Original Sin

TWELVE

Moira listened to Lily’s account of what happened on the cliffs. According to her, Fiona’s coven had killed Abby, though she didn’t know exactly how. Something had come out of the ground around Abby’s body, but she couldn’t say what.

At least a dozen people had been involved, many from Santa Louisa. Lily hadn’t seen the faces of everyone in the circle, but she recognized some.

Moira realized the absolute worst had happened. Not only had the Seven been freed, but no one had control over them. Neither Fiona nor anyone else. They were on the loose, and anything could happen.

“My pastor was there,” Lily said. “Pastor Garrett. Why?”

“Why did you go to the cliffs in the first place?” Moira demanded to know. “What were you thinking?” She breathed deeply, and her chest ached from the earlier attack.

“I-” Lily glanced at Jared.

“Don’t look at him,” Moira snapped. She was too tired and sore to coddle the teenager. She swallowed three aspirin and chased them with lukewarm water. “You went to the cliffs when I told you to stay the hell away from Abby. I told you she was up to something. You were supposed to tell me when the coven was meeting!”

Lily blinked back tears and Jared jumped to her defense. “Don’t yell at her! She just saw her best friend die- her cousin she’s known her entire life-and saw things no one’s seen before.”

Moira held back an outpouring of truths these kids needed to hear before it was too late; she wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Instead, she bit her tongue.

Lily said quietly, “I thought I could help Abby. I thought that’s what she wanted, but didn’t know how to ask. But when I got there-she-she-” Lily stuttered, not knowing how to describe it.

“Abby wanted to be there,” Moira said evenly.

“Yes.”

“You said they called you the arca. Is that right?”

She nodded, accepting with a smile the water Jared offered her. “I don’t know what it meant, but they painted these symbols on me-”

“Symbols? Show me.”

“I showered. I felt so disgusting, dirty-I can’t.”

Moira wanted to throttle her, but asked calmly, “Can you draw them for me?”

“Maybe.” She bit her lip, obviously not knowing what was written on her.

“I remember one or two of them,” Jared said.

Moira tossed him a notepad and pencil.

“Did you voluntarily cross into the circle?” she asked Lily.

“I don’t understand.”

“Did they drag you kicking and screaming to their altar, or did you walk into the circle of your own free will?”

“I-walked in, but I was worried-”

“What does that matter?” Jared interrupted.

Moira didn’t want to go into the nuances of human sacrifices and dark magic. She recited the CliffsNotes version. “Human beings have free will. We make our own decisions. Many rituals-especially the ancient rites-require a conscious choice.”

“I just wanted to help Abby. I didn’t know-”

“I told you!” Moira pressed her thumb in the center of her forehead. She’d warned her, she’d warned Jared- and she didn’t pull any punches. Maybe they hadn’t truly believed her because she was too blunt.

Moira needed a good twelve hours of sleep but doubted she’d get ten minutes before dark. She pulled the makeshift compress from her lower back, squeezed out the water from the melted ice, and added fresh ice. Her entire body ached; she needed an icy bath to numb the pain and stop the swelling. She put the compress on the back of her head now that her back was so cold she could barely feel the bruising.

“Something went wrong with the ritual and you ran away,” Moira prompted, wanting to get to the end of Lily’s story and figure out what to do with her while she called around to friends and “frenemies” to find out what arca meant. It was a container of some sort, but what could Lily have that was valuable to Fiona? “You’re certain you saw demons? What did they look like?”

“Dark. Smoke, but thicker, and they had shapes-faces, tails, not like us. They changed, looked more like animals-monsters-than people. But they looked human, too.” She choked back a sob and Jared sat next to her on the edge of the bed. He took her hand.

“It’s okay,” he murmured.

“I didn’t want to look, I closed my eyes, but then the stranger told me to run or I would die.”

Moira’s head snapped up. “Stranger? What stranger? Someone from the coven?”

“No-he came right after Abby died. Just walked up and started saying these things-I didn’t understand him. It was a foreign language, really weird, and then he looked at me, told me to run or I would die. I ran. Then there were the most inhuman screams I’ve ever heard and I glanced back and the sky was like on fire, with lightning, thunder, screams, all there around the circle, and then they were gone like the fluttering of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of birds. I thought he was behind me, and I was scared of him, but he’d saved my life. I thought he might be an angel, but he wasn’t. He was running, but then he wasn’t behind me and I was alone.”

“Describe the stranger,” Moira said, then added, “please.”

“He was wearing green hospital scrubs-you know, like what surgeons wear, or orderlies. He looked sick-pale. Dark hair. Black or dark brown. His eyes-I don’t know, they were … honest. Very-I can’t explain it, but when he told me to run, I ran. I trusted him. He stopped them, stopped them from killing me. But he was too late for Abby.” She was crying now, and Jared pulled her to his chest, rocking her.

Moira pulled out her iPhone and brought up the Santa Louisa newspaper. Her conversation with Father Philip had been running through her head, and then what Fiona had said in the jail-she knew something that they didn’t know, and Moira thought she’d figured out exactly what it was.

She retrieved articles about Santa Louisa de los Padres Mission. Skimmed them. Anthony Zaccardi, historical architect rebuilding … the fire … the murders …

Jared said, “What are you doing?”

“I have an idea about who that man was, I’m trying to find a picture.”

Moira touched article after article on the small screen until she found what she was looking for.

Raphael Cooper, psychologist and seminarian from St. John’s in Menlo Park, was assigned by the Vatican to Santa Louisa de los Padres Mission four months prior to the murders. A spokesman for the Vatican, Samuel Cardinal Benvenuti, declined to comment, releasing a written statement that briefly said, “The prayers of the Holy See are with the victims of this unconscionable attack, and with Mr. Cooper for a full recovery.” A spokesman from St. John’s Seminary said only that Cooper was abandoned by his parents as a young child and raised in an orphanage. He became a naturalized American citizen when he arrived in California twelve years ago.

An orphan? Friends with Anthony? He was one of them, Moira was certain-like Peter and Anthony and Rico and others, left on the doorstep of St. Michael’s.

A photo-tagged as from St. John’s Seminary five years earlier-showed Raphael Cooper in his late twenties. His dark hair was short and conservative; his eyes at first glance looked black, but Moira realized they were dark blue. He was handsome, broad-shouldered, with a strong, square jaw. On his neck was an inch-long scar. Pure Irish oozed from every pore. How had an Irish baby ended up at St. Michael’s? Moira knew not all of the infants left were Italian, but most of them were.

She skimmed the article. Cooper was thirty-two. Peter would have been thirty-two had he lived. Cooper hadn’t been at St. Michael’s during the time Moira lived there, but Peter must have known him.

“Is this the man?” She showed Lily the picture.

Lily nodded. “Yes-but his hair is longer and he’s lost weight. He has that scar, right there, on his neck.”