Harsh Gods by Michelle Belanger

Author:Michelle Belanger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

29

Lying there against the pale expanse of the sheet, the little coil of pink and green beads looked harmless enough, but the minute I touched Halley’s rosary, there was no mistaking Terhuziel’s token. I could feel his twisted, alien mind pressing against the raw spots where I’d cut his presence out of my head. It stirred unpleasant memories from the incident in the museum.

I slammed down on every shield I had practiced over the past few months, fighting the impulse to hurl the beads across the room.

“Playing on her devotion to her grandfather. That’s low,” Father Frank growled. “I hope you hurt this bastard good.”

I held the gaudy string of thick ceramic beads closer to the soft light of the call button mounted near the bed. Expecting to find the Name scribbled on the back of the plastic crucifix, I saw only a MADE IN CHINA stamp. Then I went decade by decade, inspecting each individual bead.

In the five decades of her rosary, a sequence of ten green beads marked the ten Hail Mary prayers. Carefully tied knots separated each bead. At the end of each decade was a broad, flat bead with the raised pattern of a rose stamped on one side. Shell pink, it sat between two larger knots. That was where the faithful would pray the Our Father before moving onto another set of ten Hail Marys.

The Our Father bead shimmered with an opalescent coating, so the ceramic looked more like mother-of-pearl. As I turned the bead around on its string, a slightly deeper pink caught my eye. Closer to fuchsia and riddled with round specks of glitter, the darker color picked out the first symbol of Terhuziel’s Luwian Name in painstakingly delicate strokes.

“Nail polish. Fuck me running,” I muttered. “She painted it on with nail polish.”

Father Frank leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the prayer beads in my hand.

“First time I’ll admit I need bifocals,” he grumbled.

Smooth ceramic whispered against my calluses as I advanced to the next decade. Sure enough, the second glyph was painted on the back of the next Our Father bead. I held it up closer to Father Frank, though with the dim lighting in the room, I didn’t expect that he would see it.

“As long as she wore this, Terhuziel could reach her, even if she was nowhere near his domain,” I explained, “but at some point she had to enter his sphere of influence for him to notice her. Where did she go, around the time her grandfather died?”

I set the prayer beads onto the nightstand, unwilling to handle them any further. Smashing them seemed like the best course of action, but that was going to make a lot of noise—and the ass-ogling night nurse was sure to come running. Maybe Lil had something useful tucked away in that purse-of-holding she toted around.

“The funeral, of course,” Father Frank responded. “Before that, she visited him twice at the hospital. They had him at the Cleveland Clinic following a massive stroke.”

Under her covers, Halley whimpered, then tentatively extended a hand.

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