Page 54 of Antihero

“You’re gonna need to—”

“I understand the protocols. It’s okay. I got you.”

“I don’t have…”—her eyes rolled up to white, fluttered back momentarily—“pillow.” The words came slurred: doan have plillow.

Evan cradled her, nestled her head in his lap, her temple on the meat of his thigh.

She gazed up at him.

“I have you, okay? Look at me. I have you.”

“Don’t leave me here alone.” Doane lee me hee lone.

“I’ll be with you until you’re back.”

A few shuddering breaths. Her hand clawed at his shirt, made a fist in the fabric.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t leave you.”

Her hand went limp.

Her eyes, shut and fluttering, lost to a dark kind of rapture.

She seized. Legs kicking, hip rattling on the step, her free elbow flailing until he pinned it gently down. Rolling her partially onto her side, he kept her head tilted, horseshoe-gripping her chin and cheeks, popping the mouth open to make sure her tongue was clear.

Passersby kept passing by, an oblivious parade of pant legs and loafers, Air Jordans and high heels.

“Dude, get a room. Your girlfriend’s freakin’ out.”

Evan glanced up at the cruel smirk of a young man in a hoodie, automatically calculating the strike point at the hinge of his jaw to knock the lower mandible clear off the temporomandibular joint. But he focused back on the young woman convulsing in his arms. He brushed the hair from her face, guarded her elbows and knees, kept her safe.

On the steps of the church, he held her. Her parted lips were full and pink, her eyelids fluttering beatifically. She was lost to an aura, her features alight with a preternatural luster.

The seizure lasted nearly three minutes.

But felt a lot longer.

At last, she quieted, stirring gently in his arms.

“I remember now,” she said, her voice little more than a rasp. “I saw it.” Her eyes blinked unseeingly. “A goat-skull tattoo on one of their chests. Devil horns.”

Lifting a tremulous hand, she felt her cheeks with her palm, as if checking that her face was still there, and then wiped the tears watering from the sides of her eyes. Pushing up out of his lap, she groaned. She leaned forward and let a few breaths shudder through her.

Rising under her own power, she continued up the steps to the church.

The homely outside of the church cracked open to reveal an interior befitting a Fabergé egg. Gold and bronze iconography everywhere—bejeweled crucifixes and ornately carved newel-posts, countless vigil lights guttering in an immense candlestand, display tables overburdened with art. A massive box with carved fringes resembled an abandoned palanquin. A half-dome painting beneath an empty rear balcony depicted the Last Supper, nimbusless Judas looking shifty. Imagery abounded, relics crowding every surface, pictures tucked into the frames of larger paintings. A marble baptismal font, mosaics, a throne befitting a Middle-earth king. Beside the ceiling plate of an elaborate chandelier, Christ peered down from a gold-wreathed spot of heavenly blue. A glow suffused the church, bleeding through stained-glass saints to blanket the pews and idols and living souls with a many-colored raiment.

The simple wooden pews of the tiny church were crowded, everyone standing. A priest in elaborate vestments of iridescent bottle-fly green prayed in Romanian. He was bookended by life-size standing icons of Christ and Mary, and backdropped by a vast decorative partition wallpapered with icon panels, each as detailed as the next. Among the shimmering imagery, he seemed a part of the church itself, which of course he was. Between his incantations, a small choir lifted their voices in four-part harmony, transforming the service into a continuous song. The acoustics were shockingly good, the hymns seeming to emanate from the carved and painted faces all around.

Evan and Anca stood unnoticed where the door let in at the side of the nave, Anca seemingly as surprised as he was to find a service in full swing. The heavy door clicked shut at their backs. The priest’s attention moved to them, his pale, concave face filling with joy. He halted in midsentence, breath catching, and then the focus of the congregation found them.

Utter silence.

The priest took an unsure step off the pulpit toward Anca and then another, broad sleeves hanging like bat wings from his spread arms. Beneath his robes, he floated toward her, staring as if unsure that she was real. Her eyes filled with tears to match his. Nearing, he lifted a bejeweled blessing cross from around his neck, and she closed her eyes and kissed it. As he set it upon her head, whooping and cries broke loose, Evan jostled to the fringe as the congregation surrounded Anca. Confusion pulsed in his chest, to have allowed himself to be pushed to the periphery, to lose someone he was protecting to a mob. But of course it was not a mob, it was a community, and he felt a sense of loss that his muscle memory had never been taught to distinguish between the two.

There were Slavic three-cheek kisses, nose bumping, the worshippers crossing themselves in threes right to left, thumbs and first two fingers pinched together. Double bowing and more kissing—kissing the icons, the edge of the priest’s sleeves, the crosses around their necks. And Anca in the center, held in an immense embrace.

“Father,” a woman cried in accented English, “should we finish the Akathist service?”