secret she was sworn to protect.
That was something, wasn’t it?
But she knew that she could no longer be trusted with that secret. That the dust had too strong of a hold on her. And with this knowledge, she leaned forward slightly, whispering softly into her cell phone, hoping someone out there would hear her and understand.
It was time to let the Father take her now. If she couldn’t be useful to Him in this world, maybe she’d do better in His.
Anticipating sweet relief, she put the pipe to her lips, tightened her grip on the lighter and sent up one last prayer for forgiveness as she rolled her thumb against the flint wheel.
The explosion barely registered as Gabriela inhaled deeply, taking into herself that thing which had been missing from her life all these years.
It felt transcendent.
A split second later, however, when she realized that the smoke she was inhaling was no longer the narcotic she craved but the stinking, sweet essence of her own burning flesh, her final conscious thought arrived along with a searing, unbelievable pain.
That was when Gabriela Zuada started screaming.
BOOK III
Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars,
White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery.
5
Every story has a hero,” he said. “Someone we invest ourselves in. But not all of those heroes are necessarily pretty. Or perfect. And I think any discussion of Milton’s masterpiece has to consider this.”
Sebastian LaLaurie squinted out at a lecture hall full of Louisiana’s so-called best and brightest, almost daring one of them to contradict him.
Nobody did.
“Look at the stories we’ve talked about these past few weeks: Moses, Miriam, David, Gideon, Elijah, Noah, Ruth . . . The Old Testament is chock-full of heroic men and women.”
A murmur of voices. Nods of agreement.
“Throw in part two of our biblical canon and you’ve got the greatest hero of them all. A simple carpenter’s son who sacrificed his life to save every last one of us.”
A chorus of amens filled the room, but Batty held up a hand, cutting them off. The last thing he wanted was to turn this lecture into some kind of revival meeting. He was here to educate, not run a cheerleading session.
He stumbled slightly and grabbed hold of the lectern to steady himself, getting a tentative ripple of laughter for his trouble.
He ignored it and pushed on. “But what if we adjust the lens a little, just like Milton did, and look at things from a slightly different angle? What if the
Another ripple, but it wasn’t laughter this time, and there wasn’t an amen within earshot. Instead, Batty saw enough startled frowns to know he’d hit a nerve. This wasn’t surprising, considering that Trinity Baptist College had been built on strict, orthodox beliefs, and few of the students here were brave enough to take the contrarian point of view.
But Batty had always liked to shake things up a bit. These kids had no earthly idea what was going on out there.
He, on the other hand, did-which was why he was currently about two drinks shy of a mid-afternoon bender.
“Milton based much of his epic poem on the book of Genesis,” he continued. “And in that book, God creates a perfect paradise, populates it with a nice young couple and puts them to work in His garden. They spend their days slaving away, doing whatever God commands-only there’s this Tree of Knowledge nearby, bearing some nice juicy fruit, and it looks pretty damn tempting.”
The fact that Batty could drink so much and still teach Religious Literature and Rhetoric without slurring his speech or falling flat on his face was something of a miracle. But he tried not to give it too much thought. If he did, he’d probably decide he wasn’t quite drunk
Images from his nightmare still lingered-
He had awakened to those screams in the middle of the night last night, disoriented and concerned, wondering if what he’d seen was real, and suddenly reminded of his own private horror.
A horror he preferred not to relive.
He said to the class, “But temptation or no temptation, God tells this nice young couple, ‘No, no, no, you keep your hands off that tree. That knowledge stuff, that’s a bad thing. You just listen to me, let me do the thinking, and I’ll take good care of you.’ ”
Batty tried a smile, but figured it probably came off more like a grimace.
“Then along comes our new hero in the form of a serpent. He sees what’s what and doesn’t like it one bit. So he tells Eve, ‘You know what? You go on, take a bite of that fruit if you want to. You deserve to live a little.’ ”
“Is this supposed to be funny?”
The question came from several rows up, somewhere near the middle of the lecture hall, and Batty swiveled his head, wobbling slightly, trying to focus in on its source.
One of his graduate students. An angry little beignet with startling brown eyes.
Rebecca’s eyes, he thought, then immediately pushed the thought away as if it were tainted by something toxic.
He needed another drink. “I guess it
Murmurs all around. None of them friendly.
“Without free will, we just follow rules. And what fun is that? No adventure, no quests, no glory, no passion, no redemption. All those things that make us human.” He paused. “Fortunately, somebody recognized that God’s Paradise was a flawed creation, and that Man was living under a kind of blissful tyranny. So he decided to do something about it.” Batty let his gaze sweep across the room. “And that, my friends, is the very definition of heroism.”
“Oh, really?” The beignet was on her feet now, a fierce little thing filled with the indignation of a True Believer. “And what did this so-called hero give us? The Holocaust? Disease? Gang violence?”
Batty shrugged. “Why stop there? What about poverty? Starving children? Endless war? The oil spill?
That last one, Batty knew, was a trigger point. Hurricane Katrina was Louisiana’s sorest of sore spots, had
