The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (23 page)

“But
why?
”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She waved her hand, flippant. “Men and their nonsense egos, thinking they need to protect us poor women from the truth. He
does
care about you, though. Enough to act the way he’s been acting, I suppose.”

That didn’t make it right. “If he really cared about me, he'd let me help. He'd let Max help. He can't keep pushing us away.”

“No,” Aralia conceded, “he can't.”

We were quiet.
That Girl Lilith
waited on screen, somber music accompanying the black and white picture.

“Want to go break into his study?” Aralia asked.

I blinked. “Seriously?”

“The answer to your question may very well be in there,” she said, an impish smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. When I didn't answer right away, she grabbed my shoulder and gave me a shake. “Oh,
come on
. It'll be fun.”

“He'll get so pissed if he finds out.”

“Your point being?”

“He's mad enough at me as it is.”

“Oh, please. He won't stay mad.”

I chewed my bottom lip. Fought a smile. Breaking into Dante's office would be a direct violation of his privacy. It would also be wrong. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, right? If Dante wasn't going to
tell
me the truth, I needed to go and
find
it. I deserved a little honesty and at this point, I didn't care who or what it was from. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let's do it.”

The door was still locked.

Aralia picked it open with a couple of bobby pins and in we went, easy as pie. Since the lamp wouldn't work because of the storm, we lit a few candles, then got to snooping. I went to the bookshelves first. Combed the spines of the tomes held there for suspicious titles. Most of them were boring demonology encyclopedias written by dead guys with Roman names. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I gave up on the shelves and went to Dante’s desk. Tried the drawer. Also locked.

“Is there a key for this somewhere?” I asked Aralia.

She looked up from the file she was thumbing through. “Underneath the phone, I think. I’ve seen him take it from there a few times.”

Aralia was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. The key was right where she said it was. Grabbing it, I unlocked the drawer and slid it open. Bills, bills, demon diagrams, paper clips…and a book? I dug it out. Ragged and old, its cover was stained with something dark—blood?—and in the middle, embossed in silver, was the seal of the First Sacrament. There was a note written on the first page. I could barely read it.

Dante,

You are better than you think you are. Use this well.

- Fabius

“Do you know who Fabius Serafini is?” I asked.

Aralia put her file back atop a haphazard stack of them shoved in a corner. “Yes. Do you?”

“Yeah.” In hindsight, it was surprising that Dante would even tell me that. “There’s a note in this book from him to Dante.”

She arched a brow. “Truly?”

“Truly.”

“Hm.”

That didn't sound like a good
hm.
Then again, was there ever a good
hm?

I got up. Handed her the book. “Here. Take a look for yourself.”

She wasted no time in cracking it open. She flipped past pages of Latin text, of demon sketches rivaling the ones Dante did, of symbols representing every Sacrament, of symbols I didn't recognize. There were a few recurring elements, including a word that started looking familiar. It showed up on nearly every page.

“What
is
that?” I asked, pointing to the word.

Aralia's face fell. “Amarax.”

“Amarax?”

“An ancient demonic name.” She flipped the page. There it was again.

“Aralia?” I asked. She looked...well, disturbed was a good word for it.

“Hm?” She flipped once more and an envelope fell out. It looked recent enough, but there wasn't a stamp or a return address. Why didn't anyone ever put a damn return address?

“To one Mr. Dante Arturo,” Aralia read. She turned the envelope over and lifted the flap. Inside was a letter, which she promptly unfolded and read aloud for my convenience. I scooted my candle over so she'd have more light, but she waved it away. She didn't need much light to see by. “If you believe your father to be involved, we need to contact Janika. She'll want to know.”

“Who's Janika?” I asked. “And Dante has a dad?”

I mean, yeah, he had a dad, but it was a strange picture to form. Dante seemed so self-sufficient, so independent, so detached from personal relationships that connecting him to anyone but Aralia and his dog required some suspension of disbelief.

Aralia's face fell even farther as she scanned the rest of the letter. “Yes, he does, but we haven't heard from him in a very, very long time. But if Dante suspects him to be involved, then...”

An icy feeling flooded my veins. “Then what?”

She didn't answer.

“
Then what?
” I urged.

“Then we're going to be in very big trouble.” She looked up. Stared past me to the door.

I turned around in my seat, followed her gaze with my own. Yeah, we were going to be in
very
big trouble.

Dante stood motionless in the doorway. His hair dripped with rainwater and his clothes fared no better. Even as a silhouette, he looked ragged.

“Hi,” I said dumbly.

“What are you doing here?” He asked, the words flat and dead as he spoke them.

I hated it when he talked to me like this. I hated it when he acted like he didn't care about me. I hated it because I knew he cared. He cared about everyone. “Aralia invited me over.”

