can feel that he is wound tight, like her. That in the next moment he will pull her mouth to his and his to hers and they’ll ignite. She’ll crack and open and be nothing but pure light energy, her soul bursting into the world to burn with his.
The scream is high pitched and long and so unexpected that it takes Tabitha and Patrick too many heartbeats to understand what’s happening.
In the hallway roars a commotion and banging and then the door flies open. “Tabitha,” Ruth comes racing in, blood trailing down her arm. She’s too far into the room before she realizes what she’s barged in on. Before she sees the naked young man with his hands threaded around Tabitha.
Ruth pauses and, in that moment, a tiny body struggles out of the darkness at her. It’s Patrick’s brother, his lips dripping blood and fingers digging into the Sister’s knee as he bites at her calf.
Tabitha screams. Footsteps pound down the hallway, and before she can warn anyone away, Ami careens into the room. Patrick’s brother switches targets, pawing at the newcomer.
Ruth stands there, sobbing, and Ami dissolves into panic just as fast, trying to fling her body to dislodge the Unconsecrated child but managing only to tangle herself in her tunic—allowing him access to her ankle. More footsteps in the hallway. The boy drops Ami and looks straight at Tabitha. He stumbles toward her and Patrick rears back.
Tabitha doesn’t think. She just acts. She snatches the boy by his arm, twisting him to keep his teeth from her. With all of her force, she flings him across the room. He slams into the wall. Bones crunch, and Patrick shouts.
“Out!” Tabitha screams at everyone. Patrick tries to approach his brother who lies crumpled on the floor, little mewling moans dribbling from his lips. The boy starts to crawl toward them, his fingertips shredding and snapping against the stone floor as he tries to gain traction.
Tabitha pushes the two infected Sisters from the room and grabs Patrick’s arm, tugging him behind her.
He grips her hand as she slams the door. “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know,” he says again as if repeating it over and over again will still the confusion inside.
Tabitha sits in the corner of a cramped room while the rest of the Sisters figure out what to do next. Ruth and Ami are in the infirmary. They’re being given their last rights and will be put down soon. “We’ll tell the village it was a bout of food poisoning,” the oldest Sister, and therefore their de facto leader, says. Everyone else murmurs in stunned agreement, but Tabitha stays silent.
“Now about the infected child,” the head Sister says. As if she’s leading some sort of meeting with an agenda.
Patrick’s brother is still in Tabitha’s room. She knows he’s made it to the door because she thinks she can hear him scratching against it. Tiny moans floating through the hallways. Patrick’s been tied to a bed in another room. Tabitha’s sure they gagged him or else she’d be able to hear him shouting for his brother, screaming that he didn’t know.
She presses her lips tight together. She’s very aware that everyone around her struggles not to look at her. She’s trying to figure out what she believes. She’s trying to decide if it matters.
She knows she asked him directly if his brother was infected and he said no. She doesn’t know if he was lying. She closes her eyes, remembering the earnest panic of his expression as she pulled him from the room.
Tabitha thinks about the book in the tunnel room. About how long this village has lasted being cut off. How she’s the one that endangered them.
Ruth and Ami, her only two friends in the Sisterhood, will be dead soon. Her family could have died as well.
“Someone will have to take care of the child,” the oldest Sister says.
Tabitha rubs a hand over her face, shifting in her chair. It’s all her fault. Whether Patrick lied to her or not, she was the one to bring the infected child into the village. The little boy is her responsibility. Just as Patrick’s fate belongs to her as well.
It would be so much easier if she knew Patrick lied to her. If she could believe that he knew all along his brother was infected. But she knows her heart, and her heart knows his, and this is how she is sure that Patrick tells the truth when he says he didn’t know.
And yet it doesn’t matter that she believes him: belief is irrelevant in the face of fact. He brought the infection. She allowed it to happen.
“I will take care of the infected child,” she says softly. She looks at the other women in the room—really looks at them. At how soft some of them appear. How old and tired. How they devote their lives to God and leave nothing for themselves.
How unlike Tabitha. She who lusted. She who put desire for a man before God. She who almost brought down her village.
“And the older brother?” the head Sister asks. For the first time Tabitha realizes the hesitation in her voice. She realizes how weak this woman is to be in charge of not just the Cathedral, but the fate of the village. She wonders if any of the rest of them know of the journal downstairs, know of the legacy of their survival.
Tabitha thinks about taking Patrick’s hand and leading him down the path and away from the village. Of banishing herself and him together. She smiles, letting the dream roll warm and round in her mind.
“He I will take care of as well,” Tabitha says.
“About the circumstances in which the older boy was found...,” the head Sister begins to say, leaving an opening for Tabitha to fill in the blank.
Tabitha stands and squares her shoulders. She keeps her chin level and voice even as she says. “It is none of your concern.” She sweeps toward the door, black tunic floating around her ankles. She waits for the head Sister to challenge her, to maintain her authority and dress Tabitha down in front of her peers for what she’s allowed to happen. But the old woman is silent.
“What will you do?” one of the other Sisters asks, as if this was some sort of democracy where everyone can voice a thought.
She pauses in the doorway, examining them, meeting their eyes one by one. Establishing her control. “I will do what is necessary,” Sister Tabitha responds.
The boy is small and broken and weak. His moans are those of a newborn kitten. Tabitha steps into her room and walks toward the window easily avoiding his reach. He starts to pull himself across the floor toward her, and she stands and stares at the Unconsecrated outside past the fences.
So much useless death. Such a waste.
When the boy is closer Tabitha kneels and cups his cheeks in her hands. He tries to squirm, tries to twist and turn so that he can taste her. “May God show mercy on us both,” she whispers before snapping his neck and bashing his small fragile head against the stone floor.
For a while she looks at him. If only Patrick had asked her to go away with him. If only they’d been on the path when the boy turned, he could have infected them both. They could have woken up dead, entwined together forever.
As she unties Patrick’s ropes she avoids his eyes.
But he grabs her and makes her look at him. “I didn’t know he was infected,” he says, his voice hoarse and lips dry. “My mother gave him to me, told me to take him away. I never knew.”
Tabitha nods. “I believe you,” she says. And it’s true.
“I would never lie to you, Tabby. I love you too much.”
She nods again. She understands this as well.
She tells him they put his brother in a special room—a safe place where Patrick could say good-bye. Then, she tells him, she will lead him back into the Forest and away from the village and together they will find a way to live and love beyond this constricted world.
He doesn’t question as she pulls him down the stairs into the basement, nor when she pulls aside the curtain and unlocks the hidden door. He follows her blindly as she leads him down the dark tunnel. She stops at the stairs climbing from the ground at the far end.
They face each other and Tabitha inhales deep, the scent of him mingling with the smell of old smoke and
