CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cassie followed Jonathan into a room shaped like a hexagon. Swords, daggers, and scimitars hung on some of the walls.
Samir stood alone at the other side of the table, his head slightly bowed. He looked up at their entrance, and as Jonathan reached his side, his dark eyes filled with concern. “What’s happened? Is Luci all right?”
Jonathan held his gaze. “She’s dead, corín. I’m so sorry.”
Samir flinched and closed his eyes as if he’d been slapped. Cassie’s heart wrenched. It was such a blunt way to tell him. Maybe that was intentional. There was no way to misunderstand the words, much as Samir might have wanted to.
Jonathan raised his hand as if to put it on the other Knight’s shoulder, but then returned it to his side again. He looked sick, and Cassie’s whole soul went out to him. “My fault. I should have asked for someone go with her. You—”
“No one’s fault but theirs.” Capitán Renaud’s loud voice filled the room. For once, Cassie was grateful to him. He entered with two people she’d never seen before. The first one, a woman with an elaborate braided updo, wore a tailored yellow shirtdress and heels and carried a thick folder. Cassie guessed she was the Scholar, though the ones she’d seen so far had been much more slovenly.
The guy was maybe in his mid-thirties, of Asian descent, with dark, wavy hair that hung to the collar of his leather jacket and a short scruff of moustache and beard. Knight, Cassie thought immediately. But no, Jonathan had asked for a mission runner. Then she made the connection: Dominic Joe, the one who called Jonathan and Gabi when they were in trouble. Jonathan had called him Nic.
Capitán Renaud added, “No one knew the Tribunal was active.”
Horror washed over Samir’s face. “The Tribunal. She was tortured.”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “She…I made contact right after her vitals spiked. They must have just gotten there. She told me it was Tribunal. I told her I was sending help, but she said it was too far—and then she dropped.”
“She was waiting for you to punch through,” Nic guessed, his voice stark. “So she could warn us.”
Jonathan looked back to Samir and swallowed. “She said to tell you…she said, ‘Tell Samir I love him, with all my heart’.”
Samir covered his face with his hand as he turned away. Cassie wished she could think of something to say. God, what if she blamed him? If she’d never shown up, Lucia would have never gone to Aquileia.
“We are very sorry for your loss, Hassan,” Capitán Renaud said. After a few moments, Samir raised his head.
Gabi and Andre entered the room. Gabi looked from Capitán’s face to Samir’s and said, “Oh, no.” Andre quietly closed the door behind them.
“Everyone sit down,” Capitán said. “West, we’ll review the tape later. And we’ll hear from Rome in a few hours.” Not looking at the video was a kindness to Samir, Cassie realized, giving her yet another reason to feel grateful to Capitán. “But we know it wasn’t a random attack.”
A wave of dizziness came over her. Not surprising, given what had just happened. She needed to keep it together.
“They’re after the codex,” Jonathan said. “They must have surveillance in place, tech or psychic, I don’t know.”
“Unless we have a traitor in our midst,” Capitán said.
“It’s not me,” Cassie blurted out.
Capitán looked bored. “You don’t know anything or anyone of importance.” It was insulting, but she felt relieved that no one would think this was her fault. He turned to the dressed-up woman with the folder. “Okafor, give us an overview of the Tribunal. My Knights could use the refresher.”
She nodded. “That’s what I expected.” After pressing a couple of buttons on her phone, a woodcut illustration appeared on the screen. It showed a woman being burned at the stake. Dread settled in the pit of Cassie’s stomach at the sight. “The Tribunal first formed in the late fifteenth century, not long after Manus Sancti. They were an elite group of Catholic inquisitors, charged by the pope to find, try, and burn heretics and witches.”
“By ‘try,’ you mean ‘torture,’ right, Hadiza?” Gabi ventured.
“Exactly.” The Scholar switched to a map of Europe. A few cities shone with red light. “The Tribunal was based in Rome, with inquisitors in Spain, France, and Germany.”
“I’m sorry, I’m confused,” Cassie said. She should’ve kept her mouth shut, but someone she’d liked had just died in a terrible way, and getting a history lesson bewildered her. “Lucia was killed by witch hunters?”
“The Tribunal was an elite force because they had psychic abilities such as Reading. Of course, this was seen as divine favor. They were believed to be living saints.” Samir gave a short laugh, raw and bitter.
Nic slouched back in his chair. He kept looking at her in a curious rather than flirty way.
