The Devil's Bible

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  Mouse sat still, waiting.

  “You won’t tell me anything about the trouble you’re in. Why would you tell him?” He sounded hurt.

  “I didn’t.” She looked up at him, a quiet hope blooming: Maybe the Bishop had kept her secrets. But, if so, why?

  “How would he know if you didn’t tell him?”

  Mouse just stared at him. There was no way to explain it to Angelo without telling him what she was—and she certainly wasn’t going to if the Bishop hadn’t. “What else did he say, Angelo?” she asked instead.

  “He said you weren’t what you seemed. I told him I already knew that.” Angelo glanced at the picture of the river over his bed. “And he wanted me to give you a message. ‘Act and God will act,’ he said. That’s Joan of Arc, right? But what the hell does it mean, Mouse?”

  Mouse didn’t answer, but she understood that the Bishop meant his words to be both an encouragement and a warning. In the Bishop’s absolutist view, he saw Mouse at a crossroads—align with her father or align with God. He was telling her that the choice was hers. Act against him, which in his mind was an act against God, and Bishop Sebastian and his army of fervent believers would come after her. Or Mouse could act against her father and, like the Maid of Orléans, an army of the righteous would fight at her side. Of course, that hadn’t ended well for Joan.

  “‘I am just a poor girl who knows nothing.’” Mouse mumbled Joan of Arc’s words with a sigh because, like her, it seemed Mouse was destined to be someone’s pawn.

  “What?” Angelo asked.

  “Nothing—it’s not important.” What she wanted didn’t matter, it seemed. The joy of realizing that the Bishop hadn’t shattered Angelo’s belief in her—at least not yet—was tinged as she realized it came with strings attached. It was his first move in making her a puppet for his cause. That’s what his message really meant: He’d keep the truth secret from Angelo as long as Mouse did what the Bishop wanted.

  “Bishop Sebastian said he thought you’d misunderstood his intentions. He wants to help you.”

  “No thank you,” she scoffed.

  “Why not? Everyone needs help sometimes, Mouse. It doesn’t make you weak.” Angelo was getting frustrated.

  “Depends on who’s offering the help. How well do you know Bishop Sebastian?”

  “Pretty well, I think. He’s as much a friend as a mentor. Why?”

  Mouse just shook her head. Angelo showed no signs of knowing that the Bishop was some hopped-up demon hunter, and Mouse couldn’t expose the Bishop’s secrets without revealing her own.

  But Angelo was still curious. “I think you can trust him, if that’s what you’re asking. ‘Act and God will act,’ he said. The Bishop wants you to do something, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wants you to leave me alone.” Angelo studied her face. “But there’s something else, isn’t there?”

  Mouse certainly wasn’t going to join her father, but she didn’t want to join Bishop Sebastian either. With both the Bishop and her father hunting her, she wouldn’t be able to settle anywhere for more than a handful of days, maybe only a few hours. Like a swift, she’d spend her life on the wing—but she was already so tired. She wanted it all to be over.

  Angelo saw the resignation in her face and he pressed his lips into a small line, nodding his head sharply. “We’re back at the church, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know. I just have to get gone. Any way I can.” She threw herself back on the bed, tears burning her eyes again as the undertow pulled at her feet once more.

  Angelo wasn’t giving up. “The Bishop said people were looking for you, Mouse. At least tell me who they are.”

  She shrugged. “Not people. My father.”

  “So how do we beat him?”

  “We don’t. It’s impossible.”

  “I’ve always believed in the impossible. So let’s have a go, shall we?”

  “You don’t understand. My father is . . . very powerful. He almost always gets what he wants.”

  “So what does he want?” Angelo pushed the laptop over and sat on the bed.

  “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mouse, come on.”

  “Your bishop thinks my father wants to use me for something. Something bad.” Mouse sat up and pulled her knees to her chest.

  “How does the Bishop know him?”

  “My father’s very influential and . . . has dealings with the Church.”

  “Why assume he wants to do something bad?”

  She shrugged her shoulders again. She didn’t know how to talk about any of this. “You can think of him like a . . . terrorist.”

  “He wants to hurt people?”

  “Not exactly. My father believes in the rightness of his cause. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He has ethics and morality, but his ethics allow him to do anything to prove he’s right.”

  “That doesn’t sound dangerous, just ambitious.”

  “The more ambitious people are, the more willing they are to do anything to get what they want.” She heard the defeat in her voice.

  “Most ambitious people end up defeating themselves, Mouse. They focus so much on what they want that they don’t realize they’ve gutted the floor where they stand. They sow the seeds of their downfall somewhere along the way—some mistake they make or someone they sod off. But because they can only think about where they want to go, things from the past and things in the present blindside them. Maybe that’s true for your father, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where do you fit in all this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Damn it, Mouse!” He got up from the bed and paced, running his hands through his hair.

  “I don’t know! Not fully.” She could talk about her father in this disguised way, but Mouse was scared to talk about herself. Angelo saw too much of her as it was.

  He sat back down on the bed beside her and was quiet for a while. “Look, I get that there’s something not . . . normal about the situation. I trust my instincts, Mouse, and I’ve known ever since that first night at the church that there’s something special about you.”

