The Devil's Bible Read online

  But she could not read him. As she wrapped her hand around the hilt of the knife on the floor at her heel, she wondered if he could read her. Then she lunged.

  He was laughing already when he caught her wrist, twisting it until she cried out and dropped the knife. He pulled her close to his chest, his mouth at her ear. “So you would kill me, too? Like those men on the battlefield?”

  He felt her go stiff.

  “Like . . .” He paused as he let his own consciousness slip inside hers, as he searched for the names that would cause her the most pain. “Like Ottakar? Ah, like Nicholas.”

  He expected wrath. But at the sound of her son’s name, Mouse went limp in his arms. The grief she’d been holding off came crashing down on her, and she broke.

  Her father caught her tenderly and then lowered her carefully down to the pallet. Gently, he wiped the stain of ink from her forehead where she had rested it against the parchment. It looked too much like the mark of the cross from a Lenten service.

  “No return to dust, no, nor penance either. Not for us,” he muttered.

  He stayed with her until her body finally relaxed into a normal sleep. As he ran his fingers softly across her cheek, he wondered if she would dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ghosts in Mouse’s head and the noises in the pub melted into a buzz of background din as a slack-jawed Jack Gray robotically answered her command.

  “I don’t know who my benefactor is. I don’t know who he is. I don’t—”

  “Stop!” Mouse said as she stood, her face flushed with shame. She would not willingly use her control over him. “I release you,” she whispered as she leaned in close and imagined herself pulling in the power like a long, slow inhale.

  In an instant, Jack straightened and reached for his beer on the bar. “Sorry, I think I zoned out there for a minute.” His voice still sounded hollow and Mouse could see the confusion in his eyes, but he was himself again. “So did you change your mind about coming back to my hotel?”

  Mouse didn’t trust herself to speak any more. She grabbed her bag and ran out of the bar. It was early evening still, the sun not yet set. The cicadas’ song that earlier had sounded like soft summer promises now built to a fever pitch with thousands of them screaming as she stepped under the canopy of trees. The natural rise and fall of their call sounded like an alarm. It was time for her to go.

  At first, when Mouse fled Podlažice all those years ago, she would only stay in a place for a few days at a time. Afraid that her father might catch up to her, she’d move on to the next town and then the next and the next. For years, she bounced like a skipped stone across Europe and Asia until, eventually, exhaustion forced her to stay put for longer. As weeks went by with no sign of her father, Mouse grew confident in her ability to hide. But she also learned that settling somewhere offered its own set of dangers.

  People in the villages wore the passing seasons etched on their faces, but Mouse never aged. Disease came to the cities, but she never got sick. Even without using her power, she was unnatural in a way that she could disguise only for a little while. And people didn’t like what they couldn’t understand. So Mouse learned to read the signs and sense when it was time to move on. It was like having a timer in her head ticking down the seconds until the bomb went off.

  She looked up now at the undersides of the May leaves that writhed with the brood of hungry insects. It was a plague year in Nashville, the culmination of a thirteen-year cycle when thousands of cicadas emerged all at once, eating everything young and green. It had been a plague year when she first came here.

  Thirteen years. Mouse shook her head. Not since her childhood had she lived in the same place for so long—never long enough to get comfortable, to belong, never long enough for a place to begin to feel like home. But here she was, settled in Nashville with a house and acquaintances if not friends. She’d even applied for tenure. Seven or eight years ago, when that alarm in her head had gone off telling her it was time to leave, she had written her letter of resignation, but she never sent it. She pulled it up on her laptop every day and thought about sending it to Dr. Williams, but every day, Mouse stubbornly made the decision to ignore that ticking clock in her head. She liked Nashville, and she was tired of running. So she stayed. And things had been quiet. Until now.

