“Ready?” She turned toward the case before a wave of dizziness forced her to sit again, head hanging between her knees.
“Way to go, Superman.” Angelo put an arm around her back to support her.
“Thanks, Lois,” she teased weakly.
After a few more minutes and another cracker, Mouse felt strong enough to stand, slowly and with Angelo’s help this time. They moved the Devil’s Bible to the center of the three protective spells Mouse had woven. Stray drops of her blood were on the floor where they laid the book. She knew it would stain the white calfskin cover. If it ever made it back to the library, Eva Hedlin would be pissed. Mouse couldn’t help but smile at the thought.
She stood with her back to the north portal doors, and Angelo handed her the paper containing the spell lifted from her father’s manuscript. He held a damp cloth in his other hand; Mouse had wet it in the sink at the bathroom when Angelo had signed for the rental car.
“I need you to stay in that fish,” she said to him as she pointed to the place opposite her. “No matter what happens. Do not leave that spot. You might see things or hear things. They might tell you that you need to get out of the church. But it’ll be a trick. Close your eyes if you need to. Sing a song or something to keep the sounds out of your head. But don’t leave the fish unless . . . unless I touch you and tell you to run.” Mouse felt confident that the three spells built with the power of this ancient place and her blood would shield them from the dangers in the book, but if her father showed up to keep her from getting the rest of the spell, their only hope—Angelo’s only hope—was to run.
“What happens if I step out of the fish?” Angelo asked. At first Mouse thought he was just being curious as usual, but then she looked at his face. He needed to know the consequences to strengthen his resolve if things got bad.
“If we’re going to be together—after—I’d like it if you were sane.”
“Got it. Stay in the fish. Can I call mine Jonah?” He raised a playful eyebrow.
“I’m not sure I like how things ended up for him.” The banter only made the growing fear worse. There was too much to lose, but Mouse saw no other way to win.
“I love you, Angelo.” As she spoke the words to him for the first time, she realized that they formed their own kind of protection in this ancient place where so many others had wept and whispered the same oath.
“I love you, too.” She heard his own desperate fear as he spoke. He didn’t have much hope either.
Then they knelt.
The heat began to emanate from the text as soon as Mouse opened the book. She searched the first page for a letter formed in her father’s blood. Knowing now how to see them and knowing the five words she needed to complete the binding spell, Mouse scanned the pages quickly, nodding almost as soon as Angelo had turned one page, ready for the next.
But she found nothing.
With each page, the heat increased, and Mouse realized that she could read the book now without the flashlight. They were surrounded by an eerie blue glow, and the air was thick with the smell of rotten eggs. She could hear voices whispering in the shadows, and she saw dark outlines moving against the walls and between the staves beyond the circle of blood.
She nodded again, but Angelo didn’t turn the page. She looked up. His head snapped, looking over one shoulder and then the other as he tried to hear what the voices were saying, tried to make out the figures lurking in the darkness.
“Angelo.” She tapped the book to get his attention.
“Sorry.” He turned the page. “I’m all right. You focus on the book.” He tried to smile, but it looked more like a grimace.
The look of fear in Angelo’s face and the sweat that dropped from his jaw down to the bloody floor forced a cold calm on her. She had to find the rest of the spell. She had to find it now.
Mouse lowered her head into her hands as she worked to understand the nature of her father’s game. He had hidden his manuscript in a place important to both of them, where they had learned something about each other, shared their fears and hopes. And he had put the first part of the spell in the story that he alone had created; he had been proud of it. So what had she been proud of? What had she created from her own self and experiences?
“It’s in the art, not the text!”
The joy of discovery was short-lived as Mouse saw the strain those few moments had added to Angelo’s face. He was staring past her. She turned. Dozens of creatures prowled just beyond the circle, threading in and out of each other like a writhing mass. They were like the thing in Humlegården.
“The spell’s holding.” Angelo said it over and over again as he watched the creatures. “The spell’s holding.”
Frantically, Mouse tried to figure out where to start. There were too many pictures in the Devil’s Bible to search them all. She needed to think like her father, to see his pattern, assess him like she would any adversary. But she could hear Angelo panting. She couldn’t think.
The most obvious place to start was her father’s portrait. She flipped to the facing pages of Satan and the empty Heavenly City entombed in red walls. Mouse forced herself to breathe slow and deep, letting the foul air of the church singe her nose, and then she closed her eyes again to concentrate. When she opened them, staring into her father’s distorted image, she saw the word trailing along one of the clawed fingers of his right hand. She laughed in relief as she reached out for the rag gripped in Angelo’s hand. But the laugh died in her throat when she looked at him. He had folded in on his knees and was rocking himself back and forth, whining to the rhythm of the hissing shadows.
“Shut up!” she screamed at the creatures. Mouse felt the power in her father’s book snake a tendril toward her. The dark things went quiet for a moment. Angelo did, too.
She pulled the rag free from Angelo’s hand and pressed it against the parchment until the faintest trace of the word scripted in her father’s blood transferred onto the paper she held.
“Only four more, Angelo. I’m hurrying.” In her mind, she recited the words of the last line of the spell over and over again.