She shifted in her seat as Hadiza continued. “These special inquisitors became aware of Manus Sancti, then a small society in Granada. In the eyes of the Church, their explorations of the paranormal made them witches and consorts of the Devil.”
“Wait a minute.” Cassie didn’t mean to keep talking, but this was a lot to take in. “How come The Tribunal got to be all psychic and magical, and Manus Sancti didn’t?”
“Because Manus Sancti wasn’t affiliated with the Church. Not long after they formed, they began admitting women, which was seen as proof of evil. And even at its beginning, Manus Sancti included Muslims, Jews, and even heretics. To the Tribunal, not being Christian equated to being in league with Satan.”
Samir was staring at the weapons hanging on the wall. With their ornate details—two even had jewels in the hilts—they looked ancient, but they gleamed as though they’d been made yesterday.
Hadiza turned back to the map. “In 1492, right after Isabella and Ferdinand conquered Granada, the Alhambra Decree ordered the expulsion of the Jews. Along with several Jews suspected of making false conversions, the Tribunal burned thirteen Manus Sancti members at the stake in Granada and five more in Seville.” The red lights on these cities pulsed.
“Holy smokes,” Cassie said and immediately realized it was a terrible word choice. “Sorry.”
Hadiza’s brows rose. “That was five percent of the group. The other members in Granada were driven underground—quite literally, in the catacombs.”
Interesting. So living underground was truly part of their heritage. Hadiza talked about religious persecution and the emigration of Manus Sancti members. Cassie’s eyelids grew heavy, as though she’d been up all night the night before. But she’d gotten plenty of sleep, and she wasn’t bored by Hadiza’s history lesson. How could she be so exhausted and dizzy at a time like this?
Jonathan touched her arm, frowning in concern. She shook her head, waving her hand in a reassuring gesture. No doubt she was just emotional. She needed to focus.
The next slide showed the basilica in Rome with sun streaming out from behind it. Hadiza said, “By the eighteenth century, the Vatican saw witch hunting as less of a priority, while the Tribunal had grown too powerful. In 1740, the pope officially decommissioned the Tribunal.
“However, the Tribunal remained an intact group that believed the Vatican had become corrupt. They declared their new goal: to convert the entire world to their brand of religion.”
“Lots of groups have that goal,” Cassie muttered.
“Quite correct. They continued to torture and murder those they considered heretics, particularly Manus Sancti. Meanwhile, we grew in numbers and spread across the world. The Tribunal saw us as a rival group intended to impose universal worship of the Devil. A new world order, if you will.”
“Right, that’s us,” Gabi said dryly.
“So they think you’re, like, the Illuminati?” Cassie asked.
“Yes,” Hadiza replied, “if the Illuminati were much worse.” She turned back to the screen. “In late eighteenth-century France, the Tribunal infiltrated the Jacobin clubs and sent most of our members in Paris to the guillotine.”
Jonathan leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I never heard about that.” Cassie hadn’t, either, of course, since all she knew about the French revolution was A Tale of Two Cities, which she’d skimmed in high school, and the movie version of Les Miserables.
Hadiza went over incidents of violence between Manus Sancti and the Tribunal throughout the nineteenth century and during the first World War. “Finally, in the early 1950s, the Tribunal killed sixty-eight of us at our Paris guarida using the Vollum strain of anthrax.” Cassie wouldn’t have guessed that anthrax existed back then. “Capitán Renaud’s mother, Jacqueline Duval, of course, was one of them.” Hadiza touched her hand to the top of her chest, her index and middle fingers extended together sideways. Jonathan, Gabi, and Nic did the same, a quick, instinctive gesture.
Samir stared at his hands that rested, folded, on the table. Capitán’s expression was stony. How old would he have been when his mother died? A child, definitely.
Hadiza explained that in 1957, Manus Sancti had launched a strike in several cities that had effectively ended the Tribunal. In the early 1990s, the Diviners had come across a few scattered discussions of the Tribunal in Internet chat rooms, but nothing more. She turned off the screen and took a seat.
Andre said, “A few years ago, we came across someone claiming to be Tribunal in the dark web, but it was gone almost immediately, and we couldn’t trace it. And no one had heard about them since.”
Capitán’s gaze flicked from him back to Hadiza. “I need to know who this new generation is. Descendants of our enemies? Psychopaths taking up an old cause?”
“We’re on it,” Andre said.
