The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (28 page)

Unable to cope with the night I had, I slogged upstairs to my bedroom and buried myself in blankets. The second my head hit the pillow, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Time had no meaning there. Demons had no power there. People didn't die there. It was a nice place, this dreamless void. I wanted to stay. Wanted give myself over to oblivion.

Unfortunately, oblivion didn't want me.

I awoke to sunlight in my eyes and bitterness in my mouth. Last night's grime covered my skin in a filmy layer of dirt. Leaves and pine needles caught in my hair and my cheek was scarred from where I'd cut it on a branch. My muscles ached. My head ached. My heart ached.

I needed coffee.

The quiet chatter filling the kitchen ended when I entered. Dante sat at the table coughing into a napkin. Aralia urged him to drink something from the mug she'd brought him but he refused. Max picked at a piece of toast. Mo sat next to Dante, ears perked. Not-Rosie lounged on the counter in one of Dante's dress shirts, stuffing her hand in a box of cereal. Her face was swollen from where I wailed on her.

How wholesome. One big fucked up demon family.

The urge to saw Not-Rosie's head off with a butter knife was gone, but I still wanted to hit her a little. A lot. It didn't help that she was blocking the coffee pot.

“Move,” I said flatly. My eyes ached from crying.

She shoved a handful of cereal in her mouth like a toddler would and slid off the counter, sitting cross-legged on the floor instead.

I poured my coffee, put it down on the table, then dragged one of the velvet chairs from the foyer in next to Dante. I sat. Sipped my coffee. “So,” I said. “Talk. Now. From the beginning. Don't leave anything out.”

Aralia stood and left. She hadn't been able to look me in the eye since we got home. Max left, too, his toast sitting untouched on his plate. He wasn’t one for conflict.

“I'm not possessed,” Dante began, wheezing into his napkin. “I want you to know that above all else. I'm not possessed. I'm...”

“He's a bastard,” Not-Rosie said. She shoved more cereal in her mouth and licked her palm clean of the crumbs. “Sort of. Go on,
beroach.
Tell her.”

He cut her a silencing look, which she shrugged off. “I'm something called a cambion. My father is a demon. My mother was human.”

Cambion. I'd heard that word before. Somewhere. “Okay. Go on.”

“Vaena,” he craned his head toward Not-Rosie, “is my half-sister. Her father is my father. We…don’t get along very well.”

“You were always his favorite, though,” Not-Rosie muttered.

“I never wanted to be.” Dante wiped his mouth, coming away with a spot of blood.

“What's Dis?” I asked. “Gershom mentioned it at The Inferno but we thought he was just rambling. He wasn't just rambling, was he?”

Dante shook his head. “No. Dis is the demonic realm. Every demon on Earth originated there. This place…it calls to many of them. All this energy here, it’s tantalizing.”

I'd graduated from sipping my coffee to gulping it. It burned, but at least it was a feeling I was familiar with.

“They lose their physical forms when they cross the Veil,” Dante continued. “Which is why demons must possess a body to survive here.”

Not-Rosie snorted, lifting the cereal box to pour it directly in her mouth. “
You
don't lose anything, Malnoch. You have no idea what it's like.”

“Malnoch's your real name?” I guessed.

He nodded. “Yes. The one my father gave me, anyway. My mother named me Dante. Arturo was my grandfather’s name.”

I sank in my chair, digesting this new glut of information. Dante was a half demon, a cambion. His demonic name was Malnoch. The theory about demons coming from another realm was true. The Veil was real―not just some intangible thing to guess at. Not-Rosie's name was Vaena. She was Dante's sister. All right. Next topic. “The note in your office mentioned that you suspected your father was involved in everything. How long have you thought this and why?”

He stared down at the napkin he’d been coughing in, a faraway look in his eyes. “I…made the assumption when you and I met for the first time. I couldn’t be sure until the incident at Mr. Zarcotti’s. Combined with the murders and the symbols and Henriette’s letter and you, I…”

“It didn’t occur to you that
maybe
you should say something about this
serious
stuff until now? You—you could have…We could have done so much more about this but you decided keeping secrets was the better option?” Had I not been grieving Rosie and nursing a massive headache, I would have been yelling at this point. I
knew
Dante was hiding something. I could somewhat understand hiding the cambion thing—half the world would want him dead if it got out—but
this?
He needed a damn good excuse to keep me from “accidentally” spilling my coffee on him.

