The door held.
The blood flowed.
“You’re killing us both,” I told him. “For a fantasy.”
The spots were back in front of my eyes, though this time they were more like stars, bright pinpricks dancing across Max’s face.
“Tell me I’m worthy,” he said again.
“What the hell do you care? It was a lie, Max. It’s all a lie.” Except it couldn’t all be a lie, because the man had melted, right in front of me, burned from within by some kind of unholy fire. Because I had withheld my blessing? The machine was no joke. The idea that I could control it, that I had any power at all—that was the joke. I had no power over Max. “Please, Max. This isn’t you.”
“You don’t know me. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“No one is that good a liar,” I said. “You don’t have to do what they say anymore. You can choose for yourself.”
“Nora.” He brushed his knuckles against my cheek, so gentle, so familiar, and despite everything, against my will, my body relaxed to his touch, for one brief second fooled all over again. Elizabeth would forgive him, I thought. She believed in God, in love, in penance and redemption. But he wasn’t seeking redemption. “I have chosen. I chose a long time ago. You say you know me. So then you know—I’m worthy. Tell me.”
“If I do, will you let me go?”
He cupped my chin and tipped my face toward his. “I need your blood. All of it, if that’s what it takes. God will love you for your sacrifice. I will love you.”
I spit in his face.
His knuckles reared back and his next touch was far from gentle. My head slammed hard against the stone ledge. “Tell me,” he roared.
Sirens in the distance. The battered door shaking on its hinges. Adriane, still screaming, screaming. Blood, pumped by a heart that betrayed me with every beat, spurting from the wound. And Max, who I’d mourned twice, who I’d given too much, Max, the cockroach, who still lived when Chris was dead, asking me for the one thing he truly deserved.
I could feel the blood leaking out of me, bones and muscles desiccating in its wake, my head heavy on my shoulders, my free arm weak, the arm he held pulsing with draining life and at the same time dead, a pale, fleshy stick that might as well have belonged to someone else. I had waited too long to grab for the gun. But I didn’t need it.
I was not the vyvolená. I was not Elizabeth. Some things I could not forgive.
“You’re worthy,” I told Max as Eli threw himself through the door and Adriane tumbled after him.
“I love you,” Max said, to someone.
He pulled the lever.
27
He was right about the blood.
More blood, more power.
As the Lumen Dei whirred into action, the light gushed into him, and he released a small sigh. I might have imagined the words he breathed out, the whispered thank-you, before the flames burst from his body and the world caught fire.
Heat seared my throat as I sucked in lungfuls of black smoke. Tears streamed from my burning eyes. Adriane’s hair was a conflagration of dancing orange flames. The smoke carried a cloyingly sweet, rotting stench that could only be burning flesh. Eli shouted my name, and then his arms were around me and I reached for Adriane, who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max, that somehow still breathed and stood and howled though he was nothing now but flame, a golem of fire that lived only because he’d forgotten how to die.
Blood still flowed from my wrist, but there was enough strength left in me for Adriane, and I broke the human chain, pulled her away from him, as Eli tore off his shirt and smothered the flames swirling around her head.
“Run,” he said, and this time she obeyed, flying through the doorway and down the ladder. I was halfway down when my legs gave way.
Eli caught me.
“That’s two you owe me,” he said as we reached the upper chapel. Coughs racked his body. Smoke billowed from the turret. He wrapped his singed shirt around my wrist, tight, and we both watched a stain of blood bloom across the white cotton. “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m just waiting for you,” I said, or tried to say, then sank to the floor.
He carried me down the stairwell, my legs hanging over his arm, my head lolling on his chest, and as we raced the flames past pyres of bones and fallen soldiers of God, Hledači and Fidei blood smeared together across the floor, he whispered to me, a litany of comfort, but it wasn’t his voice I heard. It was Max’s. It was his hoarse, whispered screams as he burned from within. It was his final goodbye. It was gratitude; it was accusation.
It was soundless, when it happened, when we emerged from the church and were rushed by cops and paramedics, and, as Eli reluctantly handed me off to them, as hands laid me flat on a stretcher, strapped me down, the end returning to the beginning, I could only look up at the tower that had become a column of fire, at the Max-shaped flames that launched themselves over the stone ledge and tumbled down and down, fire streaming behind him like the tail of a comet. There was no final scream. Just the blazing fall, and the spreading flames.
28
When we returned to the church two days later, the cops insisted on escorting us. I was surprised they’d let us go at all, but then, they had been remarkably accommodating from the start, agreeing to wait before alerting the international authorities until they’d put us on a plane back to the States. The cops wouldn’t trouble us much there, either, Eli claimed, and I was experimenting with trusting him, at least a little. The Fidei Defensor had a long reach, and they owed us one.
With the Lumen Dei destroyed once and for all, I posed no further threat to the Fidei Defensor, or the soul of the world, and Eli had convinced them that both Adriane and I knew better than to think anyone would believe our story. The cops would get a different story, neatly packaged with a perfect fall guy. The Hledači—who, along with most of the Fidei, had escaped as soon as the cops had shown up, none of them ever expecting that one of their own would resort to secular authorities—were broken and purposeless, and presumably I was the least of their concerns. It was over. We would go back to the States, back to our families and our lives, and we would …
Well, that was a problem the Fidei couldn’t solve.