  Other night screamers had joined the insect cacophony. Mouse could hear each one of them, each cricket, each cicada, each of the million mosquitos who’d come early this year to claim their blood. They gave voice to Mouse’s mood—a nagging worry about Jack Gray’s benefactor and an angry buzz at her own lack of discipline that led to her accidental use of power. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t stayed so long. She was already gambling against anyone noticing that she hadn’t aged. A person could only be a youthful thirtysomething for so long even in modern times. If she had stuck to her pattern, moved on, and started over with a new job and no strings, she wouldn’t have run into Jack, and she wouldn’t have let her guard down.

  Clenching her hands with anger and resolve, Mouse matched her step to the rhythm of the bug-song and turned toward home, counting the beats as she worked to build her wall again. She typically kept her life precisely controlled, measured like some Confucian ritual. She knew exactly how many heartbeats would carry her from her house to Wilson Hall in the center of campus and how many breaths would take her up the two flights of stairs to her office. It had been the same, day after day, for years. But the longer Mouse stayed, the more she wanted the normal life she saw around her. Lately, she’d been letting go of the routine, trying to convince herself that she could have what she wanted—that she could be like everyone else.

  “Hello, Em.”

  Mouse jumped. Her eight-year-old neighbor was standing near the sidewalk still half-obscured by the overgrown hedges. She had walked past him without seeing him, something that never happened when she was being diligent. Frustrated at her carelessness, she spun around. The joy in the boy’s face bounced all along his body and trickled out in little, quiet giggles; it was contagious. Mouse felt it wash over her like warm water. She knelt beside him, smiling.

  “Give a person a warning next time, kid,” she said as she tapped him gently on the nose. She spoke at nearly a whisper, carefully measured to be sure none of her power was leaking into her words, but some part of her relaxed a little as she looked into her young neighbor’s big blue eyes.

  Nate was part of the unexpected that had been happening to Mouse lately, one of the chinks in her armor. His family had moved in about six months ago, and, as usual, Mouse had kept her distance. She overheard Nate’s mom complain about her being rude, not that it mattered much to Mouse. She didn’t have to worry about mobs with pitchforks or witch trials or Inquisitions anymore, just people judging her for being different. She’d heard several of her colleagues speculating about whether or not she had Asperger’s or OCD. Apparently her rigid routine had not gone unnoticed. But to Mouse’s ear, these were all just different labels for odd. She’d been given many over her lifetime, most often witch or angel. No one used those much anymore.

  But Nate didn’t care that she was odd. He had quickly learned her routine, and almost every afternoon, he was waiting for her, hiding and trying to catch her off guard. For the first week, Mouse had ignored him. But he reminded her of her own little boy, her own little Nicholas, and Nate’s quiet, sure acceptance of her drew her in. So they played their game—Nate jumping out and Mouse pretending to be startled.

  “I really got you that time!” he squealed now.

  “You bet you did,” she answered, then asked the question she always asked. “Wind at your back, Nate?”

  “Not today, Em,” Nate said with a sigh as he sat down heavily on the grass beside the sidewalk.

  “Have you found trouble then?” she asked. In her conversations with Nate, Mouse had found herself echoing Father Lucas—even his gentle cadence and soft tone seeped into her words, like his voice come alive again. Nate was strugg
ling and Mouse wanted to help. It was the first time in a long time that she felt as if she had something to offer—hope in the darkness, Father Lucas would have said.

  “It’s found me,” Nate answered.

  “Uh-oh.” Mouse lowered herself to sit beside him. “Want to talk about it?” Nate’s mom had given birth to a little sister less than a month ago, and Nate was having a tough time adjusting.

  “Not really. You want to draw with me?”

  “Sure.” Mouse didn’t need him to tell her that he was lonely. His mom was busy with the baby. His dad worked away from home for months at a time. And Nate needed someone to make time just for him. Mouse would give anything to have a life like that—normal problems and normal joys.

  Nate handed over some sticks of his colored chalk. “Let’s fill the whole sidewalk from your house to mine with pictures!”

  “You bet.” Mouse propped her bag against the hedge.

