“Come on,” Angelo said gently, taking her hand and leading her out into the field.
Mouse was soon lost in a remembered world of battle filth and spilled blood. She let go of Angelo and moved along a path toward an easy dip in the hills—a place only she would know. The river had eaten a crooked bite out of the field and eroded the bank where she had gotten her first view of the battle so long ago.
The strewn bodies of men and boys and horses filled her imagination. They were so present in her mind that Mouse stumbled as she worked to step over the ghostly corpses. She stopped, the curse of her perfect memory marking just where she had lost herself and her life. She could almost hear the caw of the carrion crows flying in from the riverbank.
Mouse paused until the sunshine and breeze scattered the centuries-old memories, but her body stayed tense, waiting to feel the twist of power in her again. It had had its first taste of freedom here on this acre of land, let loose by her careless grief. She expected it to stir and beg for release. But the power had been strangely quiet these last few days—silent since she met Angelo. She looked up at him suddenly, wondering. Despite her lack of ritual, despite being caught in a torrent of emotion—despair and then hope—the beast in her still slept. Mouse wondered if it was because of Angelo.
“Is this where he—” Angelo asked sharply.
“Yes, he died just here.” She put her hand lightly on the ground.
“No, I mean, where did you lose your—”
“What?”
“Just . . . just tell me where to look.” Agitation rushed the words from him, unusually heavy with his Italian accent.
“What are you talking about? Where I lost my—” Then Mouse understood. “Oh! I said I lost my innocence. You thought I meant—”
“You mean you and he didn’t?”
“Here? In a field? No!” She shook her head, smiling. “You have some stories to tell? The virtuoso and the milkmaid go into a cow pasture . . .”
“You’re impossible.” Angelo shoved her playfully and then headed toward the monument near the road.
“I don’t think the pages are here,” Mouse called after Angelo. She was sure she would feel them if they were. They would be tainted with the leftover power that Bishop Andreas had felt in the book when she left it with him at Podlažice.
“We should still look around, just in case,” he yelled back as he ran his hands along the monument, reading. Angelo pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote names on his hand. And the date. He was curious about what this place really was, and he knew he wouldn’t get answers from Mouse.
Mouse had gotten halfway to the river when the nerves at the back of her neck prickled in warning, and she spun around. She stood still as she searched the shadows near the monument beside Angelo. Then she saw it—an opaque shape slinking through the darkness, its eyes glowing with hunger as it stalked Angelo. The creature foamed at the mouth as it leaned forward into the light, ready to claim its prey.
“Angelo!” Mouse screamed.
She wouldn’t get there in time.
The creature turned its face toward Mouse. She crouched, sure it was about to attack, but then it jerked oddly, stepped back into the shadows, and disappeared.
Angelo ran to Mouse just as she meant him to—away from the thing in the dark. She twisted around him looking for the creature but saw nothing.
“What?” Angelo asked, breathless.
“I . . . I thought I saw something. Someone.” She pulled him closer to her, but he backed away quickly, looking over his shoulder toward the monument.
“There’s nothing there,” he said.
“No.” She couldn’t stop scanning the tree line.
“Ghosts from your past, maybe?”
“Maybe. Let’s go. The manuscript’s not here.”
Mouse expected questions on the ride back to Vienna. She got silence instead. She wished they could talk about something that would help her feel normal again, but Angelo kept staring out the window. Mouse spent her time stealing glances at him and checking the mirrors, her thumbs drumming the steering wheel. She knew what she had seen in the field, and she knew what it meant. Her father had left a sentry to watch for her. Mouse wondered how long the thing had been waiting out in that field for her to come back. The good news was that it meant she was on the right track. But now her father would know she had been there. Now he would be on his guard. And Mouse needed to be prepared.
“Who died in that field?” Angelo’s voice broke the silence sharply, startling her.
“I told you. Someone I loved.” She was instantly wary.
“How did he die?”
Mouse couldn’t breathe. “He was killed.”
“How?” There was something in his voice Mouse hadn’t heard before. She didn’t know what it meant, but it scared her.
“Why does it matter?”
“Please, Mouse.”
She sighed. The creature in the field was also a sobering reminder that, regardless of how she meant to play the game, her father followed no rules. He didn’t care about collateral damage. He didn’t care about who was innocent and who wasn’t. He didn’t care if someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He would play to win—whatever it took. And now that he was in the game, it was too dangerous for Angelo to stay. Mouse had to continue looking for the missing pages, but Angelo didn’t have to go with her. She would use truth to make Angelo go home.
“I did it,” she answered him, trying to keep her voice cold and matter-of-fact.
He snapped his head around to look at her. “Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Very much.”
“I don’t see how.”
“It depends on how you killed him—if it was an accident or not. Or why you did it. If you were defending yourself, then . . .” His tone was high, like a question, and he turned away again.
“No, Angelo. You wanted to know my secrets? Well, there you go—I’m a murderer.” Her voice broke knowing that she would never be able to take this back.
“Did you want to do it?” he finally asked, quietly.
“No.” She sounded tired; she knew where the questions were headed because she had asked them all herself many times.
