The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “You’re hurt.”

  Mouse instinctively tried to place the accent—Italian but with something else. He started to lean forward.

  “Get the hell away from me.” She was sure he could hear her heart thudding as her body screamed warnings at her and the claustrophobia smothered her. She was trapped with nowhere to go.

  But Mouse had been prey before, and she wouldn’t give up without a fight.

  She took a deep breath and pulled her left arm loosely over her head, squirming with pain, and then slammed her back into the curved wall of the niche. Her shoulder jumped back into the socket with a sick crack.

  “Bloody hell!” the man yelled as he dropped to a squat. British, that was the something else she had heard. He put a knee to the stone floor and inched slightly toward her, his hand extended, and Mouse emitted a high, quiet keen. He pulled back.

  “All right. I won’t touch you, but you’re bleeding . . . a lot . . . and you don’t, you look . . .” He paused and took a breath. “Did someone hurt you?”

  “Leave me alone.” She didn’t have the breath to make it loud, but she did her best to make it sound vicious, like she was capable of anything.

  Mouse turned her focus inward and tried to summon the power to command this man to go away. But there was nothing. No nasty swirling darkness for her to tap, no hot energy taunting her with what she could do. This time, Mouse found nothing. The power was silent, dead.

  She opened her eyes at the clink of metal on stone as he laid the flashlight on the floor and started to dig into his pocket. “Let me call the police for you—”

  “No!” Her voice went high with panic, pealing against the cold stone in the crypt and making her sound childlike. “Just leave me alone!”

  “Please, it’s clear something’s happened to you. You need—”

  “Nothing’s happened.” She forced her voice back to normal, cold and dead. “Just me.”

  The man lifted his hand and ran his fingers through his hair, his forehead creased. He didn’t know what to do. He could see the vein jumping in her throat and the fear running in tremors along her body like aftershocks. The cut on her wrist was the least of her worries.

  While he hesitated, trying to figure out what to do next, Mouse flung her arm out and snatched his phone, leaving drops of blood blossoming on his khakis. He saw her eyes cloud for a moment, like she was about to pass out, but she bit into her lip and clutched the phone to her chest, eyeing him with a dare.

  He let his breath out slowly. She looked like a feral cat, and he wondered what he was getting himself into, but he couldn’t leave her. Moving slowly so as not to frighten her, he sat on the floor and crossed his legs. The light shifted wildly around the crypt as he moved.

  “I’m taking pictures of the church for a book. That’s why I was . . .” He was talking, trying to lower the tension, but the image of her gouging her wrist with a plastic knife made him cringe. “What are you doing here?”

  Mouse just stared blankly at him until he looked away. But he knew what he’d seen at the altar—and now in her eyes. He knew despair when he saw it.

  “Do you have friends I could call?” His voice was soft, coaxing. If he could calm her down, he could get her upstairs, get his phone back, and call for help.

  Mouse shook her head. The blackness of the crypt closed in on her; everything seemed fuzzy and unreal. She laid her head against her knees but kept her eyes open, wary, watching him and trying to read him in the dim light. She could sense no touch of her father on him. And suddenly, “I’ve got no strings to hold me down, hi-ho the merry-o,” was running through her head, and she could feel the delirium rising in her mind like floodwaters. She was about to lose control. Mouse needed to get away. Now. She shifted onto her knees and pushed past the man to make a run for the stairs. She didn’t finish her first step—a searing hot pain erupted in her ankle and ran up her leg. The man caught her as she fell.

  “I got you,” he said, his mouth close to her ear.

  The intimacy was corrosive for Mouse. For hundreds of years she had kept her distance from people, which meant that she’d often gone decades without being touched. To have a stranger so close, his hands on her bare skin, seeing her at her most vulnerable, holding her, whispering in her ear . . . It was too much. She couldn’t breathe.

