CHAPTER TWELVE

Mouse shed her cloak in the shadowy light of her bedroom in the chalet at Innsbruck. As it slid from her shoulders, the façade of bitter braggadocio she’d put on for Jack also slipped away, leaving her face blank once more, her eyes cold and dead. She hung Ngara’s mask on a peg on the wall, unsheathed the bone shard strapped to her thigh, and took off the black clothes. She stood naked in the empty room, staring into the silent dark, waiting for instinct to tell her what to do next.

After several minutes, she turned and picked up an old T-shirt from the foot of the bed. She pulled it over her head and climbed under the covers. The shirt had been Angelo’s. It didn’t smell like him anymore. She ran the worn fabric between her fingers as she listened to the soft sounds of her brother breathing in his room down the hall. Her father was pacing downstairs.

In a few hours, it would be the middle of the night in Texas, and she would don the mask and cloak and bone once more and become the master hunter. But this was the moment of real danger for Mouse—the quiet of night when her mind was vulnerable and something still soft came creeping into her consciousness. She rolled over on her side and curled into a ball and imagined laying brick on brick as she walled up that softness and smothered it with her will.

“Mouse?”

She shot upright. She hadn’t heard him coming.

“What’s wrong, Luc?”

He’d been crying. “I had a bad dream.”

“Just a dream?” Mouse had crafted protection spells around the border of Luc’s room, remembering her own childhood full of nightmares, real with demons who came in the dead of night to play their terrifying games. She would not let her little brother be tormented so.

“I was falling.”

“I see.”

“And I—” He hid his face in his hands, crying again.

“It’s okay, Luc. I know.” She’d already smelled the sharp twang of urine.

“But I’m too big to do that.”

“No one’s too big to get scared, and your body just did what’s natural when a person gets scared. Okay?”

He’d already stopped crying.

“Let’s get you cleaned up and then you can sleep in here with me.”

He smiled as she took his hand and led him to the bathroom.

A few minutes later, he was curled against Mouse and sound asleep. He smelled like lavender soap and clean linen. His mouth hung open a little and his hand rested under his chin. As he sighed in his sleep, Mouse felt the soft thing tug at her once more. She tried to summon the discipline to shove it back into the dark, but she couldn’t, not while she was nestled against the rhythmic rise and fall of Luc’s chest, his rapid heartbeat fluttering so close it danced with her own.

“I can’t play right now, Luc, I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“I want you to stay. I want you to play.” He stood at the threshold of her door, the smells of biscuits and bacon wafting in behind him.

“Go eat your breakfast. I’ll be back soon, and we can play then.”

“Not unless you tell me where you’re going, and why you’re wearing that mask. I don’t like it.”

“I’m . . . playing a game with someone.”

“You’re lying.” His head was cocked to the side.

“Not exactly. It’s a very grown-up game, and I can’t explain it to you.”

“Is it fun?”

“No.” She bent her head and slipped the mask into place.

“Then why do you play?”

“Because I have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Neither do you.”

“I don’t like playing the game, Luc, but I very much want to win it.” In her mind, she flipped through the images of the men responsible for Angelo’s death.

“Will you win?”

“I don’t know.” Her hand shook as she strapped the bone shard to her thigh.

“If you stay and play with me, I’ll let you win.”

Mouse looked down at him through the mask’s eyeholes. It was the first time she’d heard him willing to give up something for someone else. She knelt and took his hand. “That’s very kind of you, Luc. And I will come back just as soon as I can, and we’ll play then.”

“Please, don’t go.”

Mouse stood and grabbed the edge of her cloak. “I’ll bring you something when I come back.” And then she was gone.

The rotting remains of a storefront were all that was left of Rosenfeld. The moon hung overhead like a broken fingernail in the Texas sky. Mouse took off toward the low hills where she knew she’d find the compound. She could already hear the deep rumble of generators.

A few minutes later, she dropped down against the hilltop looking over a shallow valley. The compound seemed deserted. No lights. No movement. But Mouse knew not to trust the appearance of a thing. She could hear the heartbeats of at least twenty people. All but one seemed to pulse in the slow rhythm of sleep.

A sign on the gate of the razor-wire fence read THE ARMY OF GOD.

Mouse assumed that the compound would be equipped with motion detectors, so she couldn’t just waltz in and take what she wanted. Well, she could actually. She could kill them all with a word, be done with it and back home playing with Luc in a matter of minutes. But it would not satisfy her hunger. She needed to see the men afraid, needed to feel their lives in her hands before she claimed each one in payment for the life they had taken.