  They raced the coming twilight as they drew, Nate chatting nonstop as she listened attentively and asked all the right questions—just as Father Lucas had when Mouse was a girl. Except she and Father Lucas had chatted over ancient books and illuminations, not sidewalk art, and they had talked about philosophy and theology rather than video games and Lego sets.

  As the streetlights buzzed and popped to life, Nate’s mom strolled down the driveway. “Oh my goodness!”

  Nate jumped, but Mouse had heard her coming.

  “Mom! Give a kid a warning next time!” he said, smiling over at Mouse before he hopped up, excited to show off his art. “What do you think?” he asked his mother.

  “I think you’ve taken up a lot of Dr. Nicholas’s time.” She said it gently and with a smile, but Mouse turned to Nate and saw the joy darken just a little.

  Mouse shoved herself back onto her heels. “Actually, it was all my idea, and Nate was kind enough to let me use his chalk. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.” She looked down at the row of brightly colored drawings. Nate’s butterflies and flowers, cats and bugs of all kinds alternated with Mouse’s—a field full of hyacinths, an outline of Prague Castle, a wolf, a mother bent over her toddling son. Mouse felt the heat of emotion building in her chest again. She needed to get home.

  “Do you have children?” Nate’s mother asked.

  Mouse shook her head but kept her eyes on her drawing. Not anymore, she thought.

  “Well, the drawings are beautiful. Thank you for playing with Nate.”

  “Em and I weren’t playing, Mom. We were doing art.”

  “It’s ‘Dr. Nicholas,’ Nate. We’ve talked about how to speak to adults, right?” She shifted the baby in her arms. “I’m sorry, Dr. Nicholas.”

  Mouse ignored her. “Want to help me gather up the chalk, Nate?”

  When he knelt beside her, their backs to his mom, Mouse looked over at him with a half-grin. She took a sliver of blue chalk and signed one of her drawings—Em. She drew a mouse beside it. It was as close as she could get to telling him who she really was. Nate smiled back and wrote his own name next to hers.

  As he headed up the drive with his mom, both hands on the handle of the chalk carton, he looked back over his shoulder at Mouse who was still kneeling by the picture of the mother and little boy. “See you tomorrow!”

  Mouse just waved. She wouldn’t lie to him, and right now, she didn’t know if she’d still be in Nashville tomorrow. The cicadas had gone silent, leaving the night to the softer sounds of the crickets and katydids, and drawing with Nate had succeeded where her counting had failed—she was calm and the power in her seemed to be asleep again. It gave her time to think.

  Bodie, her cat, met her as she opened the front door. He was another slip in her discipline—letting herself love anything, even a cat, made her soft, which made her vulnerable to the power she kept tethered inside. But Bodie hadn’t given Mouse much choice in the matter. He just showed up on her porch one day and acted as if he knew her, as if he belonged, despite a lingering wildness about him. He was big, at least part Maine Coon, and Mouse half wondered if the rest of him was bobcat. It had been ten years now—the longest relationship she’d had in seven hundred years. Bodie had been the first thing to make her feel like she’d come home. He met her at the door, slept in the bed with her, demanded her attention in ways that pulled her out of her own head.

  And he was one of the main reasons she’d been so reluctant to leave Nashville. Because when Mouse left a place, she left everything else behind, too. That was the point—a clean break, nothing from her old life that could connect to her new one. Of course, she made sure she never collected much in the first place. No art on the walls and just the bare essentials of furniture. There was only one plate in the cabinets in her kitchen, one cup, a single set of mismatched utensils bought at a flea market. She kept everything in her life disposable so she could run at a moment’s notice. But Bodie wasn’t disposable.

  “We’ll figure it out, Bo,” she said as she sat on the couch and he hopped into her lap.

  Before Mouse could decide what to do next, she needed to understand the pieces in play and, most importantly, who was playing. If her father had sent Jack Gray, he’d have shown up at the pub to claim what he thought was his: Mouse.

