Chapter 16 Ilan #2
‘Took you long enough,’ Mihály said, propping a hand on the table. Ilan squeezed the slingshot. The Izir’s skin would look quite nice with a few round bruises.
The creature had begun trembling and turned glassy-eyed in shock. Ilan set it on the table, and Mihály looked between the pair of them. ‘Who wants to give me blood?’
‘You do it,’ Ilan said, before Csilla could volunteer. Her palms were together, fingertips against her lips.
‘Hurry up,’ she said, voice stiff. ‘Don’t let him suffer.’
Mihály made a quick slice on the pad of his finger with a small, scalpel-like blade, hissing and cursing all the while. He squeezed out three fat beads of red onto the clay surface of the dish.
Then he pressed the rabbit down and cut its throat, its legs kicking weakly against the wood. Fresh blood pooled on his jacket, but he held his hand cupped around something Ilan couldn’t see.
‘Come close,’ Mihály whispered, his voice urgent and deep. He placed his hand over the dish, then let it fall back to his side.
Csilla’s face was white, as bloodless as the creature dying before them, her chest still with held breath. Ilan stepped forward, looking between the drops of human blood and the dark trickle slipping down the matted fur of the rabbit’s neck. The air had a humid, coppery tang that sat in his mouth.
There was a new tint to the Izir’s blood, and for the briefest second it pulsed, struggling for fresh life as it reached for something invisible and holy. The droplets rolled then stilled, dying a second death. Ilan’s mouth went dry. He hadn’t blinked. He couldn’t deny what he’d seen.
Mihály had moved a soul.
The bastard wasn’t lying.
Csilla’s lips were slightly parted, breath shallow, her large eyes lit with warring disgust and reverence. Ilan fought the urge to step in front of her and block the wretched sight, cutting off whatever hope it had ignited.
Mihály looked up, his perfect smile back. ‘There, now you’ve seen it. A little bit of blood, a little bit of soul.’
Ilan made a gesture over the blood, warding it against dark uses. He wasn’t entirely sure that what he’d just seen wasn’t dark. ‘That’s . . .’
‘Shadow work?’ Mihály’s tone was obnoxiously teasing. He was breathless, elated, intoxicated by his own success. ‘You just saw a miracle, and you’re going to complain?’
‘I’m . . .’ Not complaining. Concerned.
‘I know you want to kill the man.’ Mihály continued. ‘Do you really care how much of his blood gets spilled if you’re the one to do it? If it doesn’t work, at least we’ll have taken a murderer off the streets. And if it does, Csilla gets her blessing.’
The open hope in Csilla’s eyes at that was painful in its sincerity, an ember to be smothered before the blaze took the whole house down. A part of him wanted to take her head and force it to look back at the raw mess of open vein and clot-covered fur that was the price of this mad power.
This holy power.
Was the violence here so different from what he wrought in his calling? The knowledge that he, too, had spilled blood in his work sat uneasily in his chest. But he’d only struck the deserving and used pain to remove their sins. Csilla saw this as salvation, but it could damn her.
‘You’d give her a soul that stained? She’ll have to work it off the rest of her life.’
Csilla only lit more brightly at that. Of course she wouldn’t mind the thought of a life sworn back to service. He looked back to Mihály; far easier to maintain the proper disdain in his tone.
‘No, I don’t need the killer’s soul; I’ve already got one of those. I just need enough of their blood to hold it while I do the work,’ Mihály sniffed.
‘You’ve got a soul.’ Ilan repeated the words, eyes darting around the dim room. He wasn’t a child grasping his mark against ghosts. He still wanted to.
‘Not here,’ Mihály said. ‘But one close to me, one I know will welcome a second chance.’ He smiled at Csilla in a way that could have been mistaken for warmth if Ilan weren’t so used to looking for sin.
There was avarice behind his gentle touches, and Ilan was sure that Csilla wasn’t aware.
Maybe even Mihály didn’t realise. But it was always the worst sort of people who wanted nothing more than to think of themselves as good.
Csilla stiffened, tilting her head. Maybe she was more aware than he gave her credit for. He could push again if it would help wake her from whatever thrall Mihály held.
‘Is this why you’ve been preaching that there can still be form beyond death? Trying to make yourself feel better about your own ghosts?’
The Izir’s handsome face sharpened into something fierce.
‘One ghost. But I think everyone has the right to know that what is dead is not necessarily lost. There’s precedent. Angyalka. Rozalia.’ He spoke with too much fire for it to be beautiful.
‘Angyalka never fully died, and Rozalia was the lover of an actual angel. Your theology is rather self-serving.’ Miracles were miracles because they were rare.
‘And yours is far too narrow. Csilla will be quite comfortable, don’t worry for her. I’m seeing to that.’ He reached out, a finger gliding along the cream lace at her neckline.
She’d gone pale, and Ilan raised an eyebrow as her lips parted, closed, then tried again. She pulled at her collar where Mihály had touched like it choked her.
‘Csilla? Are you alright?’ Mihály ran a hand over her head, a master being gentle with a pet.
‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, not looking at either of them. ‘I’d like to go back.’
The first sensible thing that had been said here, really. And she still did look incredibly pale, trembling almost imperceptibly, alone as an untethered boat in a storm.
She just liked that he was divine.
The grieving father’s words came back to him. Kovács Lili, who had trusted Mihály’s power and the comfort it brought. And the man at the club, killed only a few feet from where Mihály had passed.
The Izir had death among his followers and death in his secret home. If he knew more, that thread of connection could lead back to the source.
Ilan stepped back from the table, resisting the urge to yank Csilla behind him. But she had made her own choice even after seeing all of this.
‘Well, Inquisitor?’ Mihály asked. ‘You can see I’ve only told you the truth about the power the divine has granted me. No lies. No heresy. Will you help us?’
He should ask to pray on it, to take it to a higher power.
But it was a struggle to conjure images of righteous saints and not shaking blood and screaming rabbits.
The draft on the back of his neck felt too much like ghostly fingers, the settling sighs of old wood like something unseen breathing in the room.
The Izir didn’t even seem to understand the horror of what he was saying.
A soul stuck to this plane wasn’t some academic curiosity: it was a person’s very essence being tortured.
The only answer to all of it was to find the killer as quickly as possible and set everything back in order. He would save Silgard, both from the violence of the murders and, once all was done, this unsettling man.
He glanced at Csilla again, so clearly putting on a mask of acceptance, as if by wanting something to be normal badly enough she could make it so. Perhaps she was right, and the Church would accept her again after all this. When she had a soul.
‘Yes,’ he answered, the mark on him heavy. ‘Damn me, but I will.’