“He’s here,” she said. “With us.”
Lucy pulled the sword from its scabbard and tossed it to Agnes, who was being smacked viciously on either side of her head. Suffering in silence.
Agnes grabbed it in midair and raised the weapon as high as she could and drove it downward hard as she could, right through the top of her attacker’s foot and out the bottom of his sneaker. He was literally pinned, bleeding out quickly, his neck veins popping in pain.
Agnes stood calmly and turned to face him.
“Sorry, I must have severed an artery,” she said calmly, watching the blood wash over her flats. She let her hair and dress fall to their natural length once again and bitch-slapped him, wiping his snot from her hand on his jacket. He was weakening and unable to defend himself.
“You like to pull hair,” she said seductively, slowly wrapping her locks around his neck and jerking him toward her. “Me too.” She leaned in close to him. Face-to-face, close enough to kiss under less confrontational circumstances, and tightened her grip on the nest of hair now encircling his throat. He saw the fire in her eyes and she watched the life leave his slowly, like a sun setting into the horizon, degree by degree. She pulled and kept pulling. Until his eyes popped and his tongue swelled past his lips. Until he was dead. She untangled him and let him drop.
The thug pulled Lucy down to the floor and covered her, his weight preventing her from moving. He tore at her blouse and made a juvenile effort to feel her up. “They’re real, despite what you might have heard.”
Lucy grabbed for his throat and dug in her nails, and he scraped at her eyes, trying to push them right through the back of her head. Lucy pulled at his wrist until she could get a piece of his hand in her mouth. She bit down and tore a piece of him off and spit it out on the floor beside her. He wailed in pain. She grabbed for the Legenda at her feet and pummeled the vandal on top of her with the heavy, leather-bound book. His forearm and ribs cracked easily under the force of her blows. He released her, but she wasn’t done. Lucy looked up at the windows, with their scenes of tortured saints, and found some inspiration. She dragged the nearly unconscious vandal onto the altar and scooped a few still-burning coals from the toppled urn. She tugged at his jaw until it opened and turned slack and dropped the hot charcoal into it and closed it back up with her heel. She held her foot there, kissing his lips with her sole. Soot and ash from his boiled and blistering lips soiling her shoe.
“You have a dirty mouth.”
He literally sizzled. Cooked from the inside out. His screams, a high-pitched whistle like nothing she’d ever heard, shot up from his eustachian tubes and out his ears. Steam poured from his nose, like a raging bull in his death throes.
“Payback’s a bitch. Even if it is a few thousand years late.”
Lucy brought the Legenda Aurea down on his face full force, killing him.
“Who says I’m not merciful.”
Ricky meanwhile had bum-rushed Cecilia, knocking her down hard. She was breathless and dazed momentarily and looked up at him, her vision fuzzy, knees and elbows scraped and bloody, as he removed his thick leather belt and folded it over, snapping it against his thigh. She’d seen him look like that before above her. With evil intent. Then, it was only her self-respect that was at stake. This time, it was her life. This time, she understood.
“Don’t,” she said, still defiant, struggling to her hands and knees. “You’ll turn me on.”
Ricky smiled.
“You’ve been a very bad girl.”
He grunted and struck her. Whipping her back, her arms, and her legs savagely. Kicking her butt like a disobedient dog. Over and over. Her skin flushed and welts appeared almost instantly. Tears of pain and humiliation rimmed her eyes.
“I have,” she confessed regretfully, taking the punishment almost to see how much she could stand.
With what strength she had, Cecilia crawled over to the votive stand and tried to scale it, lifting herself upright however which way she could as Ricky beat her incessantly. If she was going out now, she wanted it to be standing. She grabbed a votive cup in each hand and flung the boiling liquid at Ricky’s face with all her might. He dropped the strap and fell to his knees, clutching at his face, screaming, but more in anger than pain. While he was blinded momentarily, she ran toward him and kneed him in the head, pushing him over onto his belly on top of the overturned wooden altar, stunned. But not dead.
