The Blessed (36 page)

“I won’t. I swear.”

“She met some guy during the storm. I guess they hooked up and spent a few nights in that big old church they’re converting. You know the one.”

“Yeah,” he said, his expression tightening, eyes narrowing. “I know the one.”

Bill might have been old and gin-soaked, but the writer in him was good at reading faces.

“She said it was a spiritual thing. Never heard her talk like that before.”

“Me either.”

“I said you might get mad.”

Bill held his hand out expectantly.

Ricky stood up and looked down at the old man and held the bottle out just within Bill’s reach. The old man grabbed it like manna from heaven.

“Thank you, son.”

“No need, old man. A promise is a promise.”

Ricky walked slowly down the block to one of the few corner pay phones left in Williamsburg, dropped a few coins, and dialed a number.

“Dr. Frey, please.”

“I’m sorry, he’s unavailable right now. May I take a message?”

“This is Ricky Pyro, one of his rehab patients. Can you tell him that I have to cancel my appointment? I’m playing a special gig tonight. At Precious Blood Church in Cobble Hill. He’s been asking about it. Tell him he shouldn’t miss it.”

Cecilia, Lucy, and Agnes descended the cobblestone steps as they had before and stopped at the squat narrow door. It was ajar. Cecilia pushed it open and led the others in. It was dazzling. Every votive was lit and burning, throwing
warm red light and thick shadows across the sacred fossils bedecking the chapel and a lone figure seated cross-legged, hands clasped, still, head bowed, swaying slightly, and facing the altar. He shimmered in the candlelight and shadow of the Sacred Heart fresco before him.

“Sebastian,” Cecilia whispered.

They were all nervous about approaching him. He seemed in a trance. Weak, breathing shallow and unsteady. Like a resistant captive in the midst of a hunger strike.

“Is he all right?” Agnes asked, wanting to run to him to find out.

Lucy shrugged, uncertain. “He’s alive. I think.”

Finally, he spoke.

“I have no idea what will happen, or in which places the pain will come,” he mumbled, before opening his eyes to see them. They were cemented into a stare that left them to wonder whether he’d gone completely mad.

Agnes walked slowly toward him and fell to her knees.

“Sebastian, we’re here.”

He smiled and brushed his hand against her cheek.

“Agnes.”

Lucy and Cecilia came and kneeled as well. He met each of their eyes with his.

“You came back,” he said.

“Of our own free will,” Lucy said.

“I think we are being watched. You’ve got to leave here,” Cecilia said.

“Why? There isn’t anywhere to go.”

He was having trouble responding fully, almost seeming to hear and answer different questions than the ones they were asking.

They looked around in awe and trepidation, their memories of a few days earlier still raw and visible, bloodstains still on the floor. Their chaplets resting in the reliquary.

“What happened to us down here?” Lucy asked. “We need to know.”

He did his best to explain and reassure them all at once. “I would never hurt any of you.”

They wanted to be skeptical, to fight what they were feeling inside, but he was so beautiful, so genuine, so real, and now so vulnerable that it was almost impossible not to get lost in him.

“We want to understand,” Cecilia added. “We want to believe you.”

Sebastian was heartened by their trust.

“I will tell you everything I know,” he said, gesturing then toward the bone-legged altar. It was surrounded by four pillar candles, one at each corner, and covered with the chasubles they modeled. A patchwork tablecloth of green, red, and white fabric with elaborately woven images of young men and women crowned with halos and clothed in glory. Atop it sat magnificent place settings, gold plates and long-stemmed silver cups glimmering. At the center, the
Legenda Aurea
Agnes had flipped through on the lectern.

The girls joined him at the altar and sat on the antique short benches he’d arranged around it. They felt like royalty.

“What is this?” Cecilia asked.

Sebastian took a brass candle lighter that had been leaning against the altar and struck a match. He lit one candle and passed the rod around, asking each girl to do likewise.

It was a ritual, but unlike the ones they had experienced before. This was only for them.

When the last candle had been lit, Sebastian took the case holding the chaplets and placed it on the altar before them.

“We’re getting them back?”

“Yes.”

“But Sebastian, they don’t belong to you,” Agnes said.

“That’s true.”

“Jesse said you stole them,” Lucy reminded him.

“I didn’t steal them. I took them,” he admitted.

“I don’t understand. You took them but you didn’t steal them?” CeCe asked.

“I took them,” he explained. “So I could return them to their rightful owners.”

“Us?” Lucy asked.

“These chaplets were made from holy relics, from the bones of St. Lucy, St. Cecilia, and St. Agnes, as proof of their existence through the ages and held closely by generation after generation of men and women who worshipped them, were devoted to them, and prayed for their return when the world was most in need of them.”

“Now?” Lucy asked.

“Now,” Sebastian said. “This legacy, these chaplets are
your inheritance. I had to get them to you before Frey stopped me.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows who we are and will try to stop us however he can.”

