The Devil's Bible Read online

  Mouse turned back to Solomon. “Which way did he go?” she asked.

  “The way Death always goes,” the woman drawled out, pointing across the tracks in the direction of the city cemetery.

  Mouse took off running.

  “What the hell?” Jack shouted. “Let’s call the cops.”

  “He’ll be gone if we wait,” she yelled back over her shoulder. She could hear Jack muttering to himself, trying to decide what to do.

  Mouse didn’t wait.

  If this Death figure was like the other creatures that had crawled out of the dark to feed on Mouse’s power, the police would be no good anyway. She jumped over the low stone wall and then stopped, lowering her head and closing her eyes. Her heightened hearing picked up her own heartbeat and Jack’s well behind her. Up ahead, another heartbeat. And then a second. One was racing.

  Afraid that the creature might have already found another victim, Mouse ran. She found them quickly. The thing had its nails dug into the girl’s arm as it wove her through the headstones and then pressed her up against the side of a mausoleum. Mouse moved swiftly toward them, the power in her throbbing with reckless eagerness.

  “Stop,” she said. Mouse had never been able to compel the dark creatures she’d encountered before, but the power played freely in her and leapt to lace the word with control.

  The thing froze where it was, its mouth open in surprise and the woman still in its grip.

  As Mouse edged around the side of the crypt, the glow of a distant streetlight exposed her mistake. The man was just a man—his body hard with desire and the woman’s hand full of cash.

  Neither of them moved, not even to breathe. They couldn’t as long as they were under Mouse’s command.

  “I’m sorry.” She lifted a hand to her mouth, afraid to speak, her words barely breath. “I made a mistake. I’m . . . I’m sorry. I thought you were—” She closed her eyes and imagined herself inhaling the power as she had with Jack in the bar. “Go back to what you were doing,” she said, releasing them from her control.

  They both gasped for air. “What the hell do you want?” the woman shouted at Mouse and then looked up at the man. “You want your girl to watch, it’ll be extra.”

  Mouse turned and ran into Jack Gray.

  Jack stayed oddly quiet as they made their way back to Solomon. Mouse wondered how much he’d seen or heard in the cemetery. His silence, the fists shoved tightly in his pockets, and the three feet of distance he kept between them suggested he might have seen quite a bit. But the real question was: How much had he understood?

  When they got back to the dump, he pulled out his cell and called 911. Mouse went to check on Solomon.

  “The police gonna come?” Solomon asked, pulling Wise closer.

  “Yeah. They have to. But we’ll be sure they let us bring Wise, too. It’ll be okay,” Mouse said, not sure she believed it. She turned to Jack. “Would you go back up to the camp and tell them what’s happened so that they know why the cops are coming? It might make everything simpler if they know they’re not getting evicted.”

  Jack nodded and headed into the woods toward the tent city without a complaint—another sign that he’d seen something in the cemetery. But what Jack Gray thought he knew about her felt like a feather on her shoulders compared to the fear that she’d brought a demon to Nashville.

  “Solomon, did you get a good look at him? At . . . Death?” Maybe, Mouse thought desperately, it was just a man, just a sick, twisted coincidence that had nothing to do with her.

  “Why? You think he gonna come for you next, honey?”

  “Maybe.” Mouse wasn’t sure if it was the truth or not. “But the police will want to know, too. Can you tell them?”

  “He look like nobody and everybody. Kinda short with brown eyes and brown hair. His look was empty though.” Sounded like just a man, Mouse thought, until Solomon added, “And he had long fingernails, so long they must’ve cut into his palm the way he gripped the strings of those eyeballs.” Solomon laid her head back against the clothes dryer, and then jumped when Wise started to growl. She looked back into the woods.

  Jack was coming down from the camp, and most of the tent city residents were coming with him. Many of them circled around Solomon, laying a hand on her to give her a pat or asking if she was okay. The sounds of the sirens grew closer and soon the red lights of the fire truck and ambulance and then the bright blues of the police cars flashed across faces. People ducked their heads, squinting—everyone looked guilty in the glare.

  Jack stood a few feet away from Mouse as they waited for the police to come up the hill. And then he took a quick step toward her, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Who drew those pictures out in front of your house?” he asked, his voice thick with fear.

  Mouse had been ready for the question she thought he’d ask about what he’d seen in the cemetery. But now she fumbled, her mind racing to pull the sidewalk images up in her perfect memory as she worked to understand his question—and she saw it instantly. The wolf. She’d drawn it exactly like she had in the Devil’s Bible.

  “What are you?” His words were so soft Mouse wondered if he had actually spoken them or if she had somehow pulled them from his mind.

  The cops were there before she had the chance to feed him a lie, and Jack, Solomon, and Mouse were put into separate cars and taken in for questioning.

  At the station, Mouse was left in a tiny room to wait. It had been over two hours already. She kept her hands in her lap, picking at a cuticle, her leg bouncing uncontrollably as she waited. She counted the cinder blocks, then the footsteps outside the door, and the dead bugs trapped behind the glass in the overhead fluorescent light—anything to keep her mind off the close walls and the locked door and worrying about Solomon or what stories Jack Gray was telling in the next room.

