local boy had tried to force himself on her. She’d screamed at him to go away. He had turned on his heel, his pants still unfastened, and walked out of town. He never came back. Compelling someone like that tapped into Mouse’s darker powers, which she swore she would never use again, not on purpose. All the discipline she relentlessly practiced—the counting, the isolation, never letting herself feel anything—were her safeguards against accidentally using that power.
Mouse ran her finger through the water rings on the bar, trying to quench her emotions, and asked again, “So how’d you do it?”
“Friends in high places,” Jack said.
“We should all be so lucky.” She took a slow drink. “Want to introduce us?”
“Actually, I think he might like that.”
Mouse put the glass on the bar and swallowed the sense of urgency that was now running through her. “He?”
Clearly, Jack Gray had come with an agenda—but maybe it was not his own. Getting Jack access to the Devil’s Bible, encouraging his theories, convincing the oldest publishing house in the world to print his sham of a book, sending him to the most prestigious history lectureship—it was the sort of game her father might play, toying with his prey from a safe distance before swooping in to make the kill. Had he sent Jack to draw her out?
Mouse spun to look out over the rest of the room, scanning the growing crowd of patrons. If her father was Jack’s benefactor, then he knew where she was. And it was time to get out. Now.
“So what’s the name of your friend in high places?” she asked quietly as her eyes darted from face to face, looking for signs of her father.
“I don’t think you’d know him.”
“Come on, Jack. Tell me who he is.”
She realized her mistake instantly—she hadn’t asked Jack a question. She’d told him what to do. Her hand shot up to her mouth, but it was too late. Jack Gray’s eyes went blank, as if he’d stepped away from his body.
Mouse hadn’t meant to lace the words with power; she hadn’t meant to make them a command. But it wasn’t the first time the power had snaked through her lips of its own will and beyond her control. It’s what happened when she allowed herself any real emotion—joy, despair, anger, fear. The power woke and broke free of her. She watched in horror as Jack’s mouth worked to answer her like a puppet obeying its master, and she thought bitterly about the last time she’d lost control.
In her mind, she could hear the remembered sounds of battle—screaming horses and squealing swords. She sat in the midst of it all as war raged like violent eddies swirling around her. She was back at the battle of Marchfeld, seven hundred years ago. And in her blood-soaked lap lay Ottakar, the only man she had ever loved, the father of her child. His face was shiny with sweat and dirty from the battlefield. Mouse stroked the hair curling across his forehead and moved her other hand toward his chest in a vain attempt to staunch the blood gurgling out with the slowing rhythm of his heartbeat. There were too many wounds, too much blood. She had saved the lives of hundreds in the march to war, but she could do nothing to save him. This one. Hers. He was beyond even the healing she could do. The pain of letting him go scorched her throat, and she wept as she bent down to kiss him. This was God’s choice, not hers, but she did not have to let Ottakar suffer.
“Go now,” she had told him. “Die,” she said, the command meant as an act of mercy for him alone.
But they all had. Every soldier on that battlefield, dead. Ten thousand souls.
In her grief, she had lost control and her power had spilled out, killing every living thing around her. She’d lost everything that day. Ottakar. Her son. Her humanity.
Every day since, for seven hundred years, Mouse had paid penance for that moment. She supposed some would envy her immortality, but to Mouse it was the worst of her father’s inheritance. To be forever alone. To forever bear the guilt of what she’d done. She’d sworn then that she would never use her power again, that she would never kill again.
Despite that vow, Mouse knew there would be no reconciliation for her. She’d gone looking for it once after Marchfeld—at Podlažice monastery seven centuries ago.
But Mouse hadn’t found reconciliation. She had found her father instead.
PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,
BOHEMIA
1278
In the beginning.”
They were her father’s first words to her. They dropped like stones into the silence of Mouse’s tiny cell in the monastery just outside Podlažice.
The monks had found her at the monastery pond. She had be
en dressed in a habit, her head shaved and her breasts wrapped, so they had thought her one of them and took her in. So weak she could barely move, her bones jutting under paper-thin skin, the monks had also thought she would be dead by morning. They were wrong.
