CHAPTER FORTY #2
That had been good news, and it had given him strength, which had sped his recovery.
And now, fresh from his sick bed, looking down upon Hero Viridian from the top of the hospital steps, Keen felt a strange disconnect from reality.
It seemed that no time had passed since he’d first laid eyes on her, while at the same time eons had come and gone.
Baffling. Carefully, he made his way down the steps, his legs stiff and his gait unsteady, frustrated by having to move so slowly, like an old man.
He supposed it could have been worse. By rights, he should be dead, a snack for the Devourer.
The stray thought made his lips quirk just as Hero looked up and caught sight of him. She pushed off from the wall, a very normal grin lighting her face, fangs and all, and tapped the brim of her hat with her ebony cane. “Finally,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been out here all day.”
“I don’t move as fast as I used to,” he said, trying to sound lighthearted even as his lungs burned from the effort of walking. He stopped a few steps above her and attempted to catch his breath without her noticing.
Her expression smoothed and she peered up at him. “You don’t look so great, Keen. You sure they should have released you?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I’ll be right as rain in a few days.”
She tsk ed. “Of course you will.” She copied his one-shouldered shrug. “Or we’ll all be dead. Who knows?”
“Only the Goddess.”
Her grin returned, disconcertingly broad. “You have any plans right now?”
He shook his head. “I’m not even sure where I’m going, to be honest, but I couldn’t stay back there any longer. Besides, Mother’s on her way home. I’ll have to find somewhere for the both of us.”
Hero scoffed and waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll figure that out later.” She swung her cane with a flourish, then started down the steps, swishing crinkling oak leaves out of her way. “First, we have a funeral to go to.”
A light, misting rain began to fall on the way to the cemetery.
Normally, it would have compelled Hero to quicken her pace, but Keen was so obviously struggling that she kept herself to an amble.
A little rain wouldn’t hurt her. Besides, she was in no great hurry to get to the graveyard near Clementine Preparatory.
Her not-father was buried there – not that she’d ever visited his grave.
She’d missed his funeral, too. At the time, the nuns wouldn’t let her leave the abbey, fearing she’d never return.
So she’d missed the funeral of one parent, but she didn’t plan to miss the funeral of the second – another not-parent, a not-mother this time.
Hero blew a breath between her lips and twirled her cane as the deceptively soft mist gathered on its ebony surface and made the brick sidewalk grow slick.
She felt a small trickle down the back of her neck, creeping down her spine and beneath her shirt.
Damn little hat was useless as always, but she liked how it looked, so ridiculously small.
“I’m sorry I’m slowing you down,” Keen said, huffing far too hard for the pace.
Hero slowed, reining in her long stride even further.
“I’m in no rush to get there,” she said.
It was true: she wasn’t going to miss seeing the old hag consigned to the cold, dark earth.
There was time. If anything, she’d miss the priest’s sermon and the nuns’ blessing.
Maybe even a few words from Liam. Her brother knew the truth now, but as he told Hero, the woman had raised him.
He owed her his respect and would honor her in death. By all rights, she had been his mother.
Not mine. Never mine.
“The revered mother visited me in my cell,” she said casually as they turned off Main Street and started down the broad, tree-lined avenue toward Clementine Prep.
There was only a little traffic on the road and relatively few pedestrians out and about, driven inside by the chill rain.
A woman walking her small white dog stopped to let it do its business, but she hastily dragged it across the street when she spotted Hero.
Gratitude had worn thin already. She’d ruined a number of respected families with her actions, after all.
“She apologized, if you can believe it, sincerely I think, but I could tell it hurt her physically to have to do it. She was fit to crack her teeth with all the grinding.”
“So, she wasn’t in on it? Not willingly?”
Hero shook her head. As much as she’d wanted to go after those fucking nuns, in the end they’d been innocent bystanders, ensnared by an evil much more powerful than even they were capable of dealing with.
It was almost unforgivable, really. The Order of the Shield was supposed to be the first line of defense against Pandemonium.
