“Fish bones?”
I let the disk sit in my hand, heavy, radiating power. Oddlywarm and calming for a chunk of gold and glass. I stared at Sandy. She nodded.
“According to the legends, translations from those documents,the bones came from the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. Came from fishtouched by the hands of Jesus. No way of knowing if it’s true.”
I remembered the papers Bycheck had taken from that airportcrime scene. Photocopies. I’d thought one showed an icon — perhaps that hadbeen what was stolen. But instead, the icon showed a saint or patriarch, andthe man had been wearing this reliquary hung around his neck. I hadn’t beenable to see details in my glance at the grainy print, no color, but the shape,the size both matched.
I shivered.
“What does it do?”
“Charisma. Much charisma, in a religious setting. You want tofollow any leader who wears that thing. You want to believe what he tells you,even if it’s nonsense. One source claims that Stephen of Cloyes wore it, that’show he could drag thousands of innocents into slavery or death in the Children’sCrusade. They never explained how a French peasant boy could have gotten holdof such a thing. Or how it moved from Judea to France to the Balkans orsouthern Russia. But give that to someone like Reverend Fred . . .”
She didn’t need to draw a picture. Like I just said, truth orfalsehood didn’t matter as much as the belief.That’s one of the problems with religion. Millions of people can believe onething. Millions of others can believe the opposite. Both groups can’t be right,but both can draw power from their belief, can do “miracles” with that power.With enough faith, lies can be as powerful as the truth. And when they fight .. .
I consider myself a Christian, but some of the bigots,cultists, and sectarian despots who use that name have smeared it to the pointwhere I hesitate to claim my faith in public. No, I wouldn’t want Reverend Fredto have that relic. Him, or anyone like him.
Now the weight of the thing felt ominous. Don’t ask me how youcan feel a threat from a lump of gold and crystal and some ancient bits ofmaybe-bone. I’m sure it was all in my head, me projecting my thoughts into thething. But I still felt sick, felt cold, felt what that thing could mean, would mean, if the wrong people held itand used it.
And were there any right people? Power corrupts. I didn’tthink I could trust a saint with thatrelic, a real saint with all the virtues and no nasty habits to sweep under therug. Sandy had just confessed to seven murders, fresh blood staining that gold.Maybe the brown haze across the glass wasn’t just old grease from a thousandhands down through a thousand years.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
She cocked her head to one side, quizzical. “We’re partners.You need to know what we’re guarding.”
Oh, damn.
XXIII
So things were going to go that way. Forgive me if I don’t sound happy, but I think I wouldhave preferred a simple, straightforward shootout. Even if I lost, I could diewith a clean conscience. Like so many of my best-laid plans, this particularplot involved too many betrayals in too many directions at once. Moralambiguity, at best. At worst, I could win andlose at the same time. And survive, having to live with the memories. Beenthere, done that.
My blood pressure decided I’d better sit down now. I totteredacross to the table, juggled my crutches, pulled out a chair, and collapsedinto it. It groaned, but held me — Sandy carried enough weight herself, shewould have checked anything she bought for strength. I set the reliquarybetween us on the table, a lurking presence.
By that point, I didn’t much care if she’d laced that mug ofcoffee with strychnine. I took a couple of swallows. Good coffee, fresh-brewed and smoothly bitter, with that dash ofwhisky I’d smelled but not strong enough to affect either of us, seasonedboozers that we were.
“You saw the hawk.”
She nodded. “You knew I would. Throwing panic into all thefeeder birds and then landing a mature red-tailed hawk four feet outside mywindow, no way I wouldn’t notice her.”
“You felt my touch on her. You thought it through, and decidedthat I wouldn’t have used illegal magic to find you if I was coming here toarrest you. So you figured out how long I’d need to get over here from myoffice, and brewed the coffee on that schedule. And left the door unlocked.”
She nodded again, no need to elaborate on it. And the hell ofit was, she’d been right. As far as it went.
So there we sat, sipping coffee, like two old friends with thesilence of long comfort between us, too much shared to need many words. Whichwas also true, even if she had turnedout to be a serial killer. I pointed my chin at the medallion and chain betweenus. “How’d you find out about that?”
That drew a grimace. She took a sip of coffee, savored it,twitched one corner of her mouth in something that might have been a sardonichalf-smile, and shook her head.
“Another group wanted it, of course. They didn’t trustReverend Fred to lead our nation to the glory of the One True Faith. They foundout about his little kinks, I guess. They spend a lot of time studying eachother with close-set squinty eyes — calling ‘em a den of snakes would be aninsult to decent reptiles everywhere. And something slipped out about therelic. These folks aren’t the NSA for keeping secrets. But my brother — youremember my brother?”
I twitched my own grimace. Both her parents had died long ago,alcohol and poverty and general meanness, but her brother lurked in thebackground of her life, sort of like my father had until he died. And like me with my father, she didn’t normally speak twowords to her brother in any given year.
I’d met him once. He’d taken their shared childhood andtwisted home-life and grown up to find solace in a rigid simplistic faith whereeverything