“She shouldn't have,” he said.

I swallowed the urge to yell at him. “Well, she did. So I'm here.”

“You broke into my office.”

“You won't tell either of us anything so we decided to find the answers ourselves.”

I thought I heard him sigh. Or maybe it was the wind. “The answers to what?”

“Everything, Dante!” I guess I wasn't swallowing that urge very well. “Who's Janika, huh? Who's your dad? Where have you been all this time?”

“Beatrice,” he took a step forward.

I took one back. “Answer me. For once, just tell me the truth.”

He remained where he stood. I still couldn't see his face, but the smell coming off him was repugnant. Like he hadn’t showered in a few days. “Nothing is ever as simple as you'd like it to be, Beatrice. It's well past time you learned that.”

Oh, that’s rich. I wasn't the only one who needed to learn something here.
“You know what
you
need to learn, Dante? You need to learn that this whole lone wolf routine you've got going on
isn't going to work.
You need to learn to swallow your stupid pride and admit when you need help.”

Pot, meet kettle. In my defense, taking your own advice wasn't nearly as easy as giving it to someone else.

A booming clap of thunder rattled against the windows. Dante tilted his head up a fraction. “You need to leave. Please.”

So that's how this was going to be. Shocker. Dante didn't want to deal with the fact that someone was calling him out on his stupidity so he wanted me gone. He wanted to go back to being broody and prideful and
dumb.

Well, fine. He could be broody and prideful and dumb by himself. I was done.

“You’re not kicking me out this time,” I told him. “I’m leaving because you’re being an asshole again.”

“Where are you going?” He asked, but he didn't make the effort to sound like he cared. I suspected he wouldn't have cared if I shot him in the foot, either.

Aralia tossed her hair over her shoulder and linked her arm with mine. “That is none of your concern, Mr. Arturo.”

“Fine,” he said. “Leave. Both of you.”

“Gladly,” Aralia replied.

Filled with bravado, we stormed past him. I had to breathe through my mouth until we got out of range of his smell and down the stairs.

“It’s happening again,” Aralia said as we ducked into her car.

“What?” I asked, rubbing my hands together to generate some warmth.

She gunned the engine and turned up the heat. “Dante, he just…”

It looked to me like he was having a depressive episode. I was all too familiar with those. Not showering for days on end because the mere thought of getting out of bed is too much to bear. Struggling to feel anything beyond the emotional equivalent of a flatline. I haven’t been that low in a long time.

“I know,” I said. Because I did. More than I wanted to. “He’ll come out of it.”

“I know,” Aralia sighed, guiding the car out of the driveway and onto the highway. “He always does. Though he’s always a bit of an arse first.”

Depressed or not, he was hiding something. And it was long past time for me to find out what.

Twenty-Four

Breaking into St. Agatha's at two in the morning in a thunderstorm wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. Aralia parked her car out front and we ran for the door, only to find it locked. So, for the second time that night, we had to break into a place we probably shouldn't have been breaking into.

“This is a
nightmare
,” Aralia said, hoisting me up through the first window we could find that wasn't sealed shut.

Silvery torrents of rain poured down from the black sky, soaking through my clothes and plastering my hair to my skull like glue. I chose a bad night to forget my coat. “Ow,
ow
, hold on for a second, my head's stuck.”

“Well, unstick it!” Aralia snarled. “I'm getting soaked out here. You know how much I dislike getting my hair wet!”

I bent my neck at a painful angle and pushed myself the rest of the way through. I fell the six or so feet to the floor and landed―just barely―on my feet. Aralia followed much more gracefully.

“Here we are, Your Majesty,” she said. “I've successfully broken into your cloister for you.”

Getting inside was one thing. Getting
around
the inside was another. St. Agatha's was a big place. It was also a very dark place. There were plenty of windows, useless on a night like tonight. There were plenty of candles, snuffed until the dawn. Despite appearances, this place had electricity, too, but turning a light on had the potential to draw unwanted attention from disgruntled nuns. We didn't want that.

I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the button to turn the screen on. Two missed calls from Max. I made a mental note to return them later.

“Okay,” I whispered, holding the phone up as a kind of torch. Wasn't as bright as the chandelier above us, but it would have to do. “We need to get to the stairs and―...Aralia?”

Two seconds ago, she'd been right beside me. And now she was gone. Great.

“
Aralia?
” I tried again.

No answer.

Her abandonment didn't really come as a shock. I was always too slow for her liking. Poor puny human couldn't keep up with the centuries-old succubus. That's what my life boiled down to these days.

I needed to write a memoir.

