The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (24 page)

My eyelids fluttered. Keeping them open required almost as much effort as staying awake. All I could make out was the floor moving beneath my limp feet.

I didn't know how long we'd been moving or where the hands were taking me. But I knew when we stopped. I knew because those hands let me go. Threw me down. I hit the floor so hard that I could almost feel my brain rattling against my skull, knocking whatever was keeping me conscious clean out.

Before the darkness swallowed me, I heard a laugh.

At least this was fun for one of us.

***

“Wake up!”

A hand cracked across my face. Forced me out of my stupor. My eyes opened and the blur of the world slowly came into focus. Three faces. A dim little room. I took a breath. Gagged. Tasted like incense soaked in blood. Why couldn't I ever go anywhere nice?

“I said,
wake up
!”

Another slap. This one harder than the first. Warm, salty blood flooded my mouth. I spat it out. Hoped I hit their feet.

Obscured Face #1 grabbed my chin. There was something...not quite right about it. “You are becoming a nuisance, Beatrice Todd. We don't like nuisances.”

The other Obscured Faces were silent, large black hoods hanging over their foreheads. The one on the right was wearing some sort of necklace. White...Or maybe it wasn’t a necklace. Couldn’t tell. The one on the left...Smiling. Teeth too bright in the dark.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Obscured Face #1 asked. Their nails dug into my skin.

I winced. Tried in vain to form words I could only slur. Nothing fit right in my mouth and a shrill ringing noise filled my left ear. What was that thing called? When you hit your head and you felt sick afterward? Like you'd been drinking too much and...

A, uh...

Confession? Confusion? No, wait. Concussion. Yeah. Probably had one of those.

“You are a wicked girl,” Obscured Face #1 snarled. She got
real
close, so close that I could see her clearly despite my blurry vision. Hole in her face. She had a
hole
in her face. A black spot where her eye should have been. Missing glass eye. Black clothes. Didn't like me very much.

Sister Margaret.

I recoiled. Didn't get very far. Couldn't move my hands or my feet. Something at my back. A chair? Pretty sure I was sitting in a chair. Tied to it.

So...

Sister Margaret tied me to a chair. Attacked me in a chapel. Wasn't surprised. Everyone else in this stupid city was out to get me. Why not a nun?

Obscured Face #2 turned, melted into the shadows as though they were a part of them.

Obscured Face #3 did the same.

They left me with Sister Margaret and her one eye. Black eye. Demon eye. Possessed eye. Her hand hadn't moved. Except for when she slapped me again. How many times was that, now?

Ten?

Uh. Maybe four. Three.

“How long have you been consorting with the cambion?” She asked.

Her breath stank more than the air did. “I, uh―the...”

“The
cambion
, you little brat. You know exactly of whom I speak, do not play games with me.”

Cambion? Didn't know that word. No clue what she was talking about. Bad interrogation technique. Couldn't work if your hostage had no idea why they were being taken. Saw that on a TV show once. “I, uh...I don't know who―”

“You lie. Do you know where liars go?” Sister Margaret skipped the slap this time and grabbed something from between the folds of her robes. Looked sharp.

Knife.

Oh, no. No no no no.

“You
reek
of it.” She lurched forward like Quasimodo, shark fin shoulder blades sticking up out of her back. An image of Jaws praying the rosary popped in my head.

I needed a bigger boat.

Gritting my teeth, I tried to free my hands. No dice. I looked down. Heavy, braided rope chafed against my wrists. Didn't hurt as much as the knife would. Needed to get out of here. Needed to call for help. Dante. Aralia. Max. Someone.

Too late.

Sister Jaws attacked. Grabbed my hair and yanked my head back so that I had no choice but to look in her one eye. Reminded me of when Dante exorcised Max. That's where the comparisons ended. This wasn't an act of heroism. This was an act of torture.

“You will tell me what I need to know, you stupid girl,” Sister Margaret snarled. The knife pinched my skin. It didn't hurt so badly at first. And then the cuts got deeper. I could feel my blood welling up in my arm. My brain
reeled with questions that didn’t matter right now. Why was she doing this? Who was working with her? I didn't know what a cambion was. Didn't know how long I'd been “consorting” with it. Didn't know anything but pain and the warm red rivulets crisscrossing my wrist.

I screamed.

