In the courtyard at the Muhraka monastery, moonlight dusted a statue of Elijah. He held his jagged knife raised, ready to fall on the unrighteous. Tall and white, the statue looked like a ghost watching Angelo slide out of the back seat of the car that had just pulled up. Angelo flung both his bag and the guitar Mouse had given him across his back, bending with the weight, his feet dragging on the chalky stone as he made his way to the door. He wondered if there would be anyone awake to let them in—it was nearly midnight. Haifa had been all but empty when they drove up to Mount Carmel.
“Wait for me, son,” Bishop Sebastian called out as he leaned down to say something to the driver.
Angelo didn’t turn around. He was still angry—angry that Mouse had left him and angry that he’d had to ask the Bishop for help. Angelo had called Bishop Sebastian just minutes after he had read Mouse’s note, minutes after he’d finished praying for her. He didn’t think prayers would be enough, so he had reached out to the only person he knew could help. And even though they did what he wanted, Angelo had been irrationally angry that the Bishop and his friends had tracked Mouse to Israel so easily. He was angry that it had been the Bishop and not him who figured out her final destination: Megiddo.
Angelo had been angry from the moment he spotted the Bishop waiting like a spider for him at the airport at Tel Aviv. But the dark news the Bishop had given him sent a silent rage running through him: The Bishop’s men had found Mouse, bloody and broken, at the bottom of Tel Megiddo. On the drive to Haifa, with the salty air from the sea whipping through his open window, Angelo had not said a word.
As they took the last steps up to Muhraka, the Bishop laid his hand against the back of Angelo’s head and neck. Twelfth century pilgrims had claimed the Arabic word for their monastery: sacrifice. “You should not be alone in this,” the Bishop said.
The door opened, throwing out a rectangle of light, and a nun in brown habit and a black hood knelt to kiss the Bishop’s ring.
“Where is she?” Angelo pushed his way past the nun, stumbling through the hall and looking into dark rooms to his left and right.
“Not here. Out in the guesthouse,” the nun said quietly, not looking at him. “Follow me.”
Angelo focused on the black of her back, putting one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. When the nun opened the door to the guesthouse, Angelo could not go in.
“Let me, son,” Bishop Sebastian whispered as he eased past Angelo and into the too-bright room. Angelo leaned against the doorframe, hands on his knees, the guitar sliding from his shoulder to the floor with a hollow thwong.
“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son—”
Angelo’s head snapped up as the Bishop began the sacrament of last rites. “Stop!” He took a step toward the bed that had been pulled into the middle of the room under the overhead light.
“You don’t want to see her like this, son.”
“I am not your son.” His voice broke as he twisted around the Bishop and saw her. They hadn’t covered her. She was naked; her clothes lay strewn on the floor beside the bed. They looked like strips of meat, dark red and dull. Mouse was white. She looked cold and hard as if she’d been carved of alabaster, but she was streaked with blood and the sheets ran red with it.
Angelo walked to her, slowly lowered himself onto the bed, his hand sinking into the sticky wetness.
“Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?” The words came out stilted, each one a struggle. The Bishop had ordered his Novus Rishi friends to take Mouse to this obscure Carmelite monastery rather than to the hospital in Nazareth.
“You know why.” The Bishop had come closer. “She’s not normal,” he muttered.
“She was gone before she got here, Father. I am sorry we could not save her. But, I think, no one could.” The nun made the sign of the cross.
“She doesn’t need you to save her.” Angelo’s rage wove with his grief and came out as a snarl, twisted in his tears and spit, as he turned and slammed his hands against the Bishop’s chest, pushing him back toward the door. “Get out!”
“Angelo, you don’t have to do this alone.”
“I don’t need you either. Now get out!”
“Let me pray—”
Angelo shoved the Bishop into the nun and rammed them both through the open door, slamming it shut and locking it as he leaned back against it, not able to stand on his own anymore.
The light over the bed hung low, swinging and raking Mouse with a harsh glare. Angelo reached over and flipped the switch, throwing the room into darkness. His mind toyed with him as it played oscillating images of Mouse alive and laughing, Mouse reaching up to kiss him, Mouse ripped apart by her father and lying in the dirt as the blood rushed out of her.