  There was a tremor of excitement in his voice that ran cold in Mouse and called to the ghosts of her childhood, a haunting echo of Father Lucas. Andílek, he always called her. Angel. He had thought she was special, too—special enough to die for.

  “I’m not special, Angelo. I don’t know what you think I am, but—”

  “Stop lying to me!” Clearly, Angelo was fed up. “I’ve told you—I can handle not normal, Mouse. You need help, so swallow some of that damn pride and let me help you!” Angelo stormed out of the room. Mouse heard the bathroom door slam and, a moment later, the water running.

  She shoved a pillow away with her foot. It wasn’t her fault he was asking questions she couldn’t answer. And what did he mean that he knew she was special? She tried to replay everything that had happened at the church that night, but most of it was fuzzy; she had been so out of it. Whispering voices and moving frescoes of beheaded saints. What would any of that mean to Angelo, to make him think she was part of something? The Bishop hadn’t told him anything. What did Angelo think she was?

  Another thought came to her, something the Bishop had said—that Angelo was special, too. The evidence of it was all around her in the pictures on the walls, in the movement he gave to brick and mortar and marble. Angelo brought dead things to life. She saw the proof of it in herself, too. She had been dead to herself for centuries, so consumed with running and keeping herself shut off, that she might as well have been carved of stone. But she had told Angelo her real name and parts of her truth. She was talking about her past and about her father. Angelo was pulling her out of a tomb, coaxing her back to life the same way he gave life to the statues in his photographs.

  Angelo found her lying on the bed staring at the picture over his headboard. His hair was still wet, dripping water
as he dug in the drawer for a T-shirt.

  “Where is that?” she asked quietly, nodding at the picture.

  “A bend of the Thames near Kew Gardens.” His voice sounded strained as he crawled over her to lie beside her on the bed. She could still feel the warmth of the shower from his body, and she felt her face flush.

  “It doesn’t fit with the rest of your collection in here—statues, churches, frescoes. All spiritual. But not this one. It’s obviously important to you. It’s bigger than the others and closest to you, over your head while you sleep.”

  “Actually, I sleep like this a lot.” He swept his hand to indicate how they were lying, heads at the foot of the bed.

  “So you can look at it? Why?”

  “It is a spiritual place—for me. Maybe the most spiritual.”

  “I’m pretty sure that makes you something other than Catholic,” she teased. “Why this place?”

  “It’s where I died.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath.

  “I was almost eighteen. I had scholarships waiting on me at Guildhall and the Royal Academy. But I had no friends, no family.” It was clear he’d decided to tell her his story before she’d even asked about the picture; he spoke like he’d practiced it. “I started looking for something to do besides play guitar or piano—alcohol first, and then when it wasn’t enough, drugs and sex—anything to fill the emptiness even for a night. I couldn’t see a way out.” He blew out a breath.

  “So late one night I walked a few blocks from Guildhall toward the river, and I jumped. The water was cold, I remember, but not too bad—like a cold bath. The current pulled at me, swept me into the middle of the river, slammed me into rocks and debris. I sucked in water when I opened my mouth to scream. I didn’t get another breath.”

  He paused to fill his lungs, his body reliving the sensation of drowning. “People always say drowning is quiet and peaceful, like going to sleep. It’s not. It was loud, and it hurt like hell. My chest and throat felt like I’d swallowed drain cleaner. I knew then that I wanted to live, but I was helpless as the river took me. I felt my heart stop. I waited to feel another thump. I waited a long time as the water drove me farther downstream. But there was nothing.”

  It was Mouse’s own story given back to her. When she was overwhelmed with despair the night Ottakar told her he was going to marry another woman, Mouse had gone down to the Vltava River and let it sweep her away rather than face the future she didn’t want. This couldn’t be coincidence—something was surely at work here weaving her fate with Angelo’s. She laid her head on his chest and curled herself against him; he wrapped his arm around her back.

  “Then the strangest thing happened. I felt . . . something there with me. The presence was tangible, physical. It hurt when it grabbed me and pulled me out of the water. Just there.” He pointed at the near side of the picture, the area surrounded by shrubbery and part of a tree trunk.

  “When I opened my eyes and realized I was alive again, I looked for the person who had pulled me out and resuscitated me. I jumped up, afraid that he might have still been in the water, hurt somehow from helping me, but I couldn’t see anyone. I searched around the bushes, the other side of the tree. Nothing. I went back and looked for prints in the mud, but the only ones there were mine. There were no signs that anyone else had been there, not even drag marks from the river up the bank to where I was.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t bruised anywhere, nothing broken, no gashes. I’d been dragged down the river for miles, but I was barely even wet.” He waited for her to respond, waited for her rationalizations or questions.

  After several minutes, she asked, “What’s your full name?”

  “Angelo D’Amato.” She heard the mix of sadness and humor in his voice.

  “Angel, loved by God,” she whispered. The words sounded like a prayer to her. They woke something very different, something not priestly, in Angelo.

  “My parents adored me,” he laughed, and Mouse’s face bounced on his chest, making her laugh, too. But the sadness of what he had lost and what she had never had sobered them both quickly.