Sister Margaret cringed like
I
was the one with the knife. “Stop it!” She hissed. She let go of my hair and clamped her hand over my mouth. The knife sank deeper into my wrist. I screamed again. My throat hurt. Along with everything else.

If I didn't do something soon, Sister Margaret was going to kill me. Or worse.

That couldn't happen.

Wasn't going to let it. Just needed to fight through the pain, the confession―er,
concussion
―the blood loss. Just needed to get away.

Needed a plan. Couldn't really think of one.

Well.

There was
something
. Demons didn't like loud noises. Made them angry. Learned that from Rosie.

I screamed some more.

Sister Margaret reacted just as I figured she would. Pressed harder against my mouth to muffle the sound. I used this to my advantage. Bit down on her wrinkled palm until I tasted blood. Kept biting.

She screeched, ripping her hand away and smacking me with it. Staggered back a pace or two.

In turn, I threw all my weight to one side, face stinging from her slap. The chair rocked. My vision blurred. I wanted to puke. I did it again. The chair rocked even harder. One more time.

The floor rushed up at me. I hit it hard. Vomit licked at the back of my throat. I swallowed it down. I could throw up later. Needed to focus on freeing my hands.

“Stupid girl!” Sister Margaret cradled her bleeding hand. “You'll burn for what you've done!”

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that, well...I'd have a lot of dollars.

Like, four.

“You think you can win this?” Her voice lost its previous pitch. It shivered now. With rage, but with an undercurrent of confidence, too.

I assumed her question was a rhetorical one, so I didn't waste time with a response. Had to get out of here. Had to call Dante and Aralia and Max. And the cops, probably.

The more I twisted my wrists, the looser I could feel the rope becoming. Almost there,
almost there.

“He's coming for you.” Sister Margaret sounded very close. She crouched down in front of me and I could see myself reflected in her onyx eye. “Nothing will save you. Not even the cambion.”

Still didn't know what the cambion was. Didn't matter. What mattered was that Sister Margaret didn't try to grab me again. Didn't try to stop me from finding the loose spot in the rope, from slipping my hands free. She merely arose, a terrible vision in black, and she walked away.

Twenty-Five

I wasn't sure how I got out of that room. I vaguely remembered untying my ankles from the chair. Sort of recalled stumbling around like a drunk on New Year's Eve. Everything after that was a bit of a concussed blur.

I figured someone found me passed out from the blood loss, because when I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital room on a hospital bed in a hospital gown. An IV fed clear liquids into my hand and a monitor like the one Rosie had kept a second-by-second record of my vital signs. The curtains were drawn and the walls were white and my wrist was bandaged in layers of foamy gauze.

No more bleeding.

My head still hurt, though. Every movement, no matter how tiny, felt like a seismic shift. I groaned.

“You're awake.”

The line on the monitor that measured my heartbeat spiked. I had a visitor. A visitor I wasn’t really expecting, given our last few interactions.

“Dante,” I breathed, feeling nauseous for reasons unrelated to my concussion. I didn't dare move my head to look at him, so I looked at the ceiling instead. “I, uh...Hi.”

A chair scraped across the floor. Dante appeared on the periphery of my vision, a sad almost-smile on his face. “Hello.”

“You look terrible,” I said, and that was being kind. Honestly, he looked like shit. Scruffier than usual with longer, scragglier hair and even more bags underneath his eyes. His
bags
had bags. At least he showered.

His almost-smile widened to a small, but real one. A rarity. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

This Dante was the one I liked. The nice one who smiled and went along with my stupid jokes. Had the one with the dead voice and the foul stench showed up, I would've had him kicked out. I wasn't going to kick this one out. Yet.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. My throat was raw from the screaming or the disuse or both.

“Waiting for you to wake up,” he replied, smile vanishing. “You've been in and out of consciousness for two days.”

Two days?
Now I knew how Max felt. “Oops.”

His brow knitted together and he sank out of my line of sight to sit in the chair. “A girl named Sadie Li found you passed out in a hallway at St. Agatha's in a pool of your own blood. You were barely conscious.”

“Sadie? Are you sure that was her name?” There were tons of people living in that place and
Sadie
had to be the one to find me. God, she'd be having nightmares for weeks.

“Yes,” Dante said, “she's with Aralia and Max right now. Getting lunch.”

