Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
CALLAHAN
I break away first. Longest legs, head start, I don’t know. I’m just tearing across the quads, straining through the hazy air to see her, find her. This miracle of a girl that I never saw coming, not in a thousand years.
So I run. My hand is smarting from the blows and my nose is burning from the smoke and there’s something heavy in the pit of my stomach, but I run.
The bell tolls again.
Guilt. That’s what it is. I feel guilty.
The chapel looms, stone and shadow against sky. And in front…them. Lots of them, a wall of White Brothers shoulder-to-shoulder before the doors. A semicircle, all looking at one person.
Gwenna.
I skid to a stop.
She’s kneeling, crying, saying words I can’t really hear because now my ears are ringing and the other guys are thudding up behind me, just far enough away that the Brothers can’t see us—or haven’t, yet.
“Well?” Kai’s at my left, breathing hard. He gestures forward. “What are we waiting for?”
I don’t know if he’s asking me, or everyone. But I can’t answer. Suddenly, my body feels locked.
I love Gwenna. It’s so easy to love her. She’s so easy to love. I don’t even have to think about it: it’s like breathing or gravity or something, automatic, a force of the universe I can just give into and let pull me along. I love that. I love her. I would do anything for her.
I would.
But.
But I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t know if I can kill anyone.
Least of all on the steps of a church. Thou shalt not kill is really not that ambiguous.
I know there’s technicalities for stuff like this—for guys on deployment, whatever.
And it’s not like I haven’t found loopholes in rules before.
But no one died because of that.
And…and maybe more than that, I don’t want to have to.
I don’t want to have to resort to violence against men who’ve devoted their lives to God because I want God to be the kind of God who made a world where things like this don’t happen and His church really does let everyone get saved if they want to be.
Kingston’s saying something about splitting up, coming around from the sides, but I’m only vaguely taking in what he says.
Because I can hear Gwenna’s voice now.
And I hear her saying my name.
“I am the whore who ruined and corrupted Callahan Thomas O’Brian, a Knight of the Black Table, sworn in celibacy to God—”
The guilt in my stomach contracts. Twists. Into anger, for her, anger that they’d—
And suddenly, I can’t.
I can’t bear it.
I was never ruined. Not by her. Not by any of this.
I was saved.
They can’t make her say that. They can’t make her think that’s true. My hand tightens around my weapon.
They aren’t God. They’re just men.
Blade up, I charge.