Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

The first consequential book I read was the Bible and then, when I finished that and expressed interest in more, my grandpa gave me the Quran, the three sacred texts of Judaism referred to as the Tanach, and the Sutras of Buddhism. I can still remember being small, my legs too short to reach the floor when I sat in the pews, kicking my Mary Janes back and forth as I asked my grandpa all the spiritual questions of my youth.

Was there one God or different Gods for different religions?

Why did God let people die?

Where did they go?

Why was there so much suffering if God was good?

Why did God make Loulou so sick?

My grandpa didn’t mind my critical questions. He was patient, calm, and filled with gratification as he spoke about his Christian God. Even later, after Loulou was diagnosed for the second time with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, after our father hit her for loving the wrong man and cast her out of the house, after he himself was revealed to be corrupt and then murdered in cold blood, my grandpa maintained that God was good, but he did not castigate me for distancing myself from the Lord.

By the time I was a teen, God was not my best friend. I’d shed that romanticism along with my perception that my father was a hero and my mother a princess, as well as that childish notion that good people deserved good things.

I’d learned the truth of life. That there was no great power looking out for you, no fate preordained in the stars that controlled your life to the letter.

Life was more luck than destiny, more choice than subjugation.

Life was quite simply what you made of it.

I’d determined to make mine happy, no matter the setbacks.

Still, I attended First Light Church every Sunday for service to listen to my grandpa preach about the finer points of his religion, about love and charity, about community and acceptance. I loved to sit in the same front pew I had as a girl, close my eyes, swing my legs and listen to that melodic, reverent cadence of his voice pulling wisdom from the Bible. I loved the echoing silence hovering in the peaks and turrets of the old stone structure and the veneration emanating from the walls as if years of worship had imbued the brick and mortar with sentient feeling.

It soothed that restless darkness in my chest, like a lullaby for my demons.

I loved the community too. My grandpa’s flock hadn’t turned their backs on my mother and me after the scandal of my father’s death. Far from it, they’d turned up at our little rented bungalow after we were turned out of the mayor’s mansion and brought with them food and endless support.

So, First Light remained an integral part of my life.

I sat in the front pew as my grandpa finished his sermon about embracing self-love. My mother was beside me, dressed beautifully, not a hair out of place, but I could see the shimmer in her eyes as the words resonated with her as deeply as they did with me.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Grandpa quoted from Romans 12:2 and then looked out over the gathering in that way he had of somehow looking everyone simultaneously in the eye. “We must not all be exactly alike to live a life worthy of God’s grace. Instead, we must follow the path our hearts set out for us so that we might find fulfilment in ways more than just spiritual, but equally profound.”

I considered that as he said his final blessing, and everyone echoed, “Amen,” before dispersing into their social groups.

It shocked me to realize that I had been conforming to an old sect of beliefs and social mores that were no longer relevant. I was not the mayor’s second daughter, the good girl relegated to the shadows. I had things of import to offer the world, complicated, beautiful things as unique to me as my own fingerprint.

I’d chained my dark thoughts and natural deviancy like some rabid beast inside my chest and never given it room to breathe. It made me wonder if those predilections had grown stronger because of my neglect and now, temperamental and too big for that cage, they knocked recklessly at the door to my soul dying to get out.

Naturally, my mind went to Priest and our kiss the day before. My fingers traced the healing split in my lip as I remembered his sheer ferocity coupled almost contradictorily with his restraint. He was such a powerful man, strong enough to break my neck with a twist of his tattooed hands, but instead, he’d only shackled me with one. He let me feel all that considerable violence leashed tenuously by his control. Whether or not the control stemmed more from his loyalty to the club or from his lack of desire for me, I wasn’t sure, but the romantic in me hoped it was the former.