Her lips were dry and cracked as the heat intensified. Angelo’s hair was matted against his face with sweat. As Mouse looked down to the book, she noticed that the blood on the floor had darkened and no longer shined in the dim light. She followed the line of her patterns outward.
“No, no, no,” she moaned.
The heat licked the moisture from the blood. At the outermost circle, she saw thin flakes of dried blood curl up from the floor and rise in the hot air. Mouse’s spells were unraveling.
A panicked urgency pierced her mind with icy clarity. She knew where the next word would be. She yanked the pages of fragile parchment back to the Book of Esther.
Mother Kazi had often read Mouse the story of the reluctant queen who was offered a powerful opportunity to help her people. To honor the only mother she had ever known, Mouse had decorated the front page of Esther with an image of the squirrel that had led her astray in the woods as a child so long ago—the trip where Mouse lost herself and found the first of her gifts, the ability to see souls. At Podlažice, Mouse had never mentioned the power she had to see inside someone, but, as she worked on the book of Esther, she had told her father tenderly about Mother Kazi. He had noted what the old woman meant to Mouse, and he had hidden the word of the spell, penned lightly in a bloody reddish brown, in the fur on the squirrel’s tail. It was almost invisible. Mouse pressed the rag, quickly transferring the word onto the parchment.
She grabbed the corners of the book, ready to flip to the next image, when she felt it. One of the creatures had penetrated the circle. It raced up and down the spokes of the pentagram as if held by some invisible leash, keeping it just shy of its prey.
Time was running out, but Mouse understood her father’s pattern now. It was quite sentimental; it was their story—her father’s and hers. As she expected, the third of the five words was hiding in her painting of Earth: her home and he
r father’s conquest. The fourth was in the elaborate initial she’d crafted for the beginning of the history of Bohemia; she found the word along the back of a piece of ivy.
Angelo’s moan pulled her sharply from the search. He was looking around wildly as the figures, now hundreds of them, snarled and spat only a foot away.
“Close your eyes, Angelo. They can’t get to you. Just don’t look at them. I’m almost done.”
And then the creatures broke through the pentagram. A single line of her blood now shielded them; it was already beginning to peel away from the floor. She was out of time.
Mouse turned the pages by handfuls, the parchment squeaking in the heat and tearing at the seams. The colorful initial from the beginning of Kings lay before her, and her father’s pattern was made complete. Him, her, Earth, Bohemia, and a king—a multilayered symbol in their epic story. Her grief at a king’s death had brought her father to her. Her father’s jealousy of a king had led to her birth. It was what he wanted and what he offered her—a king’s power.
The final word lay boldly along the spine of the giant initial. It was the first word of the last line of the spell he had built in his own blood. Mouse pressed the rag against the crackling parchment and pushed down on the piece of paper holding the words of the spell. She bent to see some trace of the word, proof she had what she needed. Her hair curled on the manuscript as she lowered herself closer and closer to the script.
But there was no word there. She yanked the rag from behind the sheath of parchment. It was completely dry.
“Oh God, oh, God,” she whimpered.
She lifted the rag to her mouth and tried to spit, but her mouth was too dry. She frantically licked at the back of the page, trying to moisten it just enough to release some trace of her father’s blood, but her tongue scratched against the ancient goatskin like a cat’s.
Defeated, she laid her head on the page, the heat of it cracking the soft flesh inside her nose as she breathed. A trickle of sweat rolled across her cheek. Almost giddy with hope, Mouse ran her hand along her face and under her hair at the back of her neck until her palm glistened with sweat. She placed the paper on top of the last word of the spell and pressed her wet hand at its back, squeezing to be sure enough moisture soaked into the old parchment to lift her father’s blood from its hiding place. When she was sure she had it, she folded the paper with the spell and shoved it inside her shirt.
And then she looked up.
The church glowed like the heart of a smithy’s fire. Small tendrils of flame curled around the capitals at the base of the staves and wound their way up the columns toward the high ceiling, looking for fresh oxygen. Mouse slammed the book closed.
“Angelo! It’s time to go.” She looked up. He was still sitting in his fish, his eyes clouded and blank. “Angelo?”
She crawled toward him, but the moment she crossed the outline of the fish, the prowling creatures pressed down on her, suffocating her. Mouse started to draw from the power in the Devil’s Bible to force them back, but her father’s taint washed over her with a cold craving to pull the burning church down and crush them all—demons and book and Angelo and her.
“I won’t. I won’t.” Mouse dug her fingers into her hair, her nails cutting into her scalp as she pushed against the presence trying to twist its way into her mind like it had in the library. She willed herself to stand, legs shaking from the strain.
She grabbed Angelo by the shoulders and dragged him to the north portal doors as the creatures stalked between the pews, savoring the hunt as they tightened the circle around their certain prey. Mouse couldn’t stop the high sob of fear rattling in her throat as she kicked hard at the latch in the middle of the doors, again and again, until finally they flung open into the darkness of the early morning, and she pulled Angelo across the threshold.
The fire behind them inhaled the fresh air like a dragon taking a breath before its final attack.