Mouse knew that death would not come for her. She had tried to kill herself several times after the battle at Marchfeld but to no avail. The sweet sleep of death would claim her only for a little while and then she would wake again. And so she learned about the last of her father’s gifts: immortality. It had driven her to the monastery where she hoped to pose as a monk and claim the rights of inclusus—to be walled up in a cell where she could not hurt anyone else and where she might eventually waste away to nothing. It was the only hope left to her.
The Brothers had asked for her name when they performed last rites. She told them to call her Herman—a German word for soldier. She thought it fit, as she now carried the guilt for each of the thousands of soldiers she’d killed at Marchfeld.
When she was still alive the next morning, the Brothers called it a miracle. Mouse leveraged their awe to demand an audience with the abbot, Bishop Andreas, and she bartered with him to grant her inclusus. She promised she would script a book in exchange for being closed up and left alone. She promised the book would be a wonder, full of the world’s knowledge. Bishop Andreas thought it an act of penitence. But Mouse did not seek to be shut away from the world in hope of the forgiveness of her sins. Mouse could never be forgiven for what she’d done or for what she was. She just didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
As the last stone slid into place, squealing against the mortar and shutting out the light, Mouse pulled the candlestick closer and bent over the blank parchment on the floor. The sooner she finished the book, the sooner Bishop Andreas would leave her alone. Mouse had just pinched her fingers around the quill when she heard someone behind her.
“In the beginning.” The voice was light, teasing.
Mouse spun around. “Who is there?”
There was no place in the bare cell for a man to hide himself, and no way in or out. Even in the dim candlelight, Mouse could see that she was indeed alone, and yet it was a man’s voice she heard inside the closed-in space with her.
“Greetings, daughter. I thought it was time we met.”
Sudden rage erupted in Mouse. She had never met her father, but she had cause to hate him anyway. He was the root of all the evil in her life—the source of all the uncanny power that had marked her as different and made her an outcast. Everyone she had ever loved had been hurt because of her connection to him, because of the taint of her father’s blood. And Marchfeld had proven that she was more monster than human—all because of him.
Her father laughed softly as he leaned forward through the wall; such a wall was no boundary to one like him. He took a single cautious step beyond the dark to make himself seen.
That was a mistake.
Mouse threw herself at him with such quick, animal-like abandon that he barely had time to pull himself back into the shadows. Her fingers raked his cheek. But despite her violent intentions, only the soft rounds of her fingers slid gently along his face as he drew back—a caress whether she meant it to be or not. He could not remember the last time someone had touched him gently.
He heard her screams as she beat against the wall where he had disappeared, but he could make no sense of her garbled words. He lifted his hand to his cheek and slipped farther back into the darkness to think about his next move.
He contemplated killing her. It was what he meant to do all those years ago at her birth. But then he had forgotten about her. Well, not really forgotten because he never forgot anything, but he considered her to be of no value and so never gave her another thought. Until Marchfeld. The strength of her power had called to him, and he’d come in time to see the men and horses drop where they stood but too late to see how she had accomplished it.
It was unexpected. He lifted his hand to his cheek once more; there was much he hadn’t expected.
He had followed her all those long days after Marchfeld as she wandered the countryside. He had watched her kill herself over and over again. The first had happened too quickly for him to intervene as she ran the sword across her throat on the battlefield, surrounded by the death she had caused. He had thought her gone and screamed in rage at his unanswered questions. The devastation at Marchfeld had shocked even him, and knowing that the scope of it was beyond his own unsettled him. He could whisper his wishes in the ear of a man and make it so, but how had this girl worked the strings of two armies and silenced a horde at her whim? He wanted answers.
For hours he had knelt beside her body in the bloody mud, shooing away scavengers. And when he saw the sliced skin at her neck knit itself closed and heard her first, raspy breath, relief settled on him. It gave way quickly to fear and desire. Desire he wore comfortably as he toyed with all he might do with her, but the fear pricked at him and made him slip back into the mist at the edge of the battlefield. Unsure of himself for the first time in a very long while, he had followed her at a distance, followed her to this monastery.
He tethered himself now in patience. He could wait for the answers he wanted.
“Brother Herman!” the man yelled outside Mouse’s cell. “It is Bishop Andreas! Answer me!”
