In the dark hours of the morning, a day later and after hours of meticulous work clearing the rest of the plates, Angelo laid the gold book down on the desk, free from the ash and stone box for the first time in centuries. He waited once more for an angel to come with a warning. Or a blessing. But there was nothing.
The book shimmered like a Roman breastplate of ages gone. There were six plates altogether. Cautiously, he lifted one and then another, easing them down the golden rings that bound them. Each was covered with raised writing. He thought it was a variation of Hebrew, perhaps an earlier form than what he’d learned at seminary. He could guess at some of the words, but any real work would have to wait until daylight, when he could go to the library at the main complex.
His eyes turned instinctively to the low cot covered in disheveled linens. He hadn’t slept well, and his body was begging for another chance, but as soon as his focus shifted from the book, his mind filled again with the dream that had woken him, that had tormented him in the few hours he’d tried to sleep. It had come again and again when he’d let himself drift off, until he’d finally given up and gone back to work on the book.
The dream was like the ones he’d had at the outstation, too vivid, leaving his senses splayed and overrun. He woke wanting Mouse—to sing to him, to calm him, to pull him out of his fear. She had been there, in a way, but not as comfort. Mouse was the thing haunting him in his dream.
He’d seen her—not Kitty’s image of Mouse but not a memory of his own, either. She was wearing her father’s cloak. Her head was shaved. She was standing over a sleeping man, in the midst of men, and she had the bone from the Seven Sisters. She was wearing the mask Angelo had seen her wear in his dream at the outstation, its wild feathers and crazy patterns making her look like a monster. The bone shard was lit up, eerie blue, like when they’d found it in the cave, only brighter. Angelo even thought he could smell something—cedar, maybe.
The sleeping man woke, grabbing at his chest, panicking as he stared at Mouse, his pupils huge as they drank in the light. Then they turned to icy terror—but only for a moment. Angelo and the dream-Mouse watched the life slide slowly out of the man’s eyes. Angelo had never seen a man die before. Mouse was crying. Angelo had woken reaching out for her, the faint scent of cedar still in his nose, his hair damp with tears.
That had been hours ago. His work on the book had driven back his grief, but he could feel it stalking him like a cat. He grabbed his coat, hanging on a hook in the wall, and wandered out into the wee hours of the morning. Angelo left the door open as he walked down the path toward the lake, the bit of scattered light all he needed with the bright, full moon not yet set. He watched the chill breeze play with the water, listened to the gentle slap of it against the shore. The air had turned cold; winter was coming.
Angelo shoved one of his crutches under his arm and bent to pick up a stone. He threw it across the surface of the water. It bounced along a clear path until it sank. He looked out to the far shore where the lights of another skete twinkled in the gentle sway of the pine boughs. Angelo thought he remembered someone telling him it was called Resurrection. Here he was in the dark hours of loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane facing the light of the risen in Resurrection—did that make the lake Calvary?
He took a step closer to the edge of the shore, the water easing up under his sole. A louder clap against the surface of the lake startled him from his reverie, and he looked up to see a boat emerging from one of the hidden inlets. At first Angelo thought a monk stood at the bow of the boat. But it floated into a wash of moonlight, revealing a white tunic—not Orthodox black—tousled by the wind, and a man with no beard.
Angelo squinted, trying to make out the man’s face. He had tattoos inked along his neck. Just like the man in Angelo’s dream. Just like the “angel” in the little girl’s story.
The boat floated out over the lake, eerily silent, and then stopped dead in the water.
“Who are you?” Angelo called out. The man made the sign of the cross and the benediction.
“I have the Book of the Just.” Angelo’s voice was thick with the cold and fear. “Why did you want me to have it? I am not a just man.”
“Peace be unto you,” the man said. His voice was mesmerizing, soft like water easing over river stones but vibrant and haunting, too, like wind whipping through a forest. Angelo stood hypnotized, trembling, until the little boat disappeared behind a copse of trees into another masked inlet.
“Wait!” Angelo cried. “Will you help me?” But there was no answer.
In the wake of silence, Angelo felt very alone. He needed to unburden his guilt about Khalid and his worry that he wouldn’t be able to translate the text on the gold book, but most of all, he needed Mouse.
