Flesh-&-Bone(54)

Then Saint John of the Knife turned and melted like a bad dream into the darkness that lurked under the tall trees.

Benny and Nix stood there, sword raised, gun pointing, mouths hanging open.

The birds and monkeys were silent in the trees, and the whole forest seemed to hold its breath. Drops of blood glistened on leaves that trembled and swayed. Nix lowered her pistol and began to tremble all over. Benny wrapped his arm around her, but he had his own case of the shakes and wasn’t sure he was able to offer any real comfort.

“What just happened?” breathed Nix, her voice small and fragile. She used her thumb to gingerly uncock the pistol’s hammer and lower it into place. “I mean, seriously . . . what just happened?”

“I—I don’t know,” Benny admitted.

“Did I provoke him? Did I just make it worse?”

“No,” Benny lied. “I don’t think so.”

They backed away from the spot where the man—the reaper—had stood. Then, after five paces, they turned and ran as far and as fast as they could.





33

THE MAN CALLED SAINT JOHN STEPPED OUT FROM BEHIND A TREE AND watched the two teenagers run away.

When he’d left them, he’d gone into the woods and then circled around on their blind side, standing downwind of them so he could study them. He could have come up behind them and cut their throats, and his hands ached to do just that, but he was caught in a moment of indecision.

Before he had confronted them, Saint John had heard the boy call the girl “Nyx.”

Nyx was the mother of his god.

He rubbed at the cut on his arm and frowned in doubt. His vexation with them had been righteous but hasty. Were they, in fact, heretics who profaned her holy name?

Or . . . was this some kind of test?

He chewed on that. It would not be the first such test laid before him. He remembered that night a few days after the gray plague started when he found a wretched woman being chased through the streets of a burning city by a pack of abusive men. Saint John had seen such horrors a thousand times as the world crumbled and died, but this one instance drew his attention. On some level too profound for him to fully grasp, the events were part of a test of his faith and his resolve. It was a subtle test, and even after all these years he could not understand every aspect of it; but what was important was that he recognized it as a test.

Against his habits and better judgment, Saint John had helped that woman. He saved her from the men by opening red mouths in their flesh. Their souls flowed into the darkness.

The woman appeared to flee from him, but soon Saint John found her hiding in a church. Hiding with twenty-seven angels. Twenty-seven celestial beings who had chosen to take human form, pretending to be orphaned children.

They had adopted Saint John, and he had adopted them.

Had he not accepted the challenge of that first test, Saint John would never have met the woman who would become the pope of his Night Church.

Mother Rose.

And the twenty-seven angels?

They were his first reapers.

Saint John raised his arm to his mouth and slowly, sensually licked up each drop of his own blood. It was hot and salty, smelling of copper and tasting like iron. Saint John’s eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. Even his own blood was so delicious. All blood was delicious.

He wondered, not for the first time, if there were really vampires in the world, and if they were not merely men like him whose minds had been opened by God so they could appreciate the perfect taste of blood.

He decided that this was probably the case.

In the distance he heard a scream that rose louder than the roar of the quads on which his reapers went about their sacred work. Was it male or female? It was hard to say, because there is a level of pain so pure that it strips away gender and identity, and that was what he heard now.

Saint John nodded his appreciation. Most of the reapers were ordinary folk—believers, true, but in no other way exceptional. They were blunt.

Whoever sculpted that scream was one of the special ones. One of his angels—of which only nine were left on this side of the darkness—or one of the recruits who had fully embraced the way of the blade and the glory of the red mouth.

He smiled and nodded to himself.

He began to walk through the woods, following the footprints of the girl who called herself Nyx and the boy who served as her knight. He did not hurry. The world’s clock had run down, and haste was irrelevant.

In all it had been a good week’s work. Twenty-five hundred of the heretics had gone into the darkness at Treetops. Only six hundred of them escaped the burning of their town. Of those, four hundred reached the mountains of southern Nevada. Barely two hundred made it to this patch of wild forestland in the arid Mojave.