“It occurred to me countless times, Beatrice, but I—I was
afraid.
I never wanted any of this to happen.” He looked up to meet my gaze. That fear he was talking about made his voice quiver just enough for me to (grudgingly) believe him. Mayor wasn’t lying about his acting skills. “My father is ruthless, Beatrice, he won’t stop until he get what he wants, and I—I didn’t want to believe that he was...That he’s looking for me again. I’m sorry for lying to you, and I know I shouldn’t have, but please...Please listen to me. I
need
you to listen to me.
Please.
”

This had to be the most he’d ever said to me in a single go. Even more startling was that he legitimately sounded terrified. Of his own father. I didn’t want to think about what happened between them to scare him
that
much. It sure as hell wasn’t baseball in the yard. “…Okay.”

“Okay?” Some of that terror sounded more like relief.

“Everything. I want to hear it all.” I put my coffee down and reached across the table to take his hand in mine, hoping to reassure him that I wasn’t going to duck and run. I was Beatrice Todd, I didn’t duck and run from anything. Kazraach notwithstanding.

Twenty-Nine

Dante dropped his used napkin in the trash and plucked another one from the holder in the center of the table. With the pen Vaena tossed him from the drawer above her head, he wrote a name in the middle of the napkin. “Amarax. That is my father's name. I suppose you could say he rules Dis. He’s extraordinarily powerful, charismatic, persuasive...”

I nodded along, scooting my chair closer to him so that I could see what he was writing. He didn’t try to shift away from our close proximity like he would have before. When our knees accidentally brushed, he only paused for a fraction of a second, then carried on. We were making progress.

“That said,” he continued, covering his previous fear with a brisk, business-like tone. “He’s obsessed with getting me back to, as he puts it, where I belong.” 

“Why?” I asked. Suddenly, Mr. Zarcotti’s warning made a lot more sense. “Does being a cambion give you special powers? I mean, if your dad’s as powerful as you say he is, why would he need you?”

Vaena moved on from cereal. She dug the last of the Pop-Tarts out from the pantry and settled back down on the floor. “Malnoch can change things. But he won’t.”

I bumped my knee against his. Intentionally this time. “What does she mean by that?”

Dante rubbed his eyes, shoulders slumping as they often did when he was stressed. “I can move between Dis and Earth without losing my body. I can touch iron, use it in very small doses. I can’t ingest it, as you saw last night, but I can come in contact with it without immediately dying, which is more than what full demons can say.”

“You can do more,” Vaena grumbled through a mouthful of food, “but you don’t. You hate us.”

“Vaena,” Dante exhaled. “I’ve told you before, I
don’t
hate you.”

Vaena grunted. I guess that was a familial trait.

“As I was going to say, my father has six children.” Dante drew two lines from Amarax's name. “Baezal and Iarok are the oldest. Then Taroth and Zenaran.”

“Then you and Vaena,” I traced the lines with my finger, trying to memorize each name. “Are you a prince or something?”

Vaena cackled, having gotten over whatever her spat with Dante was about. “The Whore Prince of Dis. That's what Malnoch is. Papa wants him to inherit the throne instead of Baezal.”

“What?” I asked. King Dante, lord of the demon realm. “Really?”

“
No
,” he said harshly. “I don’t want any part of it. Of anything.”

“Your dad can't be too happy about that.”

Vaena cackled again.

“He's been pursuing me for a very long time now,” Dante said. Bitterness edged his voice. “Dragging me back to Dis. I only just got back a year ago. Then I moved here.”

“Out of all the places to move to when you escaped, why did you pick Stone Chapel?”

“The Veil is extremely thin here. On par with major war zones, large cemeteries, what have you. I figured it would be the best place to do my work.” He looked down at the napkin he was writing on. “I can't go back there again. It's a toxic place for someone like me. Someone so...human.”

