Inside the chapel, the candle flames rose high and Sebastian’s reliquary and the bodies of Cecilia and Lucy appeared to glow. There was peace and life in contrast to the mayhem and death occurring just outside the shut door and well beyond. The sirens were getting ever closer.
“She’s beautiful,” Martha cried, placing the baby girl on Agnes’s chest.
Jesse too was overwhelmed but kept his composure and his aim squarely on the door. Agnes stroked the child’s face gently. “Hello, baby. I’m your mama.” She was breathing even more heavily now and blood began pooling beneath her. “You were born from love. You are love.”
The vandals broke in and Jesse fired, emptying his barrel. Bullets struck one in the chest, groin, and finally in the head, dropping him dead. He kept pulling the trigger, but there were no bullets left. He was unarmed.
The final vandal stood at the door smiling.
“What are you doing here?” Martha shouted.
“Doctor’s orders.” The marauder smiled.
Martha screamed and ran for the killer like a banshee herself and was quickly swatted back by the iron bow, which knocked her backward and nearly unconscious. Agnes did not have even the strength to cry out to her.
Before approaching Jesse and Agnes, the vandal pulled out his phone and held the screen toward them. The screen filled with Doctor Frey’s face.
“Hello, Jesse.”
“You will burn in hell for this!”
“Yes,” Frey acknowledged. “There probably is a special place in hell for me, which pleases me to no end. Since, however, you will be arriving before me, please do save a spot for me, won’t you?”
“The police will be here any minute.”
“Yes, in exactly two minutes, as the dispatcher assured me.”
As usual, Frey was a few steps ahead and flaunting his connections, which ran deep into the very heart of the city’s services and agencies.
“You can’t stop us,” Jesse warned.
“But I can. And I must. This is a place of death, Jesse. Full of bones and corpses and relics and a dead vision for the future. It is only fitting that you die here as well.”
“You evil bastard!” Jesse shouted, rushing the vandal.
Jesse too was swatted away easily with a hard jab to his abdomen, which dropped him to his knees.
“Forget about him for now,” Frey instructed. “Kill the girl and the child. I want to see it for myself.”
The vandal approached Agnes and raised the iron bow over her, preparing to thrust it downward. Agnes could not speak.
“The price of love, dear Agnes,” Frey mocked, “can be very high indeed.”
The vandal looked down, setting his aim squarely for her chest and the child that sat innocently unaware upon it. Suddenly Agnes’s hair began to grow, surrounding the mother and child, covering them like birds in a nest. Strands of Agnes’s locks began to climb up the vandal’s legs, tying them together at the ankles, wrapping tightly around his neck, and binding his hands. He struggled futilely against her tresses, which only tightened the more he fought. No matter how hard he tried, he could not strike the mother and child.
“What is happening?” Frey shouted impatiently. “Do it. Kill them.”
At the doctor’s command, the killer managed to free his hands at last as Agnes continued to weaken. He raised the bow to deliver the death blow.
Jesse shouted, “Agnes!”
A burst of light shone from Sebastian’s reliquary, blinding the vandal. A gunshot rang out, striking the vandal in the head, killing him. Jesse grabbed his ears and looked in the doorway but could only make out a shadow in the glaring light. It was Murphy.
“Are you okay?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Jesse said, pointing to Agnes.
Murphy waved the EMTs in behind him and they rushed for the girl and then for Martha. Jesse reached for the phone, which was still connected to the call.
“Doctor Frey,” Jesse said, still barely able to catch his breath. “There is someone here who wants to speak to you.”
He handed the phone over to the captain and the line went dead.
“I’ll pay him a visit later,” Murphy said. “You all right, kid?”
Jesse dodged the question, his focus entirely on Agnes.
“Will she be okay?” Jesse asked the emergency tech.
He shook his head no.
“I’m sorry,” Murphy said, put a comforting hand on Jesse’s shoulder then stepped away.
Jesse’s gut reaction was to rage that it was too late for apologies, but in that moment, his heart was filled with nothing but forgiveness and sorrow.
Agnes was trying to speak. Jesse brought his head close to her, holding back tears. She was reciting. Praying. In Latin. Jesse didn’t know Latin or how to pray, but somehow he understood. Every word. As she spoke, the candle flames rose and the words appeared on the walls of the chapel, as if they’d been carved there, burned there, her speech turned to fire.
Et si habuero prophetiam et noverim mysteria omnia et omnem scientiam et habuero omnem fidem ita ut montes transferam caritatem autem non habuero nihil sum.
(And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.)
Et si distribuero in cibos pauperum omnes facultates meas et si tradidero corpus meum ut ardeam caritatem autem non habuero nihil mihi prodest.
(If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.)
Caritas patiens est benigna est caritas non aemulatur non agit perperam non inflat.
(Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.)
Non est ambitiosa non quaerit quae sua sunt non inritatur non cogitat malum.
(It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing.)
These were not the words spoken at a funeral or as a requiem, but at a wedding. A joyous occasion where the nature and endurance and maturation of love is defined and celebrated.
