Getting Wilde (14 page)

“You’ve been here before, you said?”
 

Max bowed slightly. “I was a tour guide for five years. There is no rock in Italy I haven’t peered under.” Max took me by the arm, and I froze for half a second. “What is it?” he asked.
 

“Nothing. Lead on.” I shook him off but didn’t bother hiding my grin as he strode ahead of me. Had Armaeus known? Dante the golden child back in France didn’t have one-tenth the kinetic power that Max’s casual touch had betrayed, and yet Dante was the one holding court at Le Sri, while Max was playing tour guide. How long was Armaeus going to let that continue? Or did he care?
 

Or, more interestingly, was he doing it on purpose? From what I could see, being a member of the council had its perks, and I would assume one of its ranking generals would have its benefits as well. But with perks generally came sacrifices. Armaeus could easily be trying to protect his extended family in his own misguided, megalomaniac way.
 

Max turned toward me. “It’s just around the—”
 

“Stop.” I pulled him into a long hallway hung with paintings that were not original to the abbey by any stretch. Behind and between the paintings, the walls were hung with carpenter cloths, pinned into place with low scaffolding. “What is this place?”
 

Max looked down the long gallery. “They removed the original frescoes for restoration, but this was once an entire gallery of beautiful artwork, commissioned over the years by the Holy See.”
 

“Uh-huh. As in popes and bishops of the Caetani family?”
 

Max nodded. “Of course. Whenever they could divert funds to Sermoneta, they did so. Enrico Caetani commissioned one of the more famous pieces, but it is no longer viewable by the public.”
 

“And he lived…”
 

“Late 1500s.”
 

“Right. And that fresco hung here, in this room. While the Templar Sator Square is in the next chamber. Do we have any other weird symbols close by, either for the Templars or the—”
 

Max cut me off excitedly. “You’re looking for a line?”
 

“I’m looking for anything I can find. My phone says my guy is here, but—” I waved around. “Here is a little broad.”
 

“Of course, of course.” Max blew out a breath. “There is the Templar Cross in the rose window overlooking the nave, of course. And the symbols of Solomon’s knot in the courtyard.” He frowned, turning as if to stare through the walls. “That would be in a direct line from here. The knot, that is. With the Sator Square between us.”
 

I nodded. I remembered the cards I’d pulled in the limo on the way here. The Two of Pents, with its infinity symbolism, equal sides balanced and intertwined. The Wheel. And the Hierophant. And here I was at the end of a line of artwork, starting with Solomon’s knot, ending with a fresco commissioned by the pope. And in the center of us was the Wheel.  It all made sense. Almost.
 

Max kept frowning, though. “But your quarry, this devil character, he cannot do anything here in the abbey. It’s public. Hundreds of people see that symbol every day. There is doubtlessly a tour in there right now. He can’t be in there without being seen. It’s not possible.”
 

“He’s not.” I shook my head, flipping my phone around for him to see. “He’s beneath it.”
 

Max frowned. “There is no beneath—”
 

“Bullshit. Where’s the nave where that window you mentioned is?”  
 

We reached the stunning chapel quickly enough. It was nearly noon now, the sun pouring in the brilliant window, lighting the floor in a myriad of brilliant colors. This wasn’t Indiana Jones, it wouldn’t be that obvious, but the light was still going to point us the way. The four equal stems of the cross flared brilliantly on a panel on the floor. A panel that appeared like any
other panel. Due to a trick of the light, however, the cross seemed to elongate slightly, its top stretching a bit almost to point…
 

I looked up. A confessional box stood at the far end of the chamber, ornate and unused. It gleamed with modern fittings. “Bingo.”
 

“Bingo?” Max followed my gaze. “You wish to make your confession?”
 

“They lock those things?”
 

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” Max followed me over to the booth, and I tried the doors. First, the side box. It opened. I poked my head inside, saw the placard. Part of the display, not used for actual confessions anymore except on special occasions. Even the Italians were embracing Vatican II, it seemed. It’d only been in play since the 1960s, but baby steps.
 

The main box was not quite so easy. The door didn’t budge, and an old-style lockset gleamed beneath the handle. “Stand right there for a minute.”
 

“It is a marvelous place, this abbey, is it not?” Max gazed upward, his voice reverential but not quite hushed. He nattered on as I pulled my picklocks from my jacket pocket. The second skeleton key worked, and I felt the door give way. I leaned against him, drawing him away as we caught the eyes of a passing tour guide, who smiled and nodded at us.
 

“Keep going along the side of the nave,” I murmured. Fortunately, the day was a busy one. The room seemed to go through a full turnover every ten minutes or so.
 

We climbed the small steps to the public access area of the nave, at a safe and respectful distance from the high altar. As expected, the view was deeply moving. But it wasn’t what I was looking for.  
 

My own upbringing in Memphis had been sadly lacking in a number of ways, but I’d spent my fair share of time in Catholic churches. It was what had inspired in me a love of the arcane and magical, or so I’d always thought. So much beauty, so much symbolism wrapped up
in extraordinary art and artifacts, all to celebrate the greater glory of God. And more to the point, so much consistency from one church to the other.
 

Without breaking stride, I stepped over the small velvet rope and moved into the sacristy. As I suspected, the small room was lined with closets. And in the closets were vestments. I pulled out a set I figured were close enough.
 

Max was right behind me. “What are you—” He pulled the vestments out of my hands. “No, you’re too small. You’ll never pass as a man.”
 

I scowled at him, but I didn’t have time to argue, especially because he was right. “There should be another door on the far side. Look for the cross, the square, the knot, use your imagination, something that matches up with the Templar artwork. Tap on the door if you find it. If not, get the hell out. We’ll have to wait until the Devil moves again to get his position. If you find it, though, go through and stay put. I’ll be right on your heels. You’ve got five minutes before you’re out of there.”
 