“How can he do that?” Cecilia said. “He has no control over us.”

“You said you thought you were being watched, followed. He is using you to find me. So he can get all of us.”

Sebastian turned suddenly grim.

“You aren’t just being followed. You are being hunted.”

The corrections officer strolled down the cement-floored hallway of the Brooklyn House of Detention. Even to a seasoned veteran of the system, it was a scary place. But then, it was meant to be. In earlier days, it might be considered the kind of place where one might be sent to “loosen the tongue,” and it still had that effect. It was a snitch factory, especially for guys like Jesse, but he didn’t break. He was proud of that.

“Arens!”

Jesse lifted himself from the hard cot slowly. The guard pressed the lock button on the side of his cell and the door slid open with an echoing clang. Jesse stepped out, cautiously, wary that this might be some sort of trick.

“You’re free to go.”

“I’m sprung? Seriously? Did someone bail me out?”

His search for a Good Samaritan was unrewarded on a technicality, though he could hardly believe anyone he knew cared enough.

“You’re not charged with anything. It’s been seventy-two hours. You served your time.”

“So soon?” he asked snidely. “I was never charged. Time for what?”

“For being a douche bag,” the officer said dismissively.

“Oh, well then, guilty,” Jesse said, holding his hands out for cuffs.

“Pick up your things at the desk and get the hell out of here.”

“Listen, I run a few nights at Sacrifice during the week. Maybe you might like to stop by with your boys. Let me know. I’ll even comp you.”

“That’s a bribe, prick.”

“You’d know.”

Jesse checked out of his accommodations and reached for his smartphone. He might have developed an instant reputation as a whiny bitch on the inside, but he made sure to play his rap sheet up for street cred on the way out. He threw on his shades, popped his jacket collar up, and put on his swagger as he hit the door. There was a photographer waiting to shoot him, as planned. Before he even got to the corner, the picture was posted, “liked,” and reblogged to every subscriber in the city. The “Free Jesse” slogan he posted across his main page in computer-animated caution tape was replaced by a “Jesse’s Free” headline and power to
the people fist icon. “From felon to chillin’ at warp tweet.” He was back.

He searched his competition as he usually did after a day or two offline, after holidays mostly, just to see what had gone on in his absence. He smiled at a folder of photos and an item about Lucy from Da Ball. He flipped through the JPEGs and captions casually, pissed that she’d even gone without him. When he opened the last photo, his face went completely white and his jaw dropped. It was picture of Lucy and Dr. Frey.

And then it hit him, all at once. Like a city bus.

“Oh God. How could I be so stupid?”

It wasn’t just Sebastian Frey was after. He texted Lucy:

911. You are not safe.

He waved his arm in the air like a madman.

“Taxi!”

He jumped in the backseat of the first yellow cab that would have him and sped to the church.

“No,” Lucy said as she began sobbing uncontrollably. Agnes and Cecilia tried to pull away from Sebastian’s grasp to comfort her, but he held them tight. “I don’t want this,” she protested hysterically, pulling at the chaplet.

“You do,” Sebastian said, a note of sympathy in his voice. “You came back.”

“I like my life. These girls have nothing to lose!” Lucy
screeched, pointing a finger at Agnes and Cecilia. “I worked so hard to have everything I ever wanted.”

“Then you must be happy. Are you . . . happy?”

Sebastian waited.

A few sobs later, she gathered herself and looked up at the three of them, standing there, sacred hearts amid sculpted bones, bathed in the corona of candlelight.

“It’s who you are. Who you have always been.”

Cecilia and Agnes reached out their hands, inviting her into their exclusive circle.

“You’re not alone anymore,” Cecilia said. “None of us are.”

She stepped up to the altar as if to the edge of a precipice and joined them. They stood like high divers about to take the plunge, anxiously awaiting the opportunity to jump. And then the tension eased. Hands clasped, they relaxed.

Sebastian, Lucy, Cecilia, and Agnes bowed their heads and felt themselves almost disappear into the smoke and fragrant heat, as if their flesh was melting away with the candle wax.

Revealed.

Stripped like the bleached bones that adorned the chapel.

At peace with themselves. At one with the chapel and with each other. A sort of music filled their ears, like the low hum of a generator or the soft chanting of a choir, which vibrated simultaneously through them and the ossuary, transforming it into a giant tuning fork. They channeled the powerful force, exchanging it with one another
and with the room until everything was infused with their energy. It made the sudden intrusion of reality, the rumble of a passing subway train, even more startling.

Sebastian opened his eyes, raised his head, and stared at the stained glass windows surrounding them. Scenes of pain. Scenes of sacrifice from the distant past fighting their way into the present.

“The faithful were not the only ones preparing for our coming,” Sebastian warned.

“Ciphers?” Cecilia asked.

“Ciphers are the leaders. They don’t hide. They manipulate, they persuade, they seduce and pursue their agenda right under our noses.”