Page 22 of Radiant

“Oh, that works.” I followed him into the next room across the bruised plank of the one-time door.

Claustrophobic thanks to the low ceiling and the raw walls, this room wasn’t exactly inviting. However, it lacked one thing present everywhere else in the ossuary: bones. Instead, I saw something that almost made my heart beat out of my chest, and before my brain could fully comprehend the sight, I found myself in Auris’s arms.

“You don’t have to look, Ethan. Listen to my voice. You don’t have to look.”

But I did. I had to, so I did. Peeking over his shoulder and past his shroud of black hair, I saw a cross, set with precision in the center of the room. Its vertical piece was bolted to the floor and the ceiling, like the exposed support beam of a building. A leather strap dangled from the horizontal part. Beaten into the cross, there were long nails—blades, really—sharp enough to mount a person on and make sure they bled and hurt. Like had been done to Auris.

I was scared. “There’s no one here.”

“No one, I promise you. We’re alone. Come.”

I shook my head and stood my ground. I had faced this before. I wasn’t going to let it be another horror to haunt me.

“No, I…I meant.” I lit up the cross with my flashlight and took a step to the side so that he held on only to my elbow. “There’s no one on the cross.”

I moved the flashlight to the right. There was a table with a toolbox on it. The box was dark green, rectangular, and it looked so very innocent. In front of it on the wooden table there were two droplets where something dark had dried into the wood and stained it.

Before I could move my flashlight to the left, Auris reached for my wrist. “Don’t. There are…more bones there.”

I had missed those then, upon first glance. In this moment, I didn’t mind not having night vision like he did.

Back in the motel room with its filthy bathroom, I had been helpless. Utterly. I had felt the reality of death, not the abstract concept. There had been a moment where it had been a certainty. What would have become of me? A skeleton to scare the living? A body, gruesome in display, the only memories associated with it the memories of crime and cruelty, not of who I had been, not of all the photos I had taken, the smiles I had demanded from people in front of my lens. Should murder be allowed to have this power, to render someone’s remains the ultimate memento of cruelty?

No, I thought. The dead are not for display, for garlands. They are not for our viewing pleasure, they are not show-and-tell items for sordid tales. They deserve compassion. They deserve their remains to be respected, and for as long as we are able, they deserve to have their lives remembered.

“Let me see.” I must have sounded certain, because Auris took his hand away and watched me explore the rest of the dark room.

The bones were on another table, laid out as if for an examination, the skeleton disarticulated but reassembled, each piece where it belonged. Each piece where it should be.

“Ethan—"

“What’s wrong with the skull?”

Auris walked up to the table and picked up that skull to look at it. “Fire. I can still smell it. This was charred.”

He looked at the rest of the bones and probably saw more there than I did. I didn’t need it confirmed though. I already knew what had happened. They had dragged another vampire in here and bound them to the cross. There had been torture, some sort of exorcism, and then they had beheaded said vampire, waited until the flesh was burned away, and for some reason, some disgusting reason, they had brought them back down here. They’d set them out, like some sort of display.

“Can we…take them away with us? I mean, this is…this is the vampire they were talking about, yes?”

A ripple ran down Auris’s dark hair. “Going by the teeth, yes.”

“Let’s take them. We should bury them. I don’t like the idea of the priests getting to keep any shred of this person. Fuckers.”

My fear, hard and ruthlessly though it had taken me, squirmed away from the anger that was bubbling up inside me. Auris looked at me, surprise in his black eyes.

“Yes, we can take these bones. I don’t know what rites they would want, but we can figure something out.”

I bobbed my head. “Okay. We’ll do that.”

“Wait here. It won’t take long.” Auris became a blur of vampiric movement.

Less than a minute later, he was back with some sort of priest robe, into which he folded the bones, all of them. He was quick, but he took care. He bound the little parcel up, moving slowly as he did, showing reverence. It was all that was left of someone who had potentially lived ages. Of someone who might have seen festivals to long-dead gods in Aswan or wild forests in the midst of Europe in which rabbits outran foxes. What a senseless waste to extinguish all of that in cruelty, pain, and fire.

We left the hidden crypt. Auris put the bones on the floor with great care to close up the back of the wardrobe behind us.

“I don’t want them to know right away. The priests we met weren’t involved with this operation directly, they’d just heard of it. With luck, no one higher up will make the connection to us.”

I snorted. “This was a feather in someone’s cap, so much so they gossiped about it.”