Blood of the Lamb (19 page)

Spencer sighed, and took the opportunity to ask, “Whom do you suppose is behind it? This abduction?”

Livia shrugged. “There are other factions, other people besides Jonah who’re impatient to Unveil. Any one of them might want to force the issue the same way Jonah does.”

Spencer looked skeptical. “To take this action and make this threat—to send the priest back here to us—they’d have to know what you’ve been told to do and why the priest is in Rome at all.”

“Father Thomas Kelly,” Livia told Spencer, waiting for the Pontifex to come on the line. “That’s his name.”

25

It was all Thomas could do to force himself to stay seated. He had to, though. If he stood, he knew he’d run again from this house, and this time he’d keep going. How long should he give her? Half of him hoped she’d never come back. The other half feared the mortal danger—no, the immortal, the eternal danger!—to Lorenzo was becoming more real with every passing second.

This was a terror he’d never encountered before. The late-night seminary arguments and wine-fueled graduate school debates about free will had never covered this territory: the possibility that a man could lose his soul not through his own choices but through the actions of another. Confession, penance, and absolution: these were central to Thomas’s faith. Any man, until his dying breath, could repent and be forgiven, could enter into the presence of God though he had denied him all his life. But redemption and God’s grace, lost forever because a monster chose to make you a monster, also—neither Thomas nor any of his classmates had for a moment considered this. Their sophistic deliberations of free will had swirled around well-worn issues of the Lord’s omnipotence and omniscience, threadbare questions of paradox with the answers always the same: God, in his omnipotence, gives us our own power; in his omniscience he grants us knowledge, in order that we make our own choices. He does this from hope and boundless love, to give each of us the privilege of coming to him freely, of choosing to put our souls into his care.

When this nightmare ended—this drug coma, this hallucination, yes, of course it was that—Thomas hoped he’d remember the foolish naïveté and philosophical bankruptcy of his now-blasted, ever-so-clever theology.

Of course, if this was just a hallucination, and the Noantri didn’t exist, then the stealing of one’s soul couldn’t happen, and all could go back to the way it had been before. Oh, this was marvelous! If he woke, he wouldn’t need to remember what he’d just learned, because it would be useless.

And if he didn’t wake, he wouldn’t need to remember it, because he’d never be able to forget it.

He started when the door opened, but this time he was prepared. The silver crucifix that usually hung around his neck was gripped in his hand. He thrust it out as Livia Pietro stepped back into the room. She stopped, stared, and shook her head. “Put that away.” Crossing the carpet, she sat again. “The Church has always been our enemy, Father Kelly, but we haven’t been yours. To think that the sight of a cross will have any effect on me—I’m sorry, but it’s narcissistic.”

Thomas slowly lowered his arm as she went crisply on.

“I’ve relayed your news to the Conclave. It caused a good deal of unease. The situation was already serious. Now it’s much worse. That Cardinal Cossa’s fate should be dependent on the revelation of the Concordat—this problem is of great concern to our Noantri leaders.”

Thomas had to search for his voice, but he found it. “You’ll forgive me if I withhold my thanks.”

She stared levelly, then continued. “The Conclave is not without resources. They’re attempting to find out what they can about what’s happened and to intervene if possible.”

“No!” Thomas jumped up. “Any interference could jeopardize the Cardinal further!”

“According to your thinking, his position is already dire. We disagree with your characterization of us, but it’s one of our First Laws that no Mortal is made Noantri against his will. It’s a condition of the Concordat. That document you despise.”

She glanced pointedly at his chair. Thomas, not sure he had the strength to stand in any case, sank back down.

“A brief history lesson for you, Father. First: although the Noantri did help Martin the Fifth to achieve the papacy, we weren’t the central agents of his rise. He had widespread support in the Church—that is, among
your
people. We aided him because Martin was able to understand the mutual advantages the Concordat would bring to the Noantri and to the Unchanged. His rivals, the Popes of the Avignon line, were blind to these benefits. The Concordat, in essence, obligates the Catholic Church to, as you say, cease trying to annihilate us. And yes, to provide us blood from Catholic hospitals. Blood is our sustenance, Father Kelly. This is not a choice we’ve made, it’s a simple fact. In return, we will make no one Noantri without his consent—no, more than consent: his request—and the consent of the Conclave.” She glanced away as she said that and was silent for a moment. Then she brought her gaze back to him and resumed. “We also, for our part, agree to remain hidden, not revealing our true natures. Not so hidden as we once were, though: we live in Community now, with our own kind, in cities around the world. This is a great comfort to us—just to be together. Because our nourishment is assured, we have no need of stealth, of violence—or of guilt. We’re no longer the feral, furtive, degraded people of the past. The Concordat has given us that.”

“You still say ‘people.’ You are not people.”

“We are. Each of us started as you are today. As a Mortal man or woman. ‘Unchanged’ is the word we use. The Change comes about through a micro-organism introduced into the blood. It alters the structure of our DNA.” She gave a slight smile. “You look surprised.”

“To hear you speak of a devil’s bargain in such cold and scientific terms.”

“It is science—it’s not supernatural. The devil, whether he exists or not, has nothing to do with this. A microbe mutated in the blood of a small number of early humans. Possibly, at first, only one. It causes a need, and a great thirst, for human blood, and grants DNA the ability to rapidly repair cells. Our cells don’t deteriorate. So we don’t die. That’s it.”

Thomas drew a breath. “I’ll remind you that the very essence of evil is to be subtle. Do you really think that because your unnatural bargain was made with a microbe and not a man with horns and a tail, it’s any less the work of Satan?” Who, until today, Thomas might have been willing to argue was only a metaphor, an externalized manifestation of the human capacity for cruelty. Or, alternately, a distilled and focused expression of the evil that did exist in the Universe, brought into being by, and purposefully in contradistinction to, the goodness of God. Right now, though, if Satan walked through the door wearing his horns and tail, Thomas wouldn’t blink.

