CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ready or not, here I come!” Luc called out.

Mouse held her breath and braced herself against the branches inside the yew tree. Luc was on the other side of the yard, turning around the corner of the Austrian chalet that had just become their new home. They’d moved a few days after Mouse had come back from her pilgrimage. Loosed from the anchors to her humanity, Mouse had found herself antsy, unsettled. The eerie stillness of her father’s house had felt claustrophobic. Playing on her promise to “fix” Luc, she had convinced her father that the boy needed a change of scenery and some fresh air and sunshine.

There had been nothing fresh or sunny about her father’s house—if it was a house. It felt like another world or no place at all, a pocket stitched into that shadowy no-man’s-land between time and space that Mouse had learned to travel. Maybe it was hell. But it was no place for a Pinocchio boy trying to be human.

The round white marble room that she had come to think of as hers had opened into a seemingly endless string of other rooms in her father’s house, mostly empty but for a few exceptions. Luc’s room had a bed but no toys, no books. There was a sparse bathroom that stank of soured urine and a room that seemed to be covered in blood splatter—some of it black and cracking with age, some still moist and thick like glue. Another room might have been a display in a museum, various devices set up around the walls—a Judas chair still encrusted with evidence of its victims, a rack, and a table lined with smaller torture tools like the Pear of Anguish. Shoved back against the side wall was a small metal box with a tiny slot closed off by an iron grille. Mouse’s first love, Ottakar, had nearly lost his life and his mind in such a box. Wearing her new indifference, she had shrugged off the memory and moved on.

The adjacent room had been covered with mirrors, every inch of the wall and ceiling glistening with reflective glass, some old and wavy, some perfectly clear. Four ornate, freestanding floor-length mirrors stood in the corners. Even the floor was a polished silver. Mirrors inside mirrors inside mirrors, and all of them showing her herself. Mouse hadn’t gone back in that room.

The most ordinary room Mouse had found in her father’s abode held a discordant collection of furniture—a few couches, ranging in style from Victorian to art deco, along with chairs, a wicker bird cage filled with dried flowers and the desiccated remains of a blue bird, and a tin lantern with punched holes in the shape of a rainbow between clouds, the candle inside still burning. Mouse had moved a couple of couches into a larger, open space to create a makeshift family room where they had spent most of their time—when she wasn’t out hunting.

Even with her efforts to make it more human for Luc, her father’s home still felt like a place crafted outside of time. Or a prison. Mouse had found no windows and no way out. There were no sounds of birdsong or traffic or wind or rain. She also never found her father’s room.

Despite the inhuman surroundings, Mouse’s influence had evoked dramatic changes in Luc. Though he never said anything about it, he was clearly more relaxed when his father wore his human form. Luc stood taller himself and walked with more natural ease. His father noticed, so when Mouse had suggested that Luc needed room to run and play in order to be less demon and more boy, her father had whisked them to this little village just outside Innsbruck, Austria, to the chalet, which was warm and cozy and everything normal, everything her father’s place was not.

The afternoon sun now filtered down from a sky that was robin’s-egg blue. Luc paused at the backyard swings, the mountains sitting like waiting giants behind him. The boy lowered his head a moment and then lifted it, smiling, and walked in a direct line toward the yew tree and Mouse.

“Found you!” He reached in and grabbed her leg.

An image of herself hugging him and laughing at his cleverness darted into her mind. Some remnant of the old Mouse knew it was what she ought to do, what she wanted to do, but the void inside her now swallowed it up before it could take hold. “How’d you find me so quickly?” she asked vacantly as she climbed down.

“I listened like you taught me. I heard your heartbeat.”

“Well done. Now it’s your turn to hide.”

His face beamed with joy. “I like this game. I’m good at it.”

“I’ll count to a hundred.”

“No peeking!”

“I promise.”

Mouse sat in the swing and closed her eyes. She’d been spending most of her days with Luc, teaching him, playing with him, listening to him. But she spent her nights searching for the first four people on her list—citrus, musk, bay rum, and cedar.

She didn’t sleep.

“Ready or not, here I come.” Despite the change in location and the cozy comfort of the new home her father filled with the trappings of a normal life, despite the bright sun on her face, Mouse still felt like a stranger to herself, her voice dull and dead like sounds underwater.

She walked barefoot through the grass, listening for a breath or a heartbeat or a giggle. Luc had given himself away more than once because he couldn’t stop laughing when she got close. He didn’t seem bothered by Mouse’s robotic nature. He liked her anyway.