Cum essem parvulus loquebar ut parvulus sapiebam ut parvulus cogitabam ut parvulus quando factus sum vir evacuavi quae erant parvuli.
(When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.)
Even in his pain, Jesse smiled. He could not help but feel this was a message spoken not just for the ages, but for him especially. From this moment forward, he would no longer be a boy, but a man.
Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum.
(We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.)
Nunc autem manet fides spes caritas tria haec maior autem his est caritas.
(And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.)
Agnes recited the last line in English, for emphasis. It was who she was, what she believed, what she had lived for.
“The greatest of these is love.”
Agnes squeezed Jesse’s hand, turned her face toward his, and opened her eyes wide, connecting with him, looking straight into his anguished soul.
“Take care of her, Jesse,” Agnes whispered, stroking her child’s face.
“What’s her name?” Jesse asked.
“Faith,” Agnes said.
Jesse nodded and took the child, bringing her face to Agnes’s lips for a single kiss. Agnes then repeated a final phrase over and over again, like a prayerful chant, as if to imprint it on the infant’s brain and on her soul.
Caritas numquam excidit.
(Love never dies.)
As Agnes uttered her last words, she let out a heavy sigh and a great sense of peace came over her. Before her, she saw Lu
cy and Cecilia, and then she saw Sebastian, standing at her feet, smiling. Sebastian walked over to her and held her hand and he gently kissed his daughter’s head. Jesse saw it too. And Martha, who had just regained consciousness and crawled to her daughter and granddaughter’s side, did as well.
Agnes’s spirit now freed from her body, the saints stood together, shoulder to shoulder, visions of strength and beauty, and smiled at them. A smile of gratitude and farewell, transforming the bone chapel into a chapel of eternal love. Jesse closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, and his mind was filled at last with understanding. When he opened them, they were gone. Frey had it totally wrong. This was not a place of death. It was a place of life. Agnes made it so.
“My baby!” Martha wailed inconsolably, stroking Agnes’s hair and lifeless cheeks.
Jesse lifted the child from Agnes’s arms and cradled her in his own.
Even the hardened police captain’s eyes filled with tears. He clasped his hands together respectfully.
The crush of emergency service personnel and police filled the tiny chapel. Jesse sat in the pew grieving quietly amid the chaos, protecting the child from the havoc all around them, his teardrops falling onto Faith’s head one by one. A kind of baptism. He thought about the sacrifice Agnes had made to bring the child into the world, the sacrifice they’d each made. She would have lived if she went to the hospital; she knew that, he thought. But her baby would be in their hands.
Gurneys from the medical examiner’s office arrived quickly and so did the crime scene photographers. He could see these hardboiled men trying desperately to keep the tears in their eyes from ruining their focus. Tony and the four vandals’ bodies were wheeled out and taken away. The investigation had already begun. The captain stood over Jesse and put his hand gently on Jesse’s shoulder.
“Who is the father?” Murphy asked quietly.
“What?” Jesse said, still very much distracted.
“Whose child is this?” Murphy asked again.
“Mine,” Jesse said. “Faith is mine.”
Police units had already surrounded Perpetual Help, leaving Doctor Frey no exit. No escape. He could see from the windows of his penthouse office the roofs of their cruisers flashing red and white lights. Lights from the vans of local TV news crews were already set up and blaring into the night sky.
He clicked through the channels on his television and one after another they rolled hastily produced “breaking news” packages of the teenage saints, their followers, the lines of mourners for Agnes keeping vigil outside Precious Blood followed by reporters predicting his impending doom, which they would carry live, of course. He hit the off button on the remote. With little recourse left, he sat in his chair and waited for the inevitable.
The doctor examined their files obsessively in his last moments of freedom. Sebastian’s. Lucy’s. Cecilia’s. Agnes’s. Wondering what he’d missed. What he might have done differently. He still could not process that these . . . teenagers had won. And that they’d won by dying. Modern-day martyrs. It had all backfired. His greatest fear realized. And there was little comfort for him in the fact that there would be others like him to carry on. There always had been. But there would be others like them too. Perhaps more. Many more. Fighting not from the shadows, from behind the scenes, like he and his kind, but out in the open. The battle would continue to rage, but the war, he feared, was lost. The ignorant would inherit the earth.
He thought about shredding the files, destroying the evidence, but neither the scientist in him nor his own hubris would permit it. The record would remain. For the judge, the jury, and perhaps for posterity as a blueprint of what not to do. He had already notified the other Ciphers of his likely predicament, as if they hadn’t heard already. None replied, which was protocol for them. Expressions of sympathy and goodwill were for the weak. The doctor understood that Daniel Less’s death had barely registered among them, and besides himself, there was no one of greater influence. It was definitely every man and woman for themselves now. Any connections to him—e-mail, correspondence, phone calls, texts, meeting logs—would be scrubbed clean and definitive statements of denial made through attorneys and public relations officers. For Frey, this process was worse than death. It was a kind of living death for a man with an ego as massive as his. Not just the shame of the fall from such great heights, the loss of power and control, but to be rejected by his peers. As he planned for the saints-to-be. Cut loose. Like dead weight tethered to an overfull life raft. To disappear. The irony of it all was crushing for him.
