“You don’t use guns.” It’s an internal thought that I don’t mean to blurt out loud.
“Where is the sport in that?” the man on the left says, his voice low and raspy. He pauses to regard me directly for the first time, allowing me to see the predatory gaze in his golden irises.
Though I never witnessed it myself, I know Korsakov killed people. He would rage at their betrayal and blame them for forcing him to exact retribution. But for weeks after someone disappeared, there would be a solemness to his demeanor. Somewhere very deep down, despite his justifications, I think ending a life haunted the man.
I see no hint of remorse in the eyes that stare back at me now, and the way they drag over my neck and chest makes me shrink into my wool blanket.
I shift my attention to the small portal window next to me, absorbing the constant hum of the engines. Far below, the city lights fade in the distance. I’ve never been on a plane before, let alone a private one. I couldn’t help the stir of intrigue when the white SUV pulled up beside it. “Where are we going?”
“My home.”
Belgium, if what she told me earlier is true. Despite everything, I feel a smile touch my lips.
“This pleases you.” Sofie peers over her newspaper again, watching me intently. The sociable, mischievous woman from the bar is gone. She guards her expressions and her tone so well, I can’t begin to read her mood.
“I’ve never been to Europe. I mean, I planned on going, someday.” Korsakov demanded that I always be within an hour’s reach unless I was robbing someone for him, so escapes to London and Rome weren’t an option. Truth be told, I think he worried that if I left, I wouldn’t come back.
I can’t believe he’s dead. I never liked the man, but I cared that he found value in me. Who knows what I’ll feel when this shock wears off, if there will be anything beyond relief.
“Fear not. You will see many new places, soon enough.” Sofie peers out her own window. “I didn’t leave my home city of Paris until I was twenty-one. Same age as you are now. That was when I met Elijah. He wanted to show me the world.”
And yet he’s never been to New York?
She knows how old I am. Or rather, the man who sent her knows. “So, you work for Malachi?” Saying that name out loud doesn’t trigger any familiarity.
“I serve him, yes. It will all make sense soon.” She pauses. “Romeria is a pretty name. Unique.”
I swallow against my unease. It’s been years since I answered to my real name, another lifetime ago. “It’s Romy.”
“I wonder why your parents chose it,” she muses, in a way that suggests she already has an idea.
“They never told me,” I lie. My mother said it came to her in a dream one night, before I was born.
“Did you know it means ‘pilgrimage’ in Spanish?”
“No. I’m sure it’s coincidence.” I doubt my parents could put ten Spanish words together between the two of them.
“‘One who journeys to a foreign land,’” she recites as if quoting a definition, her attention still out her window.
“Like Belgium?”
Her lips purse. “Though, the Spanish version would likely refer to the religious connotation. There was a time when humans routinely took long spiritual journeys in search of truth and meaning, and to make offerings to their god.” Ridicule touches her tone.
But it’s her word choice that makes my eyebrows pop. “Humans?”
“It’s an interesting thing, what we do in the name of our gods and our own salvation. Did you know they used to burn women at the stake, claiming them to be witches and devil worshippers?”
My stomach constricts.
“Even today, there are still those who search for a truth they cannot see, a truth they fear. Who will kill in the name of their god and in doing their god’s work.” She peels away from the window to pierce me with her sharp gaze. “But you already know that, do you not?”
I sense where Sofie is so smoothly steering this conversation.
“Your mother—”
“Is dead.” My pulse pounds in my ears as I match her stare, daring her to challenge that.
Only the faintest twitch of Sofie’s eyebrow hints of a reaction to my lie. “I see I’ve found a weak spot in your armor. So, you do not support her cause?”
She knows about my mother. Of course, she fucking knows. I school my expression. Losing my temper will only reveal my vulnerability. “You mean, her psychotic cult’s cause?”
It began harmlessly enough—an invitation to a group grief-counseling session in a church basement, meant to offer solace to people who had suffered a loss. That’s what it felt like—the loss of my father, even though he was still physically here, wandering the streets. We’d had our entire world flipped upside down, and I was relieved to see my mom making new friends.
But within weeks, our conversations took an odd turn. She started questioning whether maybe demons and witches did exist, and that what my father saw had been real.
Talk soon shifted to whispers of creatures living among us—hiding in plain sight—while the government covered up the truth and witches masquerading as nurses stole newborn babies from maternity wards. She even claimed she had seen proof of magic, though when I pressed, her explanation sounded more like vague riddles than anything resembling fact.
Talk of conspiracies and witchcraft and monsters consumed my mother’s every waking moment. I was fourteen and didn’t understand what was feeding these growing delusions, but I’d already lost one parent to the demons in his head, and I was afraid I might lose another.
She would leave for days on end, spending her spare hours in the old Baptist church that this group who called themselves the People’s Sentinel had purchased. We were barely surviving as it was, relying on food stamps and soup kitchens for meals and secondhand shops for clothes, but still she gave them all our money. I wasn’t surprised the day she announced we were moving into a run-down building the Sentinel had purchased for their growing “community,” in preparation against the coming war against evil. I screamed and railed, told her I wouldn’t go, that I’d run away. She held strong. I’d see the truth, she promised me.
I wanted to believe her.
For weeks, I ate and slept under the Sentinel’s roof, listening to these people—all branded with a tattoo of two interlocked crescent moons on the fleshy part of the thumb, the mark of “a disciple”—talk of otherworldly power and the spread of evil, hiding in the skin of the human form.
It was so consuming that a part of me wondered if there was truth to it. It would explain what my father saw, though it wouldn’t explain what happened to him afterward.
For her part, my mother was in her element within those walls. She quickly moved up in rank. I didn’t know what her role was, but she no longer worked at the grocery store, and everyone referred to her as “Elder” when she spoke.
She’d promised I’d see the truth, and I did, the night she took me to a wooded area outside the city. I witnessed her and the others tie a “witch” to a post on a pile of dry kindling and strike a match.
That’s the night I ran.
In some ways, I feel like I’ve been running ever since, running from what my mother did.