When they’d needed to be aware, when they’d needed to be strong, they had failed. Miserably.
“They lost their way,” she said. “Too busy maintaining their image of superiority. I’ve seen it happen far too often. The battle nuns will face a reckoning one of these days. They almost did this time around, but fate intervened. They’ll live to fight another day.”
Keen snorted softly. “Are we fate now, Viridian? A bit pretentious, isn’t it?”
“It’s not pretension, merely the truth. We saved this town, Keen, when everyone did everything they could to stop us.”
“They were ensorcelled.”
“Not at the start. Too many went into the idea of Bright Renewal with eyes open, seeing profit in taking advantage of vulnerable children.” She side-eyed him.
“I found the charter in City Hall, the signatures – business deals for supplies, uniforms, what have you. The tuition fees, Goddess save us. Maybe they were fooled into thinking the Academy had always been there, but they knew what was happening behind those walls. And they didn’t care because it wasn’t their kids. ”
Keen was silent for a few more slow steps. Then he asked softly, “What was happening behind those walls?”
Hero’s teeth clenched. She couldn’t speak of it without losing her temper and she had no desire to call up Hell in the middle of the street. “My niece told me some of it. Let’s leave it at that.”
“As you wish.”
They strolled along companionably for a moment. The mist developed a little backbone and Hero wished she’d brought an umbrella.
Then Keen asked, “What else did the revered mother say to you? Did she know about Abigail? Did she know what happened to Catarine this whole time?”
“No. I mean, she knew Abigail was off. Maybe she even knew the woman was half demon, but not that she was a cold-blooded killer. Only a few of the nuns were in Abigail’s inner cabal – Catarine’s roommate, for one.”
Keen let out a low whistle. “I suspected Sister Agnes, but not her. She seemed so distraught and, well, not a little… vapid.”
“You can call her stupid, Keen. She did allow Catarine to be lured to her doom, after all.”
“Right.” He winced, adding, “But she couldn’t have been that stupid. She fooled us, didn’t she?”
Hero swept a pile of soggy leaves out of her path with her cane.
“She played us, all right, like a good little psychopath. Put our focus on Father Kellan and acted all reluctant about it, too. I should have seen through her, but I was so… I don’t know.
I feel like we could have solved this on day one if we’d been just a little more clearheaded. ”
Keen chuckled and gave her a chiding look.
“Every PK says that after the job is done. Hindsight is the clearest sight. Maybe we could have done a better job, run a tighter case, but we did have an entire cabal and an eldritch demonic entity manipulating reality. Fair to say we did remarkably, all told.”
“Don’t forget a half-demon sister I never knew I had.”
That part was hard for them both to accept, though of course for different reasons.
Hero had learned after questioning Novice Eleanor that Catarine had always known Abigail’s secret.
It was why she’d been so determined to remove the stigma attached to those with demon heritage.
Abigail had been her best friend, and Catarine had loved the miserable bitch.
She hadn’t cared that Abby had had demon blood, but she had cared that Abigail was sacrificing children to her dark lord.
And confronting Abby about it, down in the catacombs, had gotten her killed.
Keen’s expression turned dark, brooding. Did he still pine for the girl he thought he’d known?
“Abigail had everything handed to her in life,” he said at last, speaking slowly, as if working out what he wanted to say as he was saying it. “She was beautiful, smart, popular. Exceedingly wealthy. Though now we know how her family generated their wealth.”
“Demon worship and summoning can be quite lucrative,” Hero agreed, wondering what he was getting at. “But it always comes with a price.”
“True.” His eyes cut to her. “Still, by every measure, she should have ended up a good person, even with demon heritage.” His tone softened. “You did, despite everything thrown at you.”
Forged in fire. He killed your true mother.
Her demon-father had wisely absented himself from Havenside following the destruction of the Academy, but she had no doubt he would come looking for her at some point.
Her cane thunked rhythmically on the bricks as she imagined spearing him like a wriggling fish.
