“I think it’s a spell. A make people hungry spell.”
Eli’s stomach growled softly in reply.
“See?”
The Catholic church hadn’t changed since my last visit. The bell tower was the tallest building in the town, built of thick brick walls that shadowed its tarnished, patinated bell, the openings high landing and nesting places for pigeons. The church itself was cross-shaped, brick and mortar. Brick fencing encased the expanse of close-cut lawn. The ornate bronze crosses in the niches of the fence had tarnished and leaked various shades of verdigris down the brick, like the stains of ancient tears. The top of the wall, with its pointed cross iron spikes, made the whole place look like a fortress of religion instead of a church.
The town had been at war for far too long, vamps and witches fighting, humans fighting both, the church stuck in the middle, taking sides as it could, and somehow surviving the bloodletting. At one point after the Civil War, the witches and humans had joined with the priests and taken the war to the vamps. There were beheadings and burnings and death in the streets everywhere. The Middle East today had nothing on Bayou Oiseau at the height of the vamp wars.
Eli stopped at the entrance to the gate and pulled his phone. He now had a bullet-resistant, Kevlar-protected official cell like mine, a leash to Leo, but handy in so many ways that he hadn’t been able to leave it behind. He scrolled through his address book and tapped an icon on the screen. He put the cell against his ear and walked away, so I couldn’t hear the person on the other end, even with Beast being nosy. A moment later Eli said, “Joe, my brother. Yeah. Okay. You? The arm? That’s good, that’s real good. Yeah, business. I’m in a little town called Bayou Oiseau, Louisiana. We’ve got a magical artifact here that the witches and suckheads are fighting over. The church had it for a while and then it was stolen back. According to some, the church sent a scholar to look it over. Would you take a look and see if there’s anything I need to know? Text would be great. Yeah, this number. Thanks, dude. Yeah, yeah, I might make that one. You too.” He closed his cell and gestured inside.
“You gonna tell me what that was all about?”
“I’d prefer not to. But if I have to, then yes.”
We walked through the gate of the church, and instantly the flesh on the back of my neck started to crawl. Predator/prey response. “We being watched?” I murmured to Eli, my lips not moving, so my words couldn’t be read by a lip-reader.
“Targeted,” he said casually, his lips equally still. “Eyes in the bell tower. One rifle barrel.”
“How did you see it?” I asked, curious.
“Birds shuffled.”
“Ah. That or magic glasses.”
Eli huffed out a soft laugh but didn’t contradict me. And that got me thinking about what the government might be able to do if they had witches helping them. The national registration of the supernats could someday happen, and if it did, the possible results and repercussions for those with magical potential were dire. Like forcing witches to work for the government, creating new and harmful weapons, and, worse, at the risk of families and friends being hurt if witches didn’t comply. I could see the Department of Defense chaining vamps to the wall and draining them for sips of blood before soldiers go into battle. I could see—
“You getting all the way from ‘maybe’ to ‘stupid’ with the conspiracy theories, yet?” Eli asked, an edge to his voice.
“Pretty close, after that phone call,” I said.
“Don’t. The glasses were five bucks at CVS on Decatur Street. Uncle Sam trained me well. That’s it.”
I smiled, using the excuse to tilt up my head. The rifle barrel was still following us, pointed down now. “I wasn’t trying to push your buttons.”
“Did it anyway.”
I shoved open the heavy wood door, and cool air flowed out. Cool air was one reason for the thick walls when building back in the days before central air-conditioning. “I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. I changed the subject. “Did Lucky mention the priest’s name?”
“‘Father’ usually works.”
“Hmmm. Is the bishop’s scholar still here?”
“Didn’t get that intel either. Flying by the seat of our pants, just like usual, ain’t we, babe?”
“Except for your mysterious phone call.” Eli didn’t reply, and I sighed again. “I shoulda asked Lucky.”
“Shoulda,” Eli agreed.
