The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (23 page)

I awoke with a mouthful of dirt.

I was buried in a grave somewhere.

I reached out for Penelope, for Judas, for anyone, but there was no one.

And I screamed to find myself alive and alone again.

When I was done with Aigra I hiked back to the car. The rage was still with me, despite everything I had done to him. I found myself on the hill with the bones that Penelope had photographed that day. I tore them from the ground and threw them deep into the forest, one after the other, until I couldn’t see them anymore. I smashed trees out of my path as I went, and the ones that were too large to smash I lit on fire with my burning hands. I turned the forest into ash and smoke, and my memories along with it. I burned the forest. I wanted to burn all of God’s creation.

The heat of the flames stung my eyes, and I felt tears on my cheeks for the first time in ages. I tried to stop them, but then the feelings inside me welled up and I wept there in the burning woods, while still screaming my rage and frustration.

I wept for what the angels had done to me, and what I had done to them.

I wept for what I’d been and what I’d become.

I wept for everything I had lost.

I wept for Penelope.

I wept for Amelia.

I made it back to the car as the sky in front of me began to lighten again. The sky behind me was a red haze. I sat behind the wheel and took a few deep breaths to compose myself once again. Then I started the car and headed off to find Edwards.

I died and Penelope died and Amelia died.

I couldn’t save them.

I followed the map Alice had given me to a neighbourhood of luxury homes overlooking Puget Sound on the outskirts of Seattle. They were the sort of places that all had metal gates sealing off their driveways, and garages so large they could have housed families. I half expected to be arrested by private security guards at any moment.

I couldn’t see a street sign for Genesis Way anywhere, but I didn’t really expect it to be marked. I found it anyway by driving around and pulling over every few minutes to check my progress against the map. Whoever had inked it had been dead accurate.

Genesis Way was a long, winding paved road behind another gate. It climbed a hill at the water’s edge, disappearing behind some trees and emerging again at the top of the hill and ending at a house. It was one of those houses that was all windows—you could see right through it to the cloudy sky on the other side. I’ve always been wary of such places. As much as you can look inside them, the residents can watch you. Sometimes you couldn’t ask for a better surveillance system than 360-degree windows.

There were no numbers on the gate but there was only one house up there, so I figured that was it. I parked the car and studied the place for a moment but I couldn’t see any movement or light in any of the windows. No one was home. Or maybe they were but wanted people to think they weren’t. Or maybe they were just out buying groceries. Only one way to find out. I got out of the car and popped the gate open with a little bit of all that grace I had and went up the hill to the house.

I was grateful for the fact there were no guard dogs. There always used to be guard dogs in the days before security cameras. Most people think the cameras are better, but trust me, guard dogs are much more difficult to deal with than cameras. I didn’t see any cameras either. Which didn’t mean they weren’t there, of course. But it didn’t matter that much—I’d cast a sleight on myself in the car to make me appear like Sut. The faithful servant returns home.

It took me a moment to find the door, because it was glass too. The only thing that gave it away was a small metal handle. I stood in front of it and looked inside the house for a moment. It looked like every other rich person’s multimillion-dollar house on a multimillion-dollar location: couches and chairs made out of some sort of moulded plastic, abstract metal shapes on tables—sculptures or garbage, I wasn’t sure which—a couple of telescopes on stands by the windows on the water side. And still no lights or people.

I tried the door but it was locked of course. I shrugged and hit the doorbell. Sometimes the only option is the best option.

No lights turned on, no people came to investigate who had wandered to the end of their lonely road.

I grabbed the door handle and let some grace flow from my hand into it. There was no sound at all. Expensive lock. I opened the door and stepped inside the house.

Into an entirely different house.

I stood in a living room with cozy wooden walls lined with bookshelves. A fire blazed happily away in the fireplace in one wall. The couches and chairs were plush, with cushions that looked as if you might actually want to sit on them. The tables held bottles of wine and other spirits. There wasn’t a window anywhere, although old landscape paintings hung where they might be. There was no sign of anything I’d seen from outside.

I paused and looked back through the door. The road I’d come up was still there. As was Puget Sound and the city and everything else. It was just the inside of the house that had changed.

I stepped back outside and looked back through the windows. The same, empty modern house with no bookshelves or paintings or fireplace. But when I looked through the door I could see the other place there, waiting for me. I checked for the things I’d usually check for in such a situation, but I couldn’t detect any sign of a sleight. It looked like both places were real. You see something new every day.

