“Where have you been?” Her face wore a blend of relief and anger.
“I went to see Em,” he said.
“I told you I—”
But Nate wasn’t finished. He lifted his chin defiantly. “Because she’s not odd like you said. She’s just a girl. And I like her.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Nicholas, but—”
“Just Em. Please,” Mouse said. She was trying to smile but the words had sounded sharp and her whole body was shaking. She didn’t want to have a conversation—she wanted to be done and gone. “Listen, I have to leave. My . . . aunt is not doing well, and we’ve decided to take her to see some specialists in the . . . in New England. I’m going to be gone for a while, and I was wondering if you guys would mind—” Mouse’s throat tightened. It had been a long time since she’d had anyone to say good-bye to. “Would you keep Bodie for me?”
The cat turned at the sound of his name, cocking his head at her in question, but Mouse couldn’t look at him.
“Oh, Mom.” Nate was breathless with hope.
Mouse tried to smile again but her face was too tight.
“I know it’s a burden with the new baby and all, but Bodie’s pretty easy—just a bit of food and . . . company every now and then. He likes to come and go, you know.” Mouse felt the tears burning her eyes.
“Sure, Dr. Nicholas. I mean, Em. We can take care of him for you. But Nate, it’s just while she’s away.” Nate’s mother rubbed her hand along the cat’s back. “He looks like the cat I had when I was a girl,” she added, smiling down at Nate.
Swallowing hard against the knots in her throat, Mouse cuddled Bodie up to her face, rubbing her nose against his cheek. “Be good, Bodie.” And then she lowered him into Nate’s arms, leaning close.
“I love you, too,” she whispered.
The house was too quiet when she closed the door behind her. The silence pressed on her like something tangible, but she would not break under it. She walked back to the laundry room and knelt down beside the man she had killed.
He was the end of everything for Mouse. The end of her time in Nashville. The end of her plans to leave the house to Solomon—there was no time to arrange that now. He was the end of her oath to never kill again. The end of seven hundred years of hoping that she could be something besides her father’s daughter.
But Mouse could not let guilt or sorrow pin her down. Not yet. Not until she knew no others would die because of her. She had killed this puppet of her father’s, but he would surely send others if he thought Mouse was still there. She needed to get her father’s attention—not a flicker this time, but a full flare—and then she would run far away from Nashville. But she couldn’t do that as Dr. Emma Nicholas.
Mouse sat on the floor of her bedroom, which was scattered with birth certificates and passports. It was a familiar ritual to her—deciding who to be next. In the past decades, technology had made becoming someone new both easier and more challenging. Picture IDs, global databases, and social networks kept track of people better, but Photoshop and hackers and a criminal subculture fed a thriving black market of artificial lives. For the right money, you could be anyone at any time and nobody asked any questions.
This time was different though. Mouse didn’t really care who she would be next because it didn’t matter. The dead man in her laundry room put an end to any future she might have. She couldn’t pretend anymore. No ritual, no discipline, no oath could keep her from being what she was—a murderer, a monster. Just like her father. It was in her blood, and anything else was a lie or false hope. Mouse was done with hope.
She snatched an identity at random from the pile around her and tossed the paperwork into the canvas bag she’d already filled with the few items she’d need for the journey. Then she headed down the stairs.
The house reeked of paint thinner. The carpet runner on the stairs squelched under her feet as Mouse went down to the kitchen; there would be nothing left of Emma Nicholas after tonight.
She put her canvas bag on the counter beside a tidy row of butcher knife, salt jar, and candle lighter. The last she picked up and took with her, her hands shaking as she lowered the flame to the bottom step and watched it run up the stairs like she’d seen Bodie do so many times.
As the fire spread above her, Mouse closed her eyes and called to the power inside her—gently, like gathering up a baby without fully waking it. She needed enough to get her father’s attention for only a moment, just a single, bright flash. And yet she felt like she was throwing open the doors to an oncoming storm as she pulled down the barriers in her mind and called out to her father.
His answer came in an instant, as if he’d been waiting for her: Finders keepers, you know.
His tone was playful, but Mouse arched backward in pain; the sound of his voice in her head felt like someone shoving an ice pick in her brain. Her hair fell into her eyes as she bowed her head, fighting the fear and anger that would feed the power. She wrapped her hand around the butcher knife and stepped back into the kitchen.
Aren’t you going to say hello? His voice trilled with victory.
She could feel him needling his way further into her mind, searching for some sign to tell him exactly where she was, but she had learned at Podlažice that filling her mind with something irrelevant like old texts worked like a thick fog and kept her father from seeing clearly. It could buy her some time.
“Adam and Eve had two sons,” she whispered, quoting the Antiquities. “Cain, which means a possession, and Abel, which signifies sorrow.” Josephus’s words felt like cotton in her mouth. She grabbed a handful of salt and let it drop grain by grain, pinging on the kitchen floor. “They also had daughters.”
Answer me now!