Grumbling, I pointed my phone in the direction of the stairs and got to walking. If Aralia wanted to get lost in here by herself, fine. I knew my way around. Mostly. I knew my way to my room, at least.

I found the stairs with relative ease (correction: I
ran into the banister
), then took them to the second floor. One more to go. Take that, Spinosa. I'll bet she was wandering in the dining hall somewhere.

I then rounded the corner to the next flight of stairs, only to backtrack immediately after. Voices. I definitely heard voices. Coming from the stairwell. Hushed voices. Secret voices. Urgent voices.

I shoved my phone back in my pocket to snuff the light. Prayed to the Virgin Mary that the owners of the voices didn't see it.

A moment passed. Then two. Then three. Apparently, praying in a Catholic institution worked because the voices continued their conversation without pause. They didn't see. Or if they did, they didn't care, which was fine with me. Thanks, Mary.

I waited another minute or two for the voices to cease. When they did, I peeked around the corner. Not sure why, because I couldn't see anything, but I figured that if I squinted, I could make out a few details or―

“Boo.”

“Jesus Christ!” I clutched the wall, my heart jumping into my throat.

“No, just me,” Aralia said. “But thank you.”

Though I hadn't quite recovered from that newest bout of cardiac arrest, I managed to form a coherent question. “Where the hell did you go?”

“Where the hell did
you
go?”

“
I
didn't go anywhere.
You
were the one that disappeared two seconds after we came in.”

“They're gone, by the way,” she gestured up the stairs.

“Who?” I asked, then remembered the voices. Being scared shitless had a funny way of making you forget what was important. “Oh. Them.”

“Do your nuns make a habit out of having these rendezvous so late at night?” She asked.

“Not that I know of.” I glanced around the corner again. I didn't see anything. Because it was dark. And they were gone. Aralia
just
said so. Come on, Beatrice. Get with it.

She did her arm-linking thing and led me up the stairs like a seeing-eye dog. “There was only one of them, though I didn’t get a look at who she was speaking to. She said something about needing to catch someone.”

Hm. A nun skulking around a shadowy, secluded stairwell at two in the morning was suspect enough. The mysterious stranger didn’t help. Given my track record with these things, they were probably referring to the goat they meant to sacrifice in the name of the demon lord. Because you didn't huddle around in the dark to discuss your sewing circle. Especially if you lived in Stone Chapel.

We didn't do sewing circles. Too normal.

We didn't do normal here.

Hell,
I
didn't do normal. Not after what happened earlier. I tried, but normal repaid my efforts in mobs of angry crows and possessed night club owners. Normal was what I thought I wanted, but normal wasn't what wanted me. Normal was the ex-boyfriend (or girlfriend) who didn't care anymore, and I wasn't going to pine over it. I was so
over
normal. Normal needed to take a long walk off a short pier. Normal needed―

“I take it you haven’t any ideas,” Aralia said, jostling me from my thoughts.

“Oh, uh,” moving without seeing where I was going was a disorienting experience. I kept tripping up the stairs and would have fallen down them more than once if not for her. “Nope, none. I’m never even out here at night. They keep us in our rooms after eight, remember?”

“And you've never once snuck out?”

“I've only been here two weeks.”

“Excuses, Beatrice.”

We stopped. She gave me a nudge.

“What?” I said.

“Are you going to unlock the door?” She asked.

“Depends,” I replied, reaching for my key. “Are we there yet? I can't see.”

“For God's sake,” she snatched the key away and unlocked the door. The knob turned with a click. “There.”

I guess we were here.

I went in first. Aralia followed. I wasn't sure how this was going to work. Our bunk-beds only housed two and we had just as many blankets and just as many pillows. St. Agatha's wasn't like Dante's. There weren't six different rooms to choose from. We'd need to make do with what we had.

“So,” I whispered, turning in what I thought was Aralia's direction. I didn't want to flip the light on and wake Sadie up. “Do you want to sleep on the floor or―?”

“Excuse me?” She said. “I am
not
sleeping on the floor.”

“It's the floor or nothing because there's nowhere else we can go.”

“Um,
hello?
A hotel?”

“B-Beatrice?” Sadie's voice stammered through the dark.

Damn it. “Hi, Sadie.”

“What are you doing? I thought you were...”

“Yeah,” I said, “me too. But something happened so we had to come back here.”

“This is ridiculous,” Aralia shouldered past me and a moment later, the lamp on the desk turned on.

Sadie sat on the edge of her bed, clutching her blanket to her chest like a shield. Her weary gaze flickered between Aralia and I. Judging by the panic in her voice, she'd probably be petitioning for a new roommate come morning. “What's―what's going on?”

“Nothing, darling,” Aralia answered in a way one might to a frightened toddler. “Go back to sleep.”