Angelo swallowed at the thick longing in his throat. He turned and made his way slowly back up the path, but he didn’t turn in toward the low building where he was staying. Instead he followed the trail, which grew narrower and darker as the old-growth evergreens crowded near, until they opened like a hand to reveal a clearing and a tiny church—the one whose steeple he’d seen on the first night. Angelo climbed the few steps and opened the door to the chapel. The rich smell of polished wood washed over him as the trapped air ran out into the night. He made his way toward the iconostasis at the back of the room. Faint moonlight shone through the windows and slid over the carved wood, lighting up the raised places, the arches and crosses, but deepening the dark in the dips and valleys.
“I’m in the valley,” Angelo whispered to the painted saints before the altar. “Help me.” He gripped his crutches and eased himself onto his knees, and he prayed. It was the first time since Lake Disappointment.
The clang of bells ringing over his head announced the dawn as Angelo stiffly pushed himself upright. The monk who’d been set to guide and watch over Angelo met him at the stairs of the church, coming down from the bell tower.
“I need to go to the library,” Angelo said, his voice still raspy from the cold air. “Can you help me?”
The monk nodded.
“Let me grab some things from my room first, okay?”
The monk nodded again and pointed down the path toward the lake. Angelo understood—he’d be waiting at the boat. Back in his room, Angelo wrapped the gold book in what was left of the gauze and slid it into his bag. The ash-filled box was closed and nestled in the corner of the desk against the wall of his cell.
He started back down the path toward the lake when his phone buzzed—a text from Kitty: ANY CREATURES? ANY NEWS?
He wasn’t sure what had visited him on the lake—angel or demon or his own mind giving him something he thought he needed—but a sense of urgency ran through him now. He felt like a clock was ticking somewhere, but counting down to what, he didn’t know. His hour of prayer in the church had not quieted that urgency, but it had driven back some of his despair. He felt sure he was on the right track.
Angelo wasn’t about to share any of that with Kitty. ON THE WAY TO THE LIBRARY NOW. MORE TOMORROW MAYBE, he texted instead.
The boat rocked violently as Angelo stepped in and took a seat. The monk used a pole to push them away from the shore and toward the tall spires of the Saviour Transfiguration Chapel. The brilliant blue domes seemed to dangle above the trees like pieces of fallen sky.
A handful of monks were in the library. They looked up as Angelo entered. He wondered again at the strings the Reverend must have pulled to get the Orthodox Russians to admit a onetime Roman Catholic priest among them.
Angelo found a Hebrew primer to refresh his sketchy study of the language. He kept the gold book hidden in his bag. He read all day, through Vespers, until his co-habitant at Gethsemane came to tap him on the shoulder. Angelo took some of the books with him. When he got back to his cell, he pulled out the gold plates and the books of Hebrew and worked until his body betrayed him and demanded sleep.
The first snow fell a couple of days later. Kitty texted again. Angelo was no closer to uncovering the secrets of the book. He could read most of the words now, after deciphering ancient forms of the Hebrew letters and recognizing some of their antecedents. It was like undoing a puzzle only to reconfigure the pieces into something different. It took time.
The text of the gold book read like the Psalms—lyrical, so that without context it made no sense. Angelo felt like he understood the emotions conveyed in the beautiful words: the gnawing hunger for something that the writer also feared, a bone-deep weariness of journeying, and the elation of the promise that it would all be over soon. But Angelo didn’t know what was being hungered for, or what would be over and why. He felt sure Mouse would have known. He slammed his hands down against the desk, his frustration and disappointment biting at him like ants and a nasty worry beginning to burrow deep into his chest. He was pretty sure that this wasn’t the Book of the Just. Or, if it was, it offered no answers about how to defeat Mouse’s father. It offered no hope.
This book was clearly old—the language itself marked it as being from long before the time of Christ, and the nature of the book, with the writing embossed on hammered gold plates and bound by rings, surely signaled its authenticity as an ancient artifact. But Angelo could find no evidence that it was the Book of the Just—no catalog of battles or songs of victories that might be spells, nothing about how to still the sun and moon as mentioned in Joshua. The text of the gold book seemed personal, more like a poem of lament—how terrible life was, the wish for an end to it all, the hope of victory of the good over the evil.
