“Or . . . worse,” I said, thinking, “maybe an even more ancient corona showed up here. Something the Greeks would have attributed to a god or goddess or the witches could use to get back at the Church for a millennium of oppression, and . . .” I cocked my head and grinned at the man. His face was placid, but he stank of anger. “. . . the Church couldn’t have that, could it?”
As I spoke, the Jesuit’s nostrils flared with fury and then his skin paled with something like dread. I wasn’t good at guessing games, but I was very good at flying by the seat of my pants, and I had a feeling that I’d just flown over the priest’s home base. I thought about the smells and the white gloves. Or not just gloves. No.
“Idiot,” I said scathingly. “You tried to burn it, didn’t you? But it wouldn’t burn. It burned you instead. That’s what”—I almost said that was what I smelled, but I changed it to—“you’re hiding with the gloves. They’re bandages hiding the burned skin.”
Eli said, softly, “I talked to Joseph Makris at the Vatican.”
At the name, the priest’s eyes went wide with despair and his shoulders dropped. At the same moment he capitulated, there was a soft ding and the priest answered the cell phone in his pocket. He carried on a soft-voiced conversation before putting the phone away. Afterward, he looked even more dejected. To Eli, he said, “That was Makris. But then, you knew that, yes?”
Eli gave one of his abbreviated nods.
“We tried everything we could in the small time we were allowed. Perhaps it wasn’t for us to decipher. Perhaps we were full of hubris and foolishness.”
The priest wavered on his feet, looking drunk or hurt or . . . spelled. Yeah. Spelled and hurt both. He went on, his speech slower, his words growing less clear, slightly slurred.
“It is not of the Church, nor of the place of the skull. The writing on its rim is archaic and unlike anything I have ever seen—if it really is writing and not some form of decorative work. Not cuneiform. More ancient. Like clay tokens or runes in their simplicity, mixed with squiggly, jagged lines, lightning bolts. If it is a witch artifact, it came from an ancient past so distant that history itself has swallowed it whole.”
“Do you know what it does?” Eli asked. “What magic power it holds?”
“No. I was unable to determine anything before it . . .” He lifted both hands, and it was clear that they had been wrapped with something like medical sticky wrap and that the gloves were too large for his hands, holding the bandages in place. “I don’t know what it is, but it . . . it makes people think things they shouldn’t.” He closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly. I smelled his tears, hot and toxic. “If I had to name it,” he said, “I would call it the crown of temptation. Or the crown of despair. Desperatio coronam. It brings such grief, such anguish of the soul.” He looked to Eli. “If you find it, bring the evil thing to me, my son. I will send it to Rome, where it can be destroyed.”
“Question,” I said. “Did you start feeling unhappy and miserable before or after you tried to hurt the thing? Before or after you got burned?”
The priest’s eyes moved from Eli to his burned hands, and his lips parted.
Surprise, surprise. I shrugged. “Maybe despair and lack of clear thinking is part of a punishment for trying to hurt it. Burned hands. Grief. Maybe, like the hands, it’ll heal. And maybe it would heal faster if you let a witch heal you. Or a vamp.”
The man’s eyes blazed with righteous fury and the stink of the burn grew on the air as he clenched his hands into bloated fists. Before he could speak, I said, “Never mind. Eli, let’s get out of here before the man sets himself on fire with indignation.” Eli backed away and I followed suit, though how the priest could shoot us with burned hands seemed impossible. To be on the safe side, I angled my body to the entrance as we moved back down the nave into the narthex. And out into the noon sun.
Instantly I started sweating. Eli holstered his weapon, looking cool and unaffected by the encounter or the heat. “You want to tell me what was going on in there?” I asked.
“Yeah. My pal Joe sent back a text about a certain emblem being worn by a small, renegade group of the clergy in the Western Hemisphere.” He slipped on his sunglasses. “The emblem is a small red thing attached to their vestments. The group is composed of professor-type priests looking for magical things and magical people. A few things and a few people have gone missing.”
“Missing as in kidnapped?”
Eli shrugged, not willing to speculate.
“Think they’re working against the Mithrans?”
“Joe thinks they have an agenda that they haven’t revealed yet. And he thinks someone in Rome is responsible.”
The sun felt good on my back as we left the church grounds, but the knowledge of a sniper in the belfry didn’t. “Think he’ll shoot us?” I asked as casually as I could with sweat trickling down my spine and a target on my back.
“No. But I need to report everything to Joe.”