Reluctantly, Mouse looked up from the page. Her vision was blurry. Her eyes had grown so accustomed to staring at letters just inches away that they couldn’t focus on anything at a distance. She caught a glint of gold at the small opening in the wall along the floor in the far corner. For the first time, she noticed the cups of wine and bowls of soured stew jumbled around the opening. The rats were at them. How many days had she been walled up? Had it been weeks? She only counted the passing of time by burned-out candles and finished pages. The work was everything. It was all she had to keep the grief at bay and to keep the claustrophobic panic from consuming her.
“Brother Herman! Tell me you are working on my book!”
Mouse’s sight cleared, and she saw the bishop’s gold embroidered robes and his wiry chin pressed close to the floor on the other side of the bowls and cups.
“I swear to you that if you give me no answer, I will tear down this wall brick by brick and expose whatever sins you are trying to hide.”
“I am here.” Her voice cracked with disuse.
The bishop sighed. “You are still alive then. You are working on my book?”
“Yes.”
“Good. But you must eat. You must live long enough to give me my book.” The rats scattered as his hand snaked through the slot and pulled out the old food and drink and shoved fresh ones in their place. “Eat,” he commanded again as he left. “Drink.”
Mouse felt empty—her body sore and limp, her mind and spirit drained. She had no will of her own and so she did as she was told. She dragged herself to the bowl and took up handfuls of food and crammed them in her mouth.
She did not see her father watching from the darkness in the corner behind her—watching as she took a swig of wine, watching as she wiped her soiled fingers on her habit, watching as she inched back toward the parchment that lay in neat stacks beside a row of ink jars against the far wall.
Even the momentary distraction, just a few minutes’ break from the work, ran like fissures in Mouse’s dam against the grief and panic. She grabbed at the small knife she used to sharpen the goose-feather quills when they dulled, and she sliced it savagely down one side of the quill and then the other. She dropped the knife to the floor and dipped the sharp quill into the ink and set to work again, but her hand was shaking and the tears made it difficult to see.
She was scripting one of the alphabets in the old style she had learned from Father Lucas at Teplá Abbey when she was a girl. As her hand formed the letters, her mind flooded with memories of the two of them reading together. She closed her eyes at the remembered smells of him—a mustiness like earth, the sharp scent of ink, and the softness of incense that lingered in his hair
—and then grief washed over her. Father Lucas had raised her, protected her. He had loved her. And he had died a violent death, tortured—by whom she did not know—for keeping her secrets. His was another name to add to the list of victims who had suffered because of her.
Mouse bent down, weeping, her head resting against the parchment.
In the shadows at her back, her father cocked his head, studying her.
Mouse sat up again and looked down at the ruined parchment, the letters badly made in her shaky hand, the ink smeared where she had rested her head. Shame and anger at all she had lost overcame her, and she tore furiously at the page.
Her father could feel the power waking in Mouse, and he sighed.
She went still like a stone.
He tensed as she turned her head so slowly that he could hear the crackle and grind of the twisting vertebrae in her neck until finally she looked at him over her shoulder. In that one visible eye he saw so much hate that it made him giddy. And afraid.
What could this girl do?
“I know who you are,” Mouse said. “Though you do not look as I expected.”
Her father lifted his hand to his mouth, elbow propped on his bent knee as he considered how to answer her. He opted for another tease. “No screaming at a man who magically appears in your walled up cell? What manner of creature are you? Surely not just a girl.”
He was rewarded as Mouse’s temper flared, but then he sensed the power rising in her. As she spun toward him, he stood quickly and took a step back toward the dark corner.
Mouse sneered at his fear, but she moved no closer. She just watched him as he leaned against the wall, his arms wrapped around his chest. He wore a monk’s habit—a godly man by fraud, just like her. He appeared to be maybe thirty years old and had long, black, wavy hair that framed his pale face and curled around his neck. He was handsome, but unremarkably so, with the exception of large eyes so dark that Mouse could see no pupils. She had to make herself look away, turning her focus instead to how he held himself, trying to assess his weaknesses, to anticipate how he would move, just as she did with any enemy.
The Devil's Bible Page 2