It fit with what Angelo knew of other apocalyptic texts, like a lyrical version of Revelations. But it wasn’t nearly as specific or detailed. It did mention Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness, which made Angelo wonder if the gold book was really just the origin of another Dead Sea text—the War Scroll, which relayed in great detail a prolonged battle between the Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light. Maybe one of the apocalypse-obsessed Essenes got frustrated with the vague, metaphoric language in the gold book and decided to fix it—make it concrete, make battle plans.
But none of this speculation helped Angelo understand why the book had been sent to him or what he was supposed to do with it. Where was the secret that would give him the power to make Mouse’s father pay for what he’d done?
Without warning, grief ripped through him like shrapnel, stealing his breath and sending him staggering from where he stood at the desk, back onto his cot. He didn’t have time to give over to it—he balled his fists in the sheets and lifted his head, trying to breathe, trying to push down the hotness welling in his chest. Frantically, he pulled at his backpack, yanking it open, searching. He tossed out clothes and drove his hand deep into the bag, feeling for it, his anchor—Mouse’s stone angel.
It wasn’t there.
He scanned the room quickly, though he knew he had not seen the angel since he’d come to Valaam. He lowered himself to the floor, searching under the cot, crawling along the floor of the tiny cell.
The angel was gone.
He buried his head in hands and slid out prostrate on the floor. He’d lost his last piece of Mouse. She was fully and completely gone.
He lay there, for minutes or for hours he couldn’t say and didn’t care. It was the singing that brought him out of his mourning. His mind, wanting something to make her real again, tricked him into thinking it was Mouse at first, but then the low, uniform bass shattered his dream. It was the monks. They were singing a song she’d sung, an old Bohemian hymn, “Lord Have Mercy on Us.”
Angelo opened his eyes. He was looking up at the snow falling outside the window. An eagle owl roosted in a spruce near the rock cliff behind the building, his speckled feathers standing out against the snow, his orange eyes huge and watching Angelo. Angelo reached up to grab the corner of the desk to pull himself up, and his fingers brushed the rings of the gold book precariously perched at the edge. He squinted at the stacked ends of the plates where they fastened to the rings that bound them. There was something odd about them.
He shoved himself up to his knees, his eyes on the same level as the plates, his breath held tight with excitement. Along the top edges of each plate were little gold hills and valleys, too precise to be happenstance. They looked like the tongues and grooves of something that fit together.
A thrill of discovery ran through Angelo as he clutched at the nearby chair, dragging himself onto it. He didn’t bother with the archive gloves or the tweezers. He just carefully pulled at the joint where the ends of the gold rings met until they slowly opened, just enough for a plate to slide through.
He freed the plates, one by one, and examined the top edges, which he had initially dismissed as margins, areas left empty where the book was bound. But they weren’t empty at all, as he now saw. They were carefully laid out with a neatly fitted system of teeth that paired with another plate. He fitted the tongues and grooves together for each of three pairs. Once all six plates were correctly matched, what he saw astonished him.
The top plates rested with their text side down. He’d never thought to study the undersides of the plates. He’d assumed they were blank. But each of the three plates had a shallow etching visible only from one direction, like a perspective picture. When Angelo looked from either side or from what would be the bottom of the plate, he saw nothing, but from the top, the side where the rings attached, he could see a ragged line that ran across each plate. The end of the line on one plate perfectly matched the beginning on the next. The twists and turns looked like a road or a river. On the third plate, the line twisted back, spilling onto the middle plate once more and then turning back to sink down to the lower corner of the third plate—like something jutting out, perhaps an inlet or a peninsula. Maybe he was looking at a coastline.
The bottom plates were still right side up, filled with the text that Angelo now knew well. But if the top part was hiding something, he needed to look at the bottom plates differently, too. He bent his head down to the table, laying his face flat on the surface so he could see across the plates. The script rose up like tiny gold mountain ranges and sank into gentle valleys. With his naked eye, he couldn’t discern any significant difference in the heights of the lettering, but he felt sure it was there. He sat back, thinking.
As an idea came to him, he tugged at the center drawer of the old desk. Equipped for a monk’s study and meditation, it held a pad of paper and several pencils. Angelo ripped a piece of paper free and laid it across the bottom three plates. He rubbed the side of the pencil gently against the raised script. But he pressed too hard on his first try and ended up with a smudged copy of the words he already knew well. The second time, he kept his hand light, barely letting the pencil rest against the paper as he brushed it back and forth across the plate. A design emerged from the shades of graphite left behind.
