Page 31

VII

That next year, they sweep through Spain like a sickness.

Whole villages reduced to graveyards in their wake.

For weeks, the church bells seem to ring relentlessly, carrying news of death across the countryside.

They are thorough monsters, careful to leave no survivors in their wake, no one to carry word, or warning.

And so their play repeats the next night and the next, and the next, until the scale of death is news enough, and fearing its contagion, people begin to stay inside their houses.

That spring, they dress as plague doctors and walk ahead of their destruction.

In summer, they masquerade as members of the Inquisition, the stitched crosses enough to make gazes drop to the dirt.

By fall, Hector has set his mind firmly on churches, insisting he’s developed a taste for clergy, and will only feed on members of the house of God. As if the blood is somehow blessed, the pews better than a soft down bed.

Sabine has never been devout, never put much stock in any but herself. Still, she thinks it’s reckless, and dumb, to target a place with so much power.

But Hector will not be dissuaded. She has always found him moody, but there is a new edge to his temper, a manic glint that bothers her, especially since her fate is tied to theirs.

Renata does not seem concerned.

“It’s like a storm,” she insists. “It will pass.”

Foolish, thinks Sabine, even as she follows. Careful to avoid the churchyard soil.

The chapel itself holds no power over or against them. It is a common structure, open to all, so there is no trouble crossing the threshold, taking shelter within. It is the burial plots they must avoid.

Sabine learned this the first time she drifted toward the stone markers, and Renata caught her hand, hauled her back onto the path.

“Death calls to death,” she warned.

Now, Hector places his palms against the wooden doors and throws them open, ushering his rose and thorn inside the church.

Sabine considers the swept stone floor, the vaulted roof, the hollow cavern of the space. It is late, and the hall is dark, save for a cluster of votives, a lamp beside the altar, casting shadows up against the cross.

Hector passes a darkened candelabra and neatly tips it over, shattering the silence with a clanging crash.

The echo trails away, and shortly after, a door opens and a priest appears, disheveled but awake, straightening his robes as he approaches, looking from one of them to the next to the next.

His gaze snags first on Sabine’s loose red hair, coiled round her shoulders like a snake, then on Renata’s dark skin, draped with strands of gold, before landing at last on Hector’s tunic, lifted from a Templar.

“My children,” he says, the air around him clouding with confusion. “What brings you to the house of God?”

“Are we too late for Mass?” Renata asks, a giggle in her voice.

The priest glances at the windows, the sun long set. “It was at Vespers,” he says. “You may come back tomorrow.”

He begins to turn away, when Hector clears his throat.

“But I have sinned,” he declares, laying a hand to his chest, the symbol there. “And it weighs heavy on my heart.”

The priest turns back. Hesitates, then nods toward the confessional.

A cabinet with two doors, two separate chambers.

The priest goes in first, and Hector follows.

Sabine leans against a pillar, picking at her nails as Renata dances up the aisle.

Inside the cabinet, there is a muted struggle.

A muffled gasp. And then, moments later, Hector emerges, pulling on the priest’s attire.

“How do I look?” he says, smoothing the white robe over his tunic, a smudge of red like a kiss on the collar.

“Blasphemous,” Sabine says dryly, and Renata laughs, the sound ringing like bells through the empty church.

“Now what?” she asks, and Hector grins and says, “We wait.”

The next evening, the parishioners come pouring in.

Sabine counts them as they enter, the way she always does, no matter the size. It’s important to be thorough, to know how many were there when you started, so you know how many should be left behind.

Today, the numbers rise. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. And four more. Two dozen bodies in the church. Two dozen heartbeats. Two dozen lives.

Renata bolts the doors, and Hector takes his place before the altar. The three of them exchange a knowing look. The air draws tight, coiled with their hunger. Renata winks, and Hector smiles, their good mood bathing her like moonlight.

In these moments, it is easy to forget that Sabine is shackled to them.

It’s strange, but ever since her promise, the knowledge skirts her thoughts, as if she cannot look straight at it.

When she tries, her mind goes blank. As if the promise not to leave has become a want, and she’s aware that the want does not belong to her, exactly, and yet, she feels it just as keenly.

There are cracks, moments of remembering, but they seal up again before Sabine can fit her fingers in, pry open the gaps and reach the thoughts within.

There and gone.

At the altar, Hector raises his hands, his voice, and begins.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis . . .”

Renata was right. He does enjoy an audience. Voices murmur, bodies shift, confusion rising like steam, and by the time the congregation understands that this is not their priest, it is too late.

What happens next is a slaughter.

A gruesome banquet. Two dozen bodies thrown into wild motion, like a herd of startled animals. Frantic beasts, bleating in terror. The blessed air stained red with panic.

And the three of them, like wolves, upon a kill.

The sheer scale of death turns Sabine savage, makes her edges fray and her mind go blank. She is not drunk so much as wild. A feral rose, she thinks, the phrase looping in her mind as she falls upon the fleeing prey. Gone are her thoughts of risk, her thoughts of anything but blood.

She drinks, and drinks, sure that here at last she will finally feel glutted, finally feel full, finally find the limits of her hunger. But she doesn’t. Instead, it only opens wider, each bite like a stitch unpicked until the darkness is a chasm.

And she is falling in.

At some point, the screaming stops, the pounding, too, no one left trying to escape.

Silence washes over everything, heavy in the slaughter’s wake.

Hector sinks onto the step at the front of the room, his white robes painted crimson.

Renata sits beside him, and Sabine stretches out along the top stone stair, her head resting in Renata’s lap, lost inside the dreamy drunken aftermath, the subtle notes of sacramental wine that laced the blood.

Everything feels loose and quiet, a bolt of ribbon come unrolled.

She wants to stay there, right there, forever.

But the corpses are already cooling.

So they rise, abandoning the church and the bodies within.

Twenty-four.

Sabine knows. After all, she counted each one as they entered. But that night, drunk on blood and freedom, she doesn’t think to count the bodies as they leave.

If she had, she would have noticed that now—

There are only twenty-three.