Part 15 (1/2)
”Who whipped you?”
”The abbot.”
”Why?”
He opened his eyes and fixed her with a stare. ”He caught me in bed with one of the other novices.”
Miranda wasn't sure how to respond to that. ”So you were a monk?”
”Until the day I died.” He drank again, then again, before saying, ”I was the fourth son of a farmer in southern Ireland. I was a weak little thing, far too frail to work the fields. So when I was eleven years old my father sent me to my uncle, who ran a monastery. I was basically a t.i.the to bribe the Almighty for a better harvest.”
”That must have been hard for you, to leave home so young,” she said.
”On the contrary, that journey was the first time I ever remember looking forward to anything. I loved G.o.d. I was born to be a monk. I had no desire for a wife or family or land of my own. I longed only for silence around me and the light of G.o.d within. I spent hours in prayer, on my knees at my bedside. I hated the farm, my rough rowdy brothers, and the drudgery of our lives. I wanted to devote my life to Christ and to the written word-monks back then were some of the only scholars.”
”But when you got there . . .”
”It didn't take long for my uncle to suspect there was something abnormal about me,” Deven said. There was strangely little emotion in his words; even for something so long ago she would have expected a little anger, or sorrow, but it almost sounded as though he were telling someone else's story. ”I know now that he started the monastery after being driven out of his old one for accusations of pedophilia. He was obsessed with purity and chast.i.ty, and to sublimate his own s.e.xual urges he tried to beat mine out of me. He decided it was his mission to make me fit to stand before G.o.d. He forced me to pray for twelve to twenty hours at a time, on my knees, even after I had lost my voice; I was only allowed to eat every few days; I had to recite Leviticus while he tore open my back with the whip. Between broken bones, infection, and starvation I came close to dying more times than I can count . . . but I was so afraid of the d.a.m.nation I faced that I dragged myself back to life every time.”
”I'm sorry,” Miranda said softly.
”I don't want your pity, Queen,” he snapped. ”Don't think that we have some common bond because men treated us both like trash.”
”I don't think that,” Miranda said, her own anger flas.h.i.+ng at him. ”We're nothing alike. What happened to me didn't turn me into a drunken p.r.i.c.k who tries to get in his old boyfriend's pants after f.u.c.king him over. Trust me, I don't want to claim any common ground with you.”
”If I wanted David, I'd take him,” Deven informed her venomously.
”What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?” she demanded. ”You have a fantastic Consort who for some reason I can't figure out loves the h.e.l.l out of you, and you're fixated on a married ex who doesn't want you anymore? Who are you trying to hurt-me? David? Or yourself?” Miranda sat up straight and leveled a look of loathing on the Prime. ”You missed your chance, Deven,” she snarled. ”You blew it. It's over now. You drove him away, now he's with me, and I'm not going anywhere. So get the f.u.c.k over it.”
The ire seemed to drain out of Deven as quickly as it had come.
Silence sat awkwardly, and drunkenly, between them while she finished her drink and poured another. The Prime didn't react to her outburst at all for a while.
Finally he said, ”You can hate me all you want, but I'm not going anywhere either.”
”Yeah, I know.”
”I suppose for David's sake we should try to get along.”
”Probably.” Another pause. Then she asked, ”What do you think is happening to David and me?”
”What makes you think I would know?”
Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. ”Oh, come on. Even David thinks you know everything. You can't tell me that in all the years you've been around, you've never heard of psychic gifts being contagious.”
”As a matter of fact, I haven't,” he said.
”I picked up on his telekinesis, and he picked up on your fighting mojo. How could that happen?”
Deven leaned over the arm of the couch and felt around for a moment before coming up with a second bottle of whiskey, this one new. As he opened it, he corrected her. ”He didn't get it from me; he got it from you.”
”But I don't have it.”
”You've got precog because you're a Queen,” he said. ”It's still untrained, and so is his. The telekinesis you got from him was already honed and focused-it took him years to learn how to direct it enough to throw a living thing. What I have isn't a single gift, it's a combination of three factors: prescience, telepathy, and technique. I taught him the third, he already had the second, and from you he got the first. His work was still a little sloppy around the edges, but once he got out of his own way, it was genuinely powerful.”
”Why is it harder to throw living things?”