She cocked her head, listening harder, but there was no sound of him. Mouse walked around the corner toward the front of the house. She searched the front yard, all the trees and the bushes. She went back into the house.

“Luc!” she called. The house was empty. Her father was gone.

Mouse walked out onto the patio. “Luc! You win. Come out now!”

Her mouth went dry. She strained her ears, filtering out the hum of the ski lift a mile or so behind the house. A copse of evergreens stood between the house and ski slope. Mouse took off for the trees, calling, “Luc!”

As she broke through into the shadows and saw the thick underbrush, she recognized a twinge of panic. She couldn’t hear him or see him anywhere. She closed her eyes and used her power, searching for a glow. But Mouse had never bothered to check to see if Luc had the soft wash of light that she’d come to understand was a person’s soul. She had only ever seen a flicker of her own, once, when she was dying at Megiddo. Would Luc have one?

A murky darkness playing against the back of her eyelids seemed to be her answer until she saw a faint shimmer deep in the thicket at the base of a giant sequoia. Mouse ran.

He wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t beating. But as she came closer, the glow of him grew fuller and brighter. Luc’s collarbone jutted up like a knot under the skin above the neck of his tangled shirt, and he had sequoia needles in his hair.

She dropped down beside his little body. “Breathe,” she commanded.

Nothing happened.

Mouse lowered her mouth to his and pushed her own air into his lungs. She pressed down on his chest, pumping his heart. It only took a little encouragement for it to start beating again on its own. Luc sucked in a gaspy breath and then screamed in pain.

Resurrecting her healer’s skills, Mouse quickly set the bone back in place, bent his arm at the elbow, and held it still as she helped him sit up. “I know it hurts, Luc. But we need to get back to the house so I can wrap your arm to keep it stable. It will hurt less then, and it will all be well by tomorrow. I promise. Can you stand?”

He nodded and let her lift him up to his feet.

“I can carry you, but I’m afraid it will jostle the bone you’ve broken and make it hurt worse. Can you walk?”

“I think so,” he said through his tears.

Back in the chalet, Mouse took only minutes to wrap his arm and settle him with pillows and a fuzzy blanket on the couch watching cartoons. She sat with his feet in her lap. He liked having his feet rubbed.

The moment of panic gone, Mouse felt herself fall back into the empty chasm she’d built. “Can you tell me what happened, Luc?”

“I climbed the tree, like you did. And I held my breath, but I knew you’d hear my heartbeat just like I did yours. So I told my heart to be still and quiet. I watched you walk to the front of the house, and I almost laughed, but then everything went blurry and I was falling.” His eyes grew wide. “And then you were there.”

“I’m sorry, Luc.” She sounded anesthetized, remote.

“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”

“I should have been more careful. I should have warned you not to try to make your heart stop. I did it once, too.”

“What happened?”

“Like you, I passed out and fell, but I was only hiding behind a wall. I just hit my head on a stone.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Nothing like yours. You were very brave.”

He smiled and looked past her toward the television, but then asked, “Did someone help you?”

“Yes.” She had to make herself breathe.

“Who?”

“No one important.”

“I can tell you’re lying. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Just someone who . . . loved me. But that was a long time ago.”

“Can I meet him?”

“He’s dead.”

“You couldn’t fix him?”

“No.” She closed her eyes. She needed him to stop asking questions.

“But he fixed you?”

She nodded.

“What was his name?”

“Father Lucas.”

“Thank you, Mouse.”

“For?” She rubbed at his foot.

“Fixing me.”

Something stirred softly in Mouse’s chest. She counted the grains in the wood of the fireplace mantel until it grew silent once more.

Hours later, after her father had come back and night had fallen, Mouse took up her cloak and went hunting. On previous outings, she’d gone looking for the four men at Port Hedland, where she assumed they had been recruited by the Reverend. She’d moved from there to various military sites around Australia, but she’d had no luck.

Tonight, she meant to try a different strategy—rather than hunt prey, Mouse would look for bread crumbs. She held the place she meant to go in her mind as she pulled the cloak around her, but then she paused. Part of her didn’t want to go there at all. She had to let the part of her that was hungry for revenge consume her doubt before the rush of air sent her spiraling through black emptiness and deposited her on familiar ground. She heard the crack and pop of the fire and smelled the roasting lizard, and she let her cloak fall away to reveal the Martu outstation.

The Martu were gathered around the fire, but no one had seen her arrive. She was a black shadow against a black night, with only the glint of the bone shard strapped to her thigh to give her away. She picked her way through heartbeats until she found the one she wanted, surprisingly not at the fire with the others but shut away in the community house. Silently, Mouse made her way across the dirt courtyard, her cloak hanging loose around her ankles.