Human. In all the time I’d known him, I always thought of Dante as something more than human
.
Something indomitable, something invincible. Even when his life was on the line, I managed to convince myself that he’d be fine, that he was capable of withstanding anything just because his name was Dante Arturo. But as I looked at him now, I finally saw the man behind the mask I created for him. Too young to be so burdened, too old to believe the lie that everything would be fine. Too tired to hold his head up, too selfless to admit that he needed a break. He wasn’t invincible. I knew that now. He was a person. And he suffered just like the rest of us. “Earth kills you too, doesn't it?”

“Not quite as efficiently as Dis does.” He smiled a sad sort of smile, an ironic twist of his mouth. “But in a way, yes. It exhausts me more than anything.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, because that's what I assumed you did in this sort of situation. He wasn't dying, but he wasn't living, either. He was existing in a limbo between two places he didn't belong.

Demon prince or not, that had to suck.

“Don't be,” he replied, remembering our exchange from long ago, when we talked about Fabius and Rosie, when we fell asleep together. Incidentally, that was the only time I'd known him to rest for more than a few hours.

I cracked a smile. A sad sort of smile, mirroring his. I was angry that he lied to me. Grieving over Rosie. Hungry for something other than coffee. But I had something now that I didn't have before.

I had the truth. I had his trust. And with it, we could finally move forward.

***

“You don't like me,” Vaena pouted on the ground as I reloaded my pistol. Days of storms had at last given weigh to chilly November sunshine, the warmth of the light almost canceling out the cold of the wind. My hair hadn't completely dried from my bath, so I pulled the hood of my coat up and got to work. Target practice.

Vaena wasn't making it easy. Since Dante left to go speak with Chief Morales about last night, she decided to cling to me like a kid whose dad left on a business trip. It felt too much like babysitting.

I didn't have the patience for babysitting.

“You stole my best friend's body.” I took aim and fired at the target twenty feet away. I hit it a couple of inches above the bullseye. Considerable progress from the first time Dante had me out here. “So, no, I don't really like you that much. Sorry.”

“I didn't
steal
it,” Vaena said. “She gave it to me. Big difference.”

I fired again. Three inches to the left of the bullseye. Damn.

Vaena picked up a dead leaf, crushing it between her fingers. “You should not hate me. I am keeping your friend's body
alive
by being in it. Her soul is the only thing that is dead.”

Fighting my natural instinct to start yelling, I took aim yet again, rested my finger on the trigger.

“Besides, she was in pain, it would have been cruel to keep her here any longer―”

Okay, that was it. I slapped my gun down on the rotten hay bale we used as a table and rounded on her, pointing my finger like Mother Arden did when I was little. “Don't you dare talk about Rosie like you knew her! What you're doing to her right now is disgusting!
You
disgust me!”

Vaena blinked. Picked her teeth with dirty fingernails. “You don't understand.”

“No,
you
don't understand!” I began to stomp away but she latched onto my leg like a leech and refused to let go.

“Don't leave!” She whined.

“Get off me!”

“No, no,” she hugged me to her bony chest and pushed my hood down, fingers raking through my hair. “Can't leave,
versmaash.
Let me explain. Please, please. You must understand.”

I squirmed in her vise-grip, gagging at the rank smell that clung to her skin. “Yeah, I
understand
that you need a shower!”

“I saved you,
versmaash!
” She wailed, hugging me even tighter. “The book, the book, I showed you where the book was! And that man in the woods, he was going to kill you, but I killed him first. Didn’t you see?”

Didn't I see her
impaling him with a branch?
Yeah, I saw. “Let go of me for
two seconds
and maybe I’ll think about talking to you.”

She leaned back, squinting at up at me. “Are you going to run away?”

“No,” I said, and it was the truth. I wanted answers and she seemed prepared to give them to me.

“Do you promise?”

“Seriously?”

“You have to promise,
versmaash.
”

“Fine, I promise.”

Finger by finger, muscle by muscle, she let me go.