Mouse turned back for the Devil’s Bible.
She knew it was stupid, but it was the only testament she had to the life she had lived over seven hundred years ago—a marker for the girl she had been, for the innocence she mourned. And she needed to know that her penitence for Marchfeld still lived somewhere in the world.
Mouse grabbed the cover of the massive book and tried to drag it toward the open doors. She’d only made it a few inches before a tongue of flame flicked over her head toward the portals, tasting the cool morning.
The creatures had grown oddly still.
“Mouse!” Angelo had recovered in the clear air and ran past her to the other side of the Devil’s Bible, lifting his side while Mouse hoisted hers and shuffled backward to the door.
As she crossed the threshold, she saw the pillar of flame too late.
She knew this flame. She had seen it many times before—at night and alone in her room at the abbey.
The column of fire uncoiled.
Moloch stepped through the yellow-orange tongues and into the tiny church.
“Daddy sent me to play, little Mousey.” His human form melted from him. Heavy lids hung low over the dead eyes of a bull, and his nostrils flared with desire as he shook his massive head, flinging drool across the nave. It sizzled as it landed on the burning staves.
Angelo turned to look behind him.
The beast’s horns raked the medieval chandelier that hung in the center of the church. Moloch stretched lazily and rested a hand on the staves at either side of the aisle.
“Run, Angelo!” Mouse screamed. But Angelo couldn’t hear her over the roar of flames and the howls of the dark things that massed now at Moloch’s feet.
Mouse stepped forward, put her hand around Angelo’s arm and pulled.
He didn’t move.
Angelo was staring at the hypnotic glow of Moloch’s skin, which pulsed like smelted copper.
“Come here.”
Mouse looked up at Moloch’s command, but it was Angelo who started walking forward. She ran to catch him, wrapped her arms around him, and pulled back hard. Angelo turned, blank faced, and shoved her against the enclosed pews. By the time she got to her feet, Angelo was almost in arm’s reach of Moloch.
Mouse knew what would happen because it had happened to her over and over again as a child. When Moloch came, he would wrap his hands around her, pull her to his chest, lift her in his arms, and cradle her like a baby. Moloch loved children. It was the one thing he wanted and the one thing he could never have. That his tender embrace scorched their skin until it blistered and boiled and then burst into flame did not matter to him. He heard their screams as adulations of love. Because of what she was, Mouse had never burned quite like the others and she healed quickly, though she felt the pain all the same.
But Angelo was not like her.
Moloch had his hand raised over Angelo’s head, holding him there poised like a plaything. “Daddy said to tell you he had something for you, little Mousey,” Moloch said. “A pretty present that you’ve been wishing for.”
“You’re lying.” But she knew it was just how her father would play. He’d said it himself—honey to draw in his little fly.
“It’s a happy little soul—just for you. Your daddy said he stole it from someone, and he wanted me to give you a choice. You can have the soul you’ve always wanted in exchange for this”—his head swiveled toward Angelo—“and the little spell you’ve made.”
Mouse dropped to a crouch, her mind racing through her options. But she didn’t have any.
There wasn’t enough power in the old church for her to use—not to beat Moloch and the creatures and the fire and the Devil’s Bible. The power that lurked in the ancient book sensed her desperation and tempted her with whispered promises of revenge and victory, but she knew that power would corrupt her. She wouldn’t care what happened to Angelo, then. He would burn with all the rest of them.
Mouse shook her head.
“Is that an answer?” Moloch sounded hopeful. “’Cause I’d like to play some more. Would
n’t you?”
He lowered his hand closer to Angelo’s head. Mouse could see the hair as it lifted with the heat, twisting as it singed.
“No! Wait!” she screamed, but there was no way Mouse could win, and save Angelo, too.
“I’m tired of waiting, girl.” The flames flared as Moloch spoke.
Mouse knew there was another source of power she could tap.
Ever since Bishop Sebastian’s warnings about how her father meant to use her, Mouse had called up the memory of Marchfeld, playing it over and over in her mind, searching for something to challenge the Bishop’s understanding of what she was.
But Mouse had discovered the truth instead.
That day on the field, when the power erupted from her with her words of mercy for Ottakar, it had claimed two armies, but it was only a peck compared to what she was capable of. Since then, she had locked it up inside her again, but she knew: If she let herself really embrace that power, if she truly let it loose, she could easily be the weapon Bishop Sebastian thought her to be.
Mouse had been running from that power most of her life, terrified that using it would make her like her father. The power would be one with her, not some separate thing she could lock away inside herself as she’d done all these years. She would be giving in to her nature and accepting what she was—her father’s daughter. And that surely meant that any hope of redemption was gone; any hope of a soul, gone; any hope of being good, gone, too. Father Lucas’s dream of her as his andílek, as his angel, would die.
But Angelo would live.
The heat sucked her tears as they formed. Mouse closed her eyes and, for the first time, she opened herself fully to her father’s legacy. She let go of her resistance, threw open the gates of the cage she’d made all those years to keep herself separate from it, and she let the power free.
As it consumed her, she realized she had no control over it. The intensity of it boiled her lungs as it answered her summons.
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