“Did you do it to get something? Money?”
“No.”
“Did you do it to keep a secret?”
It hurt to realize what he must think of her, but it was necessary so he would go back home. So he would be safe. “No.”
“Because you like to kill?”
“No.”
“Out of jealousy?”
“No.”
And finally, “Mouse, did you do it for revenge?”
Mouse searched herself, even more thoroughly than when she asked herself the same question many times over the many years. With a sigh, she gave the same answer: “No.”
“Then you’re not a murderer, Mouse.” He looked at her as he said it, but he held his face carefully still.
“Is that a priest talking?” she asked.
He wouldn’t answer the question. At least not out loud.
A few moments went by in silence.
“Angelo?”
“What?”
“You never asked me if I meant to do it.”
Back in Vienna, they found a café near the station after they returned the car. Mouse took a seat in the corner at the back. She needed to see the people coming in. Sooner or later, her father would send someone. She scanned faces as she and Angelo ordered food. Neither of them ate.
“Back to Rome, then?” she asked. She was trying to give him an easy out.
Angelo pulled his phone out of his pocket. The Bishop had sent several texts asking where Angelo was and telling him to call.
“Isn’t there anywhere else to look?” He was irritated, his tone clipped.
“Yes, but—”
“Where?”
“Prague. I lived there for a while. With the man from the field.”
Angelo played with
his fork then tossed it on the table. Mouse jumped at the loud clank it made as it hit the edge of the plate. He squinted as he looked at her. “I guess it’s Prague then.”
“The train leaves in an hour.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
She looked away, unable to explain that she had seen the schedule when she had booked the train from Rome and that she could give him a complete menu of destinations and departure times for all the stations along their route.
She continued without answering. “There’s a hotel there I know. The Red Lion. I can call and make a reservation.”
“Look, Mouse, I need some air. I’ll meet you at the station. All right?” He kept his eyes on his bag as he maneuvered it past the chair and onto his shoulder.
Mouse knew his voice well enough now to hear the lie, and she knew she deserved it.
The door jingled as it closed behind him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mouse kept looking behind her as she walked through the misty drizzle to the train station at Vienna Meidling. Tiny pearls of moisture gathered along the pattern of leaves on the front of her dress like drops of dew, and every snap of her head sent them shuddering violently down to the sidewalk. She didn’t know what she was looking for as she scanned the shadows. She doubted that Bishop Sebastian had any way of tracking her here. A minion from her father, like the one in the field, was much more likely. She peered into each dark alley, almost eagerly, but there was nothing there.
She lowered her head and watched the water slowly ball at the end of a strand of hair, and then it let go. Mouse gritted her teeth and forced her eyes forward. She knew why she really kept looking back. It wasn’t fear that strained her ears listening for footfalls; it was hope. And it was pathetic. Angelo wouldn’t be there. Her little bit of dark truth had sent him running, just as she’d meant it to. But it still stung.
She chided herself for the feeling of disappointment when he wasn’t waiting at the station like he said he would be. There was no one on the platform, no one waiting for the train to Prague. There was no one in the bathroom when she went to wash her face.
Mouse was alone. Again.
She rested her head against the mirror, her breath and the warm wetness of her hair making a pattern of fog on the glass, and she swallowed all her longing.
Then she heard him.
“Olly olly oxen free.”
Not in her head this time, but real and live. It was the first time since Podlažice that she’d heard his voice with her ears instead of it piercing her mind. It seemed oddly hollow as it bounced against the bathroom tile. She watched the reflection of him in the mirror rake the water from his shoulder. He wore his typical black but a modern version in dark denim, black shirt, and trench coat. The bitter taste of adrenaline pulled her lips into a sneer as her eyes met his in the mirror, but she held tightly to the sink to keep herself from spinning around to face him. She refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her afraid. “Where have you been?” she spat.
“Busy. But I’m here now. Let’s go, daughter of mine.” He stretched out his hand, motioning her to move toward him. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.” He was picking up exactly where they had left off seven hundred years ago.
Every muscle in her body grew taut with her refusal; she could barely shake her head. She saw the flash of anger in his eyes as he lifted his hand to his hair and looked up. The fluorescent lights popped with the overrun energy in the room. Mouse blinked and everything turned eerily normal again, his face pleasant and his eyes placid.
“I just wanted to check on you. Let you know I was here for you,” the reflection said innocently. “If you needed me.”
“Just a concerned dad looking out for his girl?” she said bitterly, her nostrils flaring with her panic and sucking in the stench of stale urine and bleach. He was between her and the door out. She was trapped.
“Why not? That’s what I am,” he said.
“What?”
“Concerned. You . . . weren’t yourself in Nashville. But I guess you got everything ironed out.” The face in the mirror smiled as he arrogantly reminded her how easily he could play with her mind and take from it what he wanted. “And I heard you’ve been to Marchfeld. That can’t be a good sign.”
