Perhaps it was just the residual effect of the crucifix and all the crosses they had used to line the walls. That had to be it. The unsettling aftertaste would fade as the night wore on. Oh, yes. His nightbrothers and sisters from the nest would see to that.
He focused his attention on the man behind the altar and laughed when he realized what he held in his hands.
"Pepsi, Joseph? You're trying to consecrate Pepsi?" He turned to his nest siblings. "Do you see this, my brothers and sisters? Is this the man we are to fear? And look who he has with him! An old Jew, a young woman, and a parish hanger-on!"
He reveled in their hissing laughter as they fanned out around him, sweeping toward the altar in a wide phalanx. The young woman, the Jew, and Carl—he recognized Carl and wondered how he'd avoided capture for so long—retreated to the other side of the altar where they flanked Joseph. And Joseph . .. Joseph's handsome Irish face so pale and drawn, his mouth stretched into such a tight, grim line. He looked scared to death. As well he should be.
Palmeri put down his rage at Joseph's audacity. He was glad he had returned. He'd always hated the young priest for his easy manner with people, for the way the parishioners had flocked to him with their problems despite the fact that he had nowhere near the experience of their older and wiser pastor. But that was over now. That world was gone, replaced by a nightworld—Palmeri's world. And no one would be flocking to Father Joe for anything when Palmeri was through with him.
Father Joe . . . how he'd hated it when the parishioners had started calling him that. Well, their Father Joe would provide superior entertainment tonight. This was going to be fun.
"Joseph, Joseph, Joseph," he said as he stopped and smiled at the young priest across the altar. "This futile gesture is so typical of your arrogance."
But Joseph only stared back at him, his expression a mixture of defiance and repugnance. And that only fueled Palmeri's rage.
"Do I repel you, Joseph? Does my new form offend your precious shanty-Irish sensibilities? Does my undeath disgust you?"
"You managed to do all that while you were still alive, Alberto."
Palmeri allowed himself to smile. Joseph probably thought he was putting on a brave front, but the tremor in his voice betrayed his fear.
"Always good with the quick retort, weren't you, Joseph. Always thinking you were better than me, always putting yourself above me."
"Not much of a climb where a child molester is concerned."
Palmeri's anger mounted.
"So superior. So self-righteous. What about your appetites, Joseph? The secret ones? What are they? Do you always hold them in check?" He pointed to the girl in the leather jacket. "Is she your weakness, Joseph? Young, attractive in a hard sort of way. Is that your style? Do you like it rough? Are you fucking her, Joseph?"
"Leave her out of this. She just showed up today."
"Well, if not her, then who? Are you so far above the rest of us that you've never given in to an improper impulse, never assuaged a secret hunger? You'll have a new hunger soon, Joseph. By dawn you'll be drained—we'll each take a turn at you—and before the sun rises we'll hide your corpse from its light. You'll stay dead all day, but when the night comes you'll be one of us."
He stepped closer, almost touching the altar.
"And then all the rules will be off. The night will be yours. You'll be free to do anything and everything you've ever wanted. But blood will be your prime hunger, and you'll do anything to get it. You won't be sipping your god's thin, cold blood, as you've done so often, but hot human blood. You'll thirst for it, Joseph. And I want to be there when you take your first drink. I want to be there to laugh in your self-righteous face as you suck up the crimson nectar, and keep on laughing every night as the red hunger carries you into infinity."
And it would happen. Palmeri knew it as sure as he felt his own thirst. He hungered for the moment when he could rub dear Joseph's face in the reality of his own bloodlust.
"I was just saying Mass," Joseph said coolly. "Do you mind if I finish?"
Palmeri couldn't help laughing this time.
"Did you really think this charade would work? Did you really think you could celebrate Mass on this?"
He reached out and snatched the tablecloth from the altar, sending the Missal and the piece of bread to the floor and exposing the fouled surface of the marble.
"Did you really think you could effect a transubstantiation here? Do you really believe any of that garbage? That the bread and wine actually take on the substance of"—he tried to say the name but it wouldn't form—"the Son's body and blood?"
One of his nest sisters, Eva, a former councilwoman, stepped forward and leaned over the altar, smiling.
"Transubstantiation?" she said in her most unctuous voice, pulling the Pepsi can from Joseph's hands. "I was never a Catholic, so tell me ... does that mean that this is the blood of the Son?"
A whisper of warning slithered through Palmeri's mind. Something about the can, something about the way he found it difficult to bring its outline into focus...
"Eva, perhaps you should—"
Eva's grin broadened. "I've always wanted to sup on the blood of a deity."
The nest members hissed their laughter as Eva raised the can and drank.
Palmeri watched, unaccountably fearful as the liquid poured into her mouth. And then—
LIGHT!
An explosion of intolerable brightness burst from Eva's mouth and drove him back, jolted, cringing.
The inside of her skull glowed beneath her scalp and shafts of pure white light shot from her ears, nose, eyes—every orifice in her head. The glow spread as it flowed down through her throat and chest and into her abdominal cavity, silhouetting her ribs before melting through her skin. Eva was liquefying where she stood, her flesh steaming, softening, running like glowing molten lava.
No! This couldn't be happening! Not now when he had Joseph in his grasp!
Then the can fell from Eva's dissolving fingers and landed on the altar top. Its contents splashed across the fouled surface, releasing another detonation of brilliance, this one more devastating than the first. The glare spread rapidly, extending over the upper surface and running down the sides, moving like a living thing, engulfing the entire altar, making it glow like a corpuscle of fire torn from the heart of the sun itself.
And with the light came blast-furnace heat that drove Palmeri back, back, back until he had to turn and follow the rest of his nest in a mad, headlong rush from St. Anthony's into the cool, welcoming safety of the outer darkness.
ZEV . . .
As the undead fled into the night, their Vichy toadies behind them, Zev stared in horrid fascination at the puddle of putrescence that was all that remained of the undead woman Palmeri had called Eva. He glanced at Carl and Lacey and caught the look of dazed wonderment on their faces. Zev touched the top of the altar—clean, shiny, every whorl of the marble surface clearly visible.
He'd witnessed fearsome power here. Incalculable power. But instead of elating him, the realization only depressed him. How long had this been going on? Did it happen at every Mass? Why had he spent his entire life ignorant of this?
He turned to Joe. "What happened?"
"I—I don't know."
"A miracle!" Carl said, running his palm over the altar top.
"A miracle and a meltdown," Lacey added from behind Zev. He felt her hand on her shoulder. "Rabbi, are you feeling what I'm feeling?"
He turned to her. "Feeling how?"
She lowered her voice. "That this shouldn't be happening? That there's got to be another explanation?"
Zev wondered if the lost look in her eyes mirrored his own.
"Explanations I'm running short on."