Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(41)

“Look,” she said impatiently, “we both know that he’s not an angel. He’s a psychopath, a mass murderer or whatever.”

“You see him as an angel in your dreams, though,” said Ethan. He flapped his arms and then sat down heavily on the other chair. “This is bizarre. We’re talking about angels, psychopaths, and the possibility of a series of murders made to look like religious deaths. Are we imagining all of this?”

“Unfortunately,” said Dana, “I don’t think so. And that scares the heck out of me.”

He looked at her, and for a moment there was almost a shadow of a smile on his face. Not a happy smile, though. “Dana … we’re fifteen.”

“I know. But we’re not dumb kids. You’re smart, I’m smart, everyone in the science club is way smart.”

“Sure, but Jerry, Tisa, and Sylvia are no more detectives than we are.”

“I know.”

“We shouldn’t even be doing this.”

Dana looked down at the papers in her lap. “I didn’t ask to have those dreams, Ethan,” she said softly. “I didn’t ask to see Maisie. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Hey, I—”

She raised her head and fixed him with a hard, inflexible stare. “But for whatever reason, this is happening to me. Me. I don’t know why, but I have to believe there is a point to all this.”

“Why? You didn’t know any of them. What makes you so special?”

He stopped as if he realized how his last question sounded, in both tone and meaning. “Wait—”

“Forget it,” she said as she stood up.

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I have to go, though.”

“Want me to walk you home?” he asked awkwardly, but Dana shook her head.

“I’m not going home,” she said as she stood. “I’m going to the library.”

Ethan stood, too. “Let me put this stuff away.”

“You don’t have to come with me,” she said.

He grinned. “Yeah, I do.”





CHAPTER 37

Abigail Smith Public Library

4:19 P.M.

The Smith Library—informally known as the Abby to everyone—was one of the few things Dana genuinely liked about the town.

It was oddly large for so small a town, the result of a huge bequest in the will of a rich novelist who had lived all her life in the area. The building had once been Abigail Smith’s estate, but the huge tract of land on which it once sat was now the town of Craiger. Her mansion had been converted into a library and was one of the largest buildings in town, second only to the combined city hall and public works complex. There were rooms upon rooms of books, and a good-sized staff employed by Smith’s estate. It had become the local custom, Dana learned, for families to donate the personal libraries of family members who passed, and so the Abby’s collection swelled. The building and wings headed in all directions, and they had filled two subbasements as well as an attic that, in a move of pure inspiration, had been given over to the Abby’s collection of classic and modern horror fiction. Next to Beyond Beyond, Dana and Melissa spent most of their time swimming in oceans of words and thoughts, of poetry and prose, of ideas ancient and new.

Ethan knew the layout of the old place better than she did, though, and he led her downstairs to a series of rooms crammed with nonfiction books.

“In here,” he said, pointing to a row marked WORLD RELIGION.

There were a lot of books, and the index cards did not list any with helpful titles. Nothing that said: Weird Religious Deaths. Nothing like The How-To Book of Mass Murder.

It was going to take time, and these were not topics they could tap the librarians for help with, especially the hatchet-faced woman who oversaw the basement collections and who everyone referred to as the Wicked Witch. It was Melissa’s theory that the Wicked Witch had been assigned to the cellars to keep her from scaring away most of the public. And although Dana thought that was uncharitable, she had to admit that the librarian lacked only the green skin and pointy hat to make her a good choice for a remake of The Wizard of Oz.

So, they worked through the card catalog by themselves. Dana found what she was looking for in less than twenty minutes. There was a book called Saints and Angels: A Comprehensive Guide, which had a very detailed index.

“There,” she said, tapping an entry. Ethan bent close to read it.

“‘Martyrs, pages 172 to 201.’ Jeez,” he muttered. “You really can find anything in a library. Wonder if I can find the nose to my old Mr. Potato Head. Lost it when I was eight.”

Dana flipped to the indicated pages. “I’ll go through these,” she said. “Why don’t you see what you can find about that 5-HT2A receptor agonist stuff?”

“On it,” he said, and vanished into the rows of biology and chemistry.

Dana sat down on a leather couch, pulled out her notes with the drawings she’d made of the wounds on each of the victims, and was glad that it was drawings and not photos she had to work with. Knowing that her sketches represented the deaths of people about her own age was bad enough.

The book, however, was not a comfort. It was filled with illustrations in black and white and color of woodcuts, sculptures, and paintings dating back hundreds of years. Apparently every artist in history had spent a good chunk of their time creating art about horrible deaths of important people. And there were a lot of martyrs. Hundreds of them. Thousands, according to the footnotes, when one took into account other religions, but Dana confined her search to the troubled and bloody history of the spread of Christianity. Persecution was a theme. Torture and public execution were bizarrely common, even after Christianity became the dominant religion, and a lot of the martyrs had been killed by other Christians. She already knew that, but it still made her furious. She always felt the message of Jesus’s teachings was peaceful and beautiful.