My options hadn’t changed any so I stepped back inside the house and closed the door behind me. It would have been nice to leave the door open as an escape route, but I figured that’s not the sort of thing a loyal employee like Sut would do.

I waited for a moment but no one came to welcome me. There was no sound but the crackle of the fire. I pulled out a few of the books on the shelves. They were handbound tomes. Religious texts, mainly, although there was a copy of Aristotle’s
Poetics of Comedy
and a slim untitled book by Thomas More that was the real reason he was beheaded. I didn’t know any copies of that one still existed.

I put them back on the shelves and glanced at the paintings. They were the sort of thing you’d normally find in old English estates: pastoral landscape knockoffs à la Constable and Turner.

I moved on to the next room, a dining room with a long wooden table set with places for a dozen people. The china held a pattern of fighting dragons. It looked so old it may have come from China itself. The silverware was tarnished with age. The dust everywhere was so thick I could have written my name in it.

The kitchen looked about as heavily used as the dining room, but at least there were a few touches of modernity here. A restaurant-grade stove. A metal refrigerator the size of a small car. I opened it and looked inside, but it was empty. I began to wonder if anyone lived here at all.

I found an answer to that question on the second floor, which was interesting on its own because I didn’t remember seeing a second floor from outside the house. In the first bedroom I looked into I found a man sleeping on a bed. The room was empty of everything else but the bed—no dresser, no laundry basket, not even a window. The bed was one of those ornate affairs with large posters and a dozen silk pillows, which suited the man because he was wearing the breeches and shirt of an Elizabethan man.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to shake him awake, but he didn’t respond. He didn’t even stir. I pulled him up into a sitting position, slapped his cheeks, opened his eyes and looked inside, but he gave no response. I did note, however, that his ring finger was missing, just a stump showing where it had been cut off.

I laid him back down. I was willing to bet money that he was a faerie, and he wasn’t responding because he was off in the glamour. But given the absence of his ring finger, I suspected he wasn’t in Morgana’s court. He’d literally severed his tie to her—or someone had done it for him.

I didn’t know what that meant. I explored the other bedrooms, but they were just as empty as the rest of the place. All they held were beds that looked as if they’d never been slept in and closets with nothing in them. No windows, no phones, no computers, nothing to connect this place to the outside world.

I went back to the first room to wait for something to happen. I leaned against a bookshelf and watched the fire for a while. I poured myself a scotch—an 80-year-old Macallan Angel’s Share, if I wasn’t mistaken. Edwards had taste as well as money. I examined the paintings on the walls. Now that I looked at them closer, I wasn’t sure they were knockoffs.

I stepped up to a reproduction of Constable’s
Hadleigh Castle
and studied it. I’d seen it a number of times over the years, and it was one of my favourites—something about the way the castle overlooking the Thames had crumbled into ruins, with the storm clouds overhead threatening to finish it off. Maybe I identified with the shepherd and his dog wandering the desolation. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking about the fate of the Royal Family. Either way, I knew the painting well, right down to the individual brush strokes. And this was a perfect reproduction. Only a master forger would be able to pull it off. Or the artist himself.

“It’s real, if that’s what you’re wondering,” a familiar voice said from behind me. Or rather, familiar voices.

I turned to find a corpse in a suit standing behind me. No, not a corpse. Judas. He just looked like a corpse because he was letting his true nature show. I was so surprised to see him here that I didn’t even move. But I wasn’t surprised enough to miss the gun in his hand. As usual when guns are involved, it was pointed in my direction. That was the only thing that stopped me from leaping across the distance between us and tearing out his throat for real this time. But it wouldn’t stop me for long.

“They’re all real,” he went on, nodding at the other paintings. “The ones in the art galleries are the reproductions.”

For some reason, he didn’t seem interested in catching up on events with me. He didn’t even call me “little monkey.” I remembered I looked like Sut, but I didn’t drop the sleight. I’d been in enough situations like this—all right, not quite like
this
—to know something felt wrong here. I decided to stay in character a bit longer.

“This is private property,” I said. “I’m going to have to call the police.”

OK, it wasn’t the wittiest comment I’d ever made, but I
was
taken by surprise. And I was puzzled that I didn’t feel the usual things I felt when I encountered Judas. Rage, confusion, emptiness, the desire to murder like I have never murdered. Instead, I felt . . . hungry.