  Mouse shoved herself away from him and fell back against the wall, her leg buckling under her as it took her weight. The stone scraped her back as she slid to the floor. She covered her eyes with her hand, pressing her fingers into the soft flesh at her temples as she clenched her jaw against the pain and surge of panic.

  The man squatted beside her but kept his distance this time. “Just breathe,” he said. “Counting your breaths will help.”

  Mouse thought he was trying to sound calm, but his voice kept fading in and out like her vision. She slumped as the last of the adrenaline drained from her, leaving her empty and tired. She’d once seen a deer chased through the woods by a pack of wolves. The pack drove the deer, making her waste her energy leaping over dense brush, forcing her through one tangled thicket after another in the direction they wanted her to go until the deer found herself trapped against the mountainside. Mouse was above her on an outcropping. She watched as the deer threw herself onto the rocks, desperately seeking some path to lead her to higher ground and safety at last. The wolves just circled, waiting.

  “I’m Angelo.” The man reached his hand toward her tentatively.

  All those years ago, Mouse had watched in horror as that deer battered herself against the rocks, until, finding no escape, she had lolled her head in panic as she realized she had no hope. The wolves would have her no matter what she did.

  The rest was burned into Mouse’s memory and came to her in the night when she was lonely and afraid, when she knew there was no one to help her and nothing she could do to save herself.

  An eerie calm had settled on the doe, and she walked among the pack as easily as if she were wandering the meadow, her head high, her neck bared. And the wolves claimed her.

  “I am Mouse.”

  Her voice was dead and her eyes fixed, staring into the dark behind Angelo.

  The sound echoed around the crypt, bouncing back at her from the shadows. Mouse, Mouse, Mouse. She thought she could see the ghost corpses in all the alcoves mouthing her name.

  Angelo slipped his arms under her and picked her up. Mouse didn’t fight. She didn’t care anymore. She couldn’t. She felt numb, paralyzed, as if she’d stepped away from her body—like Jack Gray had in the bar when she’d commanded him. She didn’t care what happened to her. Like that deer, Mouse was done, her neck bared. Let the wolves come.

  Angelo carried her up the stairs and into the circle of candlelight in the apse. He knocked a camera bag out of the way and laid her on one of the old wooden pews near the divider at the schola cantorum.

  “My God,” he said as he bent to catch his breath, his hand making the sign of the cross. He glanced up, but she wasn’t even looking at him. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his khakis and paced a few feet toward the altar, away from her, and he watched her, waiting for her to try to run again. She just stared at a nearby candle until her eyes watered and she was forced to blink.

  Angelo walked over to her, pulled his phone out of her hand, and then leaned against the divider as he punched in the emergency number. But again, he hesitated.

  He knelt in front of Mouse and laid his hand across her forehead, trying to get some response. She just looked at the wall behind him.

  He was about to press the call button when he heard her whisper—“‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.’”

  Confused, he lowered the phone and looked at her. “Milton?”

  He followed her gaze, looking over his shoulder to the wall of the apse and saw the fresco of angels framing the Episcopal throne. The hair rising at the back of his neck, Angelo turned sharply to Mouse, squinting as he studied her. His life had taught him to pay attention to the
otherworldly moments, when instinct raised goose bumps on arms and screamed that the unexplainable was happening. He blew out the breath he’d been holding. Unlike most people, Angelo had plenty of experience with the impossible.

  “‘Tears such as angels weep,’” he mumbled as he slid his phone back into his pocket with a sigh.

  Angelo had experience with leaps of faith, too. He took one now.

  PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,

  BOHEMIA

  1278

  Come with me. Let me show you what you can do.”

  Mouse looked at her father’s outstretched hand and wanted to take it, to have him pull her up and let her lean into his warmth—a father’s love for his daughter—whether he knew it or not. But slowly she shook her head. She was rolling the quill between her fingers; it was so familiar now it felt more like an appendage than a tool. What would life be like if she weren’t working on a book? What would it be like without her father? Both had brought her back from the darkness and given her back her self.