Unconvinced, Sadie looked to me for further explanation.

Shit. I sucked at impromptu lying. I sucked at lying in general. Being raised by nuns did that to you. “I, uh―I went to see my ex and it didn't go well, so we came back here.” There, that was good, right? Not entirely true, not entirely false. God couldn't smite me for a half-lie. I don't think. “Aralia's staying, too. Just for the night. She'll be gone in the morning, I promise.”

Sadie glanced at Aralia as though she were a bomb with only a few seconds left on her timer. She could have yelled for Sister Margaret. She could have kicked us out. But she didn't. She was trusting me. “...Okay.”

I'd repay that trust eventually. Maybe in Fruit Loops. She liked Fruit Loops. “Sorry for waking you up.”

“It's okay,” she said, smiling in her nervous way. “I wasn't really sleeping with the storm and all...”

Aralia made a noise, crossed her arms over her chest.

Hoping to placate her, I climbed the ladder to the top bunk and tossed my pillow down. “Here, catch.”

She didn't. In fact, she made a concentrated effort
not
to catch. “I'm not sleeping on the floor, Beatrice.”

“Someone has to,” I said.

Big surprise. That someone was me.

***

As per my promise to Sadie, Aralia was gone by the time the sun came up. How she escaped without being caught was something of a mystery, but if anyone could give a boarding house of nuns the slip, it was her.

I spent the rest of the day with a crick in my neck and a bit of dried drool on the corner of my mouth. I hadn't noticed it was there until Jason Clark pointed it out in English class. I picked up my copy of the
Divine Comedy
to throw at him, but Mr. Northrop put a damper on my fun and sent me to Headmaster Vance's office before I could get the job done.

No detention this time. Vance said it was because I didn't
actually
throw the book, that my restraint showed maturity and that it saved me from another week with Ms. Hayworth. I didn't tell him that I would have thrown it if Mr. Northrop hadn't stopped me. Or that I spent most of my time at school in the library regardless of my detention status.

Why ruin a bonding moment?

After a long bus ride home, I returned to my room at St. Agatha's to a note slipped underneath my door. I wouldn't have noticed it if it hadn't gotten stuck to my shoe.

All these notes I'd been finding lately got me wondering if any of the people who wrote them knew how to use a computer. It was 2015. Email was quicker and killed less trees.

At least this one wasn't from a dead girl or Demon-Rosie.

It was from Sister Margaret. Our, uh, “floor mother.” That was her official title, anyway. I mostly knew her as the intimidating woman across the hall with the glass eye and the raspy voice. She didn't like me very much. And she wanted me to report to the chapel at 6 PM sharp, according to the note. There were pews that needed to be scrubbed. Great.

Headmaster Vance showed me mercy by skipping the detention. Sister Margaret was doing the opposite. But why? Had she found out that I left last night? Had she seen Aralia? Was she the nun lurking around the stairs in the wee hours of the morning? So many questions and not enough answers. It seemed like everyone had something to hide these days.

I barely tasted the stew we had for dinner. Sopped up the excess gravy with a hunk of bread, chased it down with a glass of milk. When I was finished, I headed to the chapel. Got there right as the clock struck six.

It was dark. A few candles were lit here and there, but they barely managed to give off enough light to make a difference. It was cold, too. Colder than usual. I shivered in my sweatpants and Stone Chapel High hoodie. Kept an eye out for Sister Margaret's knotted frame.

“Hello?” I meandered up the aisle between the pews. This place was much plainer than the city's church. No silk garnishments, no soaring windows, no pointed doorways. Just a bare, brutal sense of piousness. Another crucifix stared down at me from the front of the room. “Sister Margaret? It's Beatrice. I'm here.”

No answer.

Huh. Maybe she forgot. That'd be nice. The temptation to ditch was strong, but ditching without just cause would get me into more trouble. I didn't want that. After all, I was responsible now. Responsible-
ish
. I could wait a few minutes to see if she came and if she didn't, I'd leave. Yeah, there we go. I was so mature. Mother Arden would be proud.

I made myself at home on the first pew on the left. Waited like the responsible-ish person I was. I whistled a tune, tapped my foot, made small talk with Jesus. He didn't reciprocate.

Then I waited some more.

“I don't think she's coming,” I told Jesus. I tried. I did the responsible-ish thing. I waited to see if she'd come. She didn't. Therefore, I was well within my rights to leave. I got up to do so and when I did, a pair of hands seized me from behind.

Before I could do anything but blink, a dull burst of pain slammed into the back of my head. I slumped over, but those hands kept me from falling. Gripping me tighter, they dragged me off the pew. As much as I wanted to fight back, I could feel my consciousness slipping, receding like an ocean tide.