In Her Name

them.

“Listen, Father–”

“No, my son, there is no time for talk!” Hernandez brushed by Braddock as if he were a pocket of cold air. “I know that Satan has already worked his powers upon you, and that you are now his unwitting servant. My only hope is that you can yet be saved from his clutches!”

“Wait!” Braddock cried, torn between tackling the old man and risking the consequences or letting him charge into the tines of Reza’s claws. He decided that he had no choice but to opt for the latter.

Storming into the little clearing, Hernandez found only Jodi. “Where is he?” Hernandez demanded, his eyes darting into the shadows of the trees that lay around him like the bars of a cage. “Where is the servant of the Antichrist?”

“Father Hernandez,” Jodi said evenly, straining to control the anger and fear that sought to creep into her voice, “if you turn around, very slowly, you’ll see.”

“Enough games, child!” he said angrily. “There is no–” He felt a tap on his arm, and turned to find his companion staring at something behind them, his eyes wide with disbelief.

Following his companion’s gaze, Hernandez found what he had come for. “Mary, mother of God,” he whispered as he crossed himself.

Backlit by the sun, Reza was an animate shadow that soundlessly stepped a pace closer to the elderly priest and the councilman. Jodi had not seen or heard him get up and move to where he stood now, even though he had been right beside her a moment before. More fascinating, however, was that when she did not look directly at him, if she looked at Braddock or the priest and Reza was only in her peripheral vision, he completely disappeared, as if he were an illusion, not really there.

“Please, father,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes riveted on Reza, “don’t make any sudden moves or threaten him. He has been very cooperative, but he’s a complete unknown. Anything might set him off.”

“What has he said to you, child,” Hernandez said through his astonishment at the apparition before him, “to convince you that the ways of Darkness are best?”

Jodi shook her head. “Father, he hasn’t said a word other than what I believe to be his name, which is Reza. I don’t think he knows our language, or if he does, he’s either forgotten it or has just chosen not to communicate with us.”

“Foolish child,” Hernandez chided softly. “So easily have you been led astray.” He held up the wooden crucifix that hung from around his neck on a length of ivory cord. “As darkness flees from the light, so too does Evil retreat from the sign of the cross.” Like a mythical vampire hunter, pushing the stunned councilman aside, Hernandez stalked toward Reza, the crucifix thrust before him just like the weapon he believed his faith to be.

“Father, no!” Both Jodi and Braddock reacted instantly, trying to stop the priest from carrying out this lunatic act of self-destruction, but they may as well have been miles away. In a movement so swift that it barely registered in Jodi’s brain, Reza’s sword sang from the sheath on his back, the ornate blade reflecting the glory of the sun as it sought its target. The air was filled with the ring of metal striking bone, and Father Hernandez crumpled to the ground at Reza’s feet. As he fell, the tip of Reza’s sword caught the cord of the crucifix, deftly lifting it from around the priest’s neck and prying the cross from Hernandez’s powerless hands. With a tiny flick, the cross flew into the air to land in Reza’s outstretched fingers.

The councilman dropped to his knees and began to pray for deliverance with eyes tightly closed as Jodi and Braddock knelt beside the fallen priest.

“Oh, shit,” Jodi cried. “You stupid old fool, I tried to warn you.”

“I don’t see any blood,” Braddock remarked quietly. His eyes and hands worked over Hernandez’s body, but there did not appear to be any sign of injury. “Reza’s sword was so bloody fast I didn’t even see where it hit him,” he muttered. But then he saw the swelling near Hernandez’s hairline, where the flat of Reza’s sword must have hit the old priest’s head.

Hernandez moaned, and his eyes flickered open. “Has the beast fled?” he whispered.

“Father,” Jodi said, relieved that he seemed to be all right, “just be thankful you’re still alive, although I can’t figure out how. Where are you hurt?”

“My head,” he groaned, his face wrinkling in pain, “but that is not important. Where is the child of Satan?”

