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“The crypt, I suppose.”

“And where the hell is that?”

I smile. “Cursing in a church, Lacie? Goodness.”

She wipes her nose and scowls at me, but a muscle twitches at her lips. “You think I give a shit?”

This time I outright laugh, the sound disappearing into the hollows and crenellations, devoured by dead saints. “I would’ve pegged you as a believer, yes.”

“No.” She turns away, taking trembling fingers to the holy water font. “Not anymore.”

“Oh?”

Lacie runs a hand down her face, half shadowed in the strange, dim light of the church. Her fingers catch on drying blood and she draws them away as though burned. “Raised Catholic,” she says, her voice blade-thin, “but left the church. I had some … differences. With my parents.”

“In my experience, the Holy Church is as draconian and backward as they come.”

Lacie’s eyes wander to the altar, over the empty pews. I can tell she barely heard what I said. “It’s funny. I feel more at home in a church than I want to admit. The ritual. The regalia. The comfort of knowing someone is out there, looking down on me with love.” Her fingers tighten into fists. “But it’s not real, is it? It’s no more real than Oðin or Þorr. No more real than Yggdrasil.”

Carefully, carefully, as though I’m reaching for a terrified stray—and that is what she is, isn’t it?—I walk around the cooler to stand next to her. Together, we stare up the central aisle toward the massive crucifix hanging on hair-thin wire above the altar. Jesus weeps great bronze drops over his sagging cheeks, his pupils turned up toward heaven.

“But lamb,” I murmur, “isn’t it? Real, I mean. The monsters. The myth of it. Sure, there may be no all-knowing god protecting your steps. But there’s truth here, too. Love, kindness, gentle faith. You think you might not deserve it for leaving, but you do.”

Her eyes snap to mine, and for a moment we hold the words between us. Warming something I thought perhaps I’d lost with her.

But then she turns away, wrapping her chafed-red hands around her handle of the cooler. “Where next?”

With a sigh, I pick up my side. “Crypt entrances are often toward the front of the church, near the altar. Easier to inter the dead after funerals.”

We begin a funeral march of our own, carrying our murdered vættr in his plastic casket toward the altar. With every step, the saints’ eyes harrow me, and I duck my head. There are few things that make me uncomfortable anymore, but to be seen by these minor gods? I meant what I said to Lacie: there is more truth in faith than I, personally, would rather admit. But we can get in and out, easily and quickly. All we need to do is carry this murdering piece of filth down to his crap-covered grave and leave him there.

To the left of the apse is a small altar to Mary, her face forlorn as she holds Christ in the manner of the Pietà. He’s draped over her blue-robed legs, his face upturned, his eyes partly opened in death. Blood streams his forehead and I dash my eyes away, ahead. It’s foul, hard to look at. Even more so when I know it inspired the Crusades.

At its heart, twisting and writhing, is piercing, horrid grief. We pass the altar, a small mercy, and make our way toward a black-painted door barred with iron. It swings open under my fingertips; Catholics are known to not lock their places of worship. But an issue arises.

“Lacie, dear, the cooler isn’t going to fit through the door.”

“What? What are we going to do?”

I put the cooler down again and open the hatch. Dr. Sims’s body has snapped back as far as the plastic walls will let him, his spine cracked in two. His body has withered into black at the extremities, his jaw hinged open, the ruined slop of his eye sluicing down his face with tacky, glistening jelly. The hole in his throat winks at me, a blood-darkened new eye.

“We’ll have to carry him.”

“What?” Lacie breathes. “No, no way. I’m not touching him.”

“Don’t you want to see your friends’ murderer buried in the earth?” My voice comes out testy. She shouldn’t be so squeamish. Not anymore, not after all this.

“Not really.” Her face darkens, though, when I heave Dr. Sims’s broken body out, a wicked smile crosses her features. It’s lovely. “Actually, yes.”

“Great. Grab his legs.”

Wordlessly, we make our careful way down, down, down, my heels clicking brightly on the stone spiral stairs. Deeper into the earth we go, the smell of molding dirt and old bones twisting through the air to meet us. Lacie gags. It’s humid, rank, the too-sweet smell of festering flesh heavy, charging the air.

There is something rotten here. An emotion I’m unaccustomed to feeling gathers inside of me, twisting like a fist in flesh, sharp and painful.

Panic.

When we at last reach the bottom, I take in the broken flagstones riddled with body-sized holes, mounds of dreck and cracked-open bones.