She found Ngara huddled under blankets on a low bed shoved against the back wall of the room she painted in, canvas and paints still scattered about the middle of the floor.

“Ah, finally you have come, little one.” The old woman’s voice was weak.

“I am not your little one.”

“As I see,” Ngara said.

“You are sick?” Mouse asked. If she was sad, she didn’t let herself feel it.

“Old, is what I am. And ready. But I have been waiting for you.”

“Why?”

“You have a question for me and I have a gift for you.”

“What?”

“Ask me your question.”

“Where did they go? The men who came after us.”

“They were all gone by the time we came out of hiding. All but one.”

Mouse’s skin prickled. “Who?”

“The white-haired man.”

“Jack’s alive.” Mouse had wondered if he’d been collateral damage or if the Reverend might have considered him a loose end to be rid of, but no, Jack lived. A sneer pulled at the corner of Mouse’s mouth. She’d found her first bread crumb. “Anything else?”

“He took water and drove away.”

“Thank you.” Mouse turned to leave.

“Now you take my gift.”

“I don’t need anything from you.”

The old woman grunted with pain but kept working her way over to the edge of the cot until she could snake her arm out of the blankets and grasp at something hiding in the dark under the bed. At first, Mouse thought it was one of the Martu’s woven baskets, but as Ngara pulled it free, Mouse could see it was a mask. The base was made of braided spinifex grass, with loose strands erupting from the top like hair and long, wedgetail eagle feathers sticking up like a crown. Smaller, brilliant blue bee-eater feathers, wound in grass tethers, dangled from the sides of the mask. The woven spinifex stretched across the face, pulling the features down as if they were melting.

Mouse had never seen this mask, but she knew it all the same. Angelo had seen it in his dream. It was the mask she’d worn as she joined her father, who was doing terrible things to the people in the dream. But Angelo had been there in the dream, too.

Mouse no longer cared about dreams or visions—they were all lies. Angelo was dead. And it was she, not her father, who meant to exact a terrible vengeance. She bent and picked up Ngara’s gift. This mask was terrifying. It might be helpful with Jack.

“I made it for you. You are kurdaitcha now.” The old woman sank back onto her pillow, her energy spent. “Put it on.”

Mouse slid the mask over her face. It fit perfectly.

“Vengeance seeker. You have the bone still?”

Mouse laid her hand against the bone shard at her thigh.

“Do you know how to use it?”

“Stab it in and yank it out.”

Ngara shook her head. “It has the power of the old ones. Point it at those who have wronged you, and the bone will do the work.” Ngara closed her eyes. “Go be kurdaitcha.” Mouse walked out into the night, but she heard the old woman add, “Then you can be Mouse again.”

Mouse stopped, her head half turned back and disfigured by the mask, her cloak swept out beside her. “Mouse is gone,” she whispered.

But as she pulled the cloak around her again, she caught Ngara’s last words. “What is coming will come. You cannot run away from it.”

Mouse went looking for the Bishop first. He and his Novus Rishi bore as much responsibility for what had happened at Lake Disappointment as anyone. She meant to kill them all, but she would save the Bishop for next to last. The penultimate. She wanted him to know she was coming for him. She wanted him to be afraid. The only person she wanted to be more afraid was the Reverend. He would be the last. Mouse meant to savor him.

As she expected, the Bishop was still at the Vatican, but the nearly three years since she’d seen him last had not been kind. He looked old and broken. Night after night, she stalked him. He was always alone, walking the streets of Rome with his head down.

She thought she’d have to wait weeks, maybe even months, before the Bishop led her to Jack’s mentor, the Rabbi. Mouse planned to use him to find Jack. But it was only her eighth night of hunting when the Bishop exited the offices at the back of the Vatican around nine to get dinner, as he had every night since Mouse had been watching him. Except this time, he was dressed in street clothes. His gray slacks and jacket and sweater vest put Mouse on edge—he looked like a ghost of himself, unfamiliar and strange, but he blended well with the rest of the Roman crowd. She wondered if that was the point, for the Bishop to be anonymous, unrecognizable. The thrill of expectation ran over Mouse’s skin.

Something different was happening tonight.

She followed him to a little coffee shop nearby. He sat at an outside table at the far end of the walk behind a row of parked scooters along the side of the street. A waiter approached and took his order. There were a few other groups at tables along the walk but none near the Bishop. A black Vespa zoomed past where Mouse stood in the dark of a tree in the green space across from and a little behind the coffee shop. The Vespa pulled a U-turn in front of oncoming traffic and zipped into an empty parking spot. A car horn blared.