“I forgot.” Sometimes I wondered whether my adrenaline-addicted partner let me forget to find out stuff just so he could play commando games again. But . . . nah. Surely not.
The door closed behind us. We were standing in a darkened foyer sort of place, windowless, the interior walls constructed of wide planks of cypress wood, the finish darkened by time and damp. Ahead, I could see the sanctuary, which, if I remembered right, Roman Catholics called something else. Inside, it was obvious that the church was shaped like a cross, the thick brick walls pierced open with stained glass windows letting in the sunlight in colors of ocean blue and bloodred. The exposed beams of the roof system were far overhead, beams bigger around than my waist. Verdigris-stained brass chandeliers dangled on rusted iron chains. In niches were statues dressed in clothing from Roman times, all with halos, and some with wings. Saints and angels. At the front of the church was a cross, some twenty feet tall, with a plaster Jesus hanging there, all bloody and beaten, wearing a blue scarf over his privates and a crown of thorns. This crown looked nothing like the one in the street in the dark of a rainy night.
“Where do you think the priest is?” I asked.
“This time of day? The sacristy or his home. Or maybe he’s the sharpshooter in the belfry.” Eli pulled his cell and checked a text message, frowning.
“Sacristy?”
Eli shot me a glance and removed his glasses, the gloom too much even for the loss of cool factor. With them he indicated the room we were in. “Narthex.” He glasses-pointed ahead. “Nave. The center area is the crossing with the transcepts as the cross’ arms. The head of the cross shape is the apse, with the chancel and the altar. Behind that wall is the sacristy. This church is built on the classic, historical, cruciform architecture.”
I was pretty sure I was goggling. “Are you Catholic?”
He tapped his chest with the glasses. “Ranger. We know everything.”
“What can I do for you, my children?”
The man who was speaking was standing in the crossing, half-hidden in a shadow cast by a plaster statue, bloody and clawed, with a lion rampant, about to bite him. The statue. Not the priest. Beast peered out from my eyes, amused at the statues. Small teeth and claws. Beast’s are bigger, she thought. The priest was a middle-aged, pink-skinned, redheaded man, slight of build and serious-looking, his hands in the pockets of his long black robes.
Eli murmured, “The black robes make him an old-school Jesuit.” He narrowed his eyes as if that was important somehow and spoke louder. “Father.”
We started down the center aisle, our boots loud on the wood floor, echoing up into the rafters. The air inside was still, the way an empty house feels when its people have been on an extended vacation. It smelled of cleansers and lemon oil and ashes, and the stink of Silvadene. The silver-based cream was used for second- and third-degree burns on humans. On vamps, it would be a poison.
The priest repeated, “What can I do for you, my children?”
Before Eli could reply, I said, “The Mithran Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier, sent us to see what was going on in Bayou Oiseau between the suc—the vampires and the witches.”
He didn’t change posture, but I smelled the priest’s interest and the shot of pure adrenaline that pumped into his bloodstream. I had an instant certainty that the priest wasn’t just a priest. At my side, I felt Eli shift a step to my left, his body slightly left-side-forward, right hand at his side. That was a fighting posit
ion, and I caught a whiff of gun oil. Eli had drawn a weapon. Not good. Now that we were closer to the priest, he stank of old fire and cooked meat and frustration tightly controlled. I studied the priest, his black robes and sash unrelieved by color except for the splotch of red above his waist on his left side and the white around his collar.
The priest said, “A vampire sent you to this town?”
“Yeah. At the request of the local Clan blood-master.”
His voice soft a breeze, Eli said, “We understand that you had control of the wreath, what the Mithrans call la corona in Latin, or le breloque, in French.”
I didn’t react, but . . . how did my partner know that was Latin? No way could he blame that on being a Ranger.
The priest said, “The wreath is spelled, hiding what it is. Spells are of the devil.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“Yes. All.”
“Powers and principalities are not all from Satan.”
“You wish to bandy Scripture and Church history with me?” Something in the emphasis suggested that I was out of my league in that department, that he could squash me under his metaphorical, verbal, scholarly boot. I decided on another tack.
