The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice: Book One of the Book of Cross
© 2013 by Peter Roman
Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr
Cover design and interior design © 2013 by Samantha Beiko

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition MAY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-146-5

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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
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Edited by Kelsi Morris
Copyedited and proofread by Michael Matheson

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

ChiZine Publications

Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.
With dark nails they drove me through:
on me those sores are seen,
open malice-wounds. I dared not scathe anyone.
They mocked us both, we two together.
All wet with blood I was,
poured out from that Man’s side,
after ghost he gave up.

—The Dream of the Rood

In the beginning was an angel, a church and a knife.

I hunted down the angel, Remiel, in Barcelona. He was working as a living statue, one of those street performers whose job it is to separate tourists from their money before someone else does. His office was a wooden pedestal on La Rambla, the pedestrian boulevard by the harbour that every visitor has to hit before they start exploring the real city. He was tucked away among the kiosks that sold everything from postcards and magazines to live birds. A silver robot stood on a box to the left of him, while a clockwork man dressed in gears, wheels and pistons was on his right. Remiel was made up like a demon with golden skin, bat wings and two tails, holding a leather tome bound with three locks. He looked like just another out-of-work circus performer vying for tips. Apparently even angels have to make a living these days.

If you’ve been to Barcelona, or any other city with a tourist district, you know the scene: People with cameras and sunburns wandering around, the statues, jugglers and magicians competing with each other to earn a few of the local coins, while pickpockets go for the money the easy way.

And me.

You wouldn’t notice me. I’d be just another passing face, another man from somewhere else with a hat, sunglasses and backpack. I’m a pretty convincing nobody, thanks to centuries of experience.

But Remiel turned his head and scanned the crowd as soon as I caught sight of him. Angels have a sense for each other. He was looking for me. Trying to find me like I’d found him.

The problem for him was he was looking for the wrong thing. I’m not one of them. I can never be one of them. I’ll let you worry about whether that’s a curse or a gift.

I ducked into a kiosk and pretended to look over a selection of fridge magnets depicting the city’s famous Gaudí church—La Sagrada Familia to the purists—while keeping an eye on Remiel in the mirror on the sunglasses stand.

He fluttered his wings and lashed his tails, which prompted people in the crowd to applaud and toss money onto the mat at his feet. But he wasn’t acting for them. I knew his demon form wasn’t a disguise. He wasn’t wearing makeup and using props like all the other performers. This wasn’t even a sleight he was using to hide his real form. This was actually one of Remiel’s incarnations. And he was genuinely agitated at sensing my presence but not being able to find me. I would have been amused by the situation if I weren’t so damned desperate for grace.

He hopped down off the box and gathered up his mat and money in one smooth motion. He looked around some more as he put them in a shoulder bag he draped off one of those wings. Then he made his way through the crowd and into a side alley. I followed him, careful to keep clear of the people filming his exit. You never know when some enterprising law enforcement officer will think it’s a good idea to look at people’s cameras after a crime and then track you down at the bar or airport lounge where you happen to be enjoying a few drinks. And then you have to come up with answers to all those questions that are so difficult to answer.

After all, it was a photo that led me to Barcelona. Printed on a piece of paper and tucked inside an envelope with no return address, delivered to a hotel in Prague where I’d been staying to ride out a heroin withdrawal. I’d been trying to cultivate an addiction so I could forget about various things I no longer wanted to remember, but my body had rejected the drug. It had worked for only a few weeks, hardly enough time to forget who I was, before my body started cleaning it out of my system. Healing me like it always did. Just doing its preprogrammed job. You’ll have to trust me when I say I can’t recommend going through withdrawal while you’re still high.

A cleaning lady slipped the envelope under my door, because I’d instructed the hotel staff to stay away from my room until I checked out. You never know what can happen when I’m seeing things. The man at the front desk told me later the envelope had just shown up on the counter with nothing on it but the alias I was using at the time. It was written in blood, but I didn’t point that out to him. And if he noticed, he was professional enough to not say anything. I won’t share that alias right now in case I want to use it again. Although, all things considered, I probably won’t. When I opened the envelope I thought for a moment that maybe I was still hallucinating. There was Remiel, golden-skinned and red-eyed on La Rambla, smiling into the camera as he spread his wings for the tourist shot. The first angel I’d seen in years. Even through the photo, I could see his grace. An indescribable aura surrounding him, visible only to the angels and me. I yearned for it far more than I ever could heroin or any other drug. It was time for me to chase a new high.

