Unholy Night

Roman. Here she was, clearly stunned to see his face.

Of course she’s stunned. Here I am, after all this time, after what happened, after the way it ended.

Sela stared back at him for what seemed like ages, her expression unchanging. Her hair black as ink. Her body long and lean, with skin a polished copper, same as her eyes. Ten years. No, it’s definitely ten. She would be twenty-four now, give or take a year, but she looked almost exactly as he’d left her.

Balthazar smiled. That sad smile she used to love. The one she could never resist. Not for all her anger, not for all her sadness and distrust. Those things had never mattered when it came to Balthazar. They’d always just seemed to melt away when she looked at him. Back when they were young, and in the kind of love that only the young can be in. The first love. The sick-to-your-stomach, lying-awake-all-night- counting-the-hours-until-you-saw-each-other-next kind.

Did she ever think this day would come? Did she half expect to see me standing here every time she opened this door? Has she thought of me as often as I’ve thought of her? Has there ever been someone else? More than one someone? Is there someone now?

Balthazar opened his mouth to pay her a compliment. It wasn’t fully formed yet, but he was leaning in the direction of praising her beauty. Something like, “The years have been kind.”

No, that’s stupid. Of course they haven’t been kind.

“You haven’t aged a day” popped in next, but it lacked the poetry he was going for.

“You’re just like I remember?” No, that evokes the past, and we definitely don’t want to bring up the past.

With his mouth fully open and his time up, Balthazar settled on the innocuous but safe, “It’s good to see you.”

But before the words could roll off his tongue, a fist was in his mouth.

It was driven there with so much force that his own teeth were briefly weaponized and turned against him, cutting clean through his top and bottom lip from the inside. Balthazar nearly passed out as his brain rattled around in his skull, and he staggered backward into the cobblestone street, struggling to keep his balance.

At first he didn’t realize he’d been hit. There’d been no windup, no change of expression to warn him it was coming. One minute she’d been there, beautiful and clear, and the next, there’d been three of her — her faces floating behind a thick sheet of cloudy glass. By the time the first packets of pain began to arrive from his mouth, slicing their way through the fog, he’d been hit again. First with another fist, and then with the bottom of a sandal, as Sela kicked him square in the throat.

For a moment, it had all been beauty and reminiscence. The music of love’s long-delayed reunion. Now Balthazar was clutching his throat, gasping for breath and barely clinging to consciousness, fists and feet coming at him without mercy. His arms hung stupidly at his side as his face was struck again and again. Fist, sandal, sandal, fist. The only thing keeping him from passing out was curiosity. His mind was so wrapped up in trying to sort out just what the hell was happening, that it refused to shut down. Even as another kick found his chin, snapping his head back violently and sending Balthazar to the ground with a dull thud.

Somewhere, across a shapeless, cavernous space, the others were looking down at him, stunned and silent. One of them was yelling something. Something like “Wait!” or “Stop!” or “What are you doing?”

Is that the carpenter? Is that the carpenter telling her to stop? I can’t te — gahhhhhh, my face hurts…

With Balthazar rolling on his back, clutching at his already-swollen lips and nose, Sela finally stopped and got a good look at the other people outside her front door: three men, a girl, and an infant. All of their jaws hanging open. All of them looking at her, wondering if they were next. With her chest rising and falling with each heavy breath, Sela brushed aside the hair in her eyes, and said, “Come in.”

II

He was fourteen when he first saw her. Only two years older than he’d been when he’d robbed his first grave, but 100 years wiser.

He could remember the day, the hour, her clothes, the light. He’d been walking home from the forum, where he once picked pockets amid the noise and madness, risking so much for such paltry rewards. But not anymore. Things were different now. There was no need to pick pockets, to pay off accomplices and reward tips with part of the profits. These days, Balthazar visited the forum to spend, not earn. And there was plenty to spend, thanks to his stroke of genius, his realization that it was easier to steal from the dead than the living.

Nearly every night after that first plunder, Balthazar had waded through the dark water, returning to the shallow Roman graves on the far side of the Orontes. Nearly every night, so long as the moon hadn’t been too bright or the sentries too close, he’d dug up the freshly buried corpses of the condemned. He’d been frightened at first, yes, especially when he unearthed some of the more gruesome specimens. Those who’d been beheaded or stoned to death. Being so recently buried, their blood was often wet, the expressions on their faces still fresh. Alone in the dark, Balthazar’s young imagination had gotten the best of him in the early weeks: He’d seen their eyes pop open, felt their cold fingers grab at his arms. But as the months wore on, these hallucinations had grown less frequent, and the fear had grown weaker and weaker, until one day, he realized it had disappeared altogether.

In the two years since his stroke of genius, Balthazar had gotten so fast that he could process ten corpses in a single night, assuming the executioners had been that busy — digging them up, looting them, and returning them to the desert without the Romans ever knowing he’d been there. Filling his pockets with their rings and necklaces, with their silver and gold and silk. And all without a single accomplice. So much more reward, with only a fraction of the risk.

A month after he began operations, Balthazar had stolen enough to move his family into a new neighborhood. A year after that, he’d moved them again — this time into a house that had once belonged to a Roman nobleman. His sisters had new fabrics to sew. Abdi had new clothes and toys. And his mother had everything a mother could want: a new house to care for, plenty of food to cook, a new stove to cook it in, rugs to sit on, oil lamps to light her way. And while Balthazar knew she had her suspicions about their newfound wealth, she never asked him where the money came from or where he disappeared to each night. The closest she ever came was just before they moved into the nobleman’s house. Upon seeing it for the first time, Balthazar’s mother pulled him aside, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “Before I sleep under this roof, promise me one thing.”

“Anything, Mama.”

“Promise me that our happiness doesn’t come at the expense of another’s.”

He looked at her for a moment, silently wrestling with the prospect of lying to his mother’s face. More specifically, wrestling with how he was going to do it convincingly. On one hand, their happiness was certainly coming at another’s expense. If you wanted to get right down to it, people had paid for their happiness with their lives. On the other hand, she’d left him a fairly sizable loophole. Technically speaking, he was taking valuables from people who no longer had any use for them. Having a necklace or a gold ring wasn’t going to change the fact that they were dead, was it? He wasn’t making them any less happy than they’d been when they died, was he? Therefore, he could technically say in all honesty, “I promise.”

Balthazar had been tempted to tell her, just as he’d been tempted to tell his fellow thieves. But he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t spoken a word of his dealings with the dead. Not to his family and especially not to his fellow pickpockets. It wasn’t that he feared their condemnation, although he knew that some would surely condemn him for violating the old superstitions. What he really feared was their competition. Balthazar knew he wasn’t the only boy who’d be able to see his way past a few social mores and dead bodies. Not when there was that much money just sitting there in the sand, ready for the taking.

No, he’d stumbled onto a treasure vault that constantly replenished itself, and he wasn’t about to share it. Not when the Romans were sending so many men and their jewelry to the executioner. Not when everything was