Gabi shook her head. “How are we even sure Lucia’s captors were Tribunal? Someone could have lied to her.”
Samir drew an audible breath and spoke for the first time. “She must have seen something. Luci is a genius. She wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”
“She was certain,” Jonathan agreed in a low voice. “And she didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t going to give up a thing.”
“Did you—” Samir paused and glanced upward, his eyes glazing with tears, and tried again. “Did you have time to give her absolutio?”
Jonathan’s frown deepened. “Yeah, I…did the best I could.” He looked to Capitán. “What do we do?”
“We hunt them down,” Samir said. “Ultio mea est.”
“We need to get as much intel from them as possible,” Capitán said. “Three Knights in Rome are after them, and I’m sending a psychometrist to pick up any information she can. But none of them can Read a prisoner.”
Samir’s lip twitched upward in a snarl. “I’m happy to interrogate.”
Jonathan darted a worried glance in his direction and said to Capitán, “Send me.”
Cassie struggled to keep her eyes open, and her arms and legs felt heavy. She longed to lie down on the floor.
Capitán said to Nic, “We do need someone who can Read people. Who’s closer?”
The mission runner glanced up briefly from his phone. “Octavio Zain, in Algiers. He’s on a mission now…a necromancer in Tunis.” Clearly, he’d anticipated the question. He touched a couple more buttons. “I’m sure it can wait. I’ll contact Algiers and put Zain in contact with the team in Rome.” He glanced from Samir to Capitán. “Are we sending Hassan?”
“See how fast you can get him there. It’s his fight.” Samir gave a grateful nod. “Let’s discuss final arrangements. Was Dimitriou Orthodox?”
“No,” Samir said. “She was an atheist.”
Nic said, “Her will says cremation, internment anywhere, memorial here at El Dédalo.”
A fresh wave of shock washed through Cassie. They were talking about Lucia’s dead body.
Capitán said, “I’ve sent another Knight to retrieve her body. West, contact the family members right after this.”
“I’ll call them,” Samir said. Cassie expected Jonathan to look relieved. He looked guiltier.
Capitán nodded. “Joe, tell Zain I want every ounce of information he can get. ID every other Tribunal member they know. Let Hassan be the one to finish them. If it’s practical.”
Andre looked up from his phone. “Um. It may be too late for one of them.”
All eyes turned toward him. Capitán said, “Explain.”
“Maybe Cassie should explain.”
She’d been sagging in her seat, but now she jerked up straight. “What happened?” Was it something with her animals?
“I put a global search on Aquileia news a few minutes ago. Here’s something that’s already been shared a few times.” In a few moments, a photo appeared on the big screen in the room. A man lay in the middle of a street, surrounded by birds.
“What is this?” Capitán asked. Andre pressed another button.
The jerky video flickered in and out of focus. A whole flock of birds surrounded him, starlings, she thought, flying and pecking at whatever vulnerable spots they could reach—his hands, his head. He turned and they could see his whole face. His eyes had been pecked out.
When he opened his mouth to scream, another bird darted in to pull off a chunk of his tongue. Cassie let out a little shriek and pressed her hands to her face. More dived in to peck and yank at his throat. Blood spurted—they hit a vein.
Cassie hid her eyes. “Oh my God.” The screaming on the video had stopped.
After a moment, Andre said, “That’s the end of the footage. Jonathan, is that the man you saw?”
Cassie lifted her head again. Jonathan stared in awe at the now-blank screen. “Yeah, no question.”
Samir’s eyes sparked with vicious satisfaction while Hadiza’s expression reflected frank horror. Capitán Renaud’s eyes half closed, like a cat after it knocked a water glass off the table.
“I—I thought this would happen,” Cassie said. “Not birds, but…” She trailed off.
Capitán said, “From the other side of the world. Impressive display of power.”
She felt dizzier than ever. “I was…very angry.”
“Resourceful, too,” Capitán added. “Such an ordinary bird. But with enough of them—immediate retribution.”
“Wasn’t…choice,” she murmured. The room spun.
Samir turned to her. “I’m in your debt. If I can ever repay you, I will.”
Relief. He wouldn’t come to hate her for what had happened. But no, she didn’t deserve thanks. “I’m not…” she started to say. The edges of her vision sparkled. “I won’t going…” Jonathan moved closer and put a hand on her arm. She tried again. “I wanted maybe my…” The connection between feelings and speech had snapped in her. Everything went black.