Mouse wrapped her hand around the bone the Seven Sisters had gifted her. She prowled the border of the compound slowly, sniffing out her prey. Citrus. Musk. Bay rum. Cedar. She found them clustered together in a barracks at the back of the compound—maybe they were all part of the same unit. She pulled her cloak tightly around her, focused her mind, and instantly found herself leaning against the wall of the barracks. She waited a moment for alarms. In the answering silence, she moved around the corner of the building.

Someone had left a window open to the cool night air. Mouse climbed through like a shadow. Her nostrils flared. Citrus was in the far corner. Musk and Bay Rum were in the beds on either side of her. Cedar was near the front door.

She pulled the bone out of the sheath.

Point it at those who have wronged you, and the bone will do the work, Ngara had said.

Mouse pointed the bone at Musk.

Nothing happened.

What else had the old woman said? Be kurdaitcha. Be the vengeance seeker. It was all a matter of intent. The bone held the magic. The bone did the work. But the vengeance seeker had to fuel it with a desire for revenge. Mouse had to want these men to die. And she did—in her head. She needed to feel it in her heart.

She gritted her teeth and pulled up the memory of Lake Disappointment. She let it come, strong and real, adrenaline flooding through her. In her mind, she zeroed in on Angelo, past the flying debris and the roar of the helicopters and the whipping wind and the wails of the men being eaten by the demons.

She heard Angelo begging for his life and hers—We surrender.

She slowed down the bullet that would first shatter his rib cage and come shooting out of his backpack. She followed the trajectory of that first bullet, followed it to the man who had fired the shot. He half hung off the fuselage of the lead helicopter. He stared at Angelo’s raised hands. Mouse watched the man’s face for any sign of compassion or regret. There was none. Not even a pause as he pulled the trigger.

In her perfect memory, Mouse isolated the man’s scent. Bay Rum.

She turned to her left. The bone began to glow and grew warm in her hand. Her mind held the image of Angelo pleading, his body shredded by bullets, his glowing soul seeping out between her fingers and down into the desert sand as he left her. But when she started to point the bone at her first quarry, her hand shook violently.

I beg you, do not turn your back on what is right and good.

Mouse hissed. She thought she had purged Father Lucas’s ghostly counsel, but he was with her still. She realized with disgust that she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill a sleeping man in cold blood—not yet, anyway. Her temper flared at her failure. Without warning, the bone surged with a brilliant blue as it had when she and Angelo had found it in the cave. It vibrated in her hand, full of the vengeance Mouse had already fed it.

And Bay Rum’s heart stopped. Just like that.

She spun toward Musk and then moved across to Citrus. She felt them die at the moment her eyes rested on them. Panicking at the loss of control, she held the bone shard away from her, letting it roll passively in her palms, but it still glowed with the cold blue light. She heard Cedar cough. Instinctively, she turned to him and took a step closer. He was clutching at his chest, his eyes wide when he saw Mouse. She watched his pupils grow large—then empty.

Shocked at the suddenness of death, she looked down at her hands, horrified, as the bone’s light died, too. I will not kill anyone today. The words came against her will. They had been the foundation of her humanity for seven hundred years. Her last thread to anything good in her. And she had just cut herself loose from it. What did that make her?

She kept blinking, trying to clear the fuzziness from her sight. It was only when she tasted the salt that she realized she was crying. Even as she acknowledged the tears and the shock at what she’d done, she couldn’t feel anything but rage.

And that made her even angrier.

She snatched her cloak around her and caught her breath at the sudden change in the air. The cool Texas night evaporated instantly in the dry heat of the outback afternoon at the Martu outstation. Mouse heard a child scream behind her, but she didn’t care to look. She stormed through the community house door. Ngara’s art room was bare. No canvas or paint. No cot crammed into the corner.

Mouse had come to scream at the old woman, to demand to know who or what had twisted fate this way and set Mouse and Angelo on such a dark path. She wanted to know where they were so she could bring the fight to them, too. But Ngara was gone, and Mouse’s rage swelled, nearly blinding her.

“What are you?” the Martu child asked as Mouse staggered back through the open door.

“Gone,” she said.

She wasn’t thinking of a destination when she swirled the cloak around her. Her anger drove her toward a target like a loosed arrow. Her feet slammed against the ground, and she crouched to balance herself. She knew where she was by the smells—different and yet still the same. The minerals lifted into the air from the steam drifting up off the river. The linden trees were in bloom.

Mouse had come home again to Teplá but not to the cemetery this time. She’d come to the root of her failure—to the abbey where her struggle with goodness had begun.

But it was all wrong. The trees were thinned out, the gardens gone. The abbey buildings sprawled out in different places, the Teplá River dammed. The stones of the church wall in front of her were too smooth and the scale of it all too grand.

