Chapter 5: The Church at Midnight (1)

Black Pine at midnight looked like a postcard from a town that had given up on itself.

Iris walked between Kael and a very nervous fox, her boots crunching on gravel that hadn't been graded since the Coolidge administration. The streetlights were off — the whole town was off, the way a theater goes dark before the villain monologues. Every window was black, but every window had something behind it. She could feel them the way you feel eyes on the back of your neck. Two hundred and forty-seven people, give or take a few corpses, all holding their breath and watching the wolf king walk their main street.

"Remind me why," Iris said, conversationally, "we're not sneaking."

"Because sneaking past two hundred people who are paid to notice you is a compliment to their competence." Kael didn't turn his head. "We're walking in the open because Victor wants us seen. He wants the town to watch the wolf king walk into his church unarmed. It's a stage. We're the act."

"Great. I love being a prop." Iris adjusted the stone in her jacket pocket. It was warm — warm enough that she could feel it through the wool, like a hand cupped against her ribs. "Rex, you're quiet. That's never happened before. Are you sick?"

Rex trotted between them, copper fur flattened against his body, tail tucked so tight it might as well have been a belt. "I'm doing professional risk assessment. Quietly. Because the last time I walked into a church at midnight, the priest tried to feed me to a font. To be fair, I had stolen his font. But still. Churches and me, we have history."

"You stole a font."

"It was a very nice font." Rex's ears twitched toward the dark. "Also, for the record, if things go badly, I'm leaving you. I want that on the record in advance. Not as a threat. As an administrative notice."

"Noted." Iris stepped off the curb. "When you run, don't cut through the diner. Mabel's got a shotgun and she knows where you sleep."

"Mabel is a monster," Rex said, with feeling. "I like her."

They walked three blocks in silence. Iris counted the windows as they went. One. Two. Fourteen. At each one, a shadow moved back from the glass, fast enough that they thought she hadn't seen it. She saw all of them. She'd grown up in Portland, where the curtains were thin and the neighbors didn't care. She'd forgotten that in Black Pine, every window was a witness box.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" She said it to no one in particular.

"What." Kael's voice was low.

"Daniel Huff. The photographer. The dead guy behind the gas station. I thought he was the first corpse this town ever made. I was wrong. He was the most recent one. This whole town is a morgue with a pothole problem."

"Did you just call my valley a morgue."

"I called your town a morgue. There's a difference. The valley has better decor."

Rex snort-laughed, then clamped a paw over his own mouth, because laughing within earshot of whatever was watching from the windows seemed unwise.

"Also." Iris kept her voice even. "Three blocks. Fourteen windows. Every single one had someone behind it. Do you know how many people in this town? Two hundred and forty-seven. Do you know how many were watching us? Two hundred and forty-seven. That's a hundred percent. That's not a town. That's a surveillance state."

"They're scared." Kael's voice was flat. "They've been scared for a thousand years. The priests taught them to be scared. It's how they keep them in line."

"Fear works."

"Fear works until it doesn't."

"And when it doesn't?"

"Then they turn on the priests." Kael's eyes were fixed on the church steeple ahead. "It's happened before. It'll happen again. The only question is which side they're on when it does."

The church rose at the end of the street the way churches do in paintings that want to make you feel small — steeple black against a sky that had no stars, walls of hand-cut stone, a door that should have been locked but stood open, spilling candlelight onto the steps. It was the same church where she'd found her mother's letter four nights ago. The same basement, the same mildew, the same hundred years of candle wax and rot.

Tonight, the rot smelled like coffee.

Iris stopped at the foot of the steps. "Before we go in. Tell me what he looks like."

"Victor." Kael said the name like he was tasting something gone off. "He wears a body the way you wear a coat. The first priest died a thousand years ago, but his soul didn't end. It walks. It finds a host in every generation — someone scholarly, someone hungry, someone who wants to fix the world and doesn't mind burning it down to do it. The host thinks he's the leader. He doesn't know he's wearing a ghost. Most days, the ghost doesn't even need to steer."

"How do we know which one is talking?"

"You don't." Kael's silver eyes were fixed on the open door. "That's the point. By the time you figure out whether it's the man or the ghost talking, he's already convinced you."

"Cheerful. Anything else?"

"He can use the leash." Kael lifted his hand. The black cracks were visible, faint, under the skin of his wrist — like old scars that had never finished healing. "Whatever I have in me. He put it there. He can pull it. He doesn't have to touch me. He just has to want to, and I remember what it feels like."