“We all choose our own paths, no matter what our upbringing. Though, honestly, wealth does something to people even demons look upon with envy.”
A strained huff of laughter burst from Keen, then he stopped abruptly to draw in deep breaths. Hero stopped, too, to brush raindrops from her scapular, giving him a moment. He gave her a smile through his struggle that was more of a grimace. “I’ll be glad… when I can… breathe again.”
“No rush, DH Keen. No rush.”
After he had straightened and taken a moment to adjust his civvies, they resumed their journey, crossing the street and taking the sidewalk that led around school grounds.
The cemetery behind Clem Prep was a public space, older than Havenside itself, so old that some of its tombstones were nothing but weathered slabs of rock, their carved inscriptions worn to nothing.
All the town’s prestigious families had members buried there, having long eschewed the dismal catacombs beneath all the churches in town.
Yet Hero had a new fondness for those crooked tunnels of dead.
Without them, they wouldn’t have been able to strike at Bright Renewal as quickly as they had.
They entered through the open gates of iron filigree and Hero led them across the graves rather than taking the meandering paths. She knew where she was going. Her not-mother would be laid to rest beside her dead husband.
And where is my real mother buried?
It didn’t really matter. The woman was dust and bones by now.
Hero paused to help Keen navigate a hummock of turf. He had to hoist himself forward with a hand on a tombstone, but he didn’t complain.
Soon, a group of mourners came into view, above them on a low hill, exposed to the rain.
It was a rather small group: a tall man, a woman beside him, and two teenaged girls standing arm in arm – Liam, his wife and Hero’s niece, Molly, with…
a friend? She didn’t know the auburn-haired girl, but the two leaned on each other as if they were all they had in the world.
A few others stood across the grave from the bereaved family, mostly nuns from Clementine, attending as a courtesy. A clergyman stood at the head of the grave in elaborate vestments, a crimson-and-gold stole over his ivory robes, bald-headed and ancient-looking, his face scarred and pockmarked.
Not a priest. A bishop.
Hero sucked in a breath. She knew this bishop. She’d tried to kill him once.
“We aren’t really dressed for a funeral,” Keen remarked, keeping his voice low as they took shelter beneath a broad-canopied beech tree that still held enough deep-yellow leaves to stop much of the rain, which had by now grown irritatingly steady.
“This is as close as I plan on getting,” she said, staring at the man who’d abused countless girls at her former abbey and gotten away with it. His craggy face still bore the marks of the fire she’d set to kill him.
She could kill him now. Easily. Her hand tightened on her cane.
Too much to lose, Viridian.
Hero relaxed. A person had to specially request a bishop to give funeral rites.
This was no doubt merely one more way her not-mother was attempting to goad her.
So instead of flying into a killing rage, she stood with her partner in silence.
The droning of the bishop reached them like a buzz in the air.
“Whose funeral is it?” Keen asked after a moment.
“The woman who raised me,” she said, unwilling to say the word mother to describe her. “Elizabeth Donovan Franke.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She was a miserable cunt who tortured me every day of my life before sending me off to Blackstone Abbey in Plainfield.
That man” – she pointed a long, pale finger at the bishop – “was our priest back then. He molested half the novices there and the sisters all turned a blind eye to his crimes. Even the abbess protected him. If not for her, the fire I set might have erased his blight from the world forever.”
“Goddess!” Keen sounded horrified. “So that’s why you burned down your abbey!”
Hero said nothing, merely watched as the coffin was lowered into the damp earth by the grave workers and held her breath. Not until she heard the clumps of dirt strike the lid did she dare breathe out, long and slow.
“There. It’s done.” She turned away and reached out a helping hand toward her partner. “Let’s go.” He took her hand in a grip stronger than she expected.
“Where to, Inspector?”
She tapped her cane to her hat brim. “Out of the rain, DH Keen.” She grinned, letting her glasses slip down her nose ever so slightly. “How far away is Grantham House? I could use a drink.”