The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (14 page)

He opened the door and waited for me to go inside. “I'm saving you another week's worth of detention.”

Mercifully, the main lobby was empty. An appearance by Dante Arturo was sure to raise some eyebrows, so the less people around to see him, the better. His scuffed oxfords clicked across the floor as he walked, coat flapping at the backs of his legs. This detective-on-a-mission strut he had going on was cool and all, but he was going the wrong way.

I put my hand on his arm. He stiffened. “Hey,” I said. “The headmaster's office is upstairs.”

Coming to a hard stop, he turned to the heavy wooden staircase to our left and kept walking. I rolled my eyes. Men. You accidentally fall asleep on them
once
and they treat you like the plague.

“I know you're embarrassed and everything, but you don't have to be an ass about it,” I said.

“I'm not embarrassed,” he replied shortly. “What we did was extremely inappropriate and it will
never
happen again.”

“You make it seem like we slept together!”

He gripped the banister, staring at me over his shoulder.

I sighed. I didn't want to say what I was about to say, but he gave me no other option. “You make it seem like we
had sex.
There, is that better?”

He stomped up the stairs. The noise echoed in the high ceilings.  “No.”

A stack of books came stumbling down past us, teetering and tottering with each potentially disastrous step. A pair of familiar legs and a pair of familiar arms accompanied these books, as well as a flash of familiar auburn hair.

“Woops!” The stack of books said, swaying clumsily into Dante. “Sorry, I can't really see what I'm doing.”

“Ms. Hayworth?” I asked. She was going to break her neck.

“Beatrice?” She peeked around the stack and smiled. “Hi, could you―”

“Sure,” I took some books off the top. Cromwell’s diaries. “What are you doing with these?”

She balanced the remaining volumes on her hip and tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear. Her face was red with exertion. “It's a long story. The
mayor
called, can you believe that? He wants these. All of them. He wouldn't say why, but it's got to be important, right? The
mayor
doesn't call for just anything, so―”

“The mayor?” Dante interrupted.

Ms. Hayworth's head swiveled over to look at him, all slow and dramatic like in the movies. She gaped.

This was my first glimpse of Dante as a celebrity. I knew him as Dante the Normal Person, but Ms. Hayworth knew him as Dante the Demon Hunter, resident famous guy and shadowy vigilante who may or may not have been the Anti-Christ.

“This is Ms. Hayworth,” I told him. “She's the librarian. Ms. Hayworth, this is Dante Arturo. The weird guy from the newspapers.”

Ms. Hayworth only blinked. Didn't say anything. Just held her books. Blinked.

I jabbed her lightly with my elbow, hoping to move this conversation along. “He's not going to bite. I don't think.”

Unless, of course, she was into that sort of thing.

Dante ignored me and held out his hands. “May I?”

Ms. Hayworth looked down at her books, then back up at him. “Oh, you don't have to. They're awfully heavy.”

“I insist.” He smiled a smile that would have charmed the pants right off her if she were wearing them instead of a dress. Pulling out the big guns already.

Unable to resist, Ms. Hayworth surrendered her books. She stared at him and he stared back, smiling that stupid smile. Poor Ms. Hayworth. She was done for.

“
Anyway,
” I said. My stack was getting heavy. “Where are we taking these?”

Turning away from Dante, Ms. Hayworth cleared her throat and started down the stairs. “My car. I―uh, I'm taking them to the mayor's office during my lunch break.”

Dante's smile faded. He was back to normal Dante. Thank God. Famous Dante was too out of character for my taste. “Was that a specific request?”

I wanted to ask why he was so curious, but for once, I refrained. It was clear that he was fishing for something. What that something was, I didn't know, but if I kept my mouth shut long enough, I'd figure it out. That smile, the books? All part of his ploy. And it was working.

“It was, actually,” Ms. Hayworth said. Now that she was talking about work, she was more relaxed. Less...infatuated. “I was told to bring them to his office in person. No shipping, no boxes. He just wants the books. All thirteen—well, twelve of them.”