I said, “Is the vine of the true crown still in the Vatican? Or did it go missing?” The priest removed his hands from his pockets, and Eli tensed, not that anyone else would have noted the minute changes in his body. It was more a scent change than motion, and it eased when the priest appeared to clasp his white-gloved hands behind his back. The stink of burned meat and Silvadene was instantly stronger on the air.
I knew my partner needed something, so I went on the offensive, drawing the priest’s attention to me with a single step forward and what little I had gained from the Kid’s info. “Or should I say, one of the many vines of the crown of thorns. Several are in France, one in Germany, one in Belgium. Spain and Italy have pieces of it, even the Ukraine. And the thorns are everywhere. For the Church to send an important guy like you, it must be possible that the real one has gone missing, and they thought it might be here, sealed into the corona.
“Or . . . worse,” I said, thinking, “maybe an even more ancient corona showed up here. Something the Greeks would have attributed to a god or goddess or the witches could use to get back at the Church for a millennium of oppression, and . . .” I cocked my head and grinned at the man. His face was placid, but he stank of anger. “. . . the Church couldn’t have that, could it?”
As I spoke, the Jesuit’s nostrils flared with fury and then his skin paled with something like dread. I wasn’t good at guessing games, but I was very good at flying by the seat of my pants, and I had a feeling that I’d just flown over the priest’s home base. I thought about the smells and the white gloves. Or not just gloves. No.
“Idiot,” I said scathingly. “You tried to burn it, didn’t you? But it wouldn’t burn. It burned you instead. That’s what”—I almost said that was what I smelled, but I changed it to—“you’re hiding with the gloves. They’re bandages hiding the burned skin.”
Eli said, softly, “I talked to Joseph Makris at the Vatican.”
At the name, the priest’s eyes went wide with despair and his shoulders dropped. At the same moment he capitulated, there was a soft ding and the priest answered the cell phone in his pocket. He carried on a soft-voiced conversation before putting the phone away. Afterward, he looked even more dejected. To Eli, he said, “That was Makris. But then, you knew that, yes?”
Eli gave one of his abbreviated nods.
“We tried everything we could in the small time we were allowed. Perhaps it wasn’t for us to decipher. Perhaps we were full of hubris and foolishness.”
The priest wavered on his feet, looking drunk or hurt or . . . spelled. Yeah. Spelled and hurt both. He went on, his speech slower, his words growing less clear, slightly slurred.
“It is not of the Church, nor of the place of the skull. The writing on its rim is archaic and unlike anything I have ever seen—if it really is writing and not some form of decorative work. Not cuneiform. More ancient. Like clay tokens or runes in their simplicity, mixed with squiggly, jagged lines, lightning bolts. If it is a witch artifact, it came from an ancient past so distant that history itself has swallowed it whole.”
“Do you know what it does?” Eli asked. “What magic power it holds?”
“No. I was unable to determine anything before it . . .” He lifted both hands, and it was clear that they had been wrapped with something like medical sticky wrap and that the gloves were too large for his hands, holding the bandages in place. “I don’t know what it is, but it . . . it makes people think things they shouldn’t.” He closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly. I smelled his tears, hot and toxic. “If I had to name it,” he said, “I would call it the crown of temptation. Or the crown of despair. Desperatio coronam. It brings such grief, such anguish of the soul.” He looked to Eli. “If you find it, bring the evil thing to me, my son. I will send it to Rome, where it can be destroyed.”
“Question,” I said. “Did you start feeling unhappy and miserable before or after you tried to hurt the thing? Before or after you got burned?”
The priest’s eyes moved from Eli to his burned hands, and his lips parted.
Surprise, surprise. I shrugged. “Maybe despair and lack of clear thinking is part of a punishment for trying to hurt it. Burned hands. Grief. Maybe, like the hands, it’ll heal. And maybe it would heal faster if you let a witch heal you. Or a vamp.”
