Chapter 15
She couldn’t help herself, even though she knew she should have more shame. She sucked on the end of the pen, watching him. She liked watching him.
It wasn’t just that he was a fairly attractive man.
In fact, although she did find him attractive, it wasn’t in the conventional sense.
In fact, when she’d first joined the Church, she hadn’t thought him all that attractive, although he wasn’t unattractive, either.
But the longer she was with the Church, the more she found herself awed and infatuated by the Reverend Preacher Dale Durant.
She would do anything for him.
Die for him, if that’s what he and God wanted her to do.
Kill for him, although the thought of that made her nervous.
She was glad she didn’t have a driver’s license.
She didn’t like taking the bus to work or here, to the Church, but she was afraid to drive.
Sometimes, one of the others would drive her.
Monica or Sharon, usually. Sometimes Rick or Bill.
Jerry had driven her once, but she didn’t like the way he drove, a little reckless, it seemed to her.
Of course, she shouldn’t judge, because hadn’t Jerry been chosen by God and the Reverend to act as Their Hand of Holy Judgment?
I swallowed, setting the pen—a generic Bic ballpoint—back on the table, then looked up at the three pairs of eyes that were watching me.
Raj wasn’t. He was staring out of the glass wall of the conference room at whatever was going on out on the main floor of the federal office building.
Or maybe he was just intentionally not looking at me.
“Did—” I had to swallow again. “Did you want me to keep going?” I asked. In theory, I should have been asking the question of Raj, but since he wasn’t looking at me, I asked Hart, instead.
The look of revulsion on Hart’s face—like that on Cass’s and Drew’s, as well—told me he didn’t want me to, but they might need me to keep going, nevertheless.
“No.” Even though he kept staring out of the room, the answer came from Raj, his tone just as disgusted as everyone else’s expressions. “That gets us what we need. Namely, that others in the Church of Holy Judgment—”
Hart let out a rude noise, and that did make Raj turn to shoot a mild glare at the back of his head.
“Others,” Raj repeated with emphasis, “in the Church of Holy Judgment were aware and approving of Durant’s promotion of anti-Nid rhetoric.”
“Not sure anti-Nid rhetoric is quite the fucking point,” Hart grumbled loudly. “Pretty sure he told his asshat minions to kill people.”
Raj sighed, his eyes seeking the ceiling, a sign, I knew, that he was frustrated. “Except that we don’t actually have an account of him saying that, explicitly.”
I tried to catch Raj’s gaze, but he was still avoiding looking at me. I wondered if I’d done something to make him upset with me, not just upset about the situation. But he wasn’t giving me the kinds of clues I could read, so I couldn’t tell.
Worry about that added to the churning mess of acidic FBI coffee, acetaminophen, and anxiety about the Church of Holy Judgment in my stomach, and I shifted uncomfortably.
“You okay, Rayn?” Cass asked, reaching out a hand to gently touch my arm.
I nodded. I wasn’t, really, but I was okay enough.
I wasn’t too tired, I wasn’t going to throw up, and my headache was almost gone.
Or, at least, it had been when Raj had picked me up at Beyond the Veil this morning.
Vi was working the desk, and I’d wanted to make sure she was all set with the post-séance paperwork before abandoning her.
I cleared my throat, and everybody except Raj looked at me. “Then I’ll do more,” I said. “In case we do have that in one of these.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Cass said.
“That’s my job,” I replied, although it was Raj I was watching. He still didn’t turn my way.
I didn’t wait for permission, and picked up the pen again, focusing on the last thing I’d gotten from it.
Jerry and Carl had both been chosen. She was glad it had been them—both because she agreed that something needed to be done about the corruption of the human race, just as the Reverend Preacher had said, but also because she would be too afraid to do it herself.
But if God called her to take action to purge the corruption from the world, called on her to destroy one of these monsters, by whatever means she had to hand, she would do so.
After all, that’s what the Reverend Preacher had told them to do—to destroy the monsters in their midst.
I sat back, my eyes closed as I tried to breathe through the anger that surged up in my chest at having to share thoughts with someone who thought of people as monsters.
Not just people, people I cared about. People like Raj.
People like Hart and Mason and Fiona… and Grace and Zane.