“You're missing one?” Dante asked. We stepped down the last stair and Ms. Hayworth hurried to open the door for us.

“Yeah,” I answered in her stead. “The one from 1800.”

“1800?” He lifted his books up to inspect their spines. “Are you positive that's the one that's missing?”

“Yep.” We followed Ms. Hayworth to her car. She popped the trunk and we deposited the books inside. “Why?”

Turning the charm back up to eleven, Dante looked Ms. Hayworth dead in the eye and asked if he could go with her to the mayor's office. She hesitated. In turn, he offered to take her to lunch. Anywhere she wanted to go. His treat. She blushed, and that's precisely when I knew she'd agree.

She did.

Mission accomplished.

We went back inside.

“Is that it?” I asked.

Ms. Hayworth nodded. She kept glancing at Dante when she thought he wasn't paying attention. That would have worked if he wasn't
always
paying attention.

He clasped his hands behind his back, speaking to her and looking at me. “If you'll excuse us, Ms. Hayworth, I need to speak to the Headmaster on Beatrice's behalf.”

Glad all that flirting didn't affect his memory.

“Of course,” Ms. Hayworth stepped aside, swept her arms toward the staircase. She hadn't stopped smiling since he asked her to lunch. “He's that way.”

Dante bent at the waist in a slight bow. “Thank you.”

I waited until we reached the second floor to open my mouth. Frankly, I was proud of myself for waiting so long.

“What are you up to?” I asked. The locker-lined hallways were empty as well, but it was only a matter of time before the bell rang. Dante had to be gone before then.

“I don't trust Michael Bishop.” He slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat. “I never have. Those people found at that warehouse were not murdered by human hands. That much is obvious.”

“Why would he lie about that, though?” It was a stupid question. The mayor was a
politician
. Worse, he was a politician in
Stone Chapel
. They all lied on basic principle.

“He's covering something up,” Dante replied matter-of-factly. We stopped a few feet from the Headmaster's office. “He and I have never gotten along. He's tried having me arrested multiple times for various things. Traffic violations, disturbing the peace. Nothing that would hold up in court.”

This was shaping up to be some serious detective movie material. The lone hero versus the corrupt authority figure. A gray, rainy city where crime raged unabated. Sprinkle in a few cover-ups and wrongful accusations and you had yourself a hit. “You'd figure he'd be more grateful that you do his job for him most of the time.”

Dante sighed. “Yes, well, he just so happens to hold a…popular opinion about me.”

“That you're the Anti-Christ?” I guessed.

“Yes,” he said dryly. I’m sure being called the harbinger of evil all the time got a little stale after a while. “It doesn't matter. What matters is why he wants those Diaries.”

“What's so special about the missing one?”

“Do they teach you nothing in history class?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means this country's educational system is failing you.” He leaned against a locker. With his dark hair and dark slacks and serious expression, he looked like a modern day film noir star. All he needed to do now was talk faster and drink more alcohol. “I don't suppose you've ever heard of the Solstice Earthquake of 1800?”

It didn't sound like something we covered in the Local History seminar we had to take last year. “Uh, nope.”

“On the night of December 22
nd
, 1800,” he explained quietly, “sixty-seven people were killed in what is officially recorded as an earthquake.”

“An
earthquake?
” I thought those were more of a west coast thing.

“An earthquake,” he affirmed. “That's the official word. But I have reason to believe it wasn’t
just
an earthquake.”

I waited for him to explain what he meant and he didn't disappoint.

“While investigating the bodies from the warehouse, I noticed a strange symbol that appeared to be burned on each person's abdomen.”

“Max posted something about that on Armageddon Now,” I said, nodding.

“You know his website?” Dante asked.

“Yeah. He was the one who helped me get into hunting in the first place.”

“I see,” he said, grimacing.

Woops. Sorry, Max. “What does this symbol have to do with the mayor?”