And yet, here he was. Not getting lunch. Braving the vertigo, I tilted my head to the side to look at him. He leaned toward me, elbows propped up on the bed. A bouquet of daisies and a couple of cards were on the table behind him. “Why aren’t
you?
” I asked.

He blinked. He should have known it was a habit by now. To worry about him. Someone needed to.

“I'm more worried about
you
,” he said.

“Eh, I've had worse.” I paused. Gave his head a little push. “Now answer my question.”

“Beatrice,” he caught my hand in his and held it tight. “I need you to tell me what happened.”

Nobody could kill a mood quite like Dante Arturo could kill a mood. Scowling, I yanked my hand away and folded them across my stomach. “Why don't you go first? What's with you?”

“What do you mean?” He asked.

Oh, right. Dante didn't get a point unless you beat him over the head with it. Hah. Concussion joke.
“You kicked me out of your house. You kicked Max out of your house. You gave neither of us any good reason
why
, and on Halloween, you come home smelling like you hadn’t showered in days. After being gone. All night. Tell me that doesn’t sound weird to you.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he said: “I found the missing pages. That’s where I was when I came home. It took me all night, but…”

“Hold on, you what?” I braced myself on the bed and pulled myself up into less of a dead girl position and more of a semi-alive-but-in-pain girl position. My stomach rolled and the room spun, the urge to vomit rising in my throat. I twisted my eyes shut. Took a breath.

“Beatrice?” Dante said.

I waved my hand at him. “I'm fine. Just give me a minute.”

Said minute passed and the vomit urge subsided. I opened my eyes.

“Are you all right?” He asked.

“Fine,” I said. As fine as I could get these days. “Where did you find the pages?” We could get back to his weird behavior afterward.

“The mayor’s office. Locked in a drawer.”

“Because mailing them to you would have been too obvious.”

That actually made him laugh. I felt like I needed a tape recorder to commemorate the moment. “Evidently.”

“What do they say?”

He slipped his hand into the pocket of his slacks, forked over a square of yellowed paper. “Here.”

Unfolding the pages as delicately as I could, I smoothed them out on my lap and began with the one dated December 9
th
, 1800. “
God has spoken to me again today
,” I read. “
He told me how pleased he was to see the church, how glorious it was. It is almost time. Preparations must begin soon.
”

I moved on to the second page, smiling in spite of everything else. This was what we needed. These pages were our smoking gun.

The second page had no words on it, just a drawing of the seal of the First Sacrament. The third abandoned clear sentences. It was dated December 18
th
, 1800.

“
I am Elias Cromwell and I am a servant of God.
”

Those eleven words were repeated over and over again until they filled the page. With each new iteration, the writing got all the more messy. By the time he’d gotten to the end, it looked like Elias completely lost his mind.

The fourth page was undated. Elias’s crazed scrawl haphazardly covered every inch of its timeworn surface.
It is done
, he wrote. The word
done
was repeated more times than I could count.
Sixty-seven sixty-seven sixty-seven sacrifices for an eternity in Paradise. I have welcomed God into my city. Stone Chapel will be a haven. A beacon for the faithful. I have done it done it done it. By the grace of the Blessed Virgin, I have done it. They do not understand. But they will. Soon, everyone will see.

Holy shit. This was one helluva smoking gun.

I put the pages down.

“Elias was possessed,” Dante said. “He had to have been. The mayor knows this. That’s why he ripped out the pages. That’s why he detained the rest of the Diaries.”

I didn’t get it. The mayor was pretty much begging to be caught at this point. He was probably the one who sent Henriette’s letter, too. “Why would he…”

Dante read my mind. “Want to get caught? Cover this up in the first place? I don’t know. Like I said before, we need to figure out who’s pulling his strings.”

“Are we going to do anything about him, though?”

“For now, no. I want to see what he does first.” He held out his hand. I folded the pages back up and gave them to him. He slipped them into his pocket. And then everything got
real
quiet. We’d run out of business to talk about.

I looked at him. He was looking at the door. “Dante,” I said. “Why did you kick me out? Is it…is it because you’re depressed or something? Because I’ve got it too, and I…”

It took him a long time to answer. When he did, he at least had the decency to look at me. “After what we heard on the radio, I suppose...I didn’t want you to think—…It was a rash decision.” He cut himself off, holding his chin in his hand, thumb grazing his jawline. “Everything is getting so complicated. I…I just don’t want you or Max getting hurt. Any more than you already have.”