  But if it wasn’t him, then who?

  Maybe Jack came on his own, to rub her nose in his success, and maybe his benefactor was just some rich guy who didn’t want people to know he was interested in things like the Devil’s Bible. If Mouse chose to believe that, then maybe she could stay in Nashville a little longer.

  But a lifetime’s experiences had worn away her belief in fairy tales. And Jack showing up with a mysterious benefactor and a book about the Devil’s Bible seemed too coincidental. If someone else had sent Jack Gray, Mouse either needed to find out who he was and what he wanted, or she needed to make a clean break and start over somewhere else.

  She sighed and buried her face in Bodie’s fur. His purring tickled her cheek.

  “Get off, Bodie,” Mouse grunted the next morning as she arched her back, making the cat roll onto the bed and land belly up.

  She had stayed up late thinking about her options but had made no decisions. Sometime after two, she’d given up and counted the forty-three steps from the kitchen up the stairs to her bedroom. She’d fallen asleep quickly. Then the dreams had woken her.

  Her little sandy-haired boy, a field full of soldiers, the portrait from the Devil’s Bible, and Jack Gray’s eyes gone dead at her command.

  Mouse stood beside the bed, anxious to push the images away. She ran her fingers under Bodie’s chin until he wrapped his paws around her hand and pulled it to his face, biting. “From love to hate in a heartbeat. I think we’re a little unstable, Bodie,” she said as she snatched her hand away and turned toward the bathroom.

  It was the only room that she changed when she bought the place. She had no interest in trying to make the house feel like a home, but she couldn’t make herself step into the tiny, dark, walled-in shower that had been in the master bath. When the contractor had tried to show her tile samples and fixture catalogs, she’d cut him off and told him she didn’t care what it looked like as long as it was bigger and open so she could see out and so the light could come in. Mouse couldn’t stand the feeling of being closed up, not after Podlažice.

  She stood at the threshold now, Bodie waiting at the sink for her to turn the tap on for him. Four more steps to make the ritual nine from her bed to that giant, glass-walled shower.

  After the taste of freedom she’d allowed herself these last few weeks, imagining that she could be like everyone else, Mouse now felt suffocated by the burden of returning to her measured routine. She felt as if she were trying to cram something back into an impossibly small box. It was a different kind of claustrophobia—emotional and mental rather than physical, but the struggle was the same. She stood still for a moment trying to feel whether or not the power she had woken last night in the bar was still awake; it seemed quiet, just the rumbling of her empty
stomach. She forced herself to take another measured step. Only three more to go. But Mouse couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to. She wanted to hold on to the little bit of normal she’d built these last months.

  In one smooth jump, she landed in the shower, her toes curling into the grout lines to keep her balance. She reached over and turned on a trickle of cold water at the sink for Bodie, then pulled her shirt over her head and let the first spray of water, not yet hot, splash against her chest as she laughed at her silliness. The sound, bouncing off the walls, was so unfamiliar it startled her; she hadn’t laughed in a long time. It felt good. Clean and simple. As the steam began to build, Mouse took a deep, unfettered breath, filling herself with the smell of soap and a sense of liberty.

  And she felt the power quicken.

  “God, no,” she said as the heat of power rippled in her gut. “Feel nothing. I feel nothing,” she muttered to herself as she worked to make it true. “Go away, go to sleep. Please, God, go to sleep again,” she begged as she started to count—heartbeats, drops of water running down the glass—anything to quash the emotions and push the power back into its cage.

  Then the doorbell rang. Both Mouse and Bodie jumped. The doorbell never rang because no one ever came to the house. Mouse grabbed her robe. Bodie beat her down the stairs though she didn’t count her steps this time. She paused at the bottom, straining to see through the glass panels arched along the top of the door, trying to find the right angle to catch a glimpse of who or what might be waiting on the other side. Then she heard him clear his throat.