“Hi.” The man sounded too casual for what he was. “Back door was unlocked, so I let myself in.”
“How did you find me?” she asked. The more he talked, the more he might reveal about himself. She needed to find his weaknesses if she had any hope of getting Nate home alive.
“Oh, I got a picture of you, but it ain’t the best quality.” He held up a crumpled drawing of her face, scratched out on parchment with ink that had run and smeared. Her father’s idea of a picture ID, Mouse assumed. “When I seen you at the fort, though, I knew you were the right one. So I went to the police station to wait for you, but then I saw your friend—that guy that was with you last night? He was kind enough to tell me where I could find you. And this is much more private.” He waved his hand and leaned against the counter.
“You saw the police?” Nate asked, looking up at Mouse’s face, ready for a story.
Without taking her eyes off the man, Mouse spoke to the boy, hoping for an easy way out. “Nate, I need you to go home now. I’ll come see you in a little bit, okay? We can draw some more pictures.”
“Mom won’t let you. But we can draw here.”
“Yeah, let’s just all stay here,” the man said, lifting himself from the counter and taking a step toward them, shaking his head at Mouse in warning. There would be nothing easy about this.
She played out a number of scenarios in an instant. She didn’t think she was strong enough to compel someone already under her father’s influence. And she might accidentally compel Nate, too, like all those men and boys at Marchfeld. Mouse wouldn’t take the risk.
The return vent in the hall squealed as the air kicked on. Nate and Bodie jumped.
The man laughed and Mouse’s stomach turned. He meant to enjoy himself—with her and with Nate, just as he had with those other women.
She moved quickly through her options and felt her body tense in anticipation. “Sorry, Nate, I should’ve introduced you. This is a friend of my father’s.”
“Hi, I’m Nate.” The boy leaned toward the killer and offered his hand.
“That’s a good man, Nate. You done that just like your daddy taught you, huh?” the man said as he pulled the boy into a hug. He turned Nate to face Mouse and pressed him against his legs, arm draped across the boy’s chest and crusted fingernails resting along Nate’s neck.
Cold fury ran through Mouse like a rod. This was her house. She would not let this happen.
“Nate, I need to go get something, but I’ll be back in just a minute. You wait here with Bodie, okay?” As she spoke, Mouse walked past the man into the hallway that led to the laundry room at the back of the house. She saw the man’s fingers flex at Nate’s throat. But Mouse was sure he would follow. She’d seen his arrogance in the way he moved, in how he looked at her and handled Nate, in what he said and how he said it. This man did not think she was a threat.
He hesitated only a moment before his ego made the decision. He pushed Nate toward the couch. “You stay there and we’ll . . . play when I’m done.”
The man walked cautiously toward the end of the hall where Mouse paused before opening the door to the laundry room. She could see him sizing her up—she was tiny compared to him. She could see the smirk spread across his face.
Mouse stepped into the dark room first and, as soon as the man crossed the threshold, she spun and swiped his legs out from under him. She was trying hard to keep everything quiet, but the man groaned in surprise as he fell to his knees. She wrapped her left arm under his chin and pulled back, trying to choke him until he passed out.
“Em?” Nate called from the couch.
“Just a minute, Nate.” Her voice was tense as she strained against the man’s weight.
He was too heavy for her. Desperate, she scanned the room for a weapon, gritting her teeth against the burn in her arms and back. She lunged toward the dryer to her right and her hand closed around cool plastic.
The man was twisting toward her.
Mouse heard a hissing as she pulled the iron off the dryer; Bodie had followed them into the laundry room. He jumped clear of a can of starch that rolled and fell to the floor.
“Em? I think I want to go home now. Will you come with me?”
Mouse glanced toward the door, distracted for just a second, and then she was flying backward, slamming into the washer, her ribs burning where the man had kicked her. He was already scrambling to his feet, ready to lunge.
“Are you okay, Em?”
Mouse had run out of options.
She acted robotically. Chillingly calm.
As the man lurched toward her, she held his gaze and then slammed the point of the iron into his throat. She felt his hyoid bone snap as she pushed up. He threw his hands to his neck as he fell. Mouse landed hard on the floor and rolled quickly onto her knees, panting. Bodie’s eyes glowed at her from the top of the dryer.
The man twisted on the floor and clawed at his throat, making guttural noises as he choked on his own saliva. The thick smell of starch coated the air. Mouse’s stomach clenched and hurled the bile up her throat. She vomited on the floor beside the man’s head and then sat back on her heels, watching him spasm.
She had sworn that she would take no other life. Not after Marchfeld. And for seven hundred years she had kept that oath. Until now.
“Em?”
Mouse rose with fear; Nate was nearly at the door.
“Stay. . . ” Her voice cracked, and she forced herself to swallow. “Stay there. I’m coming, Nate.”
Bodie wove between her legs and together they watched as the man finally stilled, his mouth gaping. Mouse gathered the cat in her arms and then wiped her mouth against her shoulder to get rid of the spit.
