Chapter 13 Lazarus
thirteen
Lazarus
“How does it feel to be the favorite pet?” Angelo sneers, poking at me with his finger.
I brush his hand away and clench my fists at my sides. “I’m not.”
“Father’s favorite, chosen before he was even old enough. Lamb’s favorite, chosen when he was a kid. You’re their favorite pet.”
“Stop it.” I glance around for an adult but cannot find anyone nearby. Angelo confronted me while I was gathering eggs, and there is nobody here but chickens. While we were once friends, he’s become meaner and meaner by the day since I was branded and consecrated into eldership.
“You know what everyone says about you? What we all know about you?”
My gut drops as I consider his words, wondering what he knows. What they know and who they are. Surely not everyone in Bright Haven knows the shameful things I am made to do, right? Angelo laughs right in my face and takes a step closer.
“They say you’re a cocksucker,” he murmurs, grinning like it’s the funniest word he’s ever heard. “That you’re their favorite because you take their dicks and lick ‘em every night.”
Anger flicks awake inside of me, replacing all trace of anything else. I drop the basket of eggs to the ground, glaring at the boy who was once my friend. “Say it again.”
“Cocksucker,” he laughs. “And you like it too. You love it.”
Fury bursts out of me, and I leap onto him, throwing fists wildly into his face, his chest, his arms. He screams and tries to get away, but I straddle his hips, screaming right back.
I slam my fists into his face, hot, angry tears pouring down my own cheeks as his blood starts to flow, and even then I don’t stop.
I let my rage, my fear and my shame free into every punch, spitting, snarling and screaming at Angelo for speaking half of the truth and not caring to know the rest of it.
Not caring to know my side of it.
It takes two men to drag me off his limp body.
It takes five weeks for him to recover.
He never looks at me again, and I am okay with this.
“Angelo was a friend once,” I offer, lying on the mattress on my back.
The Lamb lies beside me, as he must, curled into a ball, as he does.
We ate a good meal today, bread and preserves right from the kitchens of his own home.
He hummed happily as he ate, and then got pissed off, mumbling about sin and the devil, when I told him I’d coat him in preserves and lick it all off of him until he was begging for release.
I still might do that, but time will tell. For now, I am content to explain tiny pieces of myself to him, hoping he understands why Bright Haven must pay for their sins.
“A friend?”
“Yes, once, until he turned on me. I was not sad to hear of his death.”
“How did you know about his death?” The Lamb asks, his voice timid. This is the second question he’s asked, and while I could be an ass and take food or drink away, I know I won’t. Not for a conversation I started and not for the answer he is getting in response.
“A little birdie told me.” He sighs and I laugh, turning my head to look at him. “Angelo deserved what he got.”
“I watched him die,” The Lamb whispers. “I watched Herold rip him apart and eat pieces of him. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t. Arn held me back, and he was right to do so, or I’d be dead too.”
“Arn is a piece of shit,” I comment, with another laugh.
He has always been a piece of shit, right down to his early days at Bright Haven.
Built like an ox with brains to match, yet something about him has always been slightly endearing.
He has his uses, I suppose. The Lamb snickers, and my mouth drops open.
“Laughing at your fellow man? Not very Godly of you.”
His cheeks redden and his laughter stops. “I apologize. That was unkind.”
“Is that bred into you or something? So polite. So kind. It’s disgusting.”
“My mother was kind,” he says wistfully, closing his eyes. “She was nice to everyone and taught me to be nice as much as I possibly can be. Maybe that’s why I am called to be the Blessed Lamb.”
“I doubt it.”
“God will provide the answers should He wish to,” he shrugs, yawning. “I am merely here to lead his congregation at the direction of Father. I don’t know why I was given this blood, but He knows why, and I trust in Him.”
He goes silent as I parse through that, trying to make it make sense.
There is no real tangible statement there, but there is devotion and belief, and that intrigues me.
This Lamb is good. Or at the very least, trying to be and do good, and I again don’t know what to do with that, so I put it aside for now.
“Do you know that Bright Haven isn’t the only place to worship a God?” I ask instead, curious how much he knows of the outside world.
“I would hope that many praise God.”
“Not your God. A God. Any God. There have been tons in the history of the world.”
“The true God is the God that Bright Haven worships. All others are false idols,” he mumbles, half asleep.
“That’s what they all say.”
“You have to have some belief. You use the mark of the devil as your calling card, after all.”
A laugh bursts out of me that echoes through the cabin, and The Lamb opens his eyes to look at me in question.
I chuckle again, rising from the mattress to go grab my book from the barrel.
I pluck it out, turning pages until I come across the one I’m looking for.
Sitting back down beside the Lamb, I hold the pages up for him to see.
“Witchcraft,” he whispers, staring at all the symbols.
“Astrology,” I correct. “This book is old. I found it in a house I stayed in back in Ekksha. It talks about stars and constellations, but people used to identify with them based on their birth date.”
“Explain. No question.” The Lamb yawns, but is more awake now as he scans the pages of my book.
“See here?” I point to the constellation of Leo, the lion. “The symbol for that star pattern is here. The loop with the curly off the end of it. At least, that’s my understanding.”
“So the symbol you leave behind as a mark is a star pattern?”
“Aries. The ram. For people born at the end of March and the beginning of April, like me.” Though some places do not follow the calendar anymore, Bright Haven always has. I wonder what stars the Lamb was born under. “What’s your birthday?”
“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. “I was born in the summer, but that’s all I was ever told. The sun was high and hot, and my mother labored for hours to give birth to me. My father always said that I was born a fighter, because God tried to call me home on the very same day.”
“I died on the day I was born. Ezekiel heard the midwife screaming and blew breath into my lungs to bring me back.”
The Lamb’s eyes pop open wide. “Lazarus.”
“As he named me,” I offer. “And it was Lazarus who stole all his breath fifteen years later.”
The Lamb goes silent, and I scan the pages of the book, looking for the summer months to find his star symbol. Finally, he asks. “Why? Why did you kill him?”
My gut sours, and I look away, unwilling to discuss that piece of the story. Maybe someday, but he won’t understand, I’m sure. He still thinks in the way Father demands of him, not for himself, and if he cannot see the malice of my years at the compound, I will have no choice but to end him.
I am growing quite fond of this Lamb, despite my hesitations. The company is nice, and though he frustrates me with his constant chatter about sinning and devilry, I do find him amusing. “Do you want breakfast, or do you want an answer?”
“An answer.”
“You don’t get one,” I bark back. “Pick breakfast, Lambchop.”
The Lamb nods, ducking his head. “Breakfast. No question.”
“My turn. I choose question, and I want to know what your real name is.”
“Daylan,” he responds, with the hint of a smile on his lips. “Daylan Sumner. Named for my mother Dayna and my father Landers.”
“Nothing biblical then. Good.” Daylan. His name is Daylan.
Not Mark or Matthew. Definitely not Michael, which pleases me greatly for reasons he does not know yet, but Daylan.
I roll that through my head before tossing it aside.
While it’s nice to have his real name, first and last, I am fond of my own name for him. “I’m still gonna call you Lambchop.”
“I think I’m a cancer,” Daylan mumbles, looking past me at the book.
“Could be.” I read the words beneath the image of the crab constellation and nod. “That sounds right to me.”
Intuitive. Nurturing. Kind. Sensitive. Everything the Blessed Lamb of God is meant to be and everything Ezekiel was not.
I glance over at Daylan, seeing that he has closed his eyes and fallen asleep against my shoulder.
I don’t move, letting him sleep while I continue to read about crab constellation people.