He flipped the switch again, but the truth under the light was worse.
His hand rammed down the switch once more, and he stumbled forward in the darkness, his eyes slowly adjusting as feathers of moonlight floated in through a tiny window near the ceiling. He knelt beside the bed, laid his face against her hand, and ran his fingers softly across the hole in her neck. Her face glowed in the light, and a sudden hope wrenched Angelo.
“Are you immortal?” he mouthed, not asking again but remembering.
“I can get hurt, but I always heal,” Mouse had told him. But he had not forgotten the second part of what she had said: “I think there’s at least one way I can die.”
The understanding he’d had then felt like a curse now in the silent night.
Her father had done this to her. Did that mean there would be no healing?
Bishop Sebastian banged on the door.
As Angelo looked at Mouse’s still face, her sunken chest, her white skin, his hope seemed foolish and cruel. But he willfully held to his faith anyway.
“May whatever good you do and suffering you endure, heal your sins, help you to grow in holiness, and reward you with eternal life.” He whispered the last of the penance prayers given to the dead and dying as he walked over to his guitar.
He sat on the edge of the bed and began to play.
Mouse had been dead before, but this time was different.
Before, at Marchfeld and at the river when she hanged herself and when she threw her body down the mountain, she had still been aware of herself and the world around her like she was wrapped in darkness. But there had been flickers of light, echoes of sounds. There had been pain. And they had called her back to the world even when she did not want to go.
Now she so desperately wanted to live, but she was surrounded by a black nothingness like the pit at Houska—not merely wrapped in it, but immersed, baptized, lost. Nothing lived in all that blackness. No hope, no breath, no sound. And the silence frightened Mouse. She wanted to cry out, to call for Father Lucas. He had pulled her up out of the Mouth of Hell once before, but Mouse knew it was no use now. Father Lucas was gone. There was no one else to come looking for her in the dark.
She felt her memories floating away from her like ash on the wind. But something slipped into the emptiness just as she felt herself begin to drift down into the abyss. It was a sound, soft and beckoning. It touched the pieces of her that were floating away in the dark and made them shine like bits of gold leaf dancing.
The music swirled around her, weaving her back together, like river water carrying her deep, moving swiftly around the rocks, and then breaking the surface and glittering like handfuls of diamonds in the sun. Her chest filled with the burning need to breathe, so she opened her mouth like a hungry bird and waited for the water to flood her lungs and cool the hotness there.
And then Mouse remembered—she remembered the glow she had seen hovering at her lips as she died. She remembered Angelo. She remembered want, and she remembered pain. The abyss could take that away, but the music called her home.
Mouse would not go back into the dark.
The nuns were demanding to be let in to wash the body and prepare it for burial when Angelo finally opened the door three days later. He was weeping.
“I am sorry, my son.” The Bishop had finally left Angelo to hold his vigil in solitude with the hopes it would help him grieve and move on.
Squinting in the sun, Angelo looked up, smiling, and stepped aside to allow the women into the room. He laughed as they gasped. Mouse lay wrapped in clean bedding he had found in a trunk in the guesthouse. The bed had been pushed back against the wall and the plates of food the nuns had brought to Angelo lay scattered on the floor nearby. Mouse was too weak to sit and her throat too damaged still for even a whisper, but she blinked groggily at the nuns. When they started making the sign of the cross and murmuring prayers—some of thanksgiving and others for protection against evil—Mouse weakly waved them away.
Bishop Sebastian stepped into the space they left. “My God.”
Angelo sat on the bed beside Mouse. “Ours, too,” he said.
A week later, Angelo came into the guesthouse reading a text on his phone. Mouse was taking shuffle steps around the room, balancing herself against the wall and trying to get her strength back. She was ready to go.
“Looks like your book made it home,” he said.
Mouse cocked her head in question.
“Bishop Sebastian fielded a call from an irate Eva Hedlin. Apparently the Church made a very nice donation to the library which means I don’t have to go to jail.” He smiled at her. The Bishop had left without a word, but he was in daily contact with Angelo.
“And me?” Mouse laid her hand against the pain in her throat; she could still only manage a gravelly whisper. She smiled, too, but she was really just wading through the banter to talk about more serious matters.