  Mouse wanted to go with him. Which was why she couldn’t.

  “We’ve made a thing of beauty and power together, you and I,” he said as he nodded to the tower of parchment neatly stacked against the wall. “And now it is time to go find something else to do.” He was confident in the connection that had grown between them and anxious to get her away to someplace where he could test her power and turn her—to claim her as his own.

  “You eased me out of the pit of madness, where I was glad to go. You brought beauty and art back to my life when I thought I had lost them forever. You—” Her voice choked with emotion. “You gave me back my son. For all this, I am grateful. But I cannot go with you.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid. You will be safe with me.”

  Mouse couldn’t tell him that it wasn’t fear of him that made her sure she could not go, but rather, fear of what she would become under his influence. The power in her had woken, and not from fear or anger this time, but from desire. Hers. She wanted to play with it. She reveled in the idea that like their soft brown hair, their stubbornness, their dislike of olives, and the way he chewed on his lips when he worked just as she did—like all these, they also shared this power. It made them more than just parent and offspring; it made them family.

  “There is no one else in the world like us, daughter. We belong together.”

  That was another reason she couldn’t go with him—he knew too well how to pull her strings, and he didn’t even have to invade her mind to do it. He read her the way she read a book. More time with him meant she would surely lose herself and become his puppet. Mouse swore she would never belong to another man. Not after Ottakar, who swept her into his world. And when his ambition led him to make a more advantageous match, he had thought Mouse was his to give away. Ottakar had loved her, but he had also wanted to own her, to control her. Her father would do the same.

  She shook her head slowly, decisively.

  He moved so quickly she never saw him coming. His weight slammed her into the stone floor as his hand closed around her throat. “I will not be denied.”

  Beyond the flash of rage when he’d found her writing the conjurations, Mouse had never seen him angry, and she was frightened. But she would not give in.

  “I will not go.” Her voice trembled with the force of her will.

  “You have no idea what I could do to you.” His spit landed on her lips like a kiss. “And I don’t mean just killing you. I can show you things and make you feel things. I can make you do things.” Mouse heard the whisper of doubt as he said it, but she also felt the power rolling off him. The power in her own chest swelled with the craving to answer him—like a wolf eager to prove itself against an encroaching adversary. But she would not give over to it.

  “I will not go.”

  And just as quickly as he had attacked, he stood, pulling her up with him, and then smoothed the sleeves of his habit. “You will change your mind.” He said it softly enough, but she could hear the warning.

  When she looked up, he was gone.

  The icy cell seemed smaller and the smoke from the candle choked out any clean air. Mouse felt trapped and she needed to get out. Now.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Angelo kept glancing back at her as he walked around the church gathering his camera equipment and cleaning up the blood. Mouse never moved. When the church was finally tidy and ready for tomorrow’s tourists, he carried her out to the car. As he navigated traffic the few blocks to his flat, he stole glances at her; she looked even paler with the oncoming car lights flashing across her face, the circles under her eyes nearly bruises. But it was her stillness that bothered him most.

  He balanced her weight against him as he wrestled to unlock his apartment door and then laid her on the couch. She stared at the window while he iced her ankle and wrapped her wrist. She didn’t even move to adjust her foot on the cushion or to tug at where her shirt had bunched when he laid her down. Angelo hoped tomorrow would be better.

  But tomorrow was not better.

  He woke to find her rocking on her side in the same near-fetal position. She was moaning.

  “Mouse?” He intentionally used her name, hoping it might evoke a response from her. Her eyes jerked in his direction, and he sighed with relief. He also realized that, despite the oddness of her name, it fit her somehow. “Where does it hurt?”

  “Just leave me alone,” she hissed.

