The Sinner's Bible: A Novella (The Natalie Brandon Thrillers) Read online

  “It’s fine,” Jacob said, setting his plate in the sink. “I’ll do it.”

  “No. Go put my coat on.” Jacob changed directions and plucked his puffer coat from the sofa. The sleeves hit two inches above his brother’s wrists. “Hey princess,” he said. “Don’t forget the matching gloves.”

  Jacob reached out to ruffle his hair.

  He ducked and batted his brother’s hand away. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean I really hate it when you do that.”

  “I know.” Jacob ran one hand over his shaved head, resting it on the back of his neck. “Just be glad you have hair, man. You don’t miss it until it’s gone.”

  “You want me to shave my head to prove you wrong? I will.”

  “Hey Ezra,” Jacob said softly. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t you say that. Not now.”

  “You rather I waited?”

  He held his breath. The trailer was shrinking, closing in on him. Everywhere he looked, he saw reminders of the time his brother didn’t have. The bills, the calendar, the magazine subscriptions with expiration dates further away than the doctors’ best-case scenario. “Don’t you thank me. All I did was make a sandwich.” He braced himself against the sink, turning his face to the floor. “All I did was make a fucking sandwich!”

  Jacob rested one hand on his shoulder.

  The cold leached through him, and he threw off his brother’s arm. “Why aren’t you angry?” he yelled. His eyes began to burn, and he pushed everything that made them burn into the black pit under his heart. “I’d be so goddamn angry.”

  Jacob smiled. “Even after this big bad thing, I get the only thing I ever wanted. You’ll still be here when I’m gone.”

  The blackness consumed him. He picked up a glass on the counter and hurled it to the floor. Shards hit the baseboards and ricocheted like bumper cars. He wanted one of them to hit him, maybe even nick an artery. Serve him right if I went first, he thought. Make him see what it’s like.

  Jacob squatted and picked up the mail he’d swept onto the floor, dropping it on the table. “We got work to do. You going to help or not?”

  Ezra sighed. He knew there’d be a day when he forgot what his brother looked like, when he’d give anything to be staring into Jacob’s near-lashless blue eyes. But in that moment, seeing the placid acceptance on his brother’s face, he wished he were in Timbuktu. “At least shake the glass out first, you dumbass.”

  He snatched the pile of mail and shook it over the floor, then resumed sorting. He tossed the car and health insurance bills back onto the floor. Then he pulled out a flyer printed on a glossy half-sheet. He scanned it once, then twice, wondering if he’d missed something. “This is it.”

  “What is?”

  He held it up for Jacob to see.

  His brother narrowed his eyes as he read the thick block type.

  Come see the Sinners’ Bible, the flyer said. You’re invited to an informal Q&A session with Associate Librarian Avi Druckman. Our copy is one of only eleven in the world! See this priceless historical document and hear about its place in history from Professor Elizabeth Brandon. Join us in the Rare Book & Manuscript Room at Ford Library - 6 p.m. on March 15.

  “I don’t get it.” Jacob frowned. “A book?”

  “A priceless book.” He shook his head. The only people who used that word were the ones with money. The rest of them knew everything had a price. “This is it. We can do this.”

  A university would be much easier to hit than a bank. Banks had security guards who carried guns. A handful of professors would never see it coming.

  He glanced at the Farm Bureau calendar on the wall.

  The presentation was a month and a half away. Plenty of time to plan.

  The flyer showed a big gray building in the background, ugly and modern with tiny Lego windows that probably didn’t open. Two people were in the foreground—a skinny white guy with glasses and an afro, and a smiling blonde who looked more like a movie star than a professor.

  “She’s hot,” Jacob said, pointing at the blonde.

  Ezra smiled. “Want to meet her? I think I can arrange it.”

  Chapter Four

  January 1632

  Whitehall Palace, London

  Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, reached into the sooty grate to rescue the small book. Her fingertips slid through the soft pile of ash, closing around the spine. She shook it over the floor to remove most of the debris and looked over her shoulder.

  Charles was gone.

  She knew where to find him, but it would be best to leave him alone for a few moments. He’d stalk down the hall to his study and reach for his father’s book, the Basilikon Doron. Whenever he felt unsure of himself, he sought the comfort of his father’s words. James I had been a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings. As long as Charles believed that, too, he could find the strength to do what he must. He hated punishing people. He hated conflict. But in this case, she would ensure his will held firm. Someone had made a terrible mistake, perhaps even committed a crime.

  But that wasn’t why she wanted this heretic Bible.

  She wanted it because it was a sign from God.

  He was reminding her of the many ways in which her family had failed Him.

  She held it up and blew the last of the ash from the cover. It fell to the floor like snow. “Why must You punish me this way?” she whispered.

  A punishment from God was the only explanation for the nightmare plaguing her sleep.

  Every night, she saw a man dressed in green lying on a bed. His face was the color of an eel’s belly, streaked with sweat and slime. Blood crusted his lips and chin. The assassin’s knife had penetrated his torso, sliding easily between the second and third rib, and again between the fifth and sixth.