“If you hit me, you better kill me,” Ricky growled, pulling gobs of wax along with layers of skin from his face.
Ricky rushed her again, picked her up, and slammed her to the floor so hard she felt her lungs hit her rib cage. She gasped for air, lying motionless on her back. He stepped away and jumped up on the altar and kicked the glass reliquary, shattering it as he let out an ungodly harrowing wail, the veins in his neck near bursting as he swatted the remaining candles to the floor. “You always wanted to be the center of attention—the bride in the wedding and the body in the casket. Well, one of those is about to come true at least!”
Just like her dream, she thought.
“Saints alive!” he said in the midst of the rising smoke and fire, his raw face and bloodstained teeth causing him to appear as the wild beast he actually was, gloating over his prey, as she’d let him gloat over her many times before on lost and lonely nights. “But not for long.”
Ricky jumped from the altar to the bone chandelier suspended from the chapel ceiling, hung from it, and began to swing back and forth, building momentum and staring down at Cecilia. A pendulum of unsalvageable human degradation twirling ominously above. “I think it’s time somebody knocked some sense into that thick skull of yours, CeCe.”
All she could bring into clear focus as she waited for the deathblow were the metal-studded soles of his hobnail boots. She waited for the nail heads to leave across her face the filthy imprint of the simple, mocking word they spelled out. DOUBT.
And then, as she stared up at him and waited, she thought she saw something else. The delicate pendalogues of the chandelier where Ricky was holding on, which were made from the bones of fingers and hands, appeared to slowly release him from their grasp. From her view below, it was as if they were holding Ricky up instead of him holding on. He began to count, oblivious to anything but her imminent demise.
“One,” he yelled. Cecilia noticed his grip loosen even more.
Century-old plaster from the ceiling broke free; fiery liquid dripped down and fell on top of her. She remained still, taking the pain, all the while feeling a supernatural force was at work. Cecilia spied her fractured guitar neck on the floor beside her, gearhead aflame, and took it as a sign.
“Two.” He swung over her again, the whoosh of air from his motion feeding the flames that now nearly encircled her and kept Agnes and Lucy at bay.
She waited.
“Cecilia!” Agnes screamed.
“Thr—”
The canopy that affixed the chandelier to the ceiling gave way and came crashing down, along with the ornate bone chandelier. Cecilia quickly grabbed for her broken instrument and slid under Ricky just as he landed, guitar neck pointed forcefully upward, impaling him.
They lay face-to-face, inches apart, for what felt like hours but was just seconds, as they had many a night. She watched him turn white, gurgling for his breath and begging for his miserable life.
“How about showing a little mercy?” he gasped pathetically, his tone changing to suit the dire predicament he found himself in. “Forgiveness.”
“Like you showed Catherine? Showed us?” CeCe countered. “I don’t do mercy or forgiveness, Ricky. I just work here. You will have to take that one up with the boss.”
As his breath became more labored, she brought her lips even closer to his and whispered sweetly, “I warned you never to fall for me, didn’t I? Oh, that’s right. Too late.”
With all her might she tossed him off of her, driving the splintered fretboard completely through him as she did.
Agnes and Lu
cy grabbed the coverings from the saints’ statues for protection and leaped through the wall of fire to CeCe and lifted her up. They brushed off the shards of glass and splinters protruding from their bruised and swollen skin and wiped the blood and ash away. Agnes lay her covering over the bones of the candelabra, which was now on the ground, as if she were respectfully burying it. Lucy veiled Cecilia with hers.
Four dead. Three injured. One missing.
“There will be others. You know that, right?” Cecilia said. “They were just the opening act.”
The girls surveyed the carnage. A killing field of broken bones and broken glass, shattered bodies and splintered wood all around them. They’d turned the sacred chapel into a crime scene. More urgently, a fire hazard. Ricky’s jacket exploded in flames and ignited the wooden altar, the fire seeming to lick the giant Sacred Heart fresco that was disappearing into the billowing smoke. Slowly incinerating the bodies and the evidence.
