The Blessed (12 page)

Lucy was shaken and reached desperately for a metal holy water font beside her for support. It was empty, long since dried out, and only now refilled by the runoff from her designer dress. She grabbed on to it. Trying to keep her footing, but her soles were slick and gave way, sliding out from under her. The plaster split under her weight and the bowl came right off the wall, dropping along with her to the marble floor.

Lucy fell.

She hit the ground hard, forehead first, and lay there for a while—how long she couldn’t be absolutely sure. She was dizzy and moaning quietly but present enough to wiggle her fingers and toes.

She reached for her head to make sure it was still in one piece and felt something wet above her brow and realized
instantly it wasn’t from her rain-soaked hair. She put her fingers in her mouth and licked, sitting up slowly. The trickle of blood from the steering wheel had turned to a tiny river running straight into her eye.

“Blood alcohol level?” she slurred. “Shitfaced.”

She couldn’t see a thing. For a second she wished she had her scarf back, but she knew there was no point crying over spilt Bloody Marys. Which sparked another childhood fear. She tried not to repeat “Bloody Mary” three times in her head, because that childhood game of looking in a mirror and doing so and having an image of the Virgin Mary appear in blood seemed like a real possibility now.

“Why did I quit smoking?” she groaned regretfully, fumbling in the pitch-black church through her pockets and her purse for her flint lighter—the one that led her through numerous dark VIP rooms. She’d almost given up hope when there it was, at the bottom of her handbag. Lucy popped the spring-latch cover and flicked. The thumbwheel sparked against the flint and the wick burst aflame.

“A miracle.” Lucy laughed to herself.

She blotted the gash and cleared her eye as best she could with her coat sleeve. She remained still for a while in the dark to get her bearings. The storm outside was deepening, reaching through the walls now, even into this fortified and forsaken space, goosing her back into reality. Her first thought was that this must be some vendetta for past sins; after all she hadn’t set foot in a church for years, and she was drunk at that. She got to her knees and then slowly to her feet.

“Okay, we’re even,” she said, looking upward. Her dulled senses adjusted gradually. There was just enough light to see a few feet in front of her. Raising the lighter, Lucy managed to discern the first few of a long row of pews, and to her left a large, freestanding wooden structure that looked like the most ornate cabinet she’d ever seen. And then it dawned on her—it was a confessional.

Using the long bench for both support and navigation, she shimmied toward it and rushed inside it like a child pulling up her bedsheet, looking for cover and comfort.

She placed the lighter down on a carved ridge shelf and slammed the door shut, looked around at the dark wood etchings, meticulously done, and took a seat on the crushed red velvet cushion. It was a place out of time.

The only nod to modern life was a dusty sign that read:
PLEASE TURN OFF ALL CELL PHONES, SMARTPHONES, AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES
. She laughed nervously. It made a weird kind of ironic sense to have a sort of preflight instruction affixed to a booth where an otherworldly conversation was about to take place. Preparing yourself to be skyrocketed to forgiveness.

“I need to change.” She wrung out the blue fox fur sleeves on her dress and kicked off her soaking-wet blue suede stilettos, desperately trying to stay in the moment.

She opened her satchel and started pulling out dry clothes—a fitted beige trench coat, a pair of deep garnet crushed-velvet peep-toe platform pumps and a garnet fedora to match. She began to undress, peeling the damp
outfit from her body until she stood only in her pure white silk slip. Free from her couture armor, she was quickly overtaken by the fact that she was entirely alone, the paps, wannabes, and haters that trailed her, all gone. Left only with her innermost feelings.

A girl in a box.

Her head and her life, both spinning. Weighing on her. Hurting her. Drowning her in a deluge of misery.

The flame from the lighter, which had been slowly fading, petered out completely to a puff of smoke.

“Great,” she fretted, banging her hand angrily against the side of the antique wooden booth, the chaplet on her wrist scratching at the paneled interior.

Alone.

In total darkness.

Finally silent, with just her conscience.

Lucy broke down sitting in that confessional. Drying blood mixing with mascara, charcoal-colored trails streaming down her porcelain face. Wiping bloody tears on her pristine slip. Liquor still on her breath. She wanted a shower, dry clothes, and a warm bed.

“Somebody,” she moaned out loud. “Save me from all this bullshit.”

“Save yourself,” came a muffled, disembodied reply through the shadowy confessional screen.

“Shit!” she screamed, the burst of adrenaline sobering her up instantly. She braced herself, felt her face flush and the muscles in her calves and thighs slacken as she prepared to
run for it. She couldn’t move but knew she had to. Lucy stiffened her back and her knees in the narrow booth and kicked the door open. She catapulted out of the box, still clutching the shoes from her bag, her trench coat, fedora, and weekender left behind in the confessional, along with her shame. In her desperation, Lucy slammed her knee into the edge of a pew and fell to the floor. Another scream tore from her throat. Almost instantly she felt a presence above her.

A human one.

A male one.

She felt a hand grab her arm and another wrap around her mouth and press tight. “Shhhhhhhh.”

Lucy struggled, but a knee in her back kept her down and under control. She couldn’t bite or scratch or fight back in any way. No sooner was she contemplating the worst than she felt his grip tighten, not to subdue her but to hoist her up. She nearly flew to her feet as if on wires. Lucy still could not really see his face, though she was staring directly into it. All she could discern were his hazel eyes, which appeared to glow. He removed his hand from her mouth.

“Don’t you know who I am?” she babbled nervously. “People will be looking for me.”