The rider, a tall man dressed in black, swung his leg over the Vespa and then reached up to take off his helmet. A wash of white hair cascaded down his shoulders.

Jack Gray.

Mouse moved a little farther back against the tree. This was unexpected.

“You have anything?” the Bishop asked as Jack sat down opposite him.

Jack shook his head but saved his explanation until after the waiter gave the Bishop his espresso and went back into the café. “There wasn’t enough blood left for a real spell,” Jack said softly. Mouse cocked her head, straining to hear with her unnatural senses. “And that was the last of it.”

“We’ll have to find more, then.”

“What’s the point? We’ve been looking for almost a year without a single sign from the locator spell. Because she’s dead!” A couple farther up the sidewalk turned to look as he raised his voice. He leaned toward the Bishop, now whispering. “She’s dead. They both are.”

“She doesn’t die.”

“I saw the gunfire. And the demons. No one could live through that.”

“No one human.” The Bishop’s voice was heavy with grief.

Jack took out a leather pouch and slid it across the table toward the Bishop. “Well, I’m done.”

“What’s this?” The Bishop tugged at the pouch string and slid his thumb and forefinger into the opening. He pulled out a small sliver of stone covered with a painted eye.

Mouse sucked in a breath at the tickle of power emanating from it. She had watched the portrait shard disappear in the swirl of salt and sand and had assumed that it had been consumed by the lake as the demons came and went. But Jack must have gone back for it. As the Bishop turned the stone, Mouse’s painted eye looked up at the hanging lights overhead. Jack sat back in his chair, his heart skipping.

“If you find more of her blood, you’ll need this to power the spell.” Jack reached forward and pushed the Bishop’s hand down so the stone disappeared back into the pouch. “But you’re going to want to keep it sealed up when you’re not using it.”

“Why?”

“It messes with your head. But there’s salt in the pouch that—”

“A protection spell, to counter the dark power? You are clever, Dr. Gray.”

“The locator spell is on a piece of paper in the pouch, too. I’m sure you know how it works. Now, if you’ll just give me my money, I’ll let you get back to—”

“No.”

Jack leaned back, sighing. “Come on, old man. This is pointless. She’s dead. And I’m done with all this dark shit. I want a simple life, someplace sunny where I can forget what I’ve seen.”

The Bishop took a sip of his espresso. Mouse braced herself against a press of memories: sitting across from Angelo while he did the same thing, making his espresso last until just the right moment, the final sip perfectly warm. She gripped the vengeance mask dangling from her fingers.

“I thought she was dead once before.” The Bishop paused, and Mouse could see his jaw clench. He set his cup down on the table. “But Angelo taught me to have more faith.”

“Well, I’m not a man of faith.”

“You are also not a man with many resources.”

“Which is why you need to give me my money.”

“Let me see if I can find another sample of her blood. And we will try one more time, Dr. Gray.” The Bishop pushed the pouch back across the table.

Jack just looked at it.

“I can make it very much worth your while,” the Bishop said.

“Not if the Reverend’s looking for her, too.”

“I do not believe he is a man of faith, either, Dr. Gray. He seemed very angry at how things turned out at Lake Disappointment, very much like a man who had lost a highly coveted treasure. He thinks she’s gone.” The Bishop took out some cash and put it on the table beside his empty cup. “He blames you for that loss.”

Jack pressed his lips together in a hard line, but his shoulders sagged. He knew he was beat. “So what do you want me to do now?”

“Wait. I will see if I can find another sample.” He pushed back from the table and stood up. “I’ll be in touch in a couple of weeks. Goodnight, Dr. Gray.”

The Bishop’s phone rang out as he walked away, a metallic crooning of Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me.” Jack watched the old man cross the street, snatched the bag from the table, and then got up, moving back toward his Vespa.

Mouse had crossed the street, too, and waited in the shadows against the building beyond the café lights, her cloak draped around her. She slipped the vengeance mask over her head and then took a single step forward. “Hello, Jack.”

He spun around at his name, his eyes widening as he stared at the monstrous face. He jerked toward the Vespa, but Mouse had anticipated his move. She twisted her leg around his shin and yanked back, sending him down to the pavement as she grabbed his forearm with one hand and wrapped her cloak around him with the other.

Mouse had only ever traveled through the dark planes alone. She’d underestimated the additional energy it would take to transport another person. She landed hard on the white marble floor of her room in her father’s abandoned house. Jack crumpled under his weight, and Mouse staggered backward into the wall.

