“There’s something I want to show you,” he said. “It’s in that room.” His head turned, and he stared at the door as if it held all of the answers in the known universe. He inched toward the door, and he said nothing as he unlocked it. Once it was unlocked, he didn’t push inside. Instead, he stepped aside, basically giving me the go-ahead to be the first one to walk into the room.
Hmm. At this point, I had no idea what to expect, and since he wasn’t going to tell me, I had to walk inside and see whatever it was for myself. I pushed open the door, stepping inside a dark room. No windows, obviously, since it was a basement. Behind me, Ezekiel stepped into the room and turned on the light, revealing just what it was he wanted to show me.
And what was it? Oh, let’s just say it was not something I could’ve guessed, not something I could’ve prepared myself for.
Not that I needed to prepare myself for anything. With all I’d lived through, with all I’d seen, I could confidently say I was prepared for everything. But, uh… that might not be strictly true, because when I saw what lay within the room, I froze.
I froze, but Ezekiel didn’t. He walked around me, moving to the other side of the room. What lay between us was something I’d never seen before.
A man. A man fastened to a chair, except he was… well, let’s just say he was less, as in, the man was missing a few key limbs. Hmm. Maybe not just a few. More like all of them.
His arms, his legs. The man had nothing but stumps at the elbows and knees, bloody rags of clothes on the rest of his body, cluing me in to the fact that those missing limbs used to be very attached, and there was only one person here who could’ve done it, the person who lived here.
A man of God who was not only a killer, but a mutilator. Just when you thought you were getting to know someone…
I was slow to lift my gaze off the man—who was very unconscious, if not near death—to Ezekiel, who waited on the other side of the room, watching not the man between us, but me. Waiting for my reaction.
If I was anyone else, I might’ve reacted differently. I might’ve gotten upset, demanded to know why he was doing this, but then again, if I was someone different, this man wouldn’t be in Ezekiel’s clutches to begin with. No, this man, this Greenback Serpent, had to be one of the ones who’d come to the church in search of me. Ezekiel had said he’d taken care of them, and I’d assumed he’d kill them all.
But he didn’t, because here one was, his chest still rising and falling, just barely.
“I thought you killed them,” I whispered.
“It was easier to let you believe that.”
I took a step toward the man, once again studying his missing limbs. Where the arms and legs had been severed, it appeared that Ezekiel had cauterized the wounds. I then noted the old refrigerator in the corner of the room, along with a table that housed many metal instruments that, I chose to assume, Ezekiel had used on this man.
I didn’t think I could clutch my glove harder if I tried. “Why go through all this? Why do this for a girl you don’t even know?” I asked, hearing nothing but the soft echoes of my own voice in the room. I bet no one heard this man scream when every door was closed. This made the perfect place for a little torture, although what he did with the missing limbs or the bodies of the other Serpents, I had no idea.
“It is like you said: we are the same, you and I, and even if you deny it, you are my flock.” He lowered his eyes to the man, taking him in with a slight frown on his face. “And I wanted to see what answers I could drag from him. I wanted to know who this Atlas fellow is, see if I could find him and put an end to his search of you.”
Where I might’ve told him off before, told him that I didn’t need any help, I only said, “And what did your torturing help you discover?”
He was sluggish in moving around the chair, nearing me, though he never once took his eyes off the unconscious man. “As it turns out, not much. Usually showing someone their own amputated limbs makes them pliant to whatever you want, but still he held out. It was not until he woke up missing his second hand that his tune changed.”
“You found out who Atlas is?”
“No, rather I found out he had no idea who his boss is. Any orders he gets comes through the grapevine, so to speak. He’s only ever heard Atlas’s voice over the phone. I imagine much of the other Serpents have the same story.”
Not surprising in the least. “Atlas is the man with no face, so I’m not shocked. What does shock me is the idea of a man being in charge of this gang without ever being seen by them.” I folded my arms over my chest, thinking. “I don’t think Atlas wants his men to kill me. Like you said, if they found me, they’d take me to him, so he could have the honor of ending me. Payback for what I did to his men in that church. Now, you, on the other hand—I’m surprised he hasn’t sent more men over here to take you out, after these goons failed to return.”
“I’m surprised I haven’t been visited again yet, too,” he agreed.
So, even Atlas’s men didn’t know his identity. That explained why every Serpent my father encountered told him nothing, even when threatened with a bullet to the head. They truly didn’t know. There was nothing to tell.
But how could Atlas lead them like that? I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it.
My voice came out quiet, “You shouldn’t have done this for me, Ezekiel. You put yourself in danger for me.” Even now, I still didn’t understand it. He owed me nothing, so why do all of this for me?
“I did it because I wanted to,” he said. With two more strides of his long legs, he was in front of me again, blocking my view of the unlucky man who’d found himself at the mercy of an unhinged priest. “I have faced worse than these fools.”
Somehow, I believed him. “Where did you come from?”
With another step forward, he now stood less than six inches away, his body so close to mine—and yet we weren’t fighting. It was different now. It was just… just different. “I was born to darkness, and somehow I found my way to this city, where darkness rules. I thought I had found my purpose in life…” He let out a breath, and that breath hit my face, his heat making me feel all sorts of things I shouldn’t. “And then I saw you, a rose in a bed of thorns, a white light in a sea of black. I knew the moment I laid eyes on you that you were different from the rest, and now I know why.”
The more he spoke, the more I believed each and every word he said. It was like this was a personal sermon, a private mass just for me. Right now he was my priest, not this city’s. He belonged to no one else but me.
“You have been hurt, abused, abandoned by those who should’ve protected you. I was saved by a man many call a demon, but he was kind to me when others were not.”