She planted a smile on her face as she turned the corner past the fridge.
“Okay, Nate. Let’s get you home.” The casualness of her voice frightened her. She had killed again, in cold blood this time.
Like father, like daughter.
PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,
BOHEMIA
1278
Her father was gone for several days.
Mouse knew better than to pray for Nicholas’s safety. Why should God pay her any heed? So she scripted conjurations that she had learned from Father Lucas. Pricking her finger with the needle, she painted a light coat of her blood in two columns the length of the sheet of parchment. It dried to a muddy brown, and she wrote on top of it in red ink while she muttered the words of protection.
But Mouse was also determined not to let her worry overshadow the joy of knowing her son lived. Though she did not think God’s mercy in saving Nicholas had been for her sake, she wanted to thank him anyway. With meticulous care she began to draw the Heavenly City—based in part on descriptions in Revelation and in Augustine’s City of God, which she had once copied for Father Lucas. But mostly Mouse drew the city as she imagined it. With giant, colorful towers and curving trees, her city filled an entire page. She had finished drawing all the churches and was about to start sketching angels soaring around the towers and people dancing in the streets when her father came back.
“Your son is safely reinstated to his title,” he announced.
Mouse turned to look at him, tense with dread. “And?”
“No one died,” he growled playfully.
For the first time, she smiled at him. “Thank you.”
His face shifted, and this time, Mouse could read him. Something in what she’d done or said pained him. She was about to ask what, but his bemused aloofness slid back on like a mask.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“Heaven.”
“I might like to have a go at that myself.” As he bent to look over her shoulder at the city, he saw the sheet of conjurations, and Mouse witnessed another rapid transformation as his face distorted with rage. His mouth drew back and his nose flared, and she saw the not-human in him for the first time. She flinched in anticipation, but when she opened her eyes again, his face was perfectly smooth and his
voice so calm she almost wondered if she had imagined the flash of anger.
“What are these?” he asked as he pointed at the conjurations.
“Spells of protection for Nicholas.”
“Against me?”
“Against any manner of evil that might harm him.”
He picked them up and read them. He cocked his head a moment, brought the parchment to his nose and sniffed, and then let his tongue flick to the brown stain. He nodded to himself. “May I have a sheet of parchment and the use of a quill?” His voice was tempered and too steady.
Forcing her body to stop trembling, Mouse handed him both, but as she started to pull her hand back, he put his own around her wrist. He took the needle from the floor. “Will you indulge me?”
She nodded and he jammed the needle in her finger. He squeezed until several drops of blood splattered onto the parchment. He slowly brought her finger to his lips and kissed it before letting her go.
He set about his work while she watched him, spreading the blood out into rectangles that matched the ones she had crafted for her conjurations. He blew on the parchment until it dried the same muddy brown. He dipped the quill in red ink and then, perfectly mimicking her own handwriting, he scripted a confession.
It wasn’t a confession of his own sins. Like the habit he wore, the words he wrote were false, a pretend catalog of sins—sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the spirit. It ended with a plea to God for forgiveness as it invoked Saints Adalbert and Wenceslaus to intercede on the writer’s behalf. It read just like the many confessions Mouse had seen in many other books written by any number of clergymen.
“What is this?” she asked cautiously.
“A conjuration of my own.”
“It reads like a confession.”
“Conjuration, confession—is there a difference? How is mine any different from what you have written? A list of worries—worries about what might befall a person, worries about suffering—and a plea for protection. Your conjuration is meant to protect against me. A confession is meant to protect against the actions of a vengeful God.”
Mouse tried to find some counterargument, tried to voice the theology Father Lucas had taught her about God’s goodness and mercy. But she couldn’t. Instead she simply laid her father’s false confession on the growing stack that would be stitched together to become her book. It was nearly finished.
She picked up the painting of her empty Heavenly City and leaned the corner of it toward the candle flame, no longer sure it had a place in any book of her own crafting. What did she know of Heaven? But as she hesitated, her father took it from her and laid it also on the stack of parchment.
His hand lingered on it for a moment too long, and though he turned his face away, Mouse saw his eyes glistening as they caught the candlelight.
“Did she love you?” Mouse asked.
She was bent over Cosmas’s Bohemian Chronicles. Her father lay stretched out on her pallet like a languid cat, working on his own piece of parchment. He looked up at Mouse, his eyebrow raised in question.
“My mother. Did she love you?”
“I can’t say.”
“What does that mean? You do not know or you do not want to tell me?” Her voice vibrated with her irritation; she’d felt pent up for days, like a top wound tightly with string just waiting for someone to yank and send her spinning.
Her father only shrugged.
Mouse threw her quill down and sat back on her heels, glaring at him. “You are not being fair.”
“Fair?” He barely held back the chuckle.
“I told you about Ottakar and Nicholas.”
“Now who’s not being fair? You gave me seven words about Ottakar. I learned about Nicholas on my own.”
Mouse grunted and grabbed for her quill again.
