The Blessed (38 page)

“Battle?”

“We are at war, and you are warriors. You are the fulfillment of almost two thousand years of devotion.”

“I don’t know how to fight,” Agnes said nervously.

“You are all fighters. The weapons you need are inside you,” Sebastian promised. “The gift you have received will strengthen your mind and body. Not just your soul. When you call on these tools, they will be there.”

“You said your mission was accomplished,” Agnes said. “What was your second miracle?”

“You.”

The pride in his voice was tempered by the sadness in his eyes.

“You were different people when you left this room, than when you entered it,” he said. “There is no changing it now.”

“So bring on the heavenly host, then!” She couldn’t quite explain it, but Cecilia was itching for a fight. For her, passivity was not part of this process.

“
You
are the heavenly host, Cecilia,” Sebastian said ominously. “There is no army of angels coming to save you.”

“Three girls and a guy from Brooklyn.”

“Why not,” he said simply.

His words hung in the air like a punishment. A death sentence.

“Be yourself,” Cecilia summed up.

“Trust yourself,” Agnes said.

“Save yourself,” Lucy whispered, recalling the first words of their meeting.

“You have to before you can save anyone else. Or love anyone else.”

“I believe you,” Lucy said.

“Don’t believe me,” he said. “Have faith.”

“What’s the difference?” Agnes asked.

“A child believes. In magic. In fairies. In monsters. Faith is knowledge. Certainty. Without it, we fail.”

“But faith in what?”

“Start with yourself.”

“I believe in love,” Agnes said.

Sebastian reached for her hand.

“Love is just the faith you place in someone else.”

“Then I have faith in you,” Agnes said.

A loud noise from the church above suddenly intruded.

“They’re here,” he said, preparing himself.

“I’m coming with you,” Cecilia demanded.

He took her by the shoulders gently, but firmly.

“No. You will be stronger together,” he insisted.

The rumble upstairs was getting louder and the enemy closer. He ran for the staircase.

“So, if we believe you, then we’ll die?” Agnes shouted at him.

Sebastian stopped, his back facing them. He looked up to the ceiling, mustering all his strength for his answer.

“No, if you believe me, you’ll never die.”

Monsignor Piazza took to his bedroom kneeler. He was agitated. Troubled. He removed his cassock and let it fall to his waist, exposing a scarred torso. He reached for the length of rope with knotted cords.
The discipline
had been preserved in the glass reliquary box in the chapel and was assumed to have belonged to one of the workers who died there, along with the rosaries, hair shirt, and other discouraged items of mortification used by the most faithful. It was the only thing he took. Father Piazza swung it over one shoulder and the next, again and again, in time, a click track to his suffering. He began to bleed. He began to pray.

The old man’s lips moved silently, only occasionally speaking words out loud. Fragments of supplications he knew by heart. In this pain, he sought redemption and punishment for his sins. He literally beat himself up over his betrayal of the boy who was once in his care. With each stroke he did penance for his naïveté. With each tear in his back, he repented his arrogance.

He was the one who shut off the chapel, after all. He was the one who discouraged the cult that had developed around the “subway saints,” as the neighborhood people called them. All in the name of modernity. He found himself on the slippery slope of secularity long before Sebastian ever came to him.

Raising his profile within the community, outside the church even, as a “voice of reason,” by certain public officials, for which he was rewarded with the trappings of status: board memberships, awards dinners, and weekend stays at seaside mansions. So that when Sebastian did come, with his unorthodox musings, wild eyes, sharp tongue, and spiritual fervor, he couldn’t believe him, wouldn’t recognize the truth staring him right in the face. Such people were crazy, not holy, he’d come to assume.

But now he knew. Now he did not celebrate. He suffered. He measured his legacy not in what he had gained, but in what he had lost, or given away at least. His church. His faith. And Sebastian.

In his urgent prayers he chastised himself and reminded himself of what he had gradually forgotten.

Bless all our life and the hour of our death
.

The priest dropped the cord and clasped his hands tightly under his chin.

Amen
.

“God forgive me,” he prayed, clenching his chest in pain.

“Sebastian,” he wept, striking his chest gently with his fist and bowing his head.

“Lucy.” He struck his chest again and bowed his head, continuing to do it after muttering each name.

“Cecilia.”

“Agnes.”

And with his last breath: “Forgive me.”

Lucy, Cecilia, and Agnes heard footsteps descending rapidly down the staircase.

Their hearts raced.

“He’s coming back,” Agnes said, relieved.

“No,” Cecilia said suspiciously. “It’s not him.”

CeCe looked down at her hands, her stigmata, and saw them starting to bleed. Her warning bell.

“What the hell do we do?” Lucy asked, staring at the other two in semipanic. The footsteps, which sounded more like an army, stopped for a minute outside the chapel door and the girls stood stiffly, expectantly, eyes locked on the door, until it was kicked open.

Cecilia recognized them as soon as she saw them.

“Look what Satan dragged in,” Cecilia said nonchalantly. “Ricky.”

“You know him?” Lucy asked.

Ricky answered for her. “She does. Intimately. Isn’t that right, CeCe? Surprised to see me?”

“Not really. Playing basements is your thing, isn’t it? How did you know I was here?”

“Your drinking buddy. It’s amazing the covert intelligence you can gather for a pint of Jack. I should call the CIA.”

“Bill,” Cecilia gasped softly, a sick feeling settling in her stomach. Sebastian was right, she thought. It was those closest to you.

