The Blessed (40 page)

“Jesus,” he moaned. “You can get five thousand kids to do the friggin’ Macarena slathered in Hershey’s syrup on Cadman
Plaza but not a soul to witness a mass murder in progress.”

The doctor strolled casually across the street and up the church stairs.

“Arrogant prick.”

Jesse turned around and saw a few kids hanging around the corner. Could’ve been local rubberneckers now that a fire was going, but they seemed to have something else on their mind. Maybe there was hope.

Outside, he thought, would take care of itself. He was needed inside. He waited for a minute and followed Frey into the church.

Sebastian had been outmaneuvered. The vandals had drawn him upstairs and sneaked down behind him while he searched the church, locking the sacristy door from behind. He kicked at the door over and over to no avail.

“God help them,” he prayed, tears and sweat mingling in sorrow and passion.

“Sebastian.” A menacing voice rang out from the back of the church, filling it like the tolling of a bell. It was not the voice of God.

Sebastian walked out into the church, facing the altar. His back to Frey.

“You know, priests used to say mass that way. With their backs to the people. Things change,” Frey said wistfully.

Sebastian proceeded to the altar and climbed the stairs into the marble pulpit, facing out at the church and the doctor, who was not alone. From the elevated podium, he also saw another figure in the back. A head, nervously
popping up from behind one of the back pews. It was Jesse. He didn’t react, unsure if Frey knew the blogger had followed him in or not.

“You sure you want to come in here, Doctor?”

Frey sighed. “We do what we must, you understand.”

“I do.”

“Another assistant to sacrifice?” Sebastian asked, gesturing toward the dead-eyed, uniformed psych-ward flunky Frey had brought with him.

“No,” Frey answered. “A patient. Like you. I thought you should be properly introduced,” he explained snidely. “You have a lot in common. Both sociopathic and violent. Murderous. Incurable. Though in his case it was young children, not teenage girls.”

Sebastian’s jaw tightened. “A death-penalty candidate.”

“Nearly. But as I explained to the court, he’s not responsible for his actions.”

“We are all responsible for our actions, Doctor. And for the consequences.”

Dr. Frey patted Sicarius on the shoulder, drawing a twisted smile from the defective delinquent. Frey’s crunchy footfalls echoed loudly as he and his assassin drew slowly closer.

“Still quite a mess in here. I have to make a note to speak to the developers about the status of my investment in the conversion.”

“Why are you so afraid of me?” Sebastian asked coolly. “I understand the need for you, for what you believe, yet you see no place for me.”

“Not afraid. Concerned. As I am for all my patients.”

“Bullshit, you tried to erase my mind. My identity.”

“Erase you? Or treat you?”

“Same difference, Doctor.”

“You are sick, Sebastian. You think me evil, when all I’ve ever tried to do was help you, protect you from your own insanity. And when that proved impossible, to protect others from you.”

Sebastian fought the urge to strangle Frey right on the spot and kept his cool.

“Is that what you told the police? And Jesse?”

“I told them that you were a murderer and a kidnapper. A uniquely dangerous and delusional young man. The truth.”

“It all sounds so reasonable, Doctor—even to me.”

“It should. Those girls down there are in jeopardy because of you. Not me.”

“That’s a lie.”

“You filled their heads with the same superstitious nonsense. We are long past the need for this,” Frey said adamantly, pointing to the altar. “Or for those like you.”

“Why? Because now we have you?” Sebastian said derisively. “You don’t offer happiness. You don’t offer fulfillment. You don’t offer love. You prescribe it. Soulessness. In daily doses.”

“Whatever works,” he said blithely.

“What happens when the prescription runs out, Doctor?”

“You get a refill, Sebastian.”

“Here, I’m always full,” Sebastian said. “I don’t need a refill or an insurance card or a straitjacket.”

“No, just a small weekly donation.”

“No one charged me admission.”

