Blood of the Lamb (37 page)

Yes.

It was stronger, richer, deeper. More immediate, more propulsive. Though he stood two yards from her, his fingertips could feel the silk of her skin, his palms the wildness her hair would offer if, as his hands longed to do, they reached to unfasten her braid. Her scent, that night-blooming jungle, permeated his senses, and every movement she made, every swing of hip or sweep of arm, arrested his gaze. He longed for her. He’d hidden this truth from himself behind a meandering excursus about Saint Ignatius Loyola; but now she’d said it, and he couldn’t deny it. And to whom could he confess it? What would he even say? That he, who had vowed to yield to no such wordly hunger, now ached for the touch of a creature not even of this world, a being with no soul and no place in the afterlife?

And how could he confess it, until he really, truly, felt it was wrong?

Ignatius Loyola, who had stood in this very room, had founded an order based on intellectual rigor and natural law. Thomas had joined that order with joy. His life thus far had been spent fearlessly pursuing the truth, confident that the light of reason would chase away the shadows of superstition and ignorance. His Church had agreed, maintaining that belief in the supernatural was error and, even when, in former times of ignorance, indulged in by the Church itself, had ever been so. God’s mystical nature and his miracles were one thing, not to be rationally understood; but demons, succubae, and other such creatures were mere metaphors, images useful to reveal the evil in all of us.

But here he was, Father Thomas Kelly, standing in Saint Francis’s cell with one of those creatures, yearning for her touch.

Her claim, of course, was that her people were not supernatural, just humans with a virus in the blood. Maybe so, but that didn’t change another fundamental point. The Church had always known about the Noantri. For centuries it had hunted them. That path, brutal as it was, made sense in the days of irrational belief. Then—still in those days—Martin the Fifth suddenly signed a document that began six hundred years of simultaneously trafficking with the Noantri, and denying their existence. Six hundred years during which the Church had maintained a position it knew to be false.

What else, then, was false?

The efficacy of confession?

The sanctity of the Host?

The need for priestly celibacy?

An old familiar voice, one he’d thought he’d never hear again, came whispering back to him now.

Thomas—really?

69

Her back to Thomas, Livia stood facing the polished wood and painted saints of the tall altarpiece in Saint Francis’s otherwise stark cell. She bit her lip to keep from speaking, planted her feet so she’d stay still, so she wouldn’t spin around and demand that Thomas tell her why they were here and how to find the next poem. The priest was teetering on a narrow ledge, she sensed. And so was she.

She’d hidden it from herself behind the immediacy of effort: slipping from the confessional, working their way through the shadows to the sacristy, picking the lock. Listening to Thomas’s discourse on saints and holy orders. Worrying about the oddness she sensed in him. Now, in the silence of the stone cell, she could no longer deny it.

Seeing Jonah, his grin and his broad shoulders, smelling his sweat, hearing his laugh, had thrown her into a cyclone of confusion.

She’d thought, for so long, that all that was behind her. Jonah had left her long ago. On a gray autumn afternoon, the entire world outside the windows dispirited, he’d gazed into her eyes across a gulf of disappointment, saying sadly that he could see she wouldn’t change. That she’d always be content to follow the rules, to live in the past, to hide her Blessings and mimic the mediocrity of the Unchanged around her. The necessity of that, he said, had ended long ago, and he’d tried every way he could think of to show her he was right; but he realized now that she’d never understand. She was afraid, or she was comfortable, or she was uninterested in a longer, broader view of the world; whatever the chains that were holding her back, he couldn’t let them bind him, too. The future was calling him forward, he said, and he kissed her and turned away.

She’d thought then that she’d understood who and what he was. She’d mourned their love, staggered under a weight of loss and guilt, but she’d come back to Italy, to Rome, and started life anew. Through the years since, she hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t heard from him, or even about him. She’d lived each day still believing she was right and he was wrong. Believing that over the years, as he deepened in understanding of the life he now had, the life of her people, he’d come to realize that.

It would be too late for them then, was too late for them from the moment he strode out the door without looking back, leaving her in the chill of a dusk that came too early. Her victory would be hollow, so personally meaningless that she never thought of it as a victory at all. But she did feel comfort imagining Jonah settling into a rich, fruitful Noantri life. Picturing him somewhere back at his work, studying, exploring, endlessly immersed in beauty: it was their love of art that had brought them together, had given rise to their love of each other. She’d hoped he’d think of her now and then, and that the memory would be a warm one.

But now, suddenly, frighteningly, she wondered.

It was the confessional that had opened the floodgate of her questions, not what she’d said to Thomas as much as the small dark booth itself. Hiding behind a heavy door, concealing herself in fear—this was the Noantri life. This was the life the Concordat had brought about. Yes, and Community; yes, and assimilation, which brought with it the gift of normal days, of street corner cafés and neighbors who knew her, students to teach and a house to maintain. And friendship, people she loved among both Noantri and Unchanged.

But would all this not still be possible if the Noantri Unveiled?

Maybe Jonah was right. Maybe science was ready to lead the way to Unchanged acceptance of her people, once they were understood to be no threat; and maybe the fear she and every Noantri now felt, not of discovery by the Unchanged as in the days Before, but of the wrath of the Conclave, could be banished forever.

Facing the altarpiece, Livia could not shake off this new idea: that she could find Jonah and tell him she understood now and was ready to join him. That she could disobey the Conclave. Jonah—she knew this from the look she’d just seen in his eyes—would embrace her. He would publish the contents of the Concordat. The Noantri would Unveil, and a new day would begin.