When Jack looked up through the curtain of hair hanging in his face, he screamed and scrambled back, banging into the table. He reached up and grabbed the corner, pulling himself up and twisting toward the door, already half running. Urine trickled in a thin line behind him.

Mouse laughed. “Bathroom’s first door on the left.”

He yanked open the door of Mouse’s room and ran out into the hall, trying to get away from her. He tried door after door, their metal handles slamming into the stone walls as he flung each one open only to find empty rooms with no windows and no way out. Mouse patiently followed him, her cloak skimming the glossy floors. She was still laughing at his panic, taking joy from his suffering as she thought of Angelo bleeding out in the salty soil at Lake Disappointment.

Jack made his way through the labyrinthine house until he came to the family room. Mouse had prepared the place for him. Her father had cleared out most of the furnishings when they’d relocated to Austria, but Mouse had kept a couch and table, a lamp, a trashcan, and some stocked supplies. Jack ran to the other side of the couch, crouching as he tried to hide.

Mouse’s boots clacked against the stone floor as she came near him.

“Please, please, don’t . . .” he begged.

Mouse let her laughter die away. She lowered herself onto the couch and crossed her legs. Jack folded in on himself, weeping.

“Welcome to Hell, Jack.”

He lifted his head to look at her, his face twisted in fear. “What are you?”

Mouse knew she could make it quick for him—command him to give her the answers she needed and then kill him. But the new Mouse, abandoning the light and listening to the seductive call of her dark rage, wanted to see him suffer more than she wanted information. He deserved to suffer.

His heart was beating so fast it was almost one long, continuous rushing. His pupils were dilated, and the stench of adrenaline and his soiled clothes saturated the air. Mouse had never seen someone die of fright. She watched him for a few more minutes, her head cocked in curiosity, and then she pulled the mask off. She needed Jack alive—for the moment.

“Calm down or you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”

Jack sat up, his eyes moving from her shaved head down to her cold eyes. He shook his head. “You.” Disbelief mingled with fear on Jack’s face. “You’re dead.”

“Not so much.” She reached around Jack to lay the mask on the table. She smirked when he flinched. “Stop crying and take a tissue.” She nodded to the box beside the mask on the table behind him. He reached his arm over his shoulder groping for it, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off Mouse.

“For God’s sake, Jack!” She snaked her arm past his head, grabbed the tissues, and crammed them into his lap.

Jack wiped at his face and nose. “The Bishop said—”

“Yeah, he knows a thing or two. You’ve been looking for me?”

“The Bishop wants—”

Mouse’s arm shot forward again, this time grabbing the back of Jack’s head, twisting it toward the table and slamming it down on the stone surface. The bone and cartilage in his nose cracked and popped. Blood poured down his chin. It happened so fast that he didn’t have time to cry out.

“Does it look like I care what the Bishop wants, Jack? We’re talking about what I want now.”

Jack’s hands cradled his broken nose, blood seeping through his fingers.

“Take another tissue and clean yourself up. I need you to tell me some things.” She waited as he wiped the blood from his face, then she picked up a couple of the used tissues and twisted them. “Here.” She jammed the tissue up his nostrils. “It’ll stop the bleeding and stabilize the bone,” she said, almost as if she couldn’t help it.

Jack looked up at her, confused, like a lost boy. “What do you want?”

Mouse leaned back on the couch. “I’m looking for someone, too. Well, some ones. And you seem to be good at finding things. It’s your knack, Jack.” She grinned.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen when I found you. I swear, if I had, I wouldn’t—”

“We’ll talk about all that later. I promise. But what I want to know right now is where I can find the men who were in the desert.”

Jack sagged against the couch. “I can tell you where they came from, but I don’t know if they’re still there.”

“That’ll do for now.”

“There’s a compound out in Texas, a few miles outside of a ghost town called Rosenfeld. It’s one of the places where the Reverend trains his men.”

“Heavily guarded?”

“Probably, but I’ve never been there.” He pushed at one of the tissues hanging out of his nose.

Mouse slapped her hands against her thighs and stood up. “Thank you, Jack.”

“I can go now?”

“No. I think you have more things to tell me. But I’m going to let you take care of your nose and get some rest.” She bent close to his head as he bowed it. “I’ve left you some food over there,” she pointed to boxes along the wall. “And bottled water. You’re free to explore, but as you saw, there’s nothing here. There’s no way out. Except me.”

“When will you come back?”

She chewed at her lip. “Not sure. I’ve got a bit more hunting to do.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”