“At the moment,” she told him, taking a quick glance at Reza, “your demon is giving your crucifix a good looking over.”

That was something Hernandez did not expect to hear. “That cannot be!” he exclaimed. Struggling mightily against the hands that sought to gently restrain him, he propped himself up on his elbows to see for himself.

There, as Jodi had told him, stood Reza, raptly staring at the crucifix in one hand, his sword held easily at his side in his other, the shimmering tip held just above the ground. He turned the old wooden cross over in his taloned hand with great care, as if it were a priceless family heirloom that had survived generations of hardship to arrive safely in his hands. Then, as if noticing the others for the first time, he leaned over Hernandez and dangled the cross by the cord from his fingers. Speechless, the old man reached for it with one trembling hand, and the cross came away in his fist.

“This cannot be so,” he whispered. “All my life, I have believed that evil must flee from God’s sign, but Satan has somehow transcended even this.”

“Have you ever considered,” Jodi told him, “that maybe you’re not being confronted with something evil? Just because he’s different, he’s not necessarily the work of the devil, you know. Braddock and I are different from you, but you didn’t seem to have too much trouble accepting us.”

Hernandez shook his head, stubborn to the last. “It is not the same.”

“No,” Jodi said, “it’s not. It looks like he’s more like you than we are.”

“What does that…” His voice died as he watched Reza pull something from a black leather pouch at his waist. Looking at it carefully, as if not sure of what he was seeing, an almost-human expression – longing, perhaps – crossed his face before the inscrutable alien mask descended once more. Squatting down, Reza held out his hand to Hernandez, palm up. Something small glittered on his palm.

Slowly reaching forward, careful to avoid the rapier claws at the ends of Reza’s fingers, Hernandez came away with a chain that was attached to a small crucifix that might be worn around one’s neck. The metal of the crucifix and the chain had long since oxidized to an inky blackness, but the few spots where the original material showed through left no doubt that it was made of silver. Rubbing his fingers over the surface of the cross, he was rewarded with a dull glimmer of beauty. Holding the cross from the chain, he looked at Reza. “This is yours?”

Reza seemed to concentrate for a moment, then slowly and deliberately nodded his head.

Hernandez could not say what lay in the green eyes that were fixed upon him, but he could not honestly tell himself that he believed this stranger was lying to him, or was in any apparent way an instrument of evil.

Perhaps Jodi is right, he thought. Although Satan could choose any form he wished, why would he choose such an easily penetrated disguise? Were there not better forms in which to deceive the simple folk of Rutan? The chameleon seeks to blend in with its surroundings, he thought now, not to stand apart from them. Hernandez’s people had been segregated from the human sphere for many years, making Rutan a place where different ways of any sort were viewed with skepticism, especially since the harshness of life ruled heavily in favor of community over individuality. Just as Jesus had shown his disciples the need to seek out and touch those who were wretched in the eyes of their fellow men, so too had Hernandez striven to reach out to others. Not with his staff or a scathing tongue, but with his love and compassion. He was not yet ready to dismiss his fears that this Reza was an instrument of the Devil. But he was prepared to consider the alternative, that this was a man like any other in the eyes of God, flawed and imperfect, molded of the same clay by His hands. For Hernandez, that was still a great leap of faith, but it was a chasm he was sure – in time, at least – he could cross.

But for now, holding the tiny crucifix in his hand, he could not restrain himself from asking one more question of the stranger looming over him. “Do you believe in God?”

Reza cocked his head to one side in what Jodi now thought of as some kind of Kreelan gesture or body language, and then he looked to her and Braddock, in turn, as if for help.

“I don’t think he understands the question Father,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s almost as if he can sense your thoughts or feelings and react to them, and not the words you say. But that’s only been with very simple or obvious things. What you’re asking now, especially after what he must have lived through in the Empire, goes well beyond the simple and obvious, even if you just want a yes-or-no answer.”