I needed to see it one last time. The crumbling remains of the church, its plague bones laid bare to the elements, its graveyard heaped with ashes. It was the bones that had saved us. The bones, and Elizabeth. She’d written of the Hledači—or whatever came before it—taking her to a church that smelled of decaying skulls, a church by the Vrchlice River. Somehow, bleary and concussed and nearly trampled by a crowd in patriotic frenzy, Eli had put the pieces together and persuaded the Fidei Defensor to join him at Sedlec Ossuary, outside the town of Kutná Hora, by the banks of the Vrchlice River—Sedlec Ossuary, repository of the bones of seventy thousand plague victims, six hundred years old, and now a heap of rubble. It had only been a guess, he said. We had been lucky.
It didn’t feel that way.
“How did you know what would happen?” Adriane asked softly. Other than the yes and no answers she’d given to the police, it was the first thing she’d said since the fire. Mostly, she cried. I didn’t try to comfort her; I didn’t want to know if she was crying for Max.
“I didn’t.” The three of us stood before the police tape, safe distance between us. Our police escort waited in the car. “Elizabeth said the Lumen Dei had the power to end the world. I think she meant her world. I think she meant Thomas.”
Tears welled again, but she managed the ghost of a smile. “Dead-girl letters save the day.” She cradled her bandaged hand, then played her fingers idly across her shorn scalp. It was disconcerting to see Adriane without her perfect hair. It would grow back, but she wouldn’t be the same. “I thought I loved him,” she said, staring rigidly at the remains of the church, away from me. “He wasn’t like anyone I’ve ever met. And he treated me like …” Whatever it was, she swallowed it.
br /> “Just tell me when. Before Chris died, or …”
“Before. Does that make it better? Or worse?”
I didn’t owe her an answer; I didn’t have one.
“Why?” I said, because it was all I could.
“Chris was yours. He was always yours. I thought …”
“You thought what?”
“I thought that made it okay. That Max was mine. I thought in the end I was doing us all a favor.”
“Chris loved you,” I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain.
She wouldn’t look at me. “No, he didn’t. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you. Then where would I have been?”
“Not here.”
“I wanted to tell you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Max said we should wait.”
“Max said a lot of things.”
“Honestly? I didn’t think you’d be surprised,” she said. “I know what you think of me.”
“I thought you were my friend,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.”
Adriane noticed everything, I reminded myself, even when she was pretending not to. I’d thought she was spoiled and selfish and an excellent liar; she’d lived down to my expectations.
She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “He promised me he could save us. I believed him.”
She wasn’t the only one, I could have reminded her. I could have held her, and given her permission to cry.
I couldn’t touch her.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she added. “I wish I’d killed him myself.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t.”
She turned away. Her shoulders shook.
“We should go,” Eli said. “It’s a couple hours back to the city. We don’t want to miss the plane.”
“You don’t have to come with us,” I told him. “You said the Fidei would take care of the cops.”
“It’s not like I have somewhere else to be.”
My parents would be waiting for me at the airport. Like a firing squad, maybe, stiff and cold and—I could only imagine, had imagined too vividly—accusing me of breaking them, when they had been held together with little but Scotch tape and scotch on the rocks for so long. Or they would be warm, as warm as they allowed themselves to be, and I would let myself believe I’d underestimated them, that they were back and wouldn’t disappear again, but then there would be awkward hugs and hovering and that glassy look in my mother’s eyes, and the stench of desperation hovering around my father as he yearned to go back into hiding. They would fade away—and I would be left alone to face the people at school, and the reporters, and Adriane, and all the places where Max had taken my hand or breathed in my ear or told me he loved me, and the emptiness that used to be Chris.
But at least my parents would be waiting.
“I never really thanked you,” I said.
“I’m waiting.”
He smiled.
“Right. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Are you sorry?” I asked.
“About saving your life? Twice?”
“About”—I swept my hand across the wreckage—“this. All of it.”
“I wonder about it,” he said. “The Lumen Dei. What it could really do.”
“I told you what it could do. You should be glad you didn’t see it.”
“But maybe you were right. Maybe they weren’t worthy. And if—”
“No,” I said. “No. It’s gone. It’s over.”
“Someone will try to rebuild it,” he said, and there was something in his voice, some hint of curiosity, that made me afraid. Kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo starý. “Knowing God, touching the ultimate … that’s not easy to walk away from.”
“That’s not your problem anymore,” I said, and willed it to be true, for both of us. “You’re free. To live a normal life, remember? Kickboxing. Laundry. Whatever.”
“It was never about being normal,” he said. “Not really. I just wanted it to be my life. I wanted to choose.”
“And you did.”
“I did,” he said.
Then he took my hand. His fingers were callused; his palm was warm. He squeezed, once, a question. I tightened my grip, only for a second, only slightly, but enough for an answer. A yes.
