Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [102]
The orderly, who had accompanied the chief to the basement, grudgingly lifted the book to see a sketch of a church. A thunderbolt clapped from the sky and the church was in flames. Inside, a man, woman, and child huddled together happily. On either side of them two figures hung from crosses: a disemboweled woman and a man with his eyes gouged out.
chapter twenty-six
The bark of the trees felt familiar beneath Juno’s sensitive fingertips. The sound of the wind was a song he had heard before. And he felt the clearing on the skin of his face and smelled the flowers from the garden, just as he had as a child. Juno had found his way home. It had taken a while, but it was if the church was homing in on him, pulling him into its arms.
But as soon as he climbed the few low steps, pushed open the heavy wooden doors, and stepped inside, he felt that the energy, which he knew like the feel of his own skin, had been altered. He felt the soft chuckle raise the hair on the back of his neck before he heard it.
Juno did not respond, only lifted a hand to steady himself against the last row of pews. Maybe he had come for this. After all, Lydia had warned him that he might be a target of this maniac. Maybe this was Juno’s cowardly way of committing suicide, unable as he felt to face the world that had been revealed to him.
“It’s all so perfect,” said Bernard Hugo. “We are all truly part of a divine plan. Don’t you think so, Juno? I didn’t even have to come for you, you came to me.”
Pain and rage radiated off Bernard Hugo in pulsating waves that moved through Juno like electricity. But his voice was measured, like a metronome, and as cold as liquid nitrogen. Juno sensed it was best to stay silent, feeling that the sound of his voice would be like a match to a fuse.
“When a predator stalks its prey, creeps through the woods or the grass, in that second before the chase begins, the prey always has a final moment of realization—an awareness that has crept into its eyes, its sensitive nose lifted suddenly to the wind, an inner silence of delicate ears straining for sound, of lean, taut muscles tensing for flight. Humans assume that a scent caught, in the last minute, on the wind, warns the prey. But I think it’s something else. A disturbance in psychic energy, a spiritual knowledge that one has entered the last moments of life on this earth, a mental connection with the creature who will have the final impact on one’s existence. Do you think that’s true?”
Juno sat, knowing it would be futile and ridiculous for a blind man to run. He wasn’t afraid to die, if it came to that. “Who are you and what do you want from me?”
“Who am I? Don’t you even know me? You, the murderer of my son, don’t even know my name?”
“I have never hurt anyone in my life.”
“You claim to be a holy man and a healer. And you are nothing but a liar. You are false to God, like all of them. But you are the worst of all.” His voice was rising and he was moving closer to Juno. “At least the others were false only to themselves. But you fooled everyone. In the end, when my son lay dying, your prayers meant nothing. You were no closer to God than anyone else.”
“Have you killed all these people because I am not a healer, because I was not able to heal your son? I tried—God knows, I would have done anything to be what people thought I was.”
“And all this time,” Bernard continued, unhearing, “I have been under your nose, stealing the dirty sheep from your diseased flock and offering their purified hearts back to God. I am His warrior, His angel of death. All was taken from me so that I could do the Lord’s work. And you never even knew me. Your uncle knew me as Vince. Vince A. Gemiennes—the name God gave me.”
“So you think that by killing those innocent people, you have given your son’s death meaning?”
“They had no right,” he yelled, almost shrieking. “They had no