Page 47 of Blood Hymn

When I let her go, she's got my blood on her lips.

Above us, at the top of the steps, the chapel doors are shut. Candlelight flickers in the tall windows. Somewhere inside, faint and scratchy, a record has started to play, an old hymn on an old turntable, the one the old man used to play in the family chapel every Sunday of my life.

Evie looks up at the doors. She looks back at me.

"Ready?" she asks.

I check the magazine in the AR. I check the Glock on my hip. I press my hand flat against my side one more time and feel the warm wet under my palm and take it away.

"Always."

CHAPTER 17

EVIE

At the top of the chapel steps, Silas pulls the Glock off his hip and presses it into my hand.

"Seventeen rounds," he tells me. "Your .38's done."

I let the empty revolver drop into the flood behind me. The Glock is heavier than I expect, square and cold and slick with river water, and my fingers close around it like they've been waiting.

Through the doors, the hymn on the old turntable comes to the end of its verse and begins another. "Blessed Assurance." I know every word. I sang it in this chapel at my mother's funeral with Charlotte's hand on my shoulder.

Silas puts his shoulder to the right-hand door. I take the left. We look at each other once.

He kicks.

The door slams back against the wall, and the chapel opens in front of us, long and narrow, twelve pews to a side, lit by what must be a hundred candles. They're everywhere, on the altar rail, on iron stands along the walls, in the windowsills of the tall stained glass, and in the middle of it all, at the end of the aisle, Judah Harlowe stands behind the altar in his dark suit with his hands folded on an open Bible.

His four men are already firing.

I throw myself sideways behind the last pew as the first rounds punch through the door where I was standing. Splinters spray across my face. Silas has gone the other way, low and fast, into the shadow along the right wall. The AR barks twice, and a stained-glass window above the guard nearest him explodes outward into the night in a rain of blue and red. The guard ducks. Silas is already on him.

I don't see all of it. I see pieces, in flashes, over the back of the pew. Silas coming up under the guard's rifle and driving it into the ceiling. The two of them crashing against a candle stand, candles toppling, rolling, one catching the hem of a velvet banner. Silas's elbow going into the man's throat. The man dropping. A second guard coming down the side aisle toward them both with his rifle up, and Silas turning too slowly, too slowly, one hand clamped to his left side.

I rise over the pew and fire three times. The second guard spins and falls into the aisle.

"Evie, down!"

I drop. Bullets rake the pew above my head and the wood jumps under my hands. The third guard is on my side of the chapel, halfway up the left aisle, firing from behind the end of a pew. I crawl on my elbows between the benches toward the center aisle, over hymnals, over a woman's scarf somebody left on the floor. The shooting stops. He's reloading. I hear the magazine drop.

I come up out of the pews into the aisle three yards from him while he's slapping the new magazine home and shoot him twice in the chest. He sits down on the kneeler and falls against the pew in front of him.

The fourth guard is the last one standing, on the far side of the altar rail, and he doesn't have a rifle. He's got a knife, a long one, and he's coming at Silas.

Silas has gotten to his feet somehow, against the right wall under the shattered window. His face is gray in the candlelight. He sees the man coming and gets his hands up, but he's slow, slow the way he was never slow in the barn or the tree line or the red room, and the knife goes in low on his left side, into the place I packed with my own fingers this morning.

He doesn't cry out. He grunts, like a man lifting something heavy. His hand closes on the guard's wrist, holding the knife where it is, and with his other hand he takes the man's head and drives it face first into the plaster wall. Once. Twice. The man's legs go. Silas lets him fall.

Then Silas slides down the wall until he's sitting on the floor beneath the broken window, with his legs out in front of him and both hands pressed to his side.

"Silas."

"I'm here." His voice is thick. "I'm here. Don't look at me. Look at him."

I look at him.

Judah Harlowe hasn't moved from behind the altar. He hasn't ducked. He's standing exactly where he was when the doors came open, with his hands folded on the Bible and the candlelight throwing his shadow up the white wall behind him onto the plain wooden cross.