Judas chuckled. “Sorry, Cross,” he said, “but when Sut didn’t check in I contacted him and found out what you did. You may as well stop wasting your grace.”

So I did. I dropped the sleight and let myself look like myself again. I watched him closely to see how he’d react. He just smiled and blinked a couple of times as my appearance changed.

“You look like hell,” he said. “Almost as bad as the last time I saw you.”

“Remind me when that was again,” I said.

“The crucifixion,” he said. “But I wouldn’t expect you to remember such a minor event as that.”

Yeah. All right. Things were starting to come together.

“Well, that’s where I have a problem,” I said. “Because you look like Judas, but I
know
I’ve seen Judas since the crucifixion.”

“Oh, of course—the disguise,” he said, and chuckled. And then he changed appearance in front of me, becoming a thin, skeletal man. He looked almost identical to the man in the book Alice had given me in the library, once you factored in artistic licence. Unfortunately, he still held the gun. I guess it wasn’t part of his disguise. “I’ve become so used to wearing him that I forgot,” he said.

“Jonathan Edwards, I presume,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And you’re Jesus Christ.”

“Not really,” I said.

“No, not really,” he said.

That was why I felt the way I did. He was an angel, not Judas. And I could sense his grace, which is why I felt hungry instead of angry. So that cleared some things up. Although not why he was pretending to be Judas.

“How about we skip the witty banter and you tell me what you’re doing,” I suggested.

“Certainly,” he said. “I’m killing you.” And then he shot me in the heart three times.

I’ve been shot before. In fact, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been shot. Musket balls, shotgun pellets, AK-47 rounds—I’ve been intimate with all of them. And one thing remains the same: they all hurt like nothing you ever have known. Except for the ones that don’t hurt. They’re the ones that kill you. They don’t hurt because you’re already dead, and one of God’s few mercies is you don’t feel the things that
really
kill you.

Edwards’s shots didn’t hurt at all. Nothing hurt as I fell back to the floor, hitting my head on the edge of the bookshelf. I tasted blood in my mouth but the blood didn’t hurt either. I had enough presence of mind to know I was in trouble, but I couldn’t even summon up grace to heal myself.

Shit. Not again.

I couldn’t even look away from Constable’s castle until Edwards stepped into my line of sight again and stood over me. He pointed the gun at my head and smiled some more.

Goddamn, I hated angels.

“I don’t understand why people pray to you,” he said. “You’re such a disappointment.” Then he pulled the trigger, and I saw the light at the end of the tunnel once more.

I was back in the faerie pub. I had a drink in my hand but I didn’t remember ordering it. I didn’t remember how I’d got there. I didn’t even remember what year it was. My drink tasted like embalming fluid but I drank it down anyway and waved my hand at the bartender for another.

But for once he didn’t serve me because he was busy looking at the stage. Everyone in the pub was looking at the stage. The musicians were gone, even though I could still hear them playing somewhere. A slow, deep number I didn’t recognize that sounded like a funeral dirge.

Morgana was on the stage now, lying in the bed from her chambers. She was naked and I saw she was full term with the child. She writhed on the sheets and screamed, and that’s when I realized she was giving birth.

And then everyone else around me screamed too, echoing her own cry. I looked around but no one moved to help her. So I pushed my way through the crowd and climbed up on the stage.

Despite all the years I’d spent alive, I’d never helped anyone give birth before. But how hard could it be?

“Cross,” Morgana hissed at the sight of me, and everyone in the pub hissed my name too. It was more than a little unnerving.

I looked down at her and saw her belly moving. No, twisting and shaking. Like something inside was fighting to get out, not coming out naturally.

“Forgive me for drawing you away from whatever it was you were doing,” said Morgana, smiling at me, “but I thought you might want to be present for the birth of your child.” The words sounded even creepier coming out of the mouths of all the fey.

“Don’t you have a doctor in here?” I asked, looking around. “All these people and you never bothered to ensnare a doctor?”

“We have no need of physicians,” Morgana said, and screamed again. Now I saw it was a scream of delight, not pain. She arched her back, and the baby inside her
surged
down, heading for the exit.

“What do I do?” I asked. I went to take her hand to offer what support I could, but she pushed me away, laughing.

“Hold your child,” she said, and the crowd repeated her command.

And then the baby was there, slipping out of Morgana in a stream of blood and more black rings and scraps of parchment and pieces of quartz and snakes that slithered away.

I reached for the baby, but stopped when I saw it. And then, before Morgana let me slip back into death, I screamed.