He let the Max thing go for now, though I had a feeling the poor boy would be getting a lecture on the risks of soliciting demon hunting advice to impressionable (and very persistent) people on the internet sometime in the near future. “As if the man's insistence on denying hard facts isn't damning enough, I'd seen the symbol on an envelope two days before the discovery of the bodies. An envelope containing a letter dated December 24
th
, 1800.”

Two days after the earthquake.

I'd given Bishop the benefit of the doubt before, but the evidence was stacking up against him. Something was definitely rotten in the state of Maine.

“That's convenient,” I said. Max didn't mention anything about a letter. Maybe he didn't know. Maybe Dante was keeping it secret from everyone but me. The thought of knowing something no one else did filled me with a sense of pride. I was finally being allowed to sit with the cool kids. “What'd it say?”

“It was a letter from one Ms. Henriette Lawson to her uncle in England. She―”

In that very instant, the bell rang. Of
course
it did. I was
finally
being trusted with sensitive information and the freaking bell rings.

“Shit,” I muttered, pushing him toward the door. “It’s time for you to go.”

“What are you—”

Doors began to open. Noisy chatter filled the hall, and with it an influx of bored looking students.

“Go, go, go!” Before he could protest, I shoved him in the Headmaster’s office and slammed the door behind him like he was my dirty little secret. My
internationally
famous
dirty little secret.

The important thing here was that no one saw him.

Mission accomplished.

Fourteen

“Beatrice?”

I wondered what that symbol looked like. The one on Dante's mystery letter. Nothing I scribbled down in the margins of my English notes seemed plausible. The standard banishing/summoning seals were too obvious.
Everyone
knew what they looked like.

Hmm. If I were orchestrating a cover-up of a supposed “earthquake” that happened more than two hundred years ago, what would I use to throw the world's greatest demon hunter off my trail?

“
Beatrice?
”

What about the exorcism seal Dante drew at The Inferno? Yeah. That could work. Would the mayor know what it looked like, though? The Fifth Sacrament wasn't exactly public knowledge. But it
would
get Dante's attention. Maybe that was Bishop's angle. Maybe he
wanted
to get caught. But for what?

“Ms. Todd!”

“Huh?” I tore my gaze from my paper. My English teacher, Mr. Northrop, glowered at me from the front of the room. The girl sitting next to me giggled.

“I sincerely hope those are
notes
you've been taking,” Mr. Northrop said.

“Oh,
totally
,” I replied, smiling what was possibly the fakest smile ever formed by a human being. I edged my notebook into my lap to hide the doodles.

He stepped in front of whatever it was he’d been writing on the board. “Then you won't have any trouble telling me what I was just talking about, hm?”

Time to put my improv skills to use. “Uh, you were hoping I've been taking notes.”

Mr. Northrop sighed. Everyone loved sighing at me. Apparently I wasn’t worth a proper sentence. “What was I talking about in regards to the
text
, Beatrice?”

The girl next to me giggled again. I glared at her. “You were talking about the
Divine Comedy.
”

Unless we'd moved on from that in the middle of class, I was at least half right.

“Be more specific,” he said.

Crap.

A slimy voice slithered in from the back of the room. “You were talking about the significance of the forest at the beginning of the
Inferno.”

I twisted around in my seat. Ugh.
Jason Clark.
He had such a punchable face. “No one asked you.”

He shrugged, and in that moment, I swear I wanted to throw my desk at him.  “Hey, I was just helping.”

“I don't
need
your help.”

“That's enough, you two,” Mr. Northrop said. He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He didn't get paid enough for this. “We don't need a repeat of last month.”

“We might,” I grumbled, turning back around. Stupid Jason Clark. He was so...
stupid.

I forced myself to pay attention for the rest of class just in case Mr. Northrop decided to blindside me again. No easy task, considering everything else I had to keep me occupied, but I managed. Barely.

When the bell rang, I bolted out of there as fast as I could. I didn't want Mr. Northrop asking any questions and I definitely didn't want to be exposed to Jason's idiocy a second longer than needed. Since English was my last class, I merged with outgoing traffic and went downstairs to catch my ride. Dante's car was parked in its usual spot, glinting in the sunlight. I got in.

