Joe was glad Carl wasn't here to hear this. He wouldn't understand or appreciate Lacey's outspokenness. But that was Lacey. No excuses, no sugar coating: Here I am, here's what I think, take it or leave it. Through the years she'd made him angry at times, but then she'd smile and he'd see his sister Cathy in her face and his anger would fade away.
He pointed to the gold crucifix hanging from her neck. "But you wear a cross. Didn't you once tell me you'd die before wearing anything like that?"
"I damn near did die because I wasn't wearing one. So now I wear one for perfectly pragmatic reasons. I've never been one for fashion accessories, but if it chases vampires, I want one."
"But you've got to take the next step, Lacey. You've got to ask why the undead fear it, why it sears their flesh. There's something there. When you face that reality, you won't be an atheist or agnostic anymore."
Lacey smiled. "Did I mention I'm a devout empiricist too?"
"Like a worm, she wiggles," Zev said. "Too many philosophy courses."
Lacey turned to him. "That's not exactly a mezuzah hanging from your neck, rabbi."
"I know," Zev said, fingering his cross. "Like you, I wear it because it works. That is undeniable. Where its power comes from, I don't know. Maybe from God, maybe from somewhere else. The how and the why I'll figure out later. I've been too busy trying to stay alive to give it my full attention." He held up his hands. "Talk of intangibles we should save for the daylight. Now we should ready ourselves. I believe we'll soon have uninvited and unsavory company. We should be prepared."
Looking unhappy, Zev wandered away. But Joe didn't want to let this drop. He sensed a chance to break through his niece's wall of disbelief. By doing so he might save her soul.
He lowered his voice. "If the power of the cross is not from God, Lacy, then who?"
"Might not be a who," she said with a shrug. "Might be a what. I don't know. I'm just going with it for now."
" 'There are none so blind as those who will not see,' " Joe said.
"It's not blindness to not see something that won't show itself. Where's your god now?" She jutted her chin at Zev's retreating figure. "His god and yours—where's he been? This is Ascension Thursday, right? Think about that. Maybe Jesus ascended and kept on going. Turned his back on this planet and forgot about it. After the way he was treated here, who could blame him?"
Joe shook his head, feeling a growing anger mixed with dismay. He hated to hear his niece talk like this. "Are you still an anarchist too?"
"Damn betcha."
"Well now, it looks like you've got what you wanted—a world without religion, without government, without law—what do you think?"
Joe could tell by the set of her jaw and the flash of fire in her eyes that he'd struck a nerve.
"This is not at all what I was talking about! This undead empire is more repressive than any regime in human history. It makes Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia look like Sunday school!"
"And they're here to stay," Joe said, wondering if all today's plans and preparations weren't an exercise in futility.
He wondered where Palmeri was and how long before he got here.
PALMERI . . .
He wore the night like a tuxedo.
Dressed in a fresh cassock, Father Alberto Palmeri turned off County Line Road and strolled toward St. Anthony's. He loved the night, felt at one with it, attuned to its harmonies and its discords. The darkness made him feel so alive. Strange to have to lose your life before you could really feel alive. But this was it. He'd found his niche, his me'tier.
Such a shame it had taken him so long. All those years trying to deny his appetites, trying to be a member of the other side, cursing himself when he allowed his appetites to win, as he had with increasing frequency toward the end of his mortal life. He should have given in to them long ago.
It had taken undeath to free him.
And to think he had been afraid of undeath, had cowered in fear that night in the cellar of the church, surrounded by crosses. But he had not been as safe as he'd thought. A posse of Serfs had torn him from his hiding place and brought him to kneel before Gregor. He'd cried out and begged with this undead master to spare his life. Fortunately Gregor had ignored his pleas. All he had lost by that encounter was his blood.
And in trade, he'd gained a world.
For now it was his world, at least this little corner of it, one in which he was completely free to indulge himself in any way he wished. Except for the blood. He had no choice about the blood. That was a new appetite, stronger than all the rest, one that would not be denied. But he did not mind the new appetite in the least. He'd found interesting ways to sate it.
Up ahead he spotted dear, defiled St. Anthony's. He wondered what the serfs had prepared for tonight. They were quite imaginative. They'd yet to bore him.
But as he drew nearer the church, Palmeri slowed. His skin prickled. The building had changed. Something was very wrong there, wrong inside. Something amiss with the light that beamed from the windows. This wasn't the old familiar candlelight, this was something else, something more. Something that made his insides tremble.
Figures raced up the street toward him. Live ones. His night vision picked out the earrings and familiar faces of some of the serfs. As they neared he sensed the warmth of the blood coursing just beneath their skins. The hunger rose in him and he fought the urge to rip into their throats. He couldn't allow himself that pleasure. Gregor had told him how to keep the servants dangling, keep them working for him and the nest. They all needed the services of the indentured living to remove whatever obstacles the cattle might put in their way.
Someday, when he was allowed to have get of his own, he would turn some of these, and then they'd be bound to him in a different way.
"Father! Father!" they cried.
He loved it when they called him Father, loved being one of the undead and dressing like one of the enemy.
"Yes, my children. What sort of victim do you have for us tonight?"
"No victim, father—trouble!"
The edges of Palmeri's vision darkened with rage as he heard of the young priest and the Jew and the others who had dared to try to turn St. Anthony's into a holy place again. When he heard the name of the priest, he nearly exploded.
"Cahill? Joseph Cahill is back in my church?"
"He was cleaning the altar!" one of the servants said.
Palmeri strode toward the church with the serfs trailing behind. He knew that neither Cahill nor the Pope himself could clean that altar. Palmeri had desecrated it himself; he had learned how to do that when he became leader of Gregor's local get. But what else had the young pup dared to do?
Whatever it was, it would be undone. Now!
Palmeri strode up the steps and pulled the right door open—
—and screamed in agony.
The light! The light! The LIGHT! White agony lanced through Palmeri's eyes and seared his brain like two hot pokers. He retched and threw his arms across his face as he staggered back into the cool, comforting darkness.
It took a few minutes for the pain to drain off, for the nausea to pass, for vision to return.
He'd never understand it. He'd spent his entire life in the presence of crosses and crucifixes, surrounded by them. And yet as soon as he'd become undead he was unable to bear the sight of one. In fact, since he'd become undead he'd never even seen one. A cross was no longer an object. It was a light, a light so excruciatingly bright, so blazingly white that looking at it was sheer agony. As a child in Naples he'd been told by his mother not to look at the sun, but when there'd been talk of an eclipse, he'd stared directly into its eye. The pain of looking at a cross was a hundred, no, a thousand times worse than that. And the bigger the cross or crucifix, the worse the pain.
He'd experienced monumental pain upon looking into St. Anthony's tonight. That could only mean that Joseph, that young bastard, had refurbished the giant crucifix. It was the only possible explanation.
He swung on his servants.
"Get in there! Get that crucifix down!"