Yet, here she was, in the same place where she’d spent her childhood—on the outside of the Church of the Annunciation of the Lord at Teplá. Always on the outside looking in, Mouse had spent her childhood wanting to belong to those who did not want her—the righteous, the blessed, the good. Why couldn’t she turn her back on them the way they had always shunned her?

Mouse slammed her fist against the wall over and over, trying to beat out the residue of her longing until her knuckles shattered underneath her black glove. She leaned heavily into the stone, weeping as she slid down to her knees. She pulled the cloak up to hide her face but was surprised to find herself falling through the dark planes her father had taught her to use. She felt something pull at her like a magnet, and she landed softly on a cold stone floor.

She shook her head, sobbing, and curled her arms over her head. She never would have come here of her own will. Not now. This was not a place to feed her anger. This place conjured old yearnings.

Midmorning light bounced around cave walls still covered in Mouse’s paintings. A fading image of a wolf took up much of the back wall. Bohdan. Her salvation when she’d gone wandering in the darkness once before. Bohdan had believed in her goodness and taught her to hope for it, too. He had guided her back to the light.

Mouse spun around and ran outside. “Not this time!” she yelled at the heavens. “I don’t care anymore. Not about goodness. Not about my soul. Sure as hell not about you!” Her voice echoed around the mountains. “I have nothing! You keep taking it. You break me, over and over again. And then expect me to pull myself up and be your good little girl? Well fuck you!” Spit flew from her mouth.

She sank onto the ground where she’d once watched the sun rise and set over the mountains beside her gentle Bohdan, her hand sunk into his thick, warm fur, the weight of his head in her lap. Together they had watched the sometimes soft, sometimes radiant colors of the sky play along the still waters of the lake below like living art. And Mouse had believed again in the mercy and glory of a loving God.

And then Bohdan had been taken from her. And Ottakar. And Nicholas. And all those men at Marchfeld. And seven hundred years of any gentle touch or friendship or love. Until Angelo. And now he had been taken, too.

“I can’t do it this time.”

She pushed herself upright, no tears left. She went to wipe the snot and saliva from her chin and saw her torn leather glove, bits of her own skin and blood peeking out along the knuckles. Mouse stood, unnaturally calm now. She walked slowly along the familiar path that wasn’t really a path anymore, eaten by brush and mountain grass, down to the lake. She knelt at its edge and leaned over the water like the pine and spruce trees that circled the shore. She plunged her hands into the cold water, gloves and all, until the blood was gone and the sting of her broken knuckles was soothed. She sat back, cross-legged, and looked out over the lake that glinted in the morning light like a pane of glass.

She felt sure something had drawn her here—God or the Seven Sisters or some unnamed thing playing with her fate. She didn’t care to know anymore. She didn’t care what their plan was or what they wanted from her, so she gave them an impossible ultimatum: “You give me Angelo back and I’ll believe in goodness again. Until then, leave me alone.”

She threw a stone into the lake and watched the ripples dance against the shore, and then Mouse drew the cloak around her and left the Sumava woods for the last time.

“Oh, I love her!” Luc squealed as Mouse put the puppy down on the kitchen floor.

“I told you I’d bring you something.” She looked up to see her father standing stiffly in the hallway. “You okay with this?”

He shrugged. “I understand a person can learn a lot from having a dog.”

“A person learns from the dog—not from having it. A dog can teach you unconditional love.”

“Surely not me,” her father said, his eyebrow raised.

“I meant ‘you’ universally.”

“I see. How was Texas?”

Mouse looked down at Luc. She hadn’t told her father where she was going or what her big-picture plan was, but then, she’d never been able to keep secrets from him. She didn’t care to anymore, but she didn’t want Luc to know.

Luc was letting the puppy lick his face. “Isn’t she cute?”

“You might want to take her in the backyard. She might need to go to the bathroom.”

Luc scooped up the puppy and ran out the patio doors.

“You haven’t said anything to him, have you?” Mouse asked her father. “About what I’m doing when I’m gone?”

He pulled out a stool and sat down. “I didn’t think you cared. About anything anymore.”

“I don’t. Tell him if you want. What I’ve done can’t begin to compare to your sins.”

“Well, everyone has to start somewhere.” Her father picked at a bit of puppy hair on the cuff of his pants. “It went well, I take it?”

“Yeah.”

He chuckled. “Then why is your face covered in shame?”

“Same reason yours is covered in scars. When we fall, we fall slow.”

Luc came running back into the kitchen, the puppy at his heels.

“What are you going to name her?” Mouse asked.

“Mine.”