“You’re in the clear already. You were Emma Lucas to her, remember? That Emma doesn’t exist anymore. So you’re home free.” He tossed his phone on the bed and wrapped his arms around her. She slapped him playfully on the arm.
They had been lightness and joy as Mouse continued to heal, though the nights were harder. They both struggled to sleep. They both suffered from dreams of fire and lightning, ashes and blood—but they were together, each helping the other through the darkness. And yet, Mouse noticed that Angelo would not talk about the days to come. It worried her and picked at the edges of her happiness, as did the certainty that she’d forgotten something important about her father. She could see him in her mind atop Megiddo and he was laughing—but she couldn’t remember why.
Mouse looked down at the phone on the bed, its face still lit with the Bishop’s text, and she wondered, not for the first time, what he meant to get out of helping them. “Can we go home?” she asked instead.
“What about your father?”
Mouse knew he was stalling; they’d had this conversation already. Had her father meant to kill her but couldn’t? If so, then he would surely try again. Or had he meant to teach her a lesson, taking her to the edge of oblivion and then trusting that her immortality would heal her as it always had? If that were true, did it mean that he was finally convinced that she would be of no use to him? Or that he was saving her to play again another day? The questions were endless, and neither she nor Angelo had come up with any answers.
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s go home.”
Angelo sighed as he sat heavily on the bed. “But where’s that?”
Megiddo, the nothingness after, Angelo’s music calling her back—these had taught Mouse that home for her wasn’t a place. Angelo was home. And she wanted to be home for him as well.
“Rome?” she asked, not sure how to say the rest.
“Is that home for you?”
Mouse sank onto the bed beside him. She picked up the phone, pointing at the part of the Bishop’s text that Angelo had not shared: ORDINATION SCHEDULED. ST. FRANCIS’S FEAST DAY.
“Is it for you?” she asked.
Angelo put his head in hands. “It’s what he wants.”
“He didn’t put it like that, but yes, I think so.”
“Or what?”
He looked up at her, worry in his eyes. “He didn’t say, but the Novus Rishi—they’re everywhere, Mouse. I don’t have a choice.”
“Yes you do.” She’d lived her life letting her father’s blood, her gifts, and other people define who she was and what she was. She’d waited on God to give her a purpose. But Megiddo had shown her that it had been her choice all along. And the choices weren’t simple—not either/or, good or evil, just a girl or something else. She was both; she was all.
Even now, the power ran through her freely but so too did the glow of a soul. She could feel them both dancing in her blood. What she did with them was up to her. Angelo had helped her see this, and she wanted to give the gift back to him even if it meant saying good-bye.
Wincing as she swallowed, she asked, “What do you want, Angelo?”
“Does it matter? Not to the Bishop.” He spun to look at her, and she could see the tension in his face as the anger he’d been tethering while she recovered finally broke loose. “And not to you either.”
“That’s not true. I—”
“You? You left me in a damn hospital so you could go play the hero. Do you think that’s what I wanted?” He shook his head.
“I was wrong.”
“What?” The simplicity of her answer surprised him.
“I should have talked to you about it. I should’ve let you make your own choice. I’m sorry.”
Angelo looked at her like he was trying to see inside her. Finally he said, “Never again. You promise? Promise that you won’t run off and—” The grief of having lost her broke across his face, and his body started to bend in on itself, but she was there, slipping in under his arms, holding him and laying his head against her chest.
“I promise, Angelo.”
His fingers dug into her back as if he was afraid she would disappear. “I can’t live like that, Mouse. I can’t lose you like that again.”
“I promise, Angelo. Never again.” She wove her fingers between his.
He laid back to rest against the wall and pulled her with him. “But if I don’t go back and take my vows, the Bishop won’t leave us alone,” he said warily, turning back to the problem at hand. “He’ll send the Novus Rishi to hunt us.”
“Well, I’m pretty good at running.” Mouse leaned into him. “And I know how to hide.”
“But that’s not home.”
She turned, lifting her face to him. “We are home, Angelo,” she said as her lips closed on his.
“Home,” he breathed when she pulled back. He stood and tugged her up with him, slinging his guitar and bag over his shoulder. “Ready, then?”
“Always.”