“Don’t take it too hard. He probably doesn’t even remember what he told me, poor drunken bastard. I would have found you anyway. We’ve been tailing you for a while.”

“Too much stalking, not enough rehearsing. I told you you’ll never get anywhere that way, Ricky,” Cecilia said. “Did you come to entertain me?”

“No. I came to kill you. And you. And you,” he said calmly, smiling through his nicotine-stained teeth and pointing to Lucy and Agnes. “So did they, by the way.”

The guys behind him tightened up, ready for a fight.

“None of you is smart enough to plan this,” CeCe said. “Who sent you?”

“A doctor friend I met in rehab,” Ricky said. “Networking, you know.”

Lucy and Agnes backed up, but there was nowhere else to go. They had their backs to the altar and the wall. Cecilia backed up as well, the heel of her shoe kicking into her
guitar, which was leaning against the altar, making a terrible clang.

“New song?” Ricky said. “A death knell, maybe?”

“A requiem,” Cecilia answered. “For you.”

“Tough talk,” he said dismissively. “Did I mention we’re going to kill you?” Ricky said, feigning forgetfulness. “But maybe a little fun first. What do you say, gents?”

The sound of shrill, compulsive, hormonal laughter, like a tribe of chimps, echoed through the tiny room.

“And who do we have here?” Ricky asked, approaching Agnes and stroking her hair. “Fresh meat.”

“Leave her alone, Ricky!” Cecilia yelled.

“Awww, don’t be jealous,” he said. “There’s plenty to go around.”

“Sebastian,” Agnes whispered, cringing in disgust, trying to make herself disappear.

“Don’t bother calling for your boyfriend,” Ricky said, stepping up to the altar. “He’s busy dying upstairs by now.”

Ricky kicked the altar over and the book and stand and candles came crashing down in a racket. Bubbling trails of flaming wax flowed along the crevices of the wood and tiled flooring, seeking something to ignite.

He walked over to their statues and ran his hand lasciviously along their porcelain bodies, thrusting his tongue into each of their painted mouths.

“Cold as ice,” he said snidely. “Not that different from kissing you, CeCe.”

“Did we kiss, Ricky?” Cecilia spat. “I was sure that was a
puddle of piss I was sucking in the other night.”

He picked up the statues off their pedestals and crashed them to the ground, one by one, huge shards of molded plaster and painted ceramic exploded upward.

“Such a perfect place to die, wouldn’t you say?” Ricky observed, smoke slowly rising up around him. “A church and a crypt. One-stop shopping.”

Ricky and his sadistic band eyed the girls threateningly, ravenously. However much they wanted to, Lucy, Agnes, and CeCe didn’t flinch. There was no escape anyway. They stared their tormentors down. It was a standoff.

“Time for a little ultraviolence, fellas.”

“Now that’s original,” Cecilia said scornfully. “
A Clockwork
asshole. Still stuck in the seventies. Just like your music.”

It was time. They all felt it.

“I always said I had a killer band, didn’t I?”

“Save yourself,” Lucy said, just loud enough for the other girls to hear. They understood.

Cecilia started to count her enemies out loud. “One. Two. Three. Four. Not a fair fight.”

“Life’s not fair,” Ricky said bloodlessly, motioning to one of the guys, who stepped forward silently and headed for Agnes, grabbing a handful of her hair and sniffing like a pig, reaching for the button on the top of her blouse.

“Smells like Teen Spirit,” he hissed, his sickening breath puffing straight up her nostrils.

“Smells like shit,” Agnes said, spitting in his face.

In a split second, Cecilia reached behind her and grabbed the neck of her guitar and swung it full force into the head of the attacker.

He fell to the floor in a heap at her feet.

“I told you to leave her alone.”

She raised the solid-body electric and with a frightening screech slammed the gearhead right through the back of his head, burying the neck of it there like a skewer, nearly decapitating him. A sinewy stew of blood, bone, and brain exploded outward and onto Ricky and his crew.

Lucy and Agnes were momentarily stunned but not afraid as they watched the life bubble out and around his head in a river on the floor. Ricky was impressed.

“Hunt you back,” she said with a smirk, resting her boot heel, like a proud forest ranger on a bear carcass, in his gaping wound.

“That’s way inappropriate,” he scoffed, pulling a motorcycle chain out of his back pocket. “Aren’t you supposed to be saints or something?”

“Saints, maybe. Not angels,” Cecilia said, swinging her guitar overhead once more in a wide arc, keeping them all at bay and slamming it into the bone legs of the altar behind her, shearing them off.

She tossed a length of broken bone to Lucy and to Agnes, who caught the clubs with the skill of athletes and stood at the ready, armed and dangerous. Full of zeal and confidence that they could scarcely have imagined even a few minutes earlier.

“Don’t be afraid,” she commanded.

“I’m not,” they said in unison.

Ricky and his crew bum-rushed the girls, swinging their chains ahead of them.

Lucy’s attacker was on her before she could move. He swung wildly and connected, striking her in the jaw and knocking her back toward the urn and reliquary.

The vandal laughed and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket.

“Smile,” he said, snapping her picture. “That’s bank when you’re dead.”

Lucy gave him the finger with one hand and tossed a hammer lying on the floor directly at him, hitting him in the chest.

“Bitch, this is your lucky day,” he railed, grabbing at his crotch. “First I’m going to kill you, then I’m going to screw you.”

“Screw me?” she chided him. “Alive or dead, I wouldn’t feel it, loser.”

“We’ll see about that.”