The Relic (Cradle of Darkness 2)

My dress was all the more garish beside it. “God has never been with me.”

“Has he not? The tree branch that broke so you could be free of the noose? The snowfall after you’d been harmed by the lecher, a dust of pure white covering your tracks so you might find your way home to safety?”

I’d had enough of men of God, of the complete lunacy around me. “Then why was I hung by a priest? Why was I raped for walking home from work?”

It was as if I finally asked the right question. The man gave a breath of relief. “So that we could have this moment in a lovely garden, enjoying the view.”

Chapter Nineteen

Pearl

Interlaced so tightly around in my grip that my fingers began to swell, the rosary grew red with my dripping blood. Cracked beads, a bent cross, the man depicted suffering upon it standing before me with his hand still outstretched.

A stranger to me, nothing like the vision I had clung to. As if he understood, as if he had witnessed this revelation more times than he could count, he crooked his fingers.

I filled them.

I filled that open palm with the lie of religion, abandoning my rosary and my blood-soaked utter stupidity in those waiting fingers.

Bead by bead, the string I used to say my prayers pooled in his palm. Red, damaged, but still beautiful. He let me look for as long as I could bear. And then, as if reading his mind, he closed his palm and tucked the last vestment of my flagging faith away.

“How can you stand living with the lie?”

He didn’t seem to mind that my blood smeared his hand and clothing. Offering an elbow as if to suggest we might take a stroll through nightmares, he said, “I tell everyone the truth. No one listens. So I speak as this man or that man. I speak as I always have. I call for compassion. But my father’s world is so unbalanced. It only reflects what he’s become. There are the good parts. There are the entertaining parts. There are the parts that love his son and his creations. And then there is the famished monster. Who eats, and eats, and kills. Who devours everything in his path all while searching for you.”

The only thing I had anchoring me to this world, the one thing that had pulled me from the crypt, I knew was too good to be true and too ugly to be anything but beautiful in my eyes. “I’m not his wife or his soul. I can barely keep up with his chaos. I wasn’t his sister or his queen in a past life. I was a waitress desperate to stay in the sun, who was afraid he would realize I needed him, that he did not need me, and that he will never really love me, considering what I am.”

Gesturing toward the path, he led me away from the head and past the scattering undead, saying, “Who are you to say what you are and what you are not?”

Excuse me? I was myself talking to a pretend demigod. Acknowledging that should have split me in half, but Darius had already done the rending. “I am me!”

That. That made Jesus smile. “A girl who dreamed of a window so she might sleep safely in the sun. A kind heart who wanted nothing more than to find a home.”

“Your father can read my thoughts, you’re doing the same. That does not mean you know me.” Why were all these men so insufferable? Why was he leading me through a throng of hissing vampires who scurried away as if they might be burned by the very sunlight we discussed?

“I can’t read your thoughts. What I know is because Vladislov has written to me of you. The detail in his letters… he is deeply in love. A phenomenon I never imagined I might witness, though he had told me stories of his lost wife.”

My heart had been broken so many times. I had trusted adults. I had fought to please employers. I had wandered and begged God to lead me to someone, anyone who might take away what made me wrong. And where had God led me? To an alley where Malcom had ripped my fangs from my skull. But he had not been able to remove my cravings.

Where had God been in that? Where had God been while Darius had done things I could not recall? Lip shaking in a way I hated, eyes prickling, I dared to ask, “And all my prayers?”

Where my arm was tucked into his, he patted me gently. “God heard them.”

No, he had not. And nor had this man. “But I prayed in your name. I prayed to your holy mother.”

“And that was foolish. Where in the scant, centuries-old catalogued recordings of my teachings did I ever say that prayers should be made to me or to my mother? Would that not be idolatry?”