Adriane watched us, her eyes red. Two of us, one of her: Nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
Maybe nothing ever is.
“We should go,” Eli said again.
Adriane’s face went pale with panic. Her good hand was wrapped tight around the police tape, as if it were a security blanket. “I can’t do this,” she said, in a small voice. “Nora, what am I supposed to do now?”
“You go home,” I said, Eli’s hand warm in mine. I couldn’t give her my other hand. I still couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t smile. Not here, where the smell of grass and leaves was tinged with an acrid edge of smoke, where skulls watched us from piles of toppled brick and stone, where a small red flag marked the scorched earth where Max’s body had burned to nothing. She had taken too much away, and even if she hadn’t meant to, if she hadn’t wanted to, she was still the only one left to bear the blame.
But she was the only one left, and I couldn’t leave her, too. “We go home.”
29
No trace of the Lumen Dei was ever found. No mourners came forward to claim Max as their own. No one was arrested for the destruction of Sedlec Ossuary, which was written off in the Czech press as, officially, a tragic accident that claimed one innocent life.
It had claimed both more and less than that.
We tried not to talk about what the Lumen Dei had done, and why. Whether it had been supernatural, demonic, divine, or just the combustive force of four-hundred-year-old chemicals, I didn’t want to know. Trying to find the answer would be too much like trying again.
Amid the ashes and the bones, investigators found a letter, miraculously unharmed, which was eventually donated to the libraries at the Strahov Monastery.
Eli tracked it down for me. I was too afraid to ask him whether he still cared, or why. I was almost too afraid to read the letter. But I had to know.
I had to know, brother. I had to see. The machine was a part of our Father, and so a part of me. And after all I had done to bring it into this world, I had to know what would be done with it. Václav had me deliver the Lumen Dei to a crumbling house not far from where our Father once lived in Nové Mesto, and it was there I returned, day and night, watching and waiting, until it was time. My reward, his men said, would arrive once they had activated the machine and had proof that I had delivered it intact. Until then, I dared not face Groot, dared not face our Mother or Thomas, and so I became a ghost, haunting my own life, and haunting the thieves who had helped steal it away. Through a small grate at the base of the western wall I peered into their dark lair and saw all.
Václav was not their leader, I understood this at once. He had betrayed Groot only to fall at the feet of another master, a man with eyes as silvery as his hair, whose face I recognized from those long-ago séances our Father performed, and thus yet another of our Father’s maxims was borne true: A man has no greater enemy than his greatest friend. Floating through my memory was an image of him leaning over a smoking cauldron, his face illuminated by the glowing metals within—his face, and the faces of Groot and our Father—but as I reached for it, the image burst, delicate as a soap bubble, gone forever. His name escaped me, but it did not matter then, and it matters less now.
The workings of the machine baffled them, even Václav, who had been so instrumental in its creation, but they swiftly found the cure for that ail, in Groot himself. I saw the great man brought to his knees, bound and gagged, cursing Václav and Prague and the Emperor and God, and then silent, as, infuriated by his refusals, his loyal servant slit his throat. With his final breath, he cursed them, and me.
—The girl. She will
save you. Or destroy you.
Death took him, and I will never know his meaning. But I do not doubt my powers of destruction.
The silver-haired man spoke, and beckoned into the darkness.
—We know enough to begin. Ready the source.
I had to see, but I would do anything to unsee this.
Thomas, bound. Thomas, quaking. Thomas, dragged out of the shadows and placed before the Lumen Dei. He did not struggle. Not even when he saw the knife.
The sound that ripped open the night was the sound of my heart, screaming his name. They say life is an endless circle, the snake that devours its own tail, and it must be true, for here I was back again, cowardly and hidden, as dark forces menaced the one I loved the most. I failed our Father. I would not fail Thomas. It was not a thought but a need that drove me to my feet and into the house, flying at the silver-haired man, at Václav, at Thomas, my arms outstretched in useless supplication, my lungs bursting with the pathetic cry. No. No.
No.
I had no weapon. I had no power. I had nothing but the will to save him. And that was not enough.
—Take her out and dispose of her.
It was the silvery man, who had no doubt patted my shoulder or stroked my head when I was a child, who spoke. But it was Václav who gathered me up with his clawlike fingers and dragged me away. Thomas looked at me only once through this nightmare, and that was the moment the knife plunged into his heart.
The knife, wielded by the silver-haired man. In his other hand, he held a silver goblet to catch the gush of blood.
The screams left me. It felt as if life itself left me, draining out as quickly as it drained out of Thomas, an endless river of red.
As the goblet of blood tipped into the Lumen Dei, Václav dragged me from the building. I imagined I could hear the gears whirring to life, filling the silence left by Thomas’s heartbeat.
I will never know what Václav would have done with me that night, nor can I help but wonder whether escaping with my life was a gift or a curse.
I could not cry for Thomas. Thomas, I knew, was gone. And yet, as if the universe mourned his absence as fiercely as I, the night filled with screams.