“So romantic. I can see why the girls fall for it. Dangle a few bracelets, tell them you are destined to be together. Surely there are easier ways to get a date.”

“They came to me. They were led to me as I was to them.”

“There is nothing special about you, Sebastian. You are as deluded as a person who sees the face of Jesus in a bowl of cornflakes.”

“I know what I know,” Sebastian said firmly.

“You
know
nothing. You believe. You are spreading lies. Dangerous ones.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than truth, Doctor.”

“Science
is
truth. A rigorous process of study undertaken over years to arrive at answers to age-old questions. To separate fact from fiction. There are papers, reviewed and published, open to scrutiny.”

“All paid for by the like-minded, Doctor. Ever changing. Evolving, as they say. What I know can’t be bought. It is eternal.”

“Why am I bothering? I had this argument recently with Father Piazza. You remember him?”

Frey could see that even the old priest’s name was painful to Sebastian.

“Even self-styled men of God didn’t believe you. Betrayed you. The world has turned, Sebastian.”

“Yes, it has turned. To shit.”

“And you and your little harem are here to give it
a colonic? Is that right? Cleanse us all for the Second Coming? Please don’t preach to me.”

“If you didn’t believe it, Doctor, fear it, you wouldn’t be here.”

“All hypotheticals, Sebastian. But keep telling yourself that.”

“Reality, Doctor. And soon everyone will know it.”

“No. The reality is that the police will be here shortly. Fire department too, from the looks of things. Your girlfriends will be dead. I will be a hostage. And you will be blamed. Or dead.”

“They can take care of themselves,” Sebastian responded. “And so can I.”

“Such faith you have, Sebastian. But so rarely tested.”

Jesse poked his head up again and began to tremble, frightened out of his mind for Lucy and the girls, and for Sebastian. What was coming next was obvious to all of them.

“Sicarius,” Frey commanded.

Frey motioned to his lackey, who seemed to snap out of his stupor at the order, rushing forward down the center aisle like a wild animal smelling blood. Sebastian jumped to the chancel floor from the pulpit to intercept him, defending the church sanctuary as if his life depended on it.

A last stand.

The massive collision carried them both over the altar and to the floor in a cloud of grit and dust. All of the assassin’s weight was pressing down on Sebastian as they grappled and he struggled to free his arm before he was pinned, fatally. Sebastian elbowed Sicarius in the temple, stunning him, and pushed him off.

Jesse snapped picture after picture of the brutality as it unfolded.

Sicarius got to his feet first and grabbed one of the long, heavy pipes stacked next to the wall. He swung it down toward Sebastian like the handle of an executioner’s ax, missing by inches. Sebastian tried to get to his feet, but Sicarius kicked him once in the stomach and then in the jaw, drawing blood from his nose and mouth. His breathing was labored and he could taste his own blood.

From his position on the floor Sebastian spied an aspergillum, a holy water wand, and rolled toward it. As Sicarius raised the metal pipe to strike, Sebastian slammed the butt end of the hardwood and brass sprinkler into his leg and kneecapped the larger and slower man, shattering his patella. As the killer buckled, Sebastian drove the wand into his solar plexus, winding Sicarius and incapacitating him. Sebastian wound up and struck for a third time, bringing the holy instrument down on Sicarius’s bald head with all his might.

Sebastian stopped to wipe the blood away from his face and bent down, grabbed Sicarius by the collar of his jumpsuit, and dragged him to the massive marble baptismal font in the chancel. He stared directly at the doctor, who was unmoved.

“They don’t use these much anymore,” Sebastian said, sitting Sicarius up and bending the back of his neck over the communion rail. “Things change.”

Sebastian walked over to the holy water buckets the girls had placed around the altar to catch the leaks from the storm. He
picked up three and carried them over to his broken adversary.

Through gritted teeth, Sebastian raised a bucket and poured the stale water into the man’s mouth.

“Do you renounce Satan?” Sebastian asked, beginning the faux baptism ritual.