Her father sighed and sat up and then asked indulgently, “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know about my mother.”
“You will be disappointed.”
“Why?” She was already prepared to defend this mother she did not know. “What did she do?”
“No, not about her. I am sure she was a lovely person. But I can tell you very little.”
“You conceived a child with her. How can you know nothing about her?”
He shrugged.
“Did you . . . violate her?”
He held her gaze for a while before answering. “No. But my only interest in her was what I could get from her.”
Mouse squeezed her fist around the quill.
“She was a noble. She was bored with her life. She wanted adventure. I offered her a way out and showed her a little of the world. We spent a handful of weeks together and then she got pregnant. I took care of her needs while you grew. She died when you were born.” He said it all matter-of-factly and then turned back to his parchment.
Mouse wasn’t satisfied. Her uneasiness crawled under her skin like worms. She could make no sense of this relationship with her father. What did he want? What did she want? It was this last that nagged at her. She tried to stay guarded with him, but spending day after day with someone eroded walls and left a person bare to intimacy. Except Mouse never felt that he dropped his guard; she was never really seeing him. He held himself at a calculated distance. And Mouse wanted something more.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
He nodded at a couple of pages of scripted parchment that lay on the floor between them. “I finished the Rules of St. Benedict for you.” He yawned.
“That is not what I asked.” Mouse had learned to listen carefully to his answers; they were almost always only half-truths but, oddly enough, never lies. “What are you working on now?”
A smile played at his mouth and in his eyes. “A little something of my own.”
She pushed herself back to lean against the wall of her cell. Her knees were numb from the cold stone floor. “May I see it?” she asked.
“When it is done.”
“What is it?”
“My story.”
“I want to see it.”
“When it is done.”
“No. Now.” She could feel the power flutter in her chest, and though it frightened her, it emboldened her as well. “I am tired of playing whatever game this is. If you want to know me, then know me. But you must show yourself in turn. Your real self.”
In no way could she have anticipated his reaction.
“I am afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Mouse asked softly.
“That you will be afraid. Or . . . disgusted.” He was having trouble getting the words out. “I am . . . disfigured. Ugly. An abomination.”
According to the Book of Enoch, those had been the same words God used to describe the children made from the union of rebellious angels and their human mates. Mouse had struggled with that story—God commanding the destruction of those children, who had not asked to be born, but who were ravishing the innocent. She had thought God’s punishment unjust and severe until she found herself doing the same thing to the hollow-eyed children, sealing them in the pit at Houska and leaving them to a terrible fate. All the hollow-eyed children had wanted was to be normal, to live in the light as well as the dark. What if that was what the children of the fallen angels had wanted, too? What if that was what her father wanted—to be loved, to be normal?
“I will not be afraid. I will not be disgusted,” she whispered.
He stood slowly, his head down, not meeting her gaze. And then he shimmered, and little flecks of shadow rained down from his body, his human shape falling away.
There before her, naked but for a loincloth, stood her father. As he really was.
Like his human version, he was taller than an average man, and his body was much the same—same proportions of leg and arm and torso—but his hands and feet and head were larger. Mouse studied him like a healer. Her eyes were drawn first to the twisted, thickened scars that ran along his legs and abdomen; they stood out against the otherwise
normal flesh.
But the skin began to change higher up on his chest. It grew waxy and dark, as if it had melted and grown solid again. She had seen scars like these on the burn victims she’d tended as a girl with Mother Kazi—though nothing so severe. Any normal person burned this badly would surely have died.
The tendons in his neck were stretched taut under the scars; his ears were pulled long and woven with the grisly skin along his jaw. His face was all but black. The edges of his nose pulled flat into his cheeks where the skin had struggled to heal itself. The little fingers on each hand had been burned away and the survivors were gnarled and thick-knuckled.
Her healer’s training held the horror at bay as she assessed his body, but when her eyes took in the soft brown curls covering his head, her tears came. She lifted her hands to her own head and raked them over the thick, brown stubble growing there, and then she reached up and gently traced her fingers over the scars along his face.
“May I paint your portrait?” Her voice was heavy with emotion.
He lifted his eyes to hers, searching them as he tried to fathom what she was feeling. He did not see fear or disgust. He thought it might be sorrow—and something else he could not be sure of, something unexpected.
He nodded to her. “But wait.” He shook himself a little and two great horns grew from his head. Long talons stretched out from his fingers and his toes, and his mouth filled with jagged white teeth. “We must give the audience what they expect, what they want. Yes?”
Mouse smiled as she reached for parchment and her brush and colored inks. She understood. He masked himself for protection. And this moment had been just for her.
No one had ever made such a sacrifice for her—to expose themselves, to humble themselves as he had done. As she began to draw, she felt the power in her wriggle and stretch like a bird settling at home.
CHAPTER SIX
With Bodie still nestled in her arms, Mouse walked Nate home on the remains of their chalk drawings. Nate’s mother met them on the front steps.
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