  It was her father, Henri Quatre, the previous King of France.

  As she watched, an angel of the Lord appeared before him. Instead of embracing him and carrying him to eternal glory, the angel raised a sword of flame and struck off his head. The head fell to the floor and rolled toward her feet, long black hair trailing behind it. When it touched her, the eyes opened, weeping streams of blood.

  The problem was that her father did not have long black hair.

  Her husband, Charles, did.

  She shivered and grasped at her furs. Even the memory of the dream made her cold. “Why must You punish me this way?” she said again.

  Seven years ago, she had been sent from France to cement the alliance with England. But unlike most princesses, her mission was not simply to bear Charles Stuart’s children. Her country had negotiated the right for her to remain a practicing Catholic, even as she married a prince sworn to defend the Anglican faith. The Holy Father himself had told her that her true mission was to rescue Charles from heresy. She was to convert him and, by extension, all of England back to the True Faith.

  “I was fifteen,” she whispered, sliding her fingers across the cover of the Bible. “How could You have asked such a thing of me?”

  But age was no excuse.

  Jeanne d’Arc had raised the siege of Orléans at eighteen.

  God had sent her the dream as a warning. If she failed, Charles would be killed and it would all be her fault. She had to work faster.

  But how?

  Charles’s court hated her.

  They hated her confessor and her chapel. They hated her for refusing to be crowned as their queen in an Anglican sacrament. But how could she betray the Holy Father and the True Faith and participate in a heretic’s ritual? She was a daughter of France, born of a king anointed by God.

  But that thought was troublesome, too.

  Her father had been baptized a Catholic. In his youth, he had turned from the True Faith to become a Huguenot, then turned again in order to win the crown
. The great Henri IV, who joked that Paris was worth a Mass, had then spent his entire married life humiliating her mother as he strayed from the marriage bed. No French king had ever bedded the number of women her father had. Indeed, her father had broken every vow it was possible to break, divorcing his first wife, changing religions, and betraying her mother. It had all ended in a Parisian alley, when a madman named Ravaillac plunged a dagger between her father’s ribs. She had been five months old, with no memory of him as king or father. What was she supposed to think of him based on what he left behind? A trail of bastards, proof that he had violated the Seventh Commandment with no remorse whatsoever…yet he was the most beloved king in the nation’s long history. Never had the French people wept as they had at his death.

  She could not reconcile it in her mind.

  How many times could one abjure a faith without attracting the wrath of God? How many times could one bend God’s laws to satisfy one’s own desires? Had God grown weary of her father’s shifting loyalties? First Huguenot, now Catholic, first married to Margot, then Marie, first bedding the chambermaid and then the milkmaid, with a countess thrown in for sport.

  God remembered such things.

  Why else did the Bible say the Lord God will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation? If there were any truth to that verse, Henri iv’s sins would be visited upon her, her children, and her children’s children.

  Or upon Charles, as her dream seemed to foretell.

  And now this Bible appeared, with its horrible misprint, calling to her of one of her father’s two great sins.

  It was no mistake.

  God did not make mistakes.

  “You seek vengeance on my blood,” she said. “To punish my father’s sins.”

  She had to keep Charles close, both to her and to the True Faith. Converting him was the only way to release the curse her father had set upon them all with his wickedness. If she failed, the avenging angel with the sword would come for them all.

  “No,” she whispered to the angel. “You shall not have him.”

  She clutched the false Bible to her chest, a visible reminder of what she had to do, no matter the cost.

  Chapter Five

  February 2014

  San Francisco, California

  “They totally Photoshopped you,” Natalie Brandon said, eyeing her sister’s faculty portrait. “Are you sure Crawford didn’t tell you about this?”

  “It’s a punishment. He has the whole Religious Studies department to pull from, and I’m the one who gets the call.” Beth crumpled the pink message slip, delivered to her faculty mailbox that morning. “He didn’t even have the balls to tell me in person.”

  “Seriously.” She held up the glossy flyer so Beth could see it. “No crows’ feet, no laugh lines, nothing. Maybe you should thank him.”

  Beth snatched the flyer from her hand. “I’m only thirty-six, for Pete’s sake.”

  “The freshmen in your Western Civ class were born in 1996.”

  “How did we get so goddamn old?”

  “Speak for yourself.” She pointed at the swear jar on her sister’s desk.

  Beth dug in her purse and shoved a dollar into the jar. “What do I know about the Bible? Nothing. What do I know about seventeenth-century printing customs? Nothing. What do I know about the struggle between Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics in early modern England? Next to nothing. Who the fuck—” her hand dove into her purse—“would pick me for this?”

  Would you like my help? Belial asked. I know everything about the Bible.

  “No one asked you,” she said.

  “The Sinners’ Bible.” Beth shook her blonde bob. “It’s only famous because of a mistake. That’s what my career has come to—talking about typos.”

  “Where’s the typo?”

  Beth uncrumpled the chancellor’s note. “Exodus 20:14. Like we’re supposed to know it by heart or something.”

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I don’t trust books without page numbers.”

  “All I remember about Exodus is Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.”

  “He should have stayed with Anne Baxter.”

