Page 32 of Wayward Daughter

“I’m looking into that mystery we’ve never been able to solve,” Rainer said.

The knife my mother handed me before she was taken. It was clearly magical. It was made from some kind of black stone. Obsidian blades were super sharp, but very brittle. This knife was old, but it was pristine. There were no divots or chips in the blade. It looked brand new. Rainer hadn’t been able to find a single thing about it in any of his lore books. Since my family had been in the Flame for generations, we had a ton of books you couldn’t buy anymore.

“Sounds like a plan.”

We’d narrowed the Pope down to one of the earlier ones who took the name Pius. He wasn’t as famous as other Popes because he only held that title for five years. Record keeping wasn’t all that great, but I could find theories he was assassinated by poison because there was technically no way to get rid of a Pope once they were voted in except death.

“Hey, so I get that your Pope is supposed to be super holy and everything, but shouldn’t you have a better plan to get rid of them if it turns out they aren’t since murder is an actual commandment? Have y’all never heard of just firing a bitch? This is what happens when you plan shit without women.”

Caleb started laughing, and I didn’t think I’d actually heard him do that thus far.

“You aren’t wrong. About women and needing a process for removing a corrupt Pope. Pull up the file labeled Caedis. It’s about any and all assassinations involving the Church. It’s organized by name.”

“Yo, that’s fucked up the God people have an assassination database. You know that, right?”

It was fucked up as fuck, but I was going to creep on it like my favorite author just dropped a new smutty book where a witch gets involved with a bunch of different men. I’d never get a chance to read about who the Church took out again.

“Oh, I agree. If it makes you feel better, the last entry is from a very long time ago and it was different times.”

“They say it was different times to justify grown men sleeping with teenagers. It’s still gross.”

“I agree. How old are you, Logan?” Caleb grinned.

Damn.

“Not a teenager.”

Was it weird that Caleb without the hex acted more like someone with a hex should?

I grabbed my laptop and joined Pan and Saul on the couch. Pan was sitting between us and Solomon joined me on the other side. Caleb took the love seat.

Damn. The Church took out a lot of people several hundred years ago. They also tried to take out multiple people. I had to scroll a bit. Would they document taking out their own Pope? Found it!

Huh. I found something and read the entire file before I said anything.

“Y’all, Pius was basically Rasputin. He was originally Æthelwold and was a priest in Canterbury. He survived an attack on his cathedral and told everyone it was Vikings. He kept rising in the church, even though a lot of people didn’t like him until he eventually made Pope.

“A lot of people couldn’t figure out how he did it. Even people who hated him voted for him and he didn’t promise them anything. Every time someone would start looking into him, they’d go into a meeting with him and come back forgetting everything they learned. Do you see where I’m headed with this?”

“Vampire?” Solomon asked.

Spot on.

“Yes. The Church figured out about the supernatural because a vampire used compulsion to make his way to Pope. They tried to kill him numerous times, and he didn’t die because vampires have to be staked, beheaded, or set on fire. They figured out how to kill vampires by killing him. It doesn’t answer what happened at the church, but I would imagine if a vampire compelled their way to Pope, they’d start looking into other supernatural legends.”

“The church burned. A vampire wouldn’t have been anywhere near that. They are a little more flammable than everyone else and it can kill them,” Solomon said.

“That doesn’t make sense. Vampires recoil from crosses and holy relics. How could one insert themselves into the Vatican?” Caleb asked.

“Unless that’s just what they want us to think,” Saul said. “It’s kind of hard to say someone is drinking their neighbor like a sippy cup if they’ve got crosses in their house and sit next to you in church every day.”

“Ding, ding to the big sexy giant. It’s also psychological. The newly turned ones that go bad don’t tend to know that. They react because they think it’s going to hurt them. We don’t know if Pius was turned before the church burned down or after. He wouldn’t have been the one who lit the match because vampire, but I wouldn’t imagine any of them had any interest in you until you started hunting them. The church didn’t start going after witches in a major way until at least a thousand years later.”

“Everything about Pius was hidden unless you knew where to look, apparently, and they told us some fiction when they recruited us for this. But Venatio Daemonum was research only for a very long time. They gathered as much information as they could and had to figure out how to fight them.

“The Church didn’t start sending priests until the late sixteenth century. They later acknowledged a bunch of people who were tried and killed as witches weren’t actually witches and only paying the witchfinder if he actually found a witch gave them financial motivation to frame people. They started preparing secret priests to do that work instead of the public,” Caleb said.

“Took them a while to come up with that conclusion too,” Saul said.