To prevent her from grabbing me again, I scooted over a few feet and drew a line in the mud with a twig. “This is my side. That’s your side. Neither of us can cross this line. You cross it and I'm probably going to punch you again, okay?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” I sighed. This conversation was exhausting. “Now, can you answer something for me?”

She nodded.

“Why Rosie? Why not someone else?”

She scratched one of her bald spots. Sniffed her fingers. Wiped them on Dante's shirt. At least she didn't lick them this time. “I liked her.”

“Why?” I asked. A lot of people liked Rosie, but that was the thing. They were
people
. Not demons looking for a new body to fill.

Vaena shrugged.

“If you want me to like you, you have to tell me.”

Her disaffection faded and a glimmer of hope lit her black eyes. “Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

She shifted in the mud, picked a blade of dead grass, twirling it between her finger and thumb. “She had you. And that other man.”

“Brother Luke?” I said.

“Yes. Him. Friends. I wanted friends. I was in another girl before her. In the sanatorium. And then you came one day. Watched a, ah,” she waved the grass around, “a―”

“A movie?” Rosie and I watched a lot of them.

Vaena nodded. “A movie. Yes. I wanted to watch it, too, so I...”

“You possessed her.”

“Yes.”

Just when I thought things couldn't get any weirder, here Vaena was telling me she possessed my best friend because she was
lonely.
I guess that was better than possessing her for some other reason. Some…evil demon reason.

“Do you hate me still?” Vaena let the grass go and leaned over as far as my line would allow, her eyes wide with childlike anticipation.

Hate was a strong word. Hate implied that I could never forgive her for what she did. It would be a long time coming, but I knew I'd forgive her. Eventually. Maybe.

“I don't hate you,” I said, even though I wanted to. Even though I kind of did. “Rosie wouldn't like that. But I don't really trust you right now, either.”

“But I―”

“I know, you helped me find the book and you sent Dante that letter, but you have to understand that I've lost someone really important to me. You may be in her body and you may be keeping it alive, but you aren't her. You get that? You are
not
Rosie.”

Vaena slumped. “So you hate me.”

“
No
,” I corrected firmly, “I don't. Just give me some time to get to know you, okay? And maybe we can, y'know…” I couldn’t believe I was saying this. “Be friends one day.”

“Friends?” She echoed, drawing out the word like she wanted to savor it.

The old Beatrice would have killed her by now. The new one, even though she was prone to fits of rage, learned to forgive. Not forget, I'd never forget what Vaena did, but forgive. Someday. Eventually. Maybe. That had to earn me a ton of maturity points. “Yeah. Friends.”

Squealing, Vaena broke my line rule and launched herself at me, throwing her arms around my shoulders in a bone crushing hug. “Thank you,
versmaash
, I knew you'd understand!”

“Okay, okay!” I tried to shove her off but she was stuck good and tight. She wouldn't be letting go of me unless she decided to. Resigned, I let her do her thing. Breathed through my mouth to spare myself the smell. “Hey, Vaena?”

She nestled her head on my shoulder. “Yes?”

“What does
versmaash
mean?”

“Stranger.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with squash?”

“What is a squash?”

“Never mind.”

I’d explain later.

***

Dante returned in the evening, looking more exhausted than ever. In light of his recent confessions, I decided I'd do something about it. As soon as he walked in the door, I took him by the hand and led him upstairs to the TV room.

“What are we doing?” He asked.

I pushed him onto the couch. “We're taking a nap.”

His brow furrowed. “We're
what?
”

“Taking a nap,” I steeled myself against a wave of oncoming nervousness and sat down next to him. “Go on, lie down.”

“Beatrice, I can't―”

“You owe me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You owe me, Arturo. And I owe you for getting you shot. This is my way of paying you back.”

“You're paying me back by making me take a nap?”

“I don't know if you've looked in a mirror lately, but you kind of look like crap.” Hot crap. There’s a nice mental image. “You need to rest. And the only time I've seen you actually do it is when I was with you that one time. So we're going to take a nap.”

He narrowed his eyes, reminding me so much of when we first met. He'd squint at me, I'd squint back, we'd argue. Good times. That he didn't argue now was a sign our relationship had grown. Into what, I wasn't sure yet.