With his last bit of strength Sicarius spit the water out into Sebastian’s face and tried to close his mouth.

Sebastian jammed the aspergillum into his mouth and down his throat, breaking teeth and forcing his mouth to remain agape.

“And all his works?”

Sebastian continued to question Sicarius according to the ritual as he poured first one bucket, then a second, then a third, down his throat, until it was backing up out of his mouth, nose, and ears like an overfilled gas tank.

“And all his pomps?”

Sicarius’s belly had swelled abnormally and his eyes rolled over. He was dead. Drowned. Sebastian pulled the wand out of his mouth and dropped it in one of the empty buckets with a loud clang.

The doctor spoke. “Some might say such a thing is blasphemy. Unforgivable.”

“We do what we must,” Sebastian answered, echoing the doctor’s own words. “I’ll take my chances.”

Exhausted, Sebastian recapped. He knew Jesse was there and he wanted it on the record for all time.

“You set me up and let me go. I find the girls. They lead you to me and them.”

“Simple, you have to admit. And flawless.”

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Doctor. You have it all worked out. Totally rational, logical.”

“Thank you.”

“Except for one thing. What if I wasn’t hiding? What if I was waiting? What if I wanted you to find me?”

“Why would you want to be found?”

“Maybe because I’m insane, Doctor. You said it yourself. Or you can do the math. I can decrease your kind by one, right here, right now.”

Sebastian and Frey were startled by a racket coming from outside as well as downstairs. Jesse’s flash mob had arrived, hopped the fences, shimmied up the scaffolding, and begun banging on the boarded-up windows. From the chapel. Smoke began to escape through the doorjamb and out into the church soon after.

“I’m sure you would like to kill me, Sebastian, but I have done the math, and judging from those slamming car doors outside, you are at quite a numerical disadvantage.”

Sebastian eyed the door and the thickening smoke with increasing trepidation when it unexpectedly flew open and Lucy, Agnes, and Cecilia burst out, bruised and bloodstained, from the smoke-filled sacristy, tongues of fire nipping at their heels. They ran immediately to Sebastian and encircled him in the tightest hug any of them had ever felt.

“You’re alive!” he said, happier than they’d ever heard him. “Thank God.”

Frey’s expression was grim. Jesse, still ensconced in the
balcony, was so relieved at the news he was brought nearly to tears.

“Agnes, dear. Lovely to see you again. Didn’t we have a follow-up?”

“I’ll have to reschedule.”

“He’s a fanatic. You’ve just killed for him. How much further will you go?”

“Mind games,” Sebastian noted. “Don’t listen to him.”

“You’re just enabling his fantasy and your own.”

Lucy spoke for all of them, holding tight to Sebastian.

“What happened down there was no dream. A nightmare, maybe. Not an illusion.”

“Miss Ambrose. I understand now why you haven’t called. You’ve been busy.”

Frey was working them. Getting into their heads.

Suddenly, the windows were filled with police snipers. Sirens wailed, rifle barrels poked through empty spaces between the loosened boards in the lower and upper windows. The sound of static from police radios filled the air. Lights from news cameras booting up outside shone an otherworldly glow into the church. A third alarm sounded, alerting firemen in distant stations to head for the scene, creating even more chaos in the vicinity.

“I see him, but I can’t get a fix on him!” an officer yelled. “Too much smoke.”

“The hostages are too close!” yelled another.

A voice came hurtling from a megaphone.

“This is Captain Murphy. The building is surrounded.
We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Raise your arms in the air and walk forward.”

“We’re not hostages!” Cecilia wailed to no avail, drowned out by the helicopter whirring overhead and the expectant mob surrounding them.

The fire chief ordered his men back until the police had done their job, leaving the fire and the smoke to build. The crowd outside was growing.

Sebastian turned the altar behind them on its side and ushered the girls to kneel behind it like a shield. He stepped out in front. Vulnerable. A standing target.