On the flight to Barcelona I wondered what had happened to the owner of the camera. I figured it was another angel who sent me the photo, because who else would know the truth about both Remiel and me? But there was no way Remiel would have knowingly posed for a seraphim. They didn’t particularly trust their own kind these days, and with good reason. They were always trying to kill each other when I wasn’t killing them first. Which meant some real tourist had taken the shot and then given up the camera for this photo to reach me. Hopefully it was just a straightforward theft. I’m tired of people dying on account of me.

I don’t trust the angels any more than they trust each other, which is why I assumed I was walking into some sort of trap as I followed Remiel away from La Rambla. But he had the grace hidden inside of him, and that’s the one addiction my body can’t resist. Besides, when you can’t really die, even if you want to, you tend to grow a little cavalier about threats.

Remiel wandered through the old stone buildings of the city’s Gothic Quarter, leading me through streets so narrow the evening sky was just a memory overhead. We went past produce stores and clothing stores, a bookstore with a cat sleeping on a crate of books outside, a sex store with live mannequins modelling clothing in the window, a row of wine bars. Remiel kept looking back, trying to find me, but I stayed hidden in the crowd, stopping to look at a poster advertising a concert, slipping into a group of people stumbling out of a nightclub who asked each other if it was evening or morning, stepping briefly into a hat store to buy a hat of a different colour.

It went on like that for a while, as Remiel led me out of the Gothic Quarter and across the city, to the Gaudí church. I wasn’t expecting that destination. I thought he’d take me to an abandoned building somewhere, like the apartment tower where I’d found Abraxos in Chechnya, its lower floors knocked out by tank shells. Or like the walled-off chamber in the Paris sewer where I’d killed . . . what was that angel’s name? The one that had torn out his own eyes and tried to recite T.S. Eliot to me even as I strangled him? I like Eliot as much as the next lost soul, but that wasn’t going to stop me.

I shook my head and got back to the matter at hand.

So rather than hide, Remiel headed for the most popular tourist spot in the city. Well, angels do have their own logic.

He changed into a different incarnation along the way, stepping into the shadows of a doorway, then emerging a second later as a man of average build, with dark hair and glasses. He’d also traded the gold skin for street clothes, the wings and tail for a Starbucks cup, but he kept the shoulder bag with his money. He looked like anyone else in the crowd. But he wasn’t. Neither of us were.

The sky was dark now, and the ticket booths at the entrance to the church had just closed. Remiel went around to the exits at the back. The rear of the church is what everyone recognizes from the postcards, with its towers that look as if they were dreamed up by insects, or maybe mad angels. Or maybe mad insect angels. But they weren’t. I knew Gaudí, and you’ll have to take my word for it that he was no angel. Besides, angels generally aren’t all that creative when it comes to making things. They’re more inclined to destruction.

Remiel lingered by the gate as the last of the tourists filed out of the church and into buses for the trip back to their hotels and air conditioning and rooftop wine bars. I went past him on the other side of the street and tried not to stumble too much as my body tugged me in his direction. I
really
needed grace. I sat on the patio of a café across the street from the church and ordered a glass of red and a bowl of gazpacho. You can’t go wrong with the wine or the gazpacho in Spain, even at the tourist traps. I watched Remiel look at the statues carved out of the walls of the church. Angels have always had a thing for statues. I don’t know what it is; maybe they see them as kindred spirits: “Hey, you look human but you’re not. And your creator’s been dead for ages. You’re just like me.”

All right, to be fair, no one knows if God is really dead or not. But he’s definitely been MIA for a very long time.

If Remiel still felt my presence, he didn’t seem concerned now. He leaned against a wall and waited until the last of the buses had pulled away and the guards had locked the gate, then pulled out a cellphone and talked on it for a while. I sipped my wine and savoured my gazpacho, enjoying the good things in life while I considered whether or not he was calling for help. I decided he was probably just faking the call to look like he wasn’t waiting for the guards to go back inside. It’s what I would have done.

