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“Quiet, you crazy old loon!” Alaric snapped beside the baron, and he swatted the older woman’s hand away.
The woman fell back against her bed in despair and turned into her pillow, where she buried a sob.
“Should I require your interventions, I will ask,” the baron said, as Alaric gave the boy’s elbow a nudge.
“And know that I do not require your invitation,” the guardsman said to the back of the boy’s head. “The bishop is waiting.”
They finally reached the bishop, who had moved on to another bed, offering prayers to a younger man who stared off, eyes a white void. The baron would’ve thought him dead, if not for the steady rise and fall of his chest.
“It is our duty to take in the sick of mind,” the older man said, as he dipped a ladle into the bucket held by the pentash who stood beside him. He deposited the water into the supine man’s opened mouth, dribbling it down the seemingly unconscious man’s chin. “The world casts them out as lost and broken souls, but they can be saved by the Holy Light and exorcized of the demons which plague them.”
“How do you know it is demons who plague them?” The boy’s bold inquiry earned him a narrow-eyed stare from the bishop.
“The Holy Father does not create imperfect souls. How could He when we are made in his image?”
“And you say it is your duty to offer them compassion and mercy?”
“Yes. We are the servants.”
“And did you offer mercy to the young Lord Fletcher?” The boy Drystan had told him about, who’d been taken to the undercroft for having seen something unusual crawl out of an apple. None had heard from him since.
“Of course. Would you like to pay him a visit?”
The question caught the baron off guard, as he’d not expected the boy to be alive, much less permitted to have a visitor. “Yes. I would.”
“Very well. Come with me, young baron.”
The bishop took the lead beyond the infirmary to the staircase, which the baron knew led to the undercroft below the monastery. Once in its cold and damp depths, they followed a path toward the all-too-familiar rooms, but turned down a different corridor, one in which the baron had not yet seen. The bishop came to a stop before a door and pulled out a long skeleton key. The baron’s heart pounded in his chest, as he stood. Waiting. Wondering what he’d see on the other side.
The door swung open to a small room lit only by the waning light of dusk that poured in through a nearby window. On a rickety old cot lay the young Lord Fletcher in a simple white nightshirt.
Stepping inside the room, the baron kept his gaze on the boy, who did not move, nor acknowledge his presence. Yet movement of the other boy’s chest told him the young lord still lived. “What ails him?” the baron asked, coming to a stop alongside the boy’s bed.
“Possession. Lucifer sank his willful claws into the boy’s mind and has not let go.”
Eyes a vacant white, like those of the man’s in the infirmary, the young lord stared up at the ceiling with unflinching constancy.
The baron reached out, running his finger over the boy’s arm and noting the ice-cold temperature of his skin.
As if he were already dead.
When the baron drew his arm back, the boy reached out and clutched him with long, claw-like nails that dug into his skin. A jolt of alarm rattled the baron, and he tugged against the boy’s hold. The young lord’s white eyes rolled over to black, and he snarled back at him. “They want to eat me! The demons! They will come for you! And feast! Feast on our flesh, and our soul will be gifted to the Infernal Lord! Hail to the Infernal Lord!”
With a hard yank, Jericho wrenched his arm away and took a step back, frowning down at the boy. He was the second to speak of demons coming for him.
The first having been the elderly woman.
“Poor young man,” the bishop said beside him. “‘Tis a shame when they succumb to evil. The boy had such an incredible life ahead of him.”
“Is this not a holy establishment? Do the demons not cower in the presence of theHolyFather?” The baron could not help the sneer in his voice, recalling that it was a mere worm in an apple that had brought Lord Fletcher to that place to begin. The other boy had not always been that way, which led the baron to believe something had happened in his time there.
“By taking in the possessed, we invite the infernal darkness into our sacred monastery, but I am far too merciful to turn my back to those who need help.”
“Lies. Lord Fletcher was no more afflicted by evil than the shoes upon your feet.”
The bishop’s eyes narrowed on him, and the baron could have only imagined what thoughts swirled inside his head right then. “You do not believe in the inherent evil of men?”
He did. His own father was an example, though the baron had since learned of his true nature which made him so. Not human flesh and blood, but that of something which derived from the infernal places he had only read about in Bible study.