  “We’re going to hell,” Beth said.

  Yes, Belial answered.

  “No,” she replied.

  The angel flicked her with a wing and a white-hot streak of pain strobed behind her ear. She pressed her palms to the desk.

  “Is it Belial?” Beth asked softly.

  She nodded.

  The angel, called Belial, crouched in the airless space above her brain, his wings folded over her parietal and frontal lobes. When they touched her, they lit up her skull like a pinball machine.

  It had been that way since she was nine years old. She’d been in fourth grade, standing at the chalkboard in Mrs. Wilson’s class. Suddenly, a searing pain had made her drop the chalk and press both palms to her head. She’d felt something moving beneath her skull, something with a human form and enormous feather-covered wings. She’d closed her eyes to shut out the blinding white light that accompanied the pain, but it only made the creature struggle harder to open its wings. When the creature realized her skull was the obstacle in its way, it spoke to her. “I have things I want to show you. But I have to open my wings to do it. Will you let me?”

  Through the shock of fear and pain, she’d said yes.

  Her body fell in a faint at the chalkboard. The next thing she knew, she was floating above it, with the creature at her side. All the pain and the noise and the light were gone. “My name is Belial,” he said. “I live inside you now.”

  “Are you an angel?” she’d asked.

  “Look around you and tell me what you think I am.”

  He waved his arm and she saw that they were no longer in a classroom. They were in a camp ringed with barbed wire. A man in black whipped a line of marching men, all emaciated, all wearing striped pajamas. A strange sort of snow fell from the sky, sticking to her hair and eyelashes. When the man with the whip turned to her, smiling a black and broken smile, she’d woken up in a hospital bed, screaming.

  The doctors had all sorts of official-sounding explanations for what had happened. A sudden drop in blood pressure had resulted in a coma, the body’s protective reaction to a pulse of just twenty-nine beats per minute. But they couldn’t explain what had caused the drop in the first place, and they couldn’t find Belial, no matter how many X-rays and CAT scans they did. He was there, though. She felt him. Every time he shifted his wings, the feathers pricked her brain like needles.

  No one believed her when she told them that was why she was crying.

  Instead, they prodded and poked her and locked her up in strange rooms, with bright lights strobing for hours on end. We can’t treat her, they said to her parents, until we can reproduce the seizure.

  She’d begged Belial to show himself, to do something to help her. He refused. I belong with you now, little one, he’d said. In the end, the doctors had shrugged their shoulders and let the psychiatrists argue among themselves. The state children’s hospital had finally decided Belial was a hallucination, strong enough to induce physical effects because of her overdeveloped hypothalamus. They settled on a diagnosis of early-onset paranoid schizophrenia, and prescribed her a flood of mind-numbing medication.

  The embarrassment of having a mentally ill daughter who needed constant care was too much for her mother to bear. She made friends with bottles of all shapes and sizes, rousing herself only to put Natalie’s next pill in a spoonful of grape jelly. Her father worked in an office by day, and retreated into his study by night. Beth had been the one to feed her, wash her, dress her, and brush her hair. In return, she’d helped Beth with her homework, trying to remember not to do it in pink or purple ink.

  Even before Belial, her brain could do things most others co
uldn’t. When Beth stayed at school for track practice, she’d watch her sister’s favorite shows and recite them word-for-word when Beth came home. She’d been able to tally grocery bills to the penny before she even knew what fabric softener was. After Belial, she could still do those things, but now she had his commentary to provide the context a nine-year-old lacked.

  It had taken her a long time to realize he didn’t always have her best interests at heart.

  Beth was the only one she could trust.

  Not Belial.

  Never Belial.

  He was the reason the other kids at school hated her. Before she’d learned to keep her mouth shut when he spoke to her, she’d answered him out loud. The other kids called her Nuthouse Natalie. After her second suspension for fighting, midway through fifth grade, her parents had pulled her out of school. Until the day they died and Beth moved home to take care of her, she’d barely left the house.

  The three of them—she, Beth, and Belial—had developed a tense but stable working relationship. Beth believed in cognitive therapy, Belial believed in himself, and she believed in the welcoming numbness of whiskey and vodka. There were still times when Belial overwhelmed her, making her do things she didn’t really want to do. She snaked her hand under the right sleeve of her sweatshirt and stroked the puffy silver scarflesh. She had one scar on each arm, a thin slit running from wrist to elbow. They itched when it was cold.

  “And here’s the best part,” Beth continued. “Crawford will be at the presentation. Watching me. Judging me.”

  She opened her mouth to say it wasn’t true, but it was.

  Are you surprised he feels this way? Belial asked. You lie to him on a daily basis.

  “He doesn’t know that,” she grumbled.

  He knows you’re lying about something. That’s far worse.

  They were lying about lots of things, actually.

  Crawford didn’t know about Belial, thanks to HIPAA regulations. All he knew was that she’d had health issues in the past, requiring Beth to act as her legal guardian. He didn’t trust either of them, and made no secret of it. She’d have felt bad if he wasn’t a dick. “I’ll protect you from Crawford,” she said.