The outlines of that new day, just starting to emerge from the swirl of sensations she was feeling, were shattered by a loud pop.

Before her, the saints on the tall painted panels began to move. She stepped back in instinctive alarm as, with piercing creaks, the panels slowly rotated, vanishing into the altarpiece. The low light in the cell bounced off a moving forest of gold, silver, and glass, which slowed and came to a stop facing her: reliquaries, dozens of them, hidden behind what she hadn’t even known were doors.

70

“What . . . ,” Livia sputtered. “How did you . . . ?”

“I told you,” Thomas said. “I’ve made this pilgrimage before.” He stepped back to the middle of the room, leaving open the small door on the altarpiece where the switch was hidden.

“‘He lays the sweet machine upon the stone.’ There.” Thomas pointed to a recess in the wall, where an unimposing rock was locked away behind a grate, to be viewed and venerated like the precious object it was. “Francis’s pillow. Ignatius used it, too. The sweet machine,
la dorce machina
, that would be his body. But there’s another machine here, too. This one. That’s what it’s called,
Il Macchina.
Thomas of Spoleto built it in 1704 to house relics Lorenzo di Medici donated to this church.”

“But—it still works?”

“It’s spring-loaded. As long as the friars replace the springs every few decades, it’s fine. I think they need to oil the hinges, though. It shouldn’t creak like that.”

“And Lorenzo di Medici? He was a fan of Saint Francis? That’s a stretch.”

“Desperation to get into heaven makes strange bedfellows.”

“Desperation of any kind does that, I suppose. Like you and me.”

He looked at her. He had to be able, he’d decided, to look at her, if they were to continue. And they had to continue. Lorenzo may have lied to Thomas, the Church may have lied to everyone, but Lorenzo was still a man and even if it were remotely possible that the Noantri were actually people, just a different kind of people, still, becoming one was the sort of choice a man should be able to make for himself. Not have made for him, by someone who considered him an enemy.

“Yes.” Steadily, he returned her gaze. “Like you and me.” He kept his eyes on hers, found he could, in fact, look at her, and was relieved (though he already regretted the choice of the word “bedfellows”). It might not be wise, though, to stand too near her. He took a step forward, toward the newly revealed shelves of caskets, boxes, stands, and tiny treasure chests in which rested particles of bone and hair that had once been living, breathing saints.

“Well,” Livia said, “I’m very impressed.”
She moved forward, to stand at the altar also, but to his relief she kept a space between them. “But there must be over a hundred reliquaries here.” She stepped up on the small stone ledge where the altarpiece sat. Reaching out, she tentatively pushed and pulled at half a dozen of the gold and silver cases. “They’re fastened down. Some of them seem to be built in. It would take us hours to remove them all and search them, or search behind them or under them. How—” She stopped. “I’m sorry. I was about to ask you what we should do next.”

Thomas nodded and didn’t take his eyes off the reliquaries. He’d been trying to get inside the head of Mario Damiani; this might be a good time for the famous Thomas Kelly laser-beam concentration, that blazing focus that allowed for no distractions. “If I were leaving a poem for you”—he felt a flush of heat in his cheeks—“I’d try to think what you’d be likely to look for. Something that meant a lot to the two of us—the two of them, I mean. If I were Mario. That meant a lot to them—to Damiani and Spencer George. What would that be? You knew them.”

“Only Spencer.” He could tell she was trying to keep amusement out of her voice.

“Yes, I know that. But he—they—” He swallowed. “Or maybe, not something they shared, but something Damiani would expect Spencer George to expect him to think of . . .”

“A place,” she said, taking over. “A saint, a name. This was Damiani, so a pun, a joke, an elliptical reference. Maybe—”

Bees,
Thomas thought, trying desperately to detour his brain away from the sound of her voice.
Swarm.
It meant something. Those were the words that had led them to Ludovica Albertoni, not to this cell, but still . . .
Wings untorn.
Nothing about the Ludovica tomb particularly called for bee imagery. It was odd, almost forced, in a way nothing of Damiani’s had been before this.
Bees . . .

“Virgil!” he burst out.

“What? Where?”

“Virgil. He thought bees were immortal. That a hive could come back to life after a plague wiped it out. That would’ve appealed to Damiani, wouldn’t it? To one of your people?” The words tumbled out so fast Thomas nearly tripped over them. “He wrote about it. Virgil did. A whole beekeeping manual. Part of a larger work called ‘Farmers.’ In English, it’s called that. Virgil wrote it in Latin but he titled it in Greek.” He grinned. “‘Farmers,’ in Greek. He called it the
Georgics
.”

Livia stared at him. “You’re amazing. I’ve spent the last century among academics, but you’re amazing. Can all Jesuits do this?”

Thomas turned away to hide the glow of pride suffusing his cheeks.
Honestly, Thomas. A female vampire is impressed by your intellect and that makes you blush?
Add that to the ever-growing list of things to take into the confessional next time he had the chance. He scanned the reliquaries. Each bore a small silver plate inscribed in tiny, flowing script. The low light made them hard for him to read. He knew she could do better, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before she pointed and said, “There.” Thomas leaned forward to examine one of the larger, more elaborate of the boxes, a gold castle flying a tiny gold flag. The silver script spelled out a name that should have been obvious to them from the start. With his erudition, his love of wordplay—and his love of Spencer—Damiani had chosen images for the poem to the erotic Ludovica sculpture that would have made his lover smile. They were Noantri, the lovers, and they were homosexuals; Thomas supposed he’d have to add to his list of items to take into the confessional the fact that he hoped, when this was over, the historian got a chance to see the poem, and that it did make him smile.