Her knees nearly buckled with the force of his command. It was the same power she had used on Jack Gray, though her father’s was far more intense. But he had tried to force his will on her before. He had failed.
When Mouse spoke now, it was all her own. “Too scared to come get me by yourself?” she taunted.
Too clever, I’d say. I just wanted to see what cards you’d play before I put myself in the game.
“Well, your man is dead.”
By your hand?
“I’ve killed before.”
Yes, but not murder.
“This was self-defense.”
The laughter in her mind was like someone slamming her head against a wall. He had orders not to hurt you.
“He killed those other girls.”
They were not you. And they served a purpose. He paused. You should be proud that I remembered what we talked about at Podlažice—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I’ve missed those times. I’ve missed you.
The smoke was growing thicker as it crawled down the stairs. Someone would see it soon. Mouse slid the butcher’s blade across her palm, watching the flap of skin bulge and ooze red before she balled her hand into a fist and forced the blood to pulse and then pool.
“I wanted to let you know that I’m leaving. There’s nothing here now. Not for you. Not for me.”
Tell me where you are and I will come get you. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you with me.
“You’ll see me soon enough.” Mouse looked down at the glistening salt circle she’d made around her. She let drops splatter on the floor as she quartered the circle with a cross made of her blood.
What do you mean?
She could feel him growing more frantic in her mind, searching for an answer. He knew he was running out of time, and so was she. If she waited any longer, he’d be able to pinpoint exactly where she was. She began to mouth the words of the protection spell Father Lucas had taught her when she was a girl and the nightmares had come—living and real.
Something’s different about you. It sounded more like a question.
Mouse’s lips closed around the last word of the spell. She waited. There was nothing but Josephus echoing in her head. Her father was gone again.
The plaster ceiling bub
bled and buckled with heat. Mouse thought about standing there and letting it all come down around her, but she knew it was pointless. She’d tried too many times.
But an idea had come to her as she knelt beside the dead man in her laundry room. Obviously her father didn’t want to kill her; he’d had plenty of opportunity at Podlažice. But she was of no real value to him—how could she be? So if she made him mad enough or scared enough, she knew he’d get rid of her—like throwing away a toy when it wasn’t fun anymore.
But not here. Not yet. It had to be somewhere safe and on her own terms.
Embers fell on the couch. Mouse saw the broken angel on the mantel. She meant to leave it to burn with everything else, but as the sirens sounded in the distance, Mouse wove through the falling fire to the mantel, grabbed the little figure, and shoved it in her bag. Then she ran out the back of the house.
By the time the fire trucks pulled up to the drive, Mouse had already disappeared into the darkness of the yard behind her own. As flames licked at the roof of her former house, she folded herself into the cab that she’d had waiting for her at the end of the street.
The driver was looking at the fire, too. “Hope no one was in there. Doesn’t look like there’ll be much to save.”
“No. Nothing,” Mouse answered, but in truth, she knew there were too many clues left, too many secrets to uncover in the ashes. They’d find the bones in the laundry, maybe even be able to identify the man if he’d had any kind of record. They would know he had been killed before the fire. They’d know the fire had been set on purpose. They would know Dr. Emma Nicholas wasn’t in there when it burned. They would want to know where she went. Mouse would not be coming back to Nashville anytime soon.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Airport.”
As the taxi eased out into the traffic flow, Mouse searched for something else to fill her mind, to rebuild the walls she had dismantled to let her father in. She selected her cornerstone carefully. It came from The Book of Enoch, where she had learned about the angels who came to earth and bore children with the daughters of men. She remembered well how God dealt with them as he gave his commands to the archangels: “Destroy the children of the Watchers from amongst men: send them one against the other that they may destroy each other in battle: for length of days shall they not have.”
It was Mouse’s last hope.
PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,
BOHEMIA
1278
There will be no other like it,” her father said proudly.
They looked down on the portrait she had finished. She’d painted her father as he wanted to be—full length and fierce, as if he might jump out of the page. “We have made your book special.” He laid his arm across her shoulder.
“Brother Herman!” The voice rang in from the hallway.
Her father, who still held his natural form, flinched. Instinctively, Mouse jumped in front of him, her arms spread wide, using her habit to shield him from the dangers of being seen by Bishop Andreas who crouched at the open slot. She need not have bothered. As she turned to look over her shoulder, she saw that her father was gone, folded back into the shadows.
“Brother Herman!”
“Yes, Bishop.” She knelt near the slot.
“How is my book?”
“It is almost done.”
“That is not possible,” he said as he shoved in bowls of water and food.
“We are told that all things are possible, are we not?”
“But you have not had time to do the work. And you have asked for no books to copy.”
“I do not need them.”
“Then what are you writing in my book?”
“Everything I promised. Everything you want.”
“Is it any good?”
“There will be no other like it.” Mouse repeated her father’s lines and then turned to start work on the calendar and the necrologies. She did not see her father as he hovered between the darkness and the feathered edges of candlelight. She did not see his smile or the spark in his eyes when she told the bishop that the book would soon be done.
