“I must have mislaid it somewhere. You know how vast the archives are, and?—”
Foster closed his eyes, tuning out the old man’s continued ramblings, and counted very slowly to ten. He repeated this process until the urge to snap the man’s neck subsided and then opened his eyes to glare hard at him.
“All this posturing about right and wrong has been to cover up your negligence.”
“No!” the elder insisted. “I would even call it a blessing in disguise, Foster, because the book iswrong.”
“Wrong,” he echoed sourly. “Care to elaborate?”
The praeceptor sank into his armchair as all the fight drained out of him. Foster thought he suddenly looked very small and very tired, and ignored the gnawing pang of guilt worming through him.
“There are stories about the Gospel,” the man finally spoke, tone low and resigned. “Stories that were intended to discourage anyone from seeking it out, lest they come to pass. We’ve stopped passing these stories along, in the hopes that the damned book would simply fade from memory.” He fixed Foster with a hard look. “How is it you came to know of it?”
“Did you forget that I am not a human, Malik?” Foster leaned in, fixing him with a hard stare. “Did you forget I was raised hearing stories directly from the mouths of deities who weretherewhen they took place?”
The older man shrank even further into his chair. His robe pooled around him like an oversized blanket, and he looked every bit the chastised child Foster wanted him to feel like.
“Ah. Right.”
“But not all the stories were told to me, and I want to hear yours.”
“Yes, well,” Malik sighed. “They aren’t pretty stories, and frankly they may only hold grains of truth. They’re ramblings—rumors, honestly—and could well be exaggerated.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Several hours later, Foster stepped back onto the sidewalk at the front of the Church, looking back briefly at the praeceptor’s small home. There was a long moment of stillness, a twitch of the upstairs curtains, and then the lights went out in the bedroom.
The man had been right. Foster strongly suspected the stories of the Gospel were exaggerated. A fallen angel raising an undead army of damned souls? An archangel stealing the book to bring about Armageddon? The earth crumbling to ash in a cataclysmic disaster? They were laughable ideas. Completely insane. But the one that hit close to home was the one Foster believed may actually be true—at least partially.
“The Divine who chooses to raise a loved one from the dead must be prepared for great loss,” Foster murmured to himself as he started the walk back to his apartment building, echoing the words of the old clergyman.There will be a great cost needed to balance the scales; many souls for the cost of another.
What Christos had done was considered a miracle, raising Lazarus of Betany from the dead and returning him to his home and family. But the man had gone on to become consumed by his own existence. He spent his life obsessing over what had happened to him, tried to recreate the process more than once as his family members took ill or died of old age around him.
It was a horrific choice, and Lazarus was branded a heretic for meddling in the will of the Divine. Every test he had performed, every ritual and trial he had attempted to use to replicate what had been done to him, failed. They failed, as Gabriel put it, because Lazarus wasn’t made of the right ‘stuff.’
“Look at it like this, Foster Flake,”Gabe’s words of reassurance echoed through his mind even now.“The Lamb is made of the same stuff you are. A little mortality to ground the magic, a little Divinity to give it that push. It worked for him and it will work for you because you both have the same magic. Lazarus was just a guy who got picked to be a spectacle, he never had a chance of making it work for him. It’s like asking a house fly to build you a house, or a horse to fly you to the moon. There’s a reason it’s called Playing God—you need Godblood to make it happen.”
Godblood. The mana that flowed in the veins of all the Divine and marked them as Other. Gods and demigods literally bled gold and even Risen deities bled silver. But Lazarus had been a mortal man and doomed to fail even with the rituals perfected. And theyhadbeen perfected. Gabe assured him of that fact, and Foster had felt the surge of power when he was kneeling in that pentagram.
You’re making a mistake, Foster,Judas’s warning drifted back through his mind.It’s forbidden for a reason.
His mind conjured the image of a small arm, bare and splotchy and spilling crimson from a woundhehad inflicted. He could still feel the tiny hand he had held while her blood ran into a basin, her slender wrist cold and clammy in his grip. He shoved it down violently.
It was a mercy killing,he pleaded against his conscience, but it was a hollow excuse.
The praceptor’s warning could be referring to the death he had been required to cause, yet Foster suspected it likely meant his own immortal soul which had already become blackened by his actions. He had killed a little girl before her time and would bear that stain for the rest of his immortal life.
Chapter Twelve
The room was warm, vast, and airy as mid-day light spilled over the wooden-paneled floor, a soft breeze drifting in from the wide double doors that opened onto a back patio. Lucifer stepped into the space, feet bare and clad in a gray silk robe that was fastened loosely at his waist, breathing deep to inhale the scent of the incense that wafted from a nearby burner.
He loved his ritual space more than any other in his home, more than the garden or the kitchen. It was his most sacred space, one not even Remiel would dare to breach, and soothed him like little else. He needed to be calm and collected when he wove his enchantments if he wanted the best outcome, and though the sunlight was artificial, he loved basking in it to relax and meditate.
Bookcases lined the walls, all containing his various spell components. From crystals to herbs to candles to vials of liquids from a variety of sources, he had an extensive collection of materials to choose from, and all of it was organized by purpose. He walked now toward the shelf that contained items that would help with truth seeking, honesty, and revelation.
He took a deep blue cloth to lay on his spell board, then carefully chose several crystals from their shelves—aquamarine,selestine, and a vivid blue sapphire, as well as several small pieces of iolite and charoite. Setting these aside, Luce hummed softly to himself while he picked up bottles of herbs, un-stoppering them and inhaling deep as he made his selections. Violet and foxglove, primrose and bluebell, and of course anise to focus all the energy.
“I think I might be ready now,” he murmured, laying the bundle of herbs on the board. “I’ll just need an empty vial and a pestle and mortar—ah, and a candle.”