He took her in between the lightning flashes as she stood there—scared, wet, defiant. Her beautiful blond hair lay dripping on her bare shoulders, lips pursed defiantly but quivering. It amazed him that she was still clinging to her shoes, which matched her blood, the same way a mother would hang on to a toddler to escape a burning building.
Her gorgeous blue eyes captivated him. It was as if he were talking to someone whom he only dreamed of.

“Look,” she said, her speech a breathless staccato as she tried to wiggle out of his grasp. “I don’t know who you are or what you are doing here, and I don’t care. Just let me go and we’ll pretend this never happened.”

Lucy worked her wrists up under his chin trying a Krav Maga move she’d learned from a bodyguard friend of hers to break his grip, when unexpectedly, she felt his hands loosen around her arms. He seemed to her to be looking down her slip, but it was the bracelet on her wrist that really caught his attention. She backed away from him but thought better of running, still not certain she could easily find the exit and hoping to calm him down before anything really bad happened.

“Are you done?” he asked.

“You tell me.” Lucy was feeling even more frightened when it occurred to her that maybe he’d followed her here. Maybe he was some kind of celebrity stalker waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. To get a front-page box for killing a socialite. She’d seen that movie. A few of them. But she also had to consider that, if he wanted to kill her, she’d probably be dead already. “What do you want?”

“Same as you.”

Lucy heard the scratch of a match head along a striker, then the incandescent burst of phosphorous, and both the stranger and the path were revealed, at least in part. He walked toward an elaborate iron candle stand.

He lit the first votive.

It illuminated through the rose-colored glass holder. The candle threw more shadow than light but there was just enough for her to see him, or at least his silhouette cast against the wall of the side altar.

She got a better look. He was young, probably not much older than she was, she observed, but there was nothing boyish about him. He was drop-dead gorgeous, with sharp features and a strong chin. Classic looks that fit in perfectly with the classical stylings of their surroundings. He was wearing black jeans and a tight black V-neck sweater that looked like it was almost shrink-wrapped on him. His dark brown hair was thick and sexy, like a lead singer of a band—well-coiffed in the messiest way. And his eyes. Those hazel eyes that pierced the darkness were even more entrancing in the candlelight. If she was going to be trapped with someone for three days, she could do worse.

“You need to change?” he asked.

“Oh, that was the whiskey talking,” Lucy said, embarrassed at being overheard in such a vulnerable moment. “I just needed to get out of the storm. To change, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Guess this is the place to be tonight, huh?”

“For us it is,” he replied with a smile. “What’s your name?”

He didn’t know her. A good sign. She thought about lying to him but she hadn’t needed to introduce herself in quite a while. And she liked it.

“Lucy.”

“Sebastian,” he replied, pulling up his sweater to the elbows and extending his hand.

She noticed each of his exposed arms sported a full sleeve of black ink from his bicep to his forearm, but it was the tattoo around his wrist that really got her attention. That gave her pause at first, and then set off a full-fledged panic.

It was a tattoo of an arrow, in the same style as her bracelet. It was intricate—the shaft wrapped around his wrist with the head and nock meeting on his palm side. Almost touching.

Lucy took a big step back and grabbed the pew once again, so flustered that she lost her footing.

“What is that?”

“A reminder,” he answered.

She was shaking as her skin turned not just to goose bumps but bubble wrap. “I’m out of here.”

Sebastian didn’t try to stop her. If she wasn’t so afraid of him right then, she might have even supposed he was letting her go. She backed away and headed tentatively toward the door she’d come in, but she might as well have been trying to navigate a caved-in mineshaft. She slipped to her knees and started to cry.

Lucy fell the second time.

Overcome by both the throbbing in her skull and the realization that she might have just made the biggest mistake of her life by entering the church. One thing she was sure of, she couldn’t stop. As her sobs intensified, she felt his hands on her once more. A firm but gentle grip under
each armpit and suddenly she felt herself lifted back to her feet again, facing him.

“Get up,” he said as firmly, staring directly into her eyes.

“Don’t hurt me, please.” Nearly naked, bruised, bleeding, and distraught, she did something totally out of character. She didn’t fight. She resigned herself and prepared for a forced kiss or much worse, for whatever was to come. He raised his arm, causing her to flinch. Then he proceeded to dry her tears with the sleeve of his black pullover. She grabbed him and held him tight for a second, then pulled away, not exactly sure of what had just come over her.

“Looks like you took care of that all by yourself,” he said, brushing her hair away from her face to get a clearer look at the cut.

Lucy hung her head, looking downward, crisscrossing her arms around her chest both to warm up and to hide. He could see it was all she could do to keep herself from convulsing in relief. He took his sweater off.

“No, please!”

He stopped. Looked at her. And gently wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Go,” he said, gesturing toward the confessional.

“Where?”

“Change.”

Sebastian tuned in to the angry sounds of the storm outside as he waited for Lucy to come out of the confessional, certain she would be filled with questions. Questions he wasn’t yet able to answer. Answers she wasn’t ready to hear.

13
A rumbling outside the church door, definitely not from the gale-force winds as far as he could tell, startled him. Three loud thuds announced a visitor—unwelcome or not, he didn’t know, but Sebastian was ready either way.

A soaking-wet silhouette slipped through the doorway, its image flickering in the bolts of lightning that were striking ever more frequently.

“Damn!”

He recognized the voice from the emergency room.

Cecilia.

Still, he didn’t say a word.

She pulled the door shut behind her, shaking the rain off. The darkness before her was thick and intimidating, but no more so than the wuthering wind outside. She peeled off her black ostrich feather coat, which was drenched and weighed a ton, and stripped down to a wife-beater she was wearing underneath. Her black leather panel leggings clung close to her body. She looked the part of a rock-and-roll renegade—dark kohl running eyeliner, glittery midnight blue shadow, and nude glossed lips.