  It wasn’t Mouse’s first time to be detained by police. In the early days of her immortality, the first hundred years or so, she’d made mistakes—staying too long in a place of disease while she never got sick, using outdated manners and antiquated phrases, always being the stranger, the foreigner—these got a person noticed by whoever was tasked with maintaining law and order. So she learned to keep moving, to be mindful of changing fashions and customs, to stick to cities where she was less likely to stand out. She hadn’t been interrogated in a very long time, but she remembered the game well. The sole objective was to uncover secrets—all of them, any of them, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with a crime. And Mouse had layers of secrets. That’s all she was: secrets and lies.

  When she heard steps pause outside the door, Mouse sat up a little straighter, stilled her leg, and laced her fingers together, readying herself.

  “Sorry to make you wait, Dr. Nicholas,” the detective said as she came through the door, a manila file folder and voice recorder in hand. “I’m Detective Spencer.”

  “Where’s Solomon?” Mouse was working really hard to keep herself calm. The power had been jumping like cocooned butterflies in her chest.

  “She’s with another detective telling him what she saw.”

  “What about her dog?”

  “He’s with her. I promise they’re both fine.”

  “And Jack?”

  Detective Spencer pulled the chair out and sat down opposite Mouse. She laid the digital voice recorder on the table. “You teach at the university, right?”

  “That’s right. In the history department. Thirteen years.” Mouse tried to anticipate the detective’s questions so she could move through them as quickly as possible. “Now, where’s Jack?”

  “How do you know him?”

  Mouse heard the higher pitch in the detective’s voice and the jump in her pulse—something wasn’t right—but she kept her own voice even, her answer succinct. “He was a student in a class I taught my last semester at Chapel Hill. I have had no contact with him since. Not until the lectureship last night.”

  “And you met him for drinks afterward, correct?”


  Clearly they’d questioned Jack first. “Yes. In the pub.”

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “What does that have to do with the woman who got killed?”

  “Please just answer the question, Dr. Nicholas.”

  Frustrated, Mouse shoved herself back in the chair, her mind racing through the conversation she had with Jack that night at the bar, trying to think if there was anything incriminating he could have told the police. “Old times. Jack’s book success.”

  “The bartender suggested that maybe Jack had been making unwanted advances.”

  “The bartender? Why would you—”

  “Did Dr. Gray make unwanted advances?”

  “He was a little drunk, yes, and flirty. What’s this about?” Mouse was confused and getting angry.

  “But you didn’t return his ‘flirty’ feelings?”

  “No. Why?”

  Detective Spencer’s jaw clenched, and her heartbeat was nearly deafening as she opened a folder and pulled out three photos. She slid them across the table to Mouse, who sat as if she’d been carved of wood.

  They were crime scene photos that zoomed in on wounds and body parts like pieces of a human jigsaw puzzle. They didn’t look like people at all. The three victims had been mutilated in very specific ways. The one at the dump had lost her eyes. Another had lost her ears. And the last stared back at Mouse with her tongue cut out and her mouth sheared away so that her teeth were exposed to the air, little white pearls floating in a sea of blood. A phrase from long ago echoed in Mouse’s head: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  Then the detective placed three smaller photos down beside the others. They weren’t gruesome crime scene photos; they were pictures of the victims that had been lifted from Facebook or Twitter, profiles and selfies. Mouse’s first thought was that most people would have a hard time telling any of them apart—even their friends or family could easily mistake one for the other. Each seemed to be about twenty to twenty-five years old. They all had dark auburn hair and heart-shaped faces.

  They all looked like Mouse.

  With the suddenness of a lightning strike, the game was done.

  “Jack Gray did not do this.” Mouse’s voice was dead and her face felt like stone.

  “Surely you see the resemblance, Dr. Nicholas?”

  Mouse didn’t even nod. She stared at the photos on the table.

  Someone had been sent looking for Mouse. His message was as clear as a calling card, and there could be no mistake in who sent it.

  Mouse’s father had found her at last.

  PODLAŽICE MONASTERY,

  BOHEMIA

  1278

  He crouched in the dark as he watched her bathe.

  Mouse had put the linden blooms in the water that the bishop brought her. Stripped bare, the soft light of the candles slid over her hips and thighs and reached up to cup her breast as she bent to dip a strip of cloth she’d torn from her habit into the linden-scented water. She squeezed the cloth as she laid it against her shoulder, and the water ran down her arm to drop from her fingers onto the stone floor, glistening in the light like diamonds.

  He watched her until she finished, his desire for her burning through him, and he knew he’d made a decision—he wanted her too much to kill her. He wanted more than her body, though it was beautiful. He wanted the power in her. He wanted to control her, to own her. And there was something else in his craving for her that he couldn’t name, some deeper want that made him ache with longing—that made him uneasy.

  When she reached down to gather her habit once more, he slipped, unseen, into the shadows and was gone.

  Mouse was surprised when her father didn’t come to see her the day after he’d left the finished Old and New Testaments on her floor. She had expected him to come looking for gratitude or a favor in return. Mouse didn’t know what he wanted from her, but she knew he meant to gain something, or else why bother? She felt like a trapped animal and thought about asking the bishop to let her out since her solitude was no longer solitary anyway. But if her father indeed wanted something from her, he would only come looking for her no matter where she went. Mouse bent back to work on the book, hoping that maybe his absence meant that he’d grown bored with her. Maybe she was finally alone.