“Ashes to ashes, prick,” Lucy mused. “Let’s go.”
“Not yet,” Cecilia said.
She righted the kneelers, the only pieces of wood still not aflame and kneeled down to pray. Without exchanging any words, Lucy and Agnes joined her.
“We don’t know what we are doing,” Cecilia said. “But we will do our best.”
They prayed for guidance, they prayed for wisdom, they prayed for strength, they prayed for Sebastian, they prayed for one another, they prayed for themselves. Prayed like they never had before, because they never had. Most of all they gave thanks to the ones who’d come before, whose presence, strength, and bravery they felt inside the room and inside themselves now.
As she raised her head, Agnes was troubled. She was having an attack of conscience. “Do you think that killing them makes us evil? Makes us like them?”
“I guess we’ll find out someday,” Lucy said. “But not today.”
“Time to go,” Cecilia pressed.
The fire was raging now, and the heat, smoke, and stench of burning flesh were stifling.
Agnes grabbed Legenda Aurea, flipped through it quickly, and tore out a single page. Lucy grabbed a length of bone from the ossuary and plunged it into Ricky’s burning body, turning it into a torch to light their way out. Cecilia bent down and picked up the hair shirt that had been thrown from the reliquary during the fight. She winced as she put it on her bloody back.
“Follow me,” Lucy said.
Agnes stopped as they reached the door and looked back.
“Are we the monsters now?” Agnes wondered. “Did we ruin this place?”
“No!” Cecilia said, pulling her away. “We restored it.”
Sirens began to blow before even the first few puffs of black smoke cleared the chimney. Jesse was instantly suspicious. He looked over in the café window and noticed Frey just hanging up from a call and collecting his things.
The smoke from the chapel fire began to escape through the old chimneys and vented out into the open air.
Jesse was panicking. If Lucy and the others were in there—and he was now sure they were—they wouldn’t last long. Frey had played this perfectly. Creating a literal smoke screen behind which to operate.
His flash mob was late. The police were sure to be first on the scene, and Frey had them wired from the top down. A crowd, witnesses, was their only hope.
“Jesus,” he moaned. “You can get five thousand kids to do the friggin’ Macarena slathered in Hershey’s syrup on Cadman Plaza but not a soul to witness a mass murder in progress.”
The doctor strolled casually across the street and up the church stairs.
“Arrogant prick.”
Jesse turned around and saw a few kids hanging around the corner. Could’ve been local rubberneckers now that a fire was going, but they seemed to have something else on their mind. Maybe there was hope.
Outside, he thought, would take care of itself. He was needed inside. He waited for a minute and followed Frey into the church.
Sebastian had been outmaneuvered. The vandals had drawn him upstairs and sneaked down behind him while he searched the church, locking the sacristy door from behind. He kicked at the door over and over to no avail.
“God help them,” he prayed, tears and sweat mingling in sorrow and passion.
“Sebastian.” A menacing voice rang out from the back of the church, filling it like the tolling of a bell. It was not the voice of God.
Sebastian walked out into the church, facing the altar. His back to Frey.
“You know, priests used to say mass that way. With their backs to the people. Things change,” Frey said wistfully.
Sebastian proceeded to the altar and climbed the stairs into the marble pulpit, facing out at the church and the doctor, who was not alone. From the elevated podium, he also saw another figure in the back. A head, nervously popping up from behind one of the back pews. It was Jesse. He didn’t react, unsure if Frey knew the blogger had followed him in or not.
“You sure you want to come in here, Doctor?”
Frey sighed. “We do what we must, you understand.”
“I do.”
“Another assistant to sacrifice?” Sebastian asked, gesturing toward the dead-eyed, uniformed psych-ward flunky Frey had brought with him.
“No,” Frey answered. “A patient. Like you. I thought you should be properly introduced,” he explained snidely. “You have a lot in common. Both sociopathic and violent. Murderous. Incurable. Though in his case it was young children, not teenage girls.”