It took him less than three.
 

When the telltale knock sounded, a group of school children was clustered around the nave, their eyes filled with admiration for the frescoes on either side of the altar and the lovely graceful archways of the ceiling. A schoolteacher spoke of the reasons behind creating such beautiful artwork in such a place, to encourage the faithful to gaze up outward and upward toward the heavens and remember there was something greater than themselves gazing back.
 

I was just happy not to have anyone gazing at me. I rose from my kneeling position and stepped quickly over to the confessional, then pressed inside, shutting the door quickly behind me. I heard the lock snick back into place and adjusted my eyes.
 

Max, of course, wasn’t there. Given that the compartment was about the size of a Twinkie, I would have noticed him. Instead I noticed that a slender panel stood ajar against the
back of the compartment, letting in a thin sliver of light. I pushed the panel open, stepping into a cool space smelling of age and rock dust, not unlike the chambers below the Vatican. “Thick walls,” I whispered.
 

Max nodded but held a finger to his lips. He leaned to my ear as he pointed down the narrow passage, which quickly turned into a staircase leading down. “People. More than one.”
 

We set off along the passageway, Max in his robes, his Ferragamo loafers silent on the stones. My boots did their job as well, and we moved silently, step by step, down the stair and along another passageway. Roughly, I knew we were heading back toward the main gallery we had seen before, but how many levels would we have to go?
 

And how would we get back up?
 

A loud rasping scrape reverberated from below us, the sound making my bones grind together. Beside me, Max grimaced as well, and I heard a choked gasp, then a flurry of gritted words, which, quite literally, were all Greek to me.
 

Beside me, Max’s eyes were rounded. I checked my phone again. The Devil was definitely down there.
 

But I’d been expecting him to rule the day, not be ruled by it.
 

Max waved furiously for my phone, and I handed it over to him, frowning as he swiped it to the notes app. He typed furiously, then shoved the device back at me, and I squinted down at the screen to read his words. “If he’s really the Devil, fun fact: one of the myths behind the Sator Square was its use as a demon ward by the Knights Templar. No one knows how.”
 

The shirring sound started up again, that sound of bone-on-bone agony, but this time I realized it had a resonance, a cadence. It had words. The words of the Sator Square—spoken over and over again, backward, forward, upward, down. It was enough to drive me mad.
 

And apparently I wasn’t the only one.
 

“I knew you would come, Aleksander Kreios.” A dark voice floated out over the murmuring words. “And now we’ll see if the dark legends of Sermoneta Sator Square are true.”
 

By the sound the Devil made after that, I was betting they were.  
 

The cry that tore up through the rocks was cut off short, but it served as enough cover for us to make our way another fifty feet into the passageway, down another flight of stairs, this one far steeper, and along another passageway. The walls and ceiling pressed in on us, but we could manage—myself more so than Max, whose height was becoming a liability. Clearly, the passage had been carved at a time when everyone was built to a smaller scale.
 

Eventually the corridor widened again to become a kind of gallery—short, stubby columns stretched from the ceiling to a waist-high ledge, allowing a view into a chamber below, which was filled with light. The passage continued forward, but we slowed as the outline of a man became clear, standing at the top of the stairs.
 

A lone guard in priest’s robe, his long gun equipped with a silencer. I frowned. If he had a gun and a silencer, and their point was to kill whoever was below, then why not get it over with? I had to assume it was the Devil down there making those unearthly guttural sounds, and I had to assume these people knew he’d already escaped once. Why mess around?
 

Then I peeked around one of the stone columns to the space below. Oh, of course. They wanted to play with their prey first.
 

Idiots.
 

But these weren’t the guards of SANCTUS, as I’d originally expected. They didn’t have the same air of military efficiency. The whole religious-motif thing, though, they had down.  
 

Aleksander Kreios was strapped to a stone platform in the middle of the room, his magnificent chest bare, his pants looking very much worse for the wear. He was alone, so whoever had driven him here had either betrayed him or weren’t along for this particular stop on the tour. He scowled at the men above him, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the helmet that encased his head, covering his ears. Even at this distance, I could hear the shirring noise that must be pretty much exploding his eardrums. The priest-like man standing at the base of his makeshift torture bed was adjusting an instrument panel, every turn of the knob making Kreios arc off the bed in misery.
 

I edged back, wincing, and Kreios’s face turned, his eyes searching desperately. When they rested on me, though, I froze. There was fury and pain there, yes. But there wasn’t any doubt. Not yet. If anything, the magnitude of whatever was pounding his head seemed to make the Devil more exhilarated, like it was its own special kind of drug.
 

Note to self: Kreios is a whack job.
 

Our brief connection was summarily broken with another twist of the dial. I could hear the words again, the Sator Square’s apparently meaningless babble repeating, switching back on itself, running forward again.
 

“Good, good.” The man at the instrument panel nodded with apparent satisfaction, and only then did a second man emerge from the shadows. He spoke in Greek, and Max fitted himself close to my ear, translating on the fly. “You will suffer now.”
 

“I will kill you now,” Kreios gritted out. “Betrayer.”
 

“No, you won’t.” The man waved another hand, and the intensity of the volume picked up again. I winced along with Max. What was it about the combination of these words that pricked the senses of those with psychic abilities? “You have no power here. I’d almost given up on you escaping your little cage, but you always do manage to impress. You were foolish to come here, when I had already trapped you once.” He gestured again, and my gaze followed the movement. The Devil’s reliquary sat, opened, on a bench against the far wall.
 

“What do you want, Barnabus? What is your game?” Exhilarated or not, the Devil’s voice was ragged, vibrating with pain.