For the first time since Lake Disappointment, Angelo smiled.
It was a map. Some of the letters had been shaped to be a little higher than their neighbors and left a trail of dashes and dots that led to a peak. Not quite an X to mark the spot, but little stars that erupted from the text, one on each of the three plates. Angelo had discovered a map, a map that led to three somethings. But where—and what?
He took another piece of paper and made a rubbing of the winding road or coast etched into the upper plates. He would see if he could match it against anything. The library at the main monastery complex had Wi-Fi; maybe the internet would help him track down where he needed to start looking.
But he still had no clue what he was looking for. He scanned the text of the three upturned plates, skimming over the now familiar words. About halfway down the second, he realized that the letters that now butted up against each other made new words—some letters at the far right edge of the first plate joining letters on the far left edge of the second. His eyes jumped to where the second and third plates met, and they, too, had a new set of words.
Angelo wrote them down.
I am
Beyond the waters raised by God
In the land of the lost ones,
And deep in the mountain,
Bitter with loss.
The journey is long
But the end is sweet,
And the lion watches over me.
May the breath of God guide you,
And the Book of the Just redeem you.
Peace.
So it was a map. And there were three places to visit—beyond the waters, a mountain or cave, and a third place, some kind of an end. End of the road? End of the search? But what did it mean that “the end is sweet”?
Angelo’s phone buzzed with another text from Kitty: IT’S BEEN DAYS. YOU SEEM STUCK. I’M COMING TO HELP. SEE YOU TOMORROW.
The euphoria of his discovery fell away like shed skin. But it was more than panic at knowing he was out of time. When he saw her name lit up on his phone, his mind made another connection. Mouse’s angel—Kitty must have taken it.
His face flushed with heat, angry at the arrogance that made her think she was entitled to whatever she wanted, whether it belonged to her or not. But quick on the heels of his anger came confusion and worry.
Why had she taken it? She had wanted to know how old the angel was, but that didn’t justify stealing it. What else had she said about it? Angelo’s body went slack with realization. “Is that blood?” Kitty had asked. She had zeroed in on the smears of blood on the wing.
The only reason Kitty would want someone’s blood was for a spell. Protective spells used the caster’s blood, but summoning and binding spells required the blood of the person or thing being summoned and trapped. Kitty already had Angelo on a leash; she didn’t need his blood. Obviously, she thought the blood belonged to Mouse. She was right, but Mouse was dead. Who or what did Kitty think she could summon with the blood from the angel?
And again the answer came to him like a punch in the gut. Siblings share the closest biological relationship. His stomach twisted with the truth that seemed more clear as his mind moved through the possibilities. Angelo had assumed no one else knew about Mouse’s brother. And yet, they had known about her. Why wouldn’t they know about the boy, too? And if Kitty and the Reverend knew there was a brother, Angelo was sure they would do everything in their power to procure him. They had hunted long and hard for Mouse.
Angelo let out a hiss. He’d been so focused on Mouse’s father, he’d never given her brother a thought. If Angelo was right about all this, the boy was in danger. But that worry was based on a lot of ifs.
Angelo grabbed the back of the chair and pressed himself upright. He didn’t have time to figure everything out now. He needed to be gone before Kitty got here. He turned, hobbling across the small space without his crutches to snatch clothes and cram them into his bag. He packed everything quickly except the book and the box of ash, which he carefully hid in the back of the Petra statue.
The night the Reverend had told him that Khalid was dead, Angelo had started planning. He would not have someone else’s blood on his hands. He knew then that he had to find a way to get lost, like he and Mouse had been lost. At her urging, Angelo had kept a fake ID and a credit card hidden in the lining of his bag. Once he was away from Valaam, he would use them to go wherever the map sent him. He would travel like a shadow, untraceable. Just like Mouse had taught him.
He paused at the threshold of his cell, leaning on his crutches, his bag hanging on his back as he looked down the monastery hall. A bittersweet smile played at his lips. Mouse had been on the run, too, when she’d fled Podlažice. He was just following her lead—like always.