  “I have something for you.”

  With a sigh, Mouse looked up from scripting the first of the medical texts she meant to include in her book—Constantine the African’s translation of the Art of Medicine. If the scriptures honored her time with Father Lucas, these medical texts paid tribute to Mother Kazi, the only mother Mouse had ever known and the woman who had trained her to be a healer—Mouse’s one gift that didn’t come from her father. She laid down the quill as she turned around to face him.

  In one hand, he held a brightly colored feather quill like none she had ever seen, and in the other, a beautifully carved wooden pot full of brilliant blue ink.

  “What do you want from me?” Mouse asked.

  He let disappointment play on his face like a mummer as he smoothly folded himself down on the floor beside her. “Can’t a father bring his daughter a present without suspicion?”

  “I do not want to play your game. Now tell me what you want.”

  He sat the jar and the quill between them and met Mouse’s gaze. “I don’t know.”

  The truth of his answer startled her. “But you want something?” she asked more gently.

  “I always want something.”

  “I have nothing to give you.”

  “You have yourself.”

  “No, not really. If I have my way, once I finish this book,” she looked down at the growing stack of scripted parchment, “I will sit in here until I waste away.”

  “And if you don’t waste away? If you can’t?”

  “Then I know what my eternity looks like.” She laid her hand on the wall of the tiny cell.

  He let out an angry burst of breath. “What a limited view of the world you have. And a self-centered one.”

  “What?”

  “This monastery will not be here for eternity. This cell will not be here long enough for you to turn to ash or dust or whatever it is you hope will happen to you. This world, life,” he swept his arms wide, “it’s bigger than you and your sorrows and your guilt. You are what you are.” He sighed and put his hand under her chin softly, turning her face to his and speaking more tenderly. “What you are does not have to define who you are. You can shape that all your own. Life is about joy more than sorrow.”

  “What do you want from me?” It came as a plea rather than an accusation this time.

  “To know you? To have you know me? I’m sure there must be something else more tangible, more advantageous.” He gave her truth, though not all of it. “But as my child, you are the only one of your kind in all the world, and I am curious about you. Are you not curious about yourself?”

  “I was once, but then I found out who my father was, and I was too busy hating myself to care about anything else. Until a friend, Bohdan, showed me I was more than my father’s daughter.” She said Bohdan’s name like a holy word, like a prayer.

  “Will you tell me about this friend?”

  Mouse was surprised that he asked this time rather than demanded what he wanted. “He is dead, too.”

  Her father waited until, with a shrug, she continued. “I went to the woods to die. Alone. As I said, I hated the idea that your blood was my blood, and I knew that it made me dangerous. I gave up—” Mouse swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat as she thought about Nicholas. “I gave up everything, and I ran until I thought I was far enough away that I couldn’t hurt anyone. All I wanted was to die. And that’s when I met Bohdan.” The small smile pulling at her mouth felt so unfamiliar that she put her hand on her cheek. “He was a wolf, and his pack had left him, so he was alone, too, and he was dying. But he didn’t want to. So I saved him.” Her voice broke. “And he loved me for it.”

  Her father r
eached out to catch a tear that ran down her face. “You loved him back?”

  She nodded, unable to speak, and then her jaw clenched and she pulled her face free of his hand. “But I killed him. What I was, your blood in me—it killed him. Some of your dark creatures came looking for me, drawn by the power that infects me, and they skinned him alive.” The words were tight with anger.

  “And yet you came out of the wilderness and back to the world of men after he died. Why—if you thought yourself so tainted, so dangerous—why not stay out there alone?”

  “I believed in Bohdan, so I lived on his faith in my goodness.”

  “Let me be like your Bohdan. Let me teach you how to love yourself.”

  “How naïve do you think I am?” Mouse scoffed. “And besides, all that was before Marchfeld. Marchfeld was like a mirror. I saw what I was, what I was capable of. That girl has no place among people. There is no goodness in her. There is no future for her.”

  “Yes there is. And I will show it to you.”

  “I have something for you.”

  It had been his usual greeting for several days now. He brought her many gifts: more exotic feather quills with fine points, fresh parchment that had been combed to perfection and chalked so that it felt like silk, but her favorites had been the richly colored inks in pots and jars that were themselves works of art, and the gold leaf—brilliant and fragile like a butterfly’s wings. These things awoke the artist in Mouse, and she began to re-envision the book she was making.

  “Just let me finish this,” she said to him as she bent to the parchment, a bit of gold leaf dancing on the end of her brush. She pressed it gently to the page beside a large initial that marked the beginning of the New Testament. She was replacing some of the pages he had copied so she could illuminate them, so she could make the book beautiful. So she could make the book hers.

  At first, she had seen the book only as a means to an end—giving the bishop what he wanted in order to get what she wanted. She had used the ritual of copying text to fill her mind with the mundane so she had no time to think about anything else. But now something new sparked in her.