Babies who knew nothing about the world or why someone like this woman and her fucked up church would want to hurt them. Kill them.
I took a long, deep breath, then let it out again.
“That’s it, right?” Cass asked, turning first to Raj, who wasn’t looking at any of us, and then Hart, when it became clear that Raj was going to stay keenly interested in whatever was happening among the office cubicles outside the conference room. “That they’re supposed to destroy the monsters?”
“It could be taken metaphorically,” Raj answered, not turning around, although I could tell from his tone that he was just as angry as I was.
“Bullshit,” Hart said.
“That’s as may be,” Raj replied. “But a lawyer could still make the argument, and we need it more airtight than that.”
“Then give me something else,” I said. “If it’s here, I’ll find it.”
I didn’t find what I was looking for, although when I thought about it later, I supposed that made sense.
None of what Drew and Cass had brought back from their trip to the Church of Holy Judgment had been things that would have been carried in the service—or, at least, not handled during a service.
They were office supplies, a brochure, that sort of thing. Things that people handled while thinking about their grocery list, what they wanted to make for dinner, what time they had to pick up their kids, or, most often, what they thought about Dale Durant.
A paper clip had been handled by Durant himself, but, as Raj reminded us, the fact that he’d thought about his desire to cleanse all of the city with holy fire wasn’t enough to hold him for exhorting his followers to murder.
Hart had not been happy about that, although Raj reminded him that he was probably personally very lucky that thoughtcrime wasn’t actually prosecutable.
What I did find on the paper clip was the fact that Durant printed out his sermons in order to mark them up before he gave them.
And if the vitriol and righteous indignation on the paper clip was any indication, the sermons themselves were highly likely to contain exactly the sort of thing Raj was looking for.
The problem, of course, was that we would need to actually get a copy of one of those sermons, either a marked draft or, even better, an audio recording.
Cass had offered to go in undercover, since she and Drew had already gone in once. “We wanted more information about the church,” she argued. “So wouldn’t we want to actually attend a service?”
Drew was nodding.
“Only if this dickweed gives the same sermon to the public that he gives to his fucking cultists,” Hart replied.
Cass had frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It means that the Church of Holy Judgment undoubtedly has two faces,” Raj replied.
“One they show the world, and one they keep hidden amongst only themselves. Since you can’t exactly register your organization as one that openly advocates for the extermination of some percentage of the population—at least not yet—they can’t risk newcomers being exactly what Cass would be, if she attended a service.
” His tone was bleak, and I wanted to do something to alleviate that despair.
But since he wouldn’t even look at me for more than half a second at a time, I didn’t think he’d appreciate it if I tried touching him or asking what I could do.
“Yeah, that shit,” Hart confirmed.
“Damn,” Cass replied, slumping in her chair.
Hart’s phone buzzed, and he turned it over, then looked over at Drew.
“What about some kind of repair or building inspection?” he asked, clearly pulling the idea from a message Drew had sent him.
I’d never heard Drew speak—I didn’t know if he could or did—but that never seemed to present a problem for anyone on the team.
“It has potential,” Raj replied, his expression thoughtful. “It’d be easier if we knew what kind of repair they might actually need, though.”
“So Drew and I go back in,” Cass jumped in.
“Attend one of their public services, chat up Henny”—the secretary who had been chewing on the pen—“and see what she lets slip. We’ll mention some home repairs or something.
” She offered a fake smile at Drew. “After all, we just moved here and are struggling to get our house in order, right, honey?”
Drew snorted, then shrugged.
Raj blew out a breath. “I don’t have any better ideas,” he admitted.
“So I’ll green-light it, but the two of you need to be careful.
It’s always possible that they’ve got some connection to magic use, in which case they might be able to tell you aren’t what you pretend to be.
” He glanced over at Hart. “And I can’t send Keebler in with you to act as maydar. ”
“Maydar?” I asked, confused.
“Magic-radar,” Hart answered, then held up his hands and wiggled his long fingers. “Elves can feel magic.”
“Oh,” I replied. I could also feel magic, but I didn’t think Raj was going to even entertain the thought of me going in with them. Especially since I’m a terrible liar and I didn’t particularly want to.