“Couldn’t your God have created this microbe?” Pietro asked. “In fact, in your view, how else could it have gotten here?”

“The Lord also created knives and guns. He gives us the privilege of choosing whether to use them.” On firmer ground now that he was engaged in theological debate, Thomas added, “People were not meant to live on this earth forever. Only through death can man achieve eternal life.”

“Really, Father? Do you say that to the doctors at your hospitals? The ones who stop people from dying every day? Some of whom are Noantri, by the way.”

Thomas felt the firm ground slipping. “The doctors?”

“And the lawyers, and the cabdrivers. And”—Pietro pointed to herself—“the university professors. You’ve lived beside us and known us all your life, Father Kelly.”

“No. That can’t be true.”

“It is. The Noantri came into being long ago. Before your Church, before the religions and belief systems from which your Church sprang. Before written history began. We’ve been here since the start of humankind.”

“So has evil.”

“True but irrelevant.”

Thomas shook his head. “Even if your explanation is correct, the microbe itself was clearly sent by Satan.”

Pietro smiled. “That’s not so clear to us. And to your point about eternal life, you may be right. We don’t know. What we have may only be longevity. Extreme, but not eternal. Some of our scientists think we may be deteriorating, as you are, just at a rate so slow as to be undetectable.”

Thomas found himself asking, in spite of his repugnance, “Can you . . . die?”

“We can. Not of natural causes, because of the rapidity of repair of our cells. And certainly not of silver bullets or stakes to the heart at a crossroads at midnight. Or an overdose of garlic.”

“Or,” it occurred to Thomas, “sunlight. I was with you, in the sun.”

“The Change heightens all the senses and makes us extremely responsive to our environment. We hear and see exceptionally well, for example, so most of us dislike loud noises. By that same token, bright light is painful, and for those of us who’re naturally pale, our skin sunburns easily. It’s not dangerous but it hurts, and pain is also something we feel more acutely than you do. So we wear sunglasses. And long sleeves, and hats. It was a Noantri chemist who developed sunscreen.”

“But stakes to the heart—” A scene from earlier in the day flashed before Thomas. “Surely, if I’d stabbed Spencer George in the heart . . .”

“No. It’s complex and still poorly understood, but there seems to be a sort of critical mass of blood and soft tissue that, as long as it’s maintained, will eventually repair or, if needed, replicate, the rest of the body. It can take a long, long time, depending on the damage, but it will happen. In this case, Spencer’s heart would have stopped, and the whole thing would’ve been messy, but after a day or a week of deep coma he’d have been back with us.”

“Rising from the coffin. That’s why they say you rise from the coffin.”

Pietro nodded. “That’s exactly right. We don’t sleep in coffins, of course not. But once buried, we can ‘rise again.’ It’s not really that, because it’s not really death. But we understand why it seems like it, to the Unchanged.”

And the dead shall be raised

Incorruptible

Thomas shuddered. The gift promised to all humanity at the Last Trumpet, usurped and perverted. “But you say you can die.”

“Yes. In two ways, one more widely understood than the other. First, by fire. Some chemical process involved in the Change makes our flesh more vulnerable to fire than yours. I’m not a scientist so I can’t explain it but if you want—yes, all right, never mind. The result is that fire can rapidly destroy us. If our bodies are completely consumed, there’s nothing left to initiate the process of regrowth.”

“There’s always something. A tooth, a bit of bone.”

“Bone and tooth don’t live in the same way. Or hair, or nails. Soft tissue is what’s needed. Living tissue, containing blood, which is what can be destroyed by fire.”

“And the other way?”

“Obviously, complete dismemberment would, at some point, eliminate that critical mass. How small you’d have to chop us”—to Thomas’s horror, she smiled—“that’s something we don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Because what Noantri would volunteer for that experiment?”

“Volunteer?” A wild laugh escaped him. Fiends with medical ethics? “Why not just, I don’t know what you call it, infect a bunch of people? Then you could chop them into pieces and see if they spring back to life!”

She stared. “You can’t really believe we’d do that?”

He didn’t answer.

“No,” she said, calmly and firmly. “We consider our Changed lives a great gift. A Blessing. What you’ve suggested would make any Noantri ill even to contemplate.”

Thomas felt ill himself. “But you can burn. So when you reach the fires of hell . . . But how will that happen, if you don’t die . . . ?”

“Well, Father, perhaps you can take comfort in the knowledge that millions of years from now, the earth will fall into the sun. Then the Noantri will all be destroyed. We’ll die, and, if there’s a Last Judgment, we’ll be judged.”

“You can’t be judged. You have no souls.”

“How can you be sure?”

Thomas looked around him, for help, for guidance. He was a Jesuit; he wasn’t a scientist, but he was a scholar, trained not to shy away from the conflicts between fact and faith. Nor had he, ever. Ultimately, he saw those contradictions themselves as a gift from God: they were why faith was required. If God’s goodness, if even his existence, could be proved, then what was man bringing to the table? What were we offering God? Faith was what God asked of man. It was our single gift to him. The only thing man has, and the only thing God wants.

What did that mean, then? Was it possible these—these creatures, were just another form of human life? Ultimately, as Pietro said, to die, and be judged, like all others?

Thomas looked at Livia Pietro again. For a moment, he saw her eyes as kind and her face as animated by a lively intelligence. Then:
Begotten of Satan and birthed in hell!
Inside his head, as clear as if the man himself were sitting here, Thomas heard Lorenzo’s roar.
The degradation of men’s bodies, the destruction of men’s souls. A foul and futile pledge.