The man’s eyes blazed with righteous fury and the stink of the burn grew on the air as he clenched his hands into bloated fists. Before he could speak, I said, “Never mind. Eli, let’s get out of here before the man sets himself on fire with indignation.” Eli backed away and I followed suit, though how the priest could shoot us with burned hands seemed impossible. To be on the safe side, I angled my body to the entrance as we moved back down the nave into the narthex. And out into the noon sun.
Instantly I started sweating. Eli holstered his weapon, looking cool and unaffected by the encounter or the heat. “You want to tell me what was going on in there?” I asked.
“Yeah. My pal Joe sent back a text about a certain emblem being worn by a small, renegade group of the clergy in the Western Hemisphere.” He slipped on his sunglasses. “The emblem is a small red thing attached to their vestments. The group is composed of professor-type priests looking for magical things and magical people. A few things and a few people have gone missing.”
“Missing as in kidnapped?”
Eli shrugged, not willing to speculate.
“Think they’re working against the Mithrans?”
“Joe thinks they have an agenda that they haven’t revealed yet. And he thinks someone in Rome is responsible.”
The sun felt good on my back as we left the church grounds, but the knowledge of a sniper in the belfry didn’t. “Think he’ll shoot us?” I asked as casually as I could with sweat trickling down my spine and a target on my back.
“No. But I need to report everything to Joe.”
“Fine,” I said as we passed through the brick gates unscathed. “Question. You knew all this before we got here, didn’t you?”
“I knew some. There’s been some chatter about magical devices. Alex has been monitoring it and did some deeper searching in Reach’s database. As soon as we heard about a magical device near us, I got in touch with people I know.”
Reach had been the best researcher of all, ever, anywhere, when it came to the arcane, the weird, the woo-woo stuff. Then he’d been attacked by a human and two vamps and disappeared. Or so we thought. There wasn’t any direct evidence either way. I still didn’t know if Reach was alive.
I’d come into possession of his database in what, under any other circumstance, I’d call coincidence. But I no longer believed in that, not when it came to the vamps and the layers of history and death an
d conspiracy they so loved. Someone had wanted me to get the data. I just didn’t know who yet.
Deep inside, my Beast chuffed with amusement. I didn’t know why, but I’d learned that Beast would tell me stuff when she was good and ready and not one moment sooner. I said, “And you got in touch with your friend Joe. A former Ranger?”
Eli gave his patented nonsmile, a twitch of his lips that he probably thought was cool. It could also have been constipation. Someday I’d hit him with that one and see how he reacted.
“Someone in the Vatican, maybe? People who want the magical stuff I’ve collected?”
“They think they can heal the world’s wounds with them,” he said. “And they think they’re the only ones who should have them.”
“Which means they’re the last people on earth who should have them.”
“Correctomundo.”
“Joe. Former military?”
“Current.”
“I thought you were on the outs with the Army because of me.”
Eli gave me a real smile, showing a hint of pearly whites. “Worth it, babe. Totally worth it.” More seriously he said, “I have friends who know why I was blackballed and who still keep me in the loop.”
I looked away. The guilt about Eli’s being ostracized by the military always got me deep down, but I also knew he was speaking total truth when he said it was worth it. I could smell that on him. “Okay. Joe. What’s he do?”
“Joe is the U.S. liaison in charge of overseeing the Pope’s safety.”
“Wait. The Pope as in the Pope? In Rome? That Pope?”
“Oh yeah. You have no idea how much the U.S. has invested in terms of time, intel, and equipment, keeping the Vatican’s citizens safe and alive, all of them, for the last twenty or so years, since the jihad extremist movement got so big again.”
“Okay. And Joe says?”
“That there was a blip in the Holy Vicar’s security intel yesterday morning, and it necessitated sending a small group of God’s warriors to the U.S. They landed at John F. Kennedy International this morning. They have a direct flight charter scheduled for New Orleans at four p.m. And then, unless they go the helo route, they’ll have a drive in.”