Sebastian’s jaw tightened. “A death-penalty candidate.”
“Nearly. But as I explained to the court, he’s not responsible for his actions.”
“We are all responsible for our actions, Doctor. And for the consequences.”
Dr. Frey patted Sicarius on the shoulder, drawing a twisted smile from the defective delinquent. Frey’s crunchy footfalls echoed loudly as he and his assassin drew slowly closer.
“Still quite a mess in here. I have to make a note to speak to the developers about the status of my investment in the conversion.”
“Why are you so afraid of me?” Sebastian asked coolly. “I understand the need for you, for what you believe, yet you see no place for me.”
“Not afraid. Concerned. As I am for all my patients.”
“Bullshit, you tried to erase my mind. My identity.”
“Erase you? Or treat you?”
“Same difference, Doctor.”
“You are sick, Sebastian. You think me evil, when all I’ve ever tried to do was help you, protect you from your own insanity. And when that proved impossible, to protect others from you.”
Sebastian fought the urge to strangle Frey right on the spot and kept his cool.
“Is that what you told the police? And Jesse?”
“I told them that you were a murderer and a kidnapper. A uniquely dangerous and delusional young man. The truth.”
“It all sounds so reasonable, Doctor—even to me.”
“It should. Those girls down there are in jeopardy because of you. Not me.”
“That’s a lie.”
“You filled their heads with the same superstitious nonsense. We are long past the need for this,” Frey said adamantly, pointing to the altar. “Or for those like you.”
“Why? Because now we have you?” Sebastian said derisively. “You don’t offer happiness. You don’t offer fulfillment. You don’t offer love. You prescribe it. Soulessness. In daily doses.”
“Whatever works,” he said blithely.
“What happens when the prescription runs out, Doctor?”
“You get a refill, Sebastian.”
“Here, I’m always full,” Sebastian said. “I don’t need a refill or an insurance card or a straitjacket.”
“No, just a small weekly donation.”
“No one charged me admission.”
“So romantic. I can see why the girls fall for it. Dangle a few bracelets, tell them you are destined to be together. Surely there are easier ways to get a
date.”
“They came to me. They were led to me as I was to them.”
“There is nothing special about you, Sebastian. You are as deluded as a person who sees the face of Jesus in a bowl of cornflakes.”
“I know what I know,” Sebastian said firmly.
“You know nothing. You believe. You are spreading lies. Dangerous ones.”
“Nothing is more dangerous than truth, Doctor.”
“Science is truth. A rigorous process of study undertaken over years to arrive at answers to age-old questions. To separate fact from fiction. There are papers, reviewed and published, open to scrutiny.”
“All paid for by the like-minded, Doctor. Ever changing. Evolving, as they say. What I know can’t be bought. It is eternal.”
“Why am I bothering? I had this argument recently with Father Piazza. You remember him?”
Frey could see that even the old priest’s name was painful to Sebastian.
“Even self-styled men of God didn’t believe you. Betrayed you. The world has turned, Sebastian.”
“Yes, it has turned. To shit.”
“And you and your little harem are here to give it a colonic? Is that right? Cleanse us all for the Second Coming? Please don’t preach to me.”
“If you didn’t believe it, Doctor, fear it, you wouldn’t be here.”
“All hypotheticals, Sebastian. But keep telling yourself that.”
“Reality, Doctor. And soon everyone will know it.”
“No. The reality is that the police will be here shortly. Fire department too, from the looks of things. Your girlfriends will be dead. I will be a hostage. And you will be blamed. Or dead.”
“They can take care of themselves,” Sebastian responded. “And so can I.”
“Such faith you have, Sebastian. But so rarely tested.”
Jesse poked his head up again and began to tremble, frightened out of his mind for Lucy and the girls, and for Sebastian. What was coming next was obvious to all of them.
“Sicarius,” Frey commanded.