“Beatrice,” Dante said.

“Dante,” I replied.

We drove away.

“How was lunch?” I asked. I tried picturing him and Ms. Hayworth sitting in a diner, eating cheeseburgers and sharing a milkshake. I couldn't do it.

“Fine,” he said. Physically, he was here, but mentally? He may as well have been in China. “School?”

“Fine.”

The awkward silence was making me itchy.

I turned up the radio. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on. I'd have bet my left arm that Dante'd never heard it before. He was in for a real treat.

I hummed the lyrics under my breath, tapped my foot to the beat. Kurt Cobain wailed along with me. Load up on guns, bring your friends, albino, libido, etcetera.

Dante made a face like he just swallowed something he found in his pocket. “What
is
this?”

This
was exactly the sort of reaction I expected from him. “Grunge, Arturo. The angst of the 90s! Isn't it great?”

“The poor man sounds like he's in pain.”

“That's the point. Kurt Cobain was a tortured guy.”

“I can tell.” He turned the music down, his sour expression sobering. “Our friend Bishop wasn't in his office. His secretary said he was at a meeting.”

Sure, and I was the Queen of England. “Is
meeting
code for something else?”

“I'm guessing so.” He reached into his coat and pulled out an envelope. A symbol was drawn on the front. “Here. The letter I mentioned.”

My eyes widened. I didn't get to just
hear
about the letter, I was getting to read it! Snatching it out of Dante's hand, I studied the symbol first. It looked kind of like the exorcism seal except the inner circle was enclosed by a square and nothing was inverted.

“What
is
this?” I asked, brushing my fingertips against it.

“The seal of the First Sacrament,” Dante replied. The spires of the church grew nearer with every turn he made. “Creation.”

“How many Sacraments are there?” I opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. It was fragile as a moth's wings, yellowed with age and covered in the elegant script of one Miss Henriette Lawson. The date was scrawled at the top. December 24
th,
1800. “And why haven’t I learned about them in class?”

Dante leaned back in his seat, lifting the thermos he kept in the cup holder to his lips. “Two of the five are taught in entry level demonology classes the world over. It's the other three that are kept...under wraps, if you will.”

“What do you mean?”

Henriette began her letter on a fearful note.
Dearest Uncle,
she wrote,
something terrible has happened.
Elizabeth is dead.

“Summoning and banishing. The Third and Fourth, respectively.”

It is all my fault.

We didn’t call them Sacraments in school. We just called them summoning and banishing. Or, rather, banishing and that thing you should
never ever do.
“The Fifth is exorcism. What are the other two?”

“Creation, as you've seen on the envelope, and Destruction. Hunters have kept them away from public consumption for safety reasons. We tried to do the same with the summoning ritual, but there are still a great deal of people out there who think we can somehow control demons instead of killing them.”

The Prophet came for me two days ago, claiming that God had spoken to him. My time had come, he said, and I needed to fulfill my duties. I was so afraid, Uncle, so very afraid.

“What the hell?” I held the letter up. “This is freaky.”

Dante gripped the steering wheel until his scarred knuckles paled. “Keep reading.”

Elizabeth insisted she take my place. She said it was her duty as my older sister to protect me. I begged her not to go, but The Prophet demanded a tithe.

“What's a tithe?” I asked.

“A payment to the church,” he replied.

I know not what happened at the church―
oh, that explained the tithe thing―
but what I do know is that Elizabeth is dead and the town has been overrun. The demons, Uncle, they're
everywhere.
I am too afraid to go outside. I fear that I will die here in my room.

“Holy shi―”

“Keep reading.”

“Who's the Prophet―”

“Please keep—”

I picked out a penny from the empty cup holder and threw it at him. It was meant as a playful gesture, but he looked over at me like I'd stabbed him in the temple. For a guy who didn't watch many movies, he sure was dramatic. “Chill out, Arturo.” I said. “I'm reading, see?”

