things,” Kelly babbled, through her panting. “He zapped her, and then he put her in the van and drove away.”
Molly drew in a sudden breath and almost seemed to turn green.
Michael stared at the girl for a second, and then glanced at me. His eyes widened in horror. “Alicia!” he called, stepping past Kelly and looking wildly around the park. “Alicia!”
“He took her!” sobbed Kelly, her tears making her face blotchy. “He took her!”
“Kelly,” I said, to get her attention. “What did he look like?”
She shook her head. “I don’t—I can’t . . . White, not really tall. His hair was cut really short. Like army haircuts.”
Buzz.
He’d threatened Michael to get me to bring a sword out in the open, where it was vulnerable. Then he’d tried to kill me before I locked it away again. And when that failed, he tried something else.
“Molly,” Michael said quietly. “Take the truck. Drive Sandra and Donna home. Call your mother on the way and tell her what’s happened. Stay at the house.”
“But—” Molly began.
Michael turned hard eyes to her and said, “Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Molly said instantly.
Michael tossed her the keys to the truck. Then he turned to a nearby equipment bag and smoothly withdrew an aluminum bat. He whipped it around in a flowing rondello motion, nodded as if satisfied, and turned to me. “Let’s go. You’re driving.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where?”
“St. Mary’s,” Michael said, his tone positively grim. “I’m going to talk to Forthill.”
FORTHILL HAD JUST finished saying evening Mass when we showed up. Father Paulo greeted Michael like a long-lost son, and how was he doing, and of course we could wait for Forthill in his chambers. I suspected Paulo held deep reservations in regard to me. But that was okay. I wasn’t feeling particularly trusting toward him, either.
We’d been waiting in Forthill’s quarters for maybe five minutes when the old priest came in. He took one look at Michael and got pale.
“Talk to me about the order,” Michael said quietly.
“My son,” Forthill said. He shook his head. “You know that I—”
“He’s taken Alicia, Tony.”
Forthill’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“He’s taken my daughter,” Michael roared, his voice shaking the walls. “I don’t care what oaths you’ve sworn. I don’t care what the Church thinks needs to be kept secret. We have to find this man and find him now.”
I blinked at Michael and found myself leaning a little away from him. The heat of his anger was palpable, a living thing that brought its own presence, its own gravity, into the room.
Forthill faced that anger like an old rock thrusting up stubbornly through a turbulent sea—worn and unmoving. “I will not break my oaths, Michael. Not even for you.”
“I’m not asking you to do it for me,” Michael said. “I’m asking you to do it for Alicia.”
Forthill flinched. “Michael,” he said quietly. “The order maintains security for a reason. Its enemies have sought to destroy it for two thousand years, and in that time the order has helped hundreds of thousands, even millions. You know that. A breach could put the entire order at risk—and that means more than my life, or yours.”
“Or an innocent child’s, apparently,” I said. “I guess you’re going to take that ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me’ thing kind of literally, eh, Padre?”
Forthill looked from Michael to me, and then to the floor. He took a slow breath, and then smoothed his hands over his vestments. “It never gets any easier, does it? Trying to work out the right thing to do.” He answered his own question. “No. I suppose it’s often simpler to determine the proper path than it is to actually walk it.”
Forthill rose and walked over to a section of the wood-paneled wall. He put his hands at the top-right and lower-left sections of the panel and, with a grunt, pushed it in. It slid aside, revealing a space the size of a closet, filled with file cabinets and a small bookshelf.
I traded a glance with Michael, who raised his eyebrows in surprise. He hadn’t known about the hidey-hole.
Forthill opened a drawer and started thumbing through files. “The Ordo Malleus has existed, in one form or another, since the founding of the Church. Originally, we were tasked with the casting out of demons from the possessed, but as the Church grew, it became clear that we needed to be able to counter the threats from other enemies as well.”
“Other enemies?” I asked.
“Various beings who were masquerading as gods,” Forthill said. “Vampires and