It was a bit late in the game for this conversation. “I know what I’ve signed up for,” I said. “Max did too. And we’re not afraid, okay? You don’t have to do this by yourself. You just need to let us in.”

“I know.” He surprised the hell out of me by reaching for my hand again. I let him take it. The pleading in his voice only added to the shock. “Beatrice, I need you to give me a few days. Just a few days. Then, I promise, I’ll tell you everything. I know it isn’t fair to you, but I just...”

“What could possibly need a
few days?
” I didn’t need to know his entire life’s story right this second, but the least he could do was, I don’t know, give me a
real
reason for kicking me out. “I just want to know why, Dante. It was so sudden, I didn’t think—”

“A few days.” He repeated. “Please. I just—I can’t explain right now. But I will. I promise.”

“You don’t have to protect me, Dante.” I stared down at his hand over mine. He wasn’t grabbing it. He was holding it. I looked back up to his face. There was softness in it, smooth lines instead of the usual hard angles. “I can handle whatever you have to tell me.”

“I know,” he said firmly. He sounded like he meant it. “But I need more time. A—”

“A few days, yeah. You said that.” I pulled my hand away from his so I could rub my eyes. I really,
really
wasn’t in the mood to argue about this anymore. But I didn’t want to let him off the hook, either. “Fine, Dante. A few days. That’s all you’re getting. After that, you have to tell me everything. I mean it. I don’t care if you’re a robot or something, you’re gonna tell me all about it. Deal?”

When I looked over at him again, I saw that he was smiling. Just a little. “Deal,” he said. “And I’m not a robot.”

Well, thank God for that.

We let the sterile quiet drift over us for a few seconds. I studied the bandages on my wrist, a faint spot of red in the middle of all the white. Nurse would probably need to change them sometime today.

Dante spoke. “Beatrice, what happened to you?”

“I fell down some stairs.” I said lamely.

“You don’t get a knife wound like that falling down some stairs.”

“What if I was
carrying
the knife and
then
I fell down the stairs?”

A sigh. “
Beatrice
.”

I wasn't trying to avoid the subject. I just didn't want to talk about it. And, um, I couldn't really remember most of it. The stuff I
did
remember was blurry at best. A series of shadowy images and sensations of cutting pain. Ropes on my wrists. Laughter in my ear. A word. Started with a C. “I don't know what happened, okay? I was sitting in the chapel and then I got hit in the head. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair.”

“Did you get a good look at who took you?”

I remembered three faces. The color black. A knife. The C word. Nothing concrete. Holes where memories should be, scooped out and thrown away. I relayed this information to him and he responded with a thoughtful grunt.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I'll look into it. You need to focus on getting well.”

I didn't feel too bad, considering. My head hurt and my throat hurt and my face hurt and my wrist hurt, but it could have been worse. I could have gotten stabbed in the chest like Max or possessed like Rosie. Compared to them, I had only minor ailments. “You worry too much. I'll be fine.”

He grunted again.

“Nice chatting with you, caveman.”

The door swung open. Dante leaned away from me and I did my best to look pained.

“Our girl's awake!” Aralia announced, flinging her arms wide and hitting Max in the face with her coffee cup. “Here, hold this.”

“Er, okay,” he said, like he had a choice in the matter. He smiled at me. Pushed his glasses up. “Hey, Beatrice.”

His flannel was a welcome sight. “Hey, Max.”

“You poor thing,” Aralia hurried to my bedside, shooing Dante out of his chair. “What
happened?
”

“Well, I―”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Sadie appeared behind Max, a metallic array of balloons stamped with motivational well wishes floating beside her. “Do you, um, do you want me to come back later? I don't want to interrupt.”

Oh,
Sadie
. She'd saved me from bleeding out in a hallway and she
still
thought she was in the position to interrupt. I waved her inside. “No, hey, you're fine. Come on in.”

Shyly, she did so. “I bought you these. The, um, the gift shop didn't really have a whole lot so I hope you―”

“They're great, Sadie,” I said. No one had ever gotten me balloons before. Not even for my birthday. “Thanks. And thanks for not letting me die, too. That was nice.”

She laughed, finally catching onto my special brand of humor. “You're welcome. Where would you like me to put these?”

The table with the daisies and the cards seemed appropriate. I had a real shrine going on over there. “The table's fine.”