Mouse watched the water circling the drain. His patronizing tone reminded her of Bishop Sebastian, and her fingernails screeched against the countertop, curling with a desire to rip his throat out. She felt sure her father could kill her easily if he wanted. She knew it, instinctively, like a lamb come face-to-face with the lion. It could be brutal and bloody and she would welcome it. Mouse wasn’t afraid to die, but she was afraid to live—as her father’s puppet, as a tool for controlling the minds of thousands, as a weapon unleashed on his enemies. She would not let that happen.
“Just reliving old times,” she said, fear and anger pulsing in her neck as she began playing out options in her head.
As always, her father read her easily. “Wait, wait. I call King’s X. How do they say it in America?” His eyebrows creased for a moment and then the loud clap of his hands rang out. “Time-out—that’s it!”
“What do you want?” she asked again. She was starting to shake, her senses overloading as she tried to figure out her next move. If Bishop Sebastian was right, that Mouse had gifts her father craved, she could not understand why he hesitated. Her father simply took what he wanted and now, after seven hundred years of searching, he had finally caught her, unprepared and alone. Why not take her in this moment of her weakness?
Mouse looked for answers in her father’s reflection. What she saw shocked her. The corners of his mouth twitched uneasily. He was nervous, almost afraid—unsure of himself and unsure about her. She tried to see him through the Bishop’s eyes, and suddenly Mouse began to wonder about the limits of her father’s power—and the reaches of her own. The power that had slept peacefully these last days jumped to life in her chest, ready to be freed, eager to be tested.
She was sure her father must have felt it, too. He put his hands together, lifting them to rest under his chin, the two index fingers forming a steeple against which he slowly nodded. Mouse knew the gesture; she did the same thing when she was trying to settle on a strategy.
“What I want is you, but you already know that.” His voice, warm and slick, ran down her spine. She shuddered and closed her eyes.
When Mouse looked up to the mirror again, he was standing right behind her. She had never heard him move. She gripped the porcelain in preparation.
He leaned toward her, the corner of his coat held in his fist. Just inches and he could wrap her in darkness and take her home. She would finally be his.
“Ah, Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater, had a daughter. But how to keep her?” He smacked his lips in resignation.
Mouse cocked her head, confused.
“I think I might let you come to me instead. Might see if I can find the honey to draw in my little fly.” He sighed as he let go of his coat. “But it will have to wait. I’m going to be busy with something for a while. Little Jack Horner sitting in his corner.” He stretched his hand toward her. It was just a hand, but she felt the claws prick her back all the same. “Don’t worry, though, I’ll still be watching out for you. I always do. And now I know I can find you. What a good boy am I!”
He moved toward the door but then turned back to her, grinning. “I heard there was someone with you? At Marchfeld this morning? Where is he? I’d like to meet your little friend.”
Mouse straightened and tried to swallow, searching for the answer that might save Angelo’s life. “He’s gone. He got . . . bored. Following me to some stupid field. It means nothing to him. I mean nothing to him.” In the mirror, she looked into her father’s eyes, too much like her own, which now darkened with her anger.
“He’s gone,” she said again as she lowered her eyes and turned off the water.
“Oh, really?” Her father’s voice was already fading. Well, don’t worry, dear.
You’ve always got family.
She knew he was gone before she checked the mirror, but she could feel the power roiling inside her still. She didn’t know if his presence had triggered it or if it had been ignited by her anger and fear.
It wanted out. Mouse had to do something with it. She leaned her forehead against the smooth surface of the mirror again and stretched her arms to either side, fingers squeaking against the glass. Fissures erupted along the mirror, shattering the reflection into slivers and shards. Dozens of distorted Mouse images stared back at her, each with a thin line of blood stretching across its forehead where a piece of glass sliced the skin. None of her fractured visages offered any answers about why her father had let her go.
He’d seemed nervous, distracted. He said he was busy. Maybe the Bishop was right and her father was amassing an army of demons for the oncoming war. Maybe her father didn’t want to have to deal with her until he was ready to set her off like some bomb to decimate his enemy at a strategic moment.
But as she thought about his little pumpkin-eater joke, Mouse wondered about another possibility. Maybe he had the same problem as the Bishop—maybe her father didn’t have the means to capture or to keep her. Maybe he needed, or wanted, her to join him of her own free will. If that was the case, it would buy her some time.
Mouse sighed. She felt more like that deer than ever—wolves on either side running her through the woods. They kept driving her in the direction they wanted her to go, but Mouse had no intention of getting trapped against the rocks. Not by Bishop Sebastian and not by her father. Mouse would go her own way and she needed whatever leverage her father had hidden in those pages of the Devil’s Bible.
She headed out to the platform. There was no still sign of Angelo. No sign of her father, and none of the Bishop’s spies. At the last call, Mouse boarded the train to Prague alone. She dropped onto the seat in her compartment, exhausted from the drain of power, and she pulled out her sewing box. Her hands moved incessantly—pushing needle, pulling thread. She focused on laying her loneliness and her fear against the linen square, wrapping them in colored floss, burying them beneath the image that took shape. For the first time, Mouse stitched from her imagination rather than copying something from memory. She created a picture of Angelo bent over his guitar. She used the silk threads to catch the light and give life to the music she imagined coming from the strings as Angelo’s fingers plucked them.
The Devil's Bible Page 19