When the guards did set off on their rounds, Remiel put away the phone and tapped the gate with one hand. It opened enough for him to slip through. Locks aren’t much good against his kind. And a whole bunch of other kinds. He closed the gate behind him and went over to the wall. I pretended to watch the traffic and considered ordering another glass. I really missed Spanish wine.

Remiel reached the wall and started climbing it, pulling himself up one of the statues tucked into the numerous alcoves on the church’s exterior. It would have been quite the scene if not for the fact that he disappeared as soon as he touched the wall.

That is, he disappeared to most people. But, if you’ve been following along it should be clear by now that I’m not most people. I expended a bit of the little grace I had left to sharpen my vision and found him again. He was still there, climbing, but now he looked like part of the wall. His skin and clothes matched the colour and texture of the stone. Even his bag was camouflaged. When he moved sideways across a statue to secure a better foothold, he became that statue for a second. He was just another forgotten symbol of the past.

I threw discipline to the wind, like usual, and ordered another glass. I needed something to fill the new emptiness left behind by the grace I had just used.

By the time I’d finished the second glass, Remiel had disappeared for real this time, into an opening in one of the spires. His nest, no doubt. I chuckled at my own wit, which prompted the waiter to bring me the bill.

I paid up, waited for a lull in the traffic, or at least as close to one as you could find in this city, and went after Remiel.

He hadn’t closed the gate completely behind him, so I slipped through and crossed the open area on the other side as quickly as possible. The guards hadn’t come back yet, but there were probably cameras hidden somewhere. Maybe even in the eyes of one of the statues. That’s where I’d put them.

I ran to the church and leapt onto the wall, grabbing hold of the same statue Remiel had, pulling myself up along the same path. If it was good enough for him, it would do for me. It wasn’t that different from rock climbing. I moved over saints and angels I’d long since forgotten, although a few of the faces looked familiar. I stayed clear of the nativity scene. That one always makes me a little uncomfortable.

I didn’t try to hide myself like Remiel had. I wanted to save my grace for what was to come. So I just hoped no one was watching me at the moment. And if they were, well, the heat in Barcelona can play tricks with your mind. And if someone was filming me, hey, there are always crazy tourists in every city trying to climb things they shouldn’t be climbing. Hopefully I’d be just another novelty video online. I was too hungry for Remiel’s grace to worry about it.

It took maybe a minute and a half to reach the opening where Remiel had disappeared. I paused for a few seconds beneath it while I caught my breath, perched on a stone outcropping like I was another statue. I wasn’t in the best of shape, given my most recent attempts at self-annihilation, but I wasn’t in the worst of shape either. There was a time when I wouldn’t have made it halfway up the spire before falling off. Of course, in those days I probably would have been drunk as well.

I tore myself away from such fond memories and the view of Barcelona at night. It was time to get on with things.

I reached into my backpack and took out the knife I mentioned earlier. It was a standard hunting blade I’d bought in a shop as soon as I arrived in the city. Some people think you need special weapons to kill angels, but you don’t. They bleed and die like the rest of us. The same goes for werewolves and vampires, by the way, although they’re even harder to find than angels these days. The trick is getting the chance to use a weapon against an angel at all. They’re strong and quick and just generally nasty.

But so am I.

I went in through the opening in the spire, fast and rolling. It was a small stone chamber, with no doors or other entrances, as if Gaudí had designed it specially for someone like Remiel. Maybe he had. I took it all in with one glance: the bookshelves piled high with books, the mattress and pillow on the floor, the empty bottles of wine in a corner. Remiel waiting for me in the middle of the room.

This time he was a glowing winged man in robes. He’d opted for the classic look, perhaps as an appeal to any sense of nostalgia I might have. But like I said, I wasn’t one of his kind. And I’ve never been the sentimental type. Maybe he suspected that, because he also held a glowing sword with flames lighting up the edges. Very showy. He moved so fast even I couldn’t see him—what did I tell you?—and then there I was, impaled to the floor, the sword’s blade embedded in me and the stone underneath.