“Did you just throw a penny at me?”

“
Shh!
” I put my finger to my lips. Two could play the dramatic game. “I'm reading!”

He sighed.

The Prophet claims this is all for the best. That we will soon see the fruits of our sacrifices. I do not know what to believe anymore. Elizabeth is dead. I am alone. The monsters are closing in.

What will happen if he is wrong? Will this darkness consume us? When will it stop?

Please write back as soon as you are able. I miss you, Uncle. I miss Elizabeth. I miss the light.

All my love,

Henriette

“Okay,” I said, flipping the letter over so I didn't have to see Henriette's increasingly panicked handwriting. I didn't care if she'd been dead for two centuries, I still felt bad for her. “Two questions: Who's the Prophet and why is he going around asking for tithes? And
why
does the church keep coming up?”

“That was three questions,” Dante said.

I threw another penny at him

“Will you stop throwing things at me?”

“Will
you
stop condescending me?”

We locked eyes. He looked away first. Probably because he had to drive. Still, I won. Muttering something under his breath, he undid his seatbelt and opened his door.

Oh. We were here.

At the church.

My stomach turned. “What are we doing here?”

“Research,” he got out of the car and beckoned me to follow with a crook of his fingers.

I folded Henriette's letter and put it back in the envelope then scurried after him, glancing over my shoulder to see if there were any eyeless dogs following me. There weren't.
Yet.
“Research?”

He pressed his hand to the dark, faded oak of the church doors. A crow squawked in the nearest pine tree, disgruntled as crows often were. “Do you hear anything?”

“Other than that crow plotting to peck your eyes out? No.”

I didn't want to be here. I
really
didn't want to be here. I just kept thinking about that voice in my head. A dead station in my brain, drowning everything else out. After my parents died, it took years of therapy to make feel like a real person again. The church undid all that work in the space of a few minutes. I shivered.

Dante was too busy mean mugging the church to notice. “Do you feel compelled in any way? Like you did before?”

I shook my head. “No. Can we leave?”

He wrapped his hands around both door handles and pulled. Nothing budged. I took it as a sign from God that we should leave. So did the crow. Cawing furiously, it flapped its wings and dropped down from its perch in the tree, pecking at the ground around Dante's shoes.

He ignored it. “Hm. These doors shouldn't be locked.”

“But they are,” I said, keeping a wary eye on the crow. “So we should leave.”

The crow agreed. It gave another harsh squawk before it launched itself up at Dante in a flurry of rage and feathers. Dante reacted immediately, grabbing the bird by its neck and throwing it away like it was little more than a piece of garbage. The crow tumbled across the grass, but recovered quickly and attempted a counter-attack. Its efforts were thwarted by a gunshot.

“Jesus!” I yelped, slapping my hands over my ears. “Was that really necessary?”

Dante holstered his gun―higher up on his chest, like Humphrey Bogart always did―and walked over to retrieve the crow's corpse. “This bird is possessed.”

“Of
course
it is,” I said. Because I couldn't go anywhere without demons following me.

“Look,” he held the crow up so that the sunlight could catch its beady eyes. Exposed, milky white veins began to appear like negatives of a photograph. “This bird isn't just possessed. It's newly possessed. Those veins are signs that the entropic process has yet to take place.”

I knew this one. “Entropy, that’s the, uh…”

Dante put the crow down on the walkway and spread its wings. “Entropy is what happens when—”

A lightbulb flickered on in my head. A memory from Demonic Physiology last year. “Wait, wait. I know what it is. When a demon gets into someone’s body, the decay and mutations that happen afterward,
that’s
entropy, right?”

He nodded approvingly. “Right.”

I got a C in that class. At least all my hard work was good for something.

Dante reached into his coat and came back with a box of chalk. That he had the box with him didn’t surprise me; chalk was a vital demon hunting tool. That he kept so much stuff in his
coat
of all things was the funny part.

“Now pull an umbrella out of there,” I told him.

He blinked.