When the Dark Wins

The time. The effort. These assholes had the resources to keep a pre-Delineation building like this in shape. The means to keep a bunch of Vicers around like pets. Something in her chest hitched at this. No one would be coming for her. No one could.

Several steps led up and behind the altar at the head of the darkened chapel. A trio of folding privacy screens stood behind the place where priests broke their bread and poured their wine for the faithful. She got the feeling the screens didn’t normally live there, but a second pair of guards appeared from behind them escorting another captive and banishing all mundane thought.

Not ‘escorting’. Hauling.

The knuckles of the woman’s toes dragged the floor. The two men held her up by the armpits, but a dark head of wet Vicer hair lolled.

As Buckeye and her own guards passed the trio, the nearest of the other two men bit off a curse. His boot landed only halfway on the next of the steps, and his heel went out from under him. Knee buckled. He lost his grip on the other woman.

Her body crumpled, too heavy for the single remaining guard, and went down in a heap on the steps. She didn’t move. Neck bent at a sickening angle, and the captive did nothing to right it. Her lips parted, blue-tinged, in some silent sigh, and glassy eyes stared in unblinking piety at the cathedral ceiling, forever.

The guards regrouped and gathered what was left. A portion of August’s cargo, useless.

Buckeye came to life, wrenching against the hold on her arms, feet scrabbling on stone.

No. No way! No Goddamn way!

Fingers went pincer tight and a baton jammed in the side of her breast. The guard on her right jerked her near and forced the warning through his teeth: “Don’t be stupid.”

The tender skin on the underside of her arm twisted as Buckeye craned her neck around to see the last of the dead woman, dragged away through the chapel, her pale skin some floating ghost of hope as the guards’ uniforms disappeared into the darkness around her.

Buckeye tripped on a step as the guards hustled her forward through her staring.

They rounded the screens in time to see two priests departing in the opposite direction. She squinted after them, convinced they, too, were soaked up to at least their waists, still in their clerical black. Splashes of water glittered over the stone floor.

A lone light shone from overhead, and at the furthest edge of its pool on the ground stood Elijah Mather. In the shadows to his right was a high-backed wooden chair. Before him, under the focus of the spot, was a long, open rectangle in the floor where water danced in wavelets. A baptistery.

They drowned her. They fucking drowned her.

Mather stood like a marble statue in his white cassock, his eyes following Buckeye as the guards brought her opposite the font. Movement in the darkness at his back materialized into the forms of two more priests: Brother Raymond and a face she remembered attached to the name Levi. He’d met Mather at the door that first day.

“Perhaps this one will deliver results,” Mather said.

The other two rounded the baptistery, taking her arms from the guards with something of a gentler grip. The men in grey took up positions on the near side of the screens, boots in a wide stance, arms folded over their chests. Buckeye began to shiver.

The priests, only in their black shirts and trousers again, no cassocks, guided her near the water’s edge. A squeeze at her upper arm came from Raymond’s side, but she didn’t dare look at him.

“I believe you have a gift,” said Mather. “Perhaps you will be the one.”

Brother Levi shored up his grip on her right arm and Raymond let go to approach one of the short sides of the baptistery. He stepped straight down into it—stairs, she guessed—trousers and all, some dark object in his hand he kept lifted out of the water.

“Obedience is necessary, and that you have come to show us,” said the priest in white, “but we require one who can provide a full surrender into service. Who will place their complete faith into the Church. Into the crook of its shepherds. Brothers Levi and Raymond will help us determine if you are that servant.”

Full surrender. Those empty eyes.

Buckeye swallowed.

At her feet, Raymond stood dead center in the baptistery, its edge hitting him just above the waist. He held a hand up to her. She blinked. Looked at Mather.

“Kneel,” he said.

A subtle pressure came from Levi on her shoulders, and she felt the menace of the guards and their batons behind her without having to turn around and see. Raymond waited, dark eyes guileless, and Buckeye twitched under a flash of memory. Those eyes above her. That jaw slack. Her hips meeting his.

Wrong. This is wrong. They’re gonna kill you, Bucks.

By the time her knees met the floor, her teeth were chattering.

Kill you! Do something! Run!