Deven shrugged. ”They wiggle?”
”Sophie showed me how to do something similar to that,” Miranda recalled. ”I wonder where she learned it from.”
”No idea. But the thing to remember is you've had precog y our whole life-it's part of who you are. It just didn't start to actively manifest until you became Queen. It's practically unheard of for someone to just spontaneously develop a psychic talent without at least some latent ability . . . and even less heard of to start manifesting someone else's.”
”Still, the central question isn't answered. How did it happen?”
”I would venture to guess that the answer is somewhere in our history. Legend has it that back in the ancient days, when the Signets were new, we had abilities we can only dream of, abilities we lost somewhere along the way. We are a mere echo of what we once were.”
Miranda held her gla.s.s tightly. ”But some of it is still possible.”
”Most likely all of it is, if you know where to find it. As to that, I'm as clueless as anyone. I didn't become Prime for mystical powers . . . actually I didn't do it on purpose at all, so I was never all that interested in some grand destiny.”
She crunched a half-melted piece of ice in her teeth. ”Did you mean it when you said you don't believe in G.o.d anymore?”
He crossed his arms and leaned back. ”I went to live in the house of G.o.d and spent six years tormented by his holy representative. I prayed and prayed for deliverance, and all I got were broken fingers and lye burns, because G.o.d didn't care to save a wretched little sodomite like me. I learned I was h.e.l.lsp.a.w.n because of the things I could do, and the only atonement was to let my uncle abuse my body in the name of Christ our Lord. After that I lived for seven centuries, Miranda, and spent much of that looking for some sign, anything, to bring back my faith. I tried. I traveled the world searching. And do you know what I saw?”
”What?” she asked softly, unsure how to deal with his sudden, complete honesty.
”I saw men raping women and children. I saw men killing each other in G.o.d's name. I saw greed and poverty and despair and murder of every conceivable kind. I learned that the loving Father I had yearned for wanted me to burn in h.e.l.l because I fell in love with the wrong kind of person. I saw ma.s.s murder, terrorism, genocide, oppression, and repression, and all of it, all of it, was dedicated to a G.o.d who seemed neither to notice nor care. So you tell me, Miranda. What should I believe?”
Miranda had tears in her eyes. She couldn't help it, thinking of all that had been done to an innocent child, and all that seemed to still be happening to him, in his memory, seven hundred years later. She could feel, even through his words, the pain that it caused him to feel betrayed by the belief system that had been his reason for living, once upon a time. ”But you don't have to be Catholic,” she said. ”You don't have to define G.o.d by what his fan clubs do.”
Deven smiled, and again her heart hurt for him. ”It's too late for me, Miranda. Some doors, once closed, can never be opened again.”
”What . . . what things could you do, that the monks condemned you for?”
As if beaten down by the irony of it, Deven's voice was stony and dull. ”I'm a healer,” he said. ”I've cured the plague. I've reattached limbs. I've brought mortals and immortals both back from the very edge of death.”
”That sounds like the kind of gift G.o.d would love,” she said.
”G.o.d, perhaps. At least I like to think so. Man? Never. To men, G.o.d is a weapon. A stick to beat the souls of others into submission. A blade to stab and bleed anyone with power of her own. If there is a G.o.d, he has abandoned us all to fear and eventual despair. But in the end, what does it matter to us? Nowhere is it written that heaven would open its doors to a vampire.”
He met Miranda's eyes. ”We're alone, Miranda. Our kind have no savior, no paradise to look forward to. Some of us do evil, so perhaps they'll go to h.e.l.l, but for those of us who don't . . . we're no less d.a.m.ned. But perhaps our d.a.m.nation is worse, for all I can see ahead is nothingness. No G.o.d, no devil, nothing. Just an eternity wandering the outer darkness.”
”Wow,” Miranda said. ”I think you may be the most pessimistic person I've ever met.”
”Thank you.”
”But you're wrong,” she told him. ”We're not alone. We have each other. You have Jonathan, and I have David. Maybe the reason we have soul mates is to make the darkness easier to face . . . forever.”
Deven gave her a slightly patronizing smile. ”Oh, don't worry. You won't have to worry about it forever. Now that you have a Signet I give you, say, two hundred years.”