Her father was impatient to have her with him and away from this place. She had already been corrupted by a childhood of nuns and surrogate Fathers spewing twisted theology. If he had any hope of turning her into his, he needed to get her away from all that, to show her another world, his world. He was eager to begin the work.
The more he learned of her, the more he wanted her. The love she felt for these other men—son and lover and Father Lucas—it pricked at him and twisted the knot of want in his own chest. He coveted the power of that emotion. He could tap the darker passions easily—greed, anger, lust, despair—but love lived in the light beyond the shadows.
To be able to reach souls through the heart made them yours forever. He had learned that from his ancient rival. The law had failed to inspire deep-seated change; like children, the people were only good when daddy was watching. But find a way into their hearts—a bridge between the divine and human—and you changed them from the inside out. His rival had only been able to whisper into one ear at a time, too, but his son had compelled multitudes.
That’s what he also wanted, to make the masses his from the inside out.
He put his fingers to his lips, thinking. Perhaps this girl with her power and her humanity that gave her sway over the hearts of men was his answer. Maybe she offered him the means of building an army of true converts, committed not to simply satisfying their own appetites, but to shaping the world according to his vision. Such conviction would hand him the final victory.
But first, he would have to make her his.
“Where have you been?” Mouse asked as he pulled himself through the dark a few days later.
“Preparing a place for you.” He smirked.
“For me?”
“For when we leave here. When you’re done with your book.”
Mouse turned back to the calendar. She was working on the necrology—a list of all of Bohemia’s notable dead. Most of the names she remembered from an earlier version she’d copied once at Teplá. But she chose to leave out many of the nobles who had turned their backs on Ottakar. She also omitted the Brothers at the monastery in Prague who had shunned her, and she stripped others of their titles—a petty vengeance against the ambitious people who had wronged her. But it felt good anyway. Mouse wrote them out of history; they were nothing now.
It was her book, after all.
Remnants of her bitterness sharpened her tone when she finally answered her father. “I told you I meant to stay here, to die here if I can. I do not want to be among people again. It is not safe. Surely you can understand that.”
“You don’t have to be among people. You can be with me.”
Mouse had not expected to be tempted, but a place where she would not be a danger to anyone, a place where she could be herself, to make art and live simply—that would be a home. And Mouse had never had one of those.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mouse gathered a bit of thread, slipping it into her mouth to smooth the fraying end, and willed her hand not to shake. She slid the thread through the eye of the needle. As she pulled the scarlet silk floss for her first stitch, the linen looked like it was bleeding.
This last leg of the flight to Rome was full, but the plane was dark with only a few halos of light where people were reading or working. Mouse held the book-size oak box full of her sewing things on her lap as she worked. Two other embroidered scenes spilled out along the edges of the box—Carpaccio’s St. George and the Dragon had come to her first, on the tarmac at Nashville when she was desperate to find something to do with her hands and her mind once she had settled on where to go. So she had pulled the sewing kit out of her canvas bag.
“Oh, those are beautiful,” the flight attendant whispered, trying not to disturb the sleeping passengers. She ran her fingers gently along the second of Mouse’s embroidered pictures—Rubens’s St. Michael and the Fallen Angels. It
had taken the layover in Newark and the whole long flight to Copenhagen to finish. Mouse’s fingers ached with the work, but there’d been nothing left to plan, and she was afraid the hours of sitting and waiting would erode whatever courage she had left.
“Thank you,” Mouse whispered back.
“You’re an artist?”
Mouse shook her head.
Father Lucas had been the first to call Mouse that, and she had clung to the new title. “Artist” was much better than “odd” or “witch.” As a girl, she had filled her room with paintings and then, later, in the beautiful dream-life with Ottakar at Hluboka, Mouse had found her true calling. She was a carver, making wood come to life under her hands. But sculpting freed something in the artist and revealed traits so deeply hidden that even the artist discovered them only when the piece was done. Mouse couldn’t afford that freedom of discovery. She had wrapped herself up in a cocoon after Podlažice, not like a butterfly waiting for some magical transformation but like a mummy, desiccated and unchanging.
“Heading on vacation? Or is Rome home?” The attendant smiled down at Mouse.
“Neither.”
“Business, then?”
Mouse nodded—it was business of a sort, a dark transaction she meant to execute. She bent quickly back over the linen, not wanting to talk anymore. She felt like a bit of thread pulled too taut. The silence and simple work of her hands were the only things keeping her from unraveling. Or snapping.
The attendant took the hint. “Well, I hope you get to see some of the art in the city. Might inspire more of your lovely needlework.” Then she moved on down the aisle.
Mouse had hated learning to stitch as a girl at the abbey; she thought it tedious and dull. But embroidery helped a person keep her secrets as she wove them tightly into the linen and tied them in knots. And it occupied her hands and her mind when she needed it. Mouse would burn them all after she was done. Over the years, she had watched thousands of her embroidered pieces catch fire and curl up, black and red and yellow, and then float away into nothingness. That was her art now.
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