  He watched her sleep most of the day with a growing sense that he was in over his head. Last night’s impulse belonged in an old church with candlelight, but it felt foolish now. Her body wasn’t the only thing messed up. It was clear what she was trying to do in the church. What if she tried again? What if he found her in the bathroom, wrists slit and her life running down the drain? Despite what she said, Angelo knew something had happened to her. He should call the police. They would be able to find her family or friends. She had to belong to someone somewhere.

  He grabbed her canvas bag on the floor beside the couch and shoved his hand inside to feel for a wallet or passport.

  “Ah!” He snatched his hand back, a drop of blood beading in the center of his palm. As he put it to his mouth to ease the sting, he cautiously tugged at the opening of the bag to see what had cut him, imagining scissors or a knife.

  A small statue of an angel lay nestled among the clothes at the bottom of the bag. He had jabbed his hand against the sharp point of its broken wing. He could see the tiny smear of his blood on the white clay.

  The eeriness of last night erupted again in the middle of his apartment under the glare of the midday sun where it didn’t belong. Angelo felt violated and toyed with—but by what he didn’t know. He pulled the figure from the bag, rubbed his thumb along the rough clay and then the smooth, tarnished silver coin embedded in the heart of the angel’s chest. It looked ancient, timeless.

  He looked at Mouse again, still asleep on the couch, and he slid the angel back in the bag and waited.

  Mouse woke at the sound of the phone but held herself very still, not sure where she was until the pain in her shoulder and ankle summoned images of the crypt and Angelo. Sleep had cleared her head and restored at least a basic interest in her own well-being, fueling a new anxiety as she realized she was in a strange man’s apartment. Without moving, not wanting to let him know she was awake, she looked around his flat trying to get some clue about who he was. It was oddly sparse—only a few pieces of simple furniture—but there were lots of books, mostly about art and theology.

  “Yes, Father. I know how important this is, you don’t have to keep—” Mouse could hear the frustration in his voice. “I have every intention of—”

  She started counting his footfalls as he paced the hall and then shook herself against the habit. No amount of regimen or routine would help her now.

  “As I said, she was hurt, Father. Yes, a girl . . . a woman.”

  Mouse tensed as she waited to hear Angelo describe the girl he found at the church, call her b
y her name and make some joke about it.

  “No one you know. Just a . . . a friend.”

  Mouse sat up suddenly.

  She could almost always predict what a person would say or do. She’d had plenty of opportunity to study human nature, and most people followed simple rules. Apparently Angelo didn’t. But Mouse didn’t have time to work out the puzzle of Angelo. It was too dangerous for him and for her.

  “Well what was I supposed to do? Leave her there?” He sighed. “I thought about that but she didn’t want to go. She just needed someplace safe,” Angelo said.

  Mouse hurt everywhere, but she made herself slide to the edge of the couch.

  “Hey, you don’t want to do that.” He was standing at the doorway to the hall looking at her. “Father, I have to go now. I’ll call you later.”

  Mouse settled back but kept her feet on the floor despite the throbbing in her ankle. She needed to get her strength back, get herself mobile so she could leave, and it would be easier if he weren’t there. “If your dad needs you, go. Seriously, I’m fine.”

  Angelo looked at her, confused.

  “On the phone? Your dad?”

  “Ah, no. He isn’t my father; he’s a Father Father. You know, Catholic Church kind of Father?”

  “Yeah, I know that kind of Father,” she mumbled. She inched to the edge of the couch again. “Look, I should get out of here,” she said abruptly. “Thanks for everything.”

  Angelo knelt on the floor in front of her and put his hands on hers, gently holding her to the couch. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  His touch triggered her panic again, the nerves in her skin firing hot waves up her arms. “Some people might call that kidnapping, you know. Holding someone against her will.” Something dark flashed in her eyes, and Angelo leaned back.

  Mouse studied his face but she couldn’t read him, and despite her fear, she found that exciting.

  “You haven’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours. More than that, I’m guessing. You’re dehydrated, weak, and so sore that breathing makes you wince. You need to rest, Mouse.”