  “This is what the Bishop meant today. The story of your calling.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think God saved you,” she said.

  “Something saved me.”

  “So you serve God.”

  He lifted his hand and ran his fingers through his hair, his other hand still on her back. She could feel him tracing patterns between her shoulder blades and for a moment she tried to follow the line of his fingers as they shaped the invisible tattoos, marking her.

  “Why does any of this matter to you?” she asked.

  “Why does what matter?”

  “Me. My father. My problems.” She turned to look up at him, her hair scratching against his chest. “The Bishop, your friend, someone who’s been there for you for years, tells you that this woman you’ve brought home is dangerous, but you don’t believe him. You’ve pissed off your mentor. Who knows what damage you’ve done to your career. You’re an almost-priest and you’ve got a girl living in your flat. Why? You don’t know anything about me. Why would you do any of this?”

  “I don’t have answers for you any more than I have for myself.” He dropped his hand from her back. “But you’re changing the subject. You’re just going to accept my story? No questions? No explanations for what really must have happened?”

  She shrugged her shoulders against him. “What you told me makes sense. I believe you.” Because she, too, had lived against all odds when the Vltava River had spit her out. Though Mouse knew now that her survival had been the consequence of her father’s passed-down immortality, a sign of her tainted heritage, she was sure Angelo’s had been a gift from God.

  “It makes sense?” Angelo asked. “That I was miraculously rescued and brought back to life?”

  “You’re the Catholic. Aren’t you supposed to believe in resurrection?”

  She heard the half-sigh, half-laugh in his chest. “This proves what I was saying earlier. You are most definitely odd, Mouse.”

  “That’s been said before.” She kept her tone light, but the conversation was shifting in a way she didn’t like, and she wanted some answers of her own. “You’re going to be a priest, Angelo. You’ve just told me why. You can’t turn your back on that, can you?”

  “Bishop Sebastian asked me the same thing on the phone,” he said. “But why is helping you turning my back on anything? I’m not making a decision here.” He bent his arm under his head. “When I was a child, I thought I had been given a gift so I could heal my grief and do the same for others with my music. But it was just a dream, a broken one that led me to the Thames.”

  Mouse thought about her own childhood dreams of being chosen by God for something special. She understood the bitterness in Angelo’s voice.

  “That night at the Thames, I knew I was saved for a reason. I just had to figure out what it was. So I went looking for answers. A few days later, I found myself at St. Elthedreda’s. I hadn’t been in a church since I’d come to London. I was looking at the windows of the singing angels when Bishop Sebastian—he was only a priest then—asked if I’d come for confession. The whole story came blubbering out. I was sure he’d think I was a nutter. But he started asking the same questions I was asking myself about my purpose, about why I’d been saved. Twice. All the answers seemed to lead me to the Church. But that hasn’t always felt right either.”

  They lay in silence for a while, both lost in their own thoughts, both searching for courage.

  Finally, Angelo broke the silence. “I don’t know what I’m saying, Mouse. I just know I want to help you. It feels right, and I like finally doing something that feels right in here.” He touched his chest beside where she lay. “I’ll figure out everything else in time.”

  Angelo reached over and turned off the lamp beside the bed, but light still filtered in from the hallway. As he lay back on the bed, he drew her head onto his chest again.

  “
There has to be a way, Mouse—a way to get your father to leave you alone. You’re not dangerous, and you don’t have to do something you don’t want to do. God’s greatest gift was free will.”

  “Not the chance of redemption?”

  “Redemption comes when we choose it, and not once, but over and over again.” She heard the words rumble in his chest and wished she could believe him.

  Mouse closed her eyes and felt for the glow she knew she would find. The brightness and nearness of it nearly blinded her as she expected. But she froze when she realized that she was also shining. Her face and arms, where they rested against Angelo’s body, lit up with his glow, his soul. She felt like Pinocchio wishing on a star to be real.

  “I’m glad he saved you.” In her mind, she knelt in a chapel and touched a flame to the wick of a candle as she whispered the words, but Angelo was already asleep.

  Mouse woke suddenly, eyes wide and her heart thrumming.

  “I know,” she said as she sat up. She’d lain awake with her mind trying to untie the knots—figuring out where she would go and how she would get there, running through the mental list of contacts who could help her build a new identity. She’d been trying to think of everything, except saying good-bye to Angelo. But finally the sadness had won, and she had fallen asleep crying. How long ago had that been?

  Mouse closed her eyes again to find a clearer image of what her subconscious had given her in her dream. As it came to her, the excitement tingled down her spine. It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

  “I know where it is,” she said more confidently.

  “What?” Angelo asked as he rolled over and grabbed his cell phone to check the time. He squinted trying to make out the numbers in his grogginess when he realized he was looking at a text message. From Bishop Sebastian.

  The energy in Mouse’s voice was electric. “What you said about ambition. It made me realize: I know the seed my father sowed for his own defeat.” She sounded childlike in her sense of promise, like a little girl on Christmas morning. Angelo had been right; her father had been felled by his arrogance and ambition once before. He had the grisly scars to prove it. Which meant he could make the same mistake again.