In short order, uniformed officers burst from the elevators, guns drawn, and headed for his office. At the sound of the commotion, patients began waking up and lining the hallways, not sure if what they were seeing was some sort of psychotic dream or drug-induced hallucination. The police entered and found Frey there, casually reviewing some paperwork.
“Can I help you?” he said snidely.
The sea of blue parted and Murphy stepped forward.
“Doctor Frey, you are under arrest.”
He approached the psychiatrist, pulled his arms behind his back forcibly, and cuffed him.
“What is the charge, Detective?”
“Pick one,” Murphy said smugly.
The captain pushed the doctor forward toward the office doorway like a common criminal and out into the hall where the patients were waiting for him like a jury. His humiliation was complete. He passed them silently, looking downward, until he came upon the last of them.
It was Jude.
And Sister Dorothea standing right behind him.
“Seems the shoe is on the other foot,” Frey observed. “At least for now, Jude.”
The boy stood there and met the doctor’s gaze, unflinchingly.
“Not for now,” the boy said clearly in his own voice. “Forever.”
“Cured, are we, Jude?” the doctor dryly observed of the once-mute boy’s public statement. “The power of modern medicine.”
“I’d say it’s a miracle,” Sister Dorothea parried, matching Frey’s sarcasm. “Wouldn’t you?”
Frey smiled and continued toward the elevator, surrounded by officers.
“You won’t be able to hold me for long, you know that don’t you, Detective?”
“It’s over, Doctor,” Murphy said.
Frey turned and looked toward Jude, resignation in his eyes.
“No, Detective. It’s just begun.”
The last of the mourners expressed their condolences and said their good-byes to Martha. The brownstone was empty of people but filled with silence. She glanced over toward the hallway to Agnes’s room, only partly convinced the girl wouldn’t answer back when she called her daughter’s name. The wounds were still very fresh.
“It was a beautiful service,” Hazel said sweetly, as she began to clear the dishes and coffee cups and bring them to the kitchen.
“Yes,” Martha agreed. “It was.”
“Very Agnes,” Hazel said. “Filled with love and beautiful reminisces. Walls of flowers and candles. Everywhere.”
Martha began to tremble and Hazel placed the cups and saucers down on the coffee table and walked over to comfort her.
“Why didn’t I listen sooner?” Martha anguished. “Believe her? Believe in her?”
“She was your child. How could you see her as anything else? Not want to save her? Spare her?”
The gentle and profound words of wisdom from Hazel were unexpected and touched Martha deeply, but not quite enough to relieve her of the guilt she’d been carrying around with her. “I was trying to spare myself,” she bawled.
“She loved you.”
“God forgive me.”
“He has,” Hazel said. “And so has Agnes.”
“Do you really think so?”
The sound of a few light coughs came through the speaker of the baby monitor in the kitchen and Hazel and Martha both looked toward it. It was a reminder, to Martha in particular, that it was no longer just about her and how she f
elt, her needs. There was someone far more important to be concerned about.
“I know so,” Hazel reassured her. “Why don’t you get some rest? I’ll go in and check on the baby.”
“Thank you, Hazel. You have been so strong. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You can count on me. And Jesse, Martha. We’re here for you and for her.”
“You’ve both been incredible,” Martha praised.
Compliments from Martha had always been hard to come by, but she was a different person now. They all were. Hazel smiled and hugged Martha, who retired to bed. Hazel finished cleaning up and headed for Agnes’s room. The child was restless, twitching slightly, coming, it seemed, out of a deep sleep. Hazel lifted her from her crib and walked the room front to back, side to side, bouncing the child rhythmically and singing.
“Sorry I’m not a very good singer, Faith. Now if your auntie CeCe were here, it would be a different story.”
Hazel hummed and cooed, did whatever she had to do to calm the child, and before long she fell back asleep. She laid the little girl in her crib once again and stared down at her for a long while, admiring her. She had tufts of copper hair sprouting from the sides and top of her head, and when she closed her eyes tight like that she looked very much like Agnes.
“I can’t wait to tell you about your mother, baby,” Hazel said sweetly. “It isn’t every day you can say, ‘Baby girl, your mom was a saint,’ and really mean it.”
Hazel walked the room, looking through Agnes’s closets and keepsakes, making mental notes about things to be kept for the child and things to be donated, depressed at the thought of having to give much of it away one day soon. There was no way Martha could ever handle that. It would fall to her. She knew it.
She sat down on the bed, her head in her hands, and closed her eyes, pondering all that had happened. Their childhood. Their friendship. The things that had been. The good. The bad. The things that would never be. When she opened her eyes Hazel found herself focusing on the drawer of Agnes’s desk. She stood and approached it, opened the top drawer, and was shocked at the sight of a card in an envelope with her name on it. It was taped to a vintage velvet sack, which she opened first. Inside was Agnes’s Victorian tear catcher. The one she’d admired.