The Priest: The Luke Titan Chronicles #2 Read online

  “No. I don’t have enough time. You’re the only woman in my life, Veronica.” Still smiling. “Have you thought about going back to the book on the Sphere?”

  The Sphere. The book that had led her to all of this, to Luke Titan and his world. To Christian Windsor, Tommy Phillips, and ending with Bradley-Fucking-Brown.

  “It’s dead. They stopped working on it.” The Sphere had been Luke Titan’s invention back when he was in academia, before switching careers to the FBI — his third career change. Psychiatrist, astrophysicist, and finally Special Agent. “You were, apparently, the engine that kept it moving.”

  “You could write about that. I always love good press.”

  “You could start working on it again, that would give me something to write on.”

  “Maybe I will one day. Not today, though,” Luke said.

  They sat quietly for a few seconds. Luke did this often, letting silence dominate until she was forced to speak.

  “I’ve got to write something. I just don’t know what.”

  “Well, what are your talents?”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “What are you good at?”

  “Writing.”

  “And what are you good at writing about?” Luke asked.

  Veronica thought for a second. “Investigative journalism. I’m good at portraying people in a way that makes others understand them.”

  Luke nodded. “Yes, that’s right. People are complex things. We have emotions running through us constantly, dominating our thoughts all day long. Animals do the same, but they lack the multitude of thoughts. Theirs are simple, so it’s easier to understand them. You have a talent that allows people to understand the essence of others, to boil away all the thoughts and extraneous things, so the masses can see inside someone. The Surgeon sold so well not because you wrote about your experiences of being kidnapped and tortured. It certainly wasn’t because you wrote about me. The book sold because you explained Bradley Brown’s past in a way that made people understand him, and even though he was a monster, that’s what people want. Do it again.”

  “It’s that easy, huh? Just simply pick a man off the street and start writing about him. That’ll be a bestseller, I’m sure.”

  Luke smiled again. “Well, there are interesting people out there, many of them right around you.”

  “Name one.”

  “Christian Windsor.”

  Veronica’s head jerked backward at the name. At one point, they had discussed Christian frequently during therapy — how could they not? He was an intricate part of the whole Bradley Brown horror show; and a long time ago, Veronica had wanted Christian’s help to prove Luke was a murderer. All of that was in the past now, silly notions.

  “What would I focus on, if I wrote about him? He’s a savant, but … he hasn’t done anything yet.”

  “He will, though. I can promise that.”

  “The problem is, Luke, I can’t write about a man before he does something. No one wants a biography about that.”

  “Do you trust me, Veronica?”

  She nodded. She trusted him implicitly, more so than perhaps anyone else in her life.

  “Then talk to him. I think you’ll find him a subject that the masses will want to learn about.”

  Chapter 3

  Just as two years passed for the others, they also passed for Lucy Speckle.

  She spent those two years becoming a model citizen, so to speak. No more outbursts. No more cursing or spitting. She came to realize that if she was to ever leave this place, all the nonessential things had to be essential. She even learned the name of where they kept her.

  Greenbriar Lakes.

  A great name, despite the fact that there wasn’t a lake anywhere around her.

  The subtitle, which sat on the sign outside, read, “Where People Come To Recover.”

  And that’s what Lucy spent her two years doing, recovering.

  Christian Windsor was still out there and God hadn’t told her to do anything differently. The plan was clear and so she needed to act as these people wanted her to.

  Lucy first worked on controlling her facial tics. The involuntary muscle spasms in her neck that caused her head to switch one way and the other, regardless of what was happening around her. She started working on speaking clearly, too, though both were extremely hard.

  There had been a time in Lucy’s life when she wanted nothing more than to quit stuttering. First in school, and the kids that never stopped their torture. Her father, too. Sometimes, at night, when Lucy was deep in sleep, she could still see her father’s face screaming at her.

  “STOP YOUR STUTTERING. STOP IT GODDAMNIT!”

  She would cringe and cry, and eventually Daddy would make her repent for the stuttering. It used to bother her, because when you repent, God was supposed to forgive. God never forgave Lucy, though; or if he did, he certainly didn’t stop the stuttering.

  When Daddy died, Lucy quit caring about it, though. Daddy was the last essential person she knew. However, she needed to at least appear to be working on the stutter.

  Her review day had finally come, and this was why she had worked so hard. A chance for escape, for finding Christian Windsor.

  Lucy sat in Dr. Brigham’s office.

  She had even spent the time to learn his first name: John. These things were essential, if she was to get out.

  “How’s it going today, Lucy?”

  “Good,” she said, fighting the stutter that wanted to come out — turning good to g-g-good.

  Lucy’s file was open on Dr. Brigham’s desk but she didn’t look down at it. It was only essential in that it would decide whether she left this place, but she knew how she acted was also essential; she couldn’t pay too much attention to it.

  “Today is your review day. You know that right?”

  She nodded. “Yes.” Short words helped keep the stuttering at bay.

  “I’ve got to say, Lucy, I’ve been remarkably impressed with your change in behavior. You attend all therapy sessions. You have no angry outbursts. You’re even running a Bible study? Is that right?”

  Another nod. Lucy kept her hands folded in her lap.

  “The state remanded you to us after what happened at the woman’s home. We’ve talked about that day a lot, haven’t we?”

  “Yes.” Of course they did. Lucy hated it when he spoke to her like a child.

  “Do you think you’d ever do something like that again, Lucy?”

  “No, of cuh-course, not. It was wrong.” A stutter. No more. No more. No more.

  “Why?”

  “Because I hurt people. A lot of them. I-I had no reason to hurt any of them and I know that now. I cuh-can’t let my anger out like that. It’s not fair to them.”

  “It’s not fair to you, either,” Dr. Brigham said.

  “I know.”

  A long moment passed between Lucy and the doctor. He looked at her and she kept her eyes firmly on him. She wouldn’t look away because this was perhaps the most essential moment. A judgment day, of sorts.

  “I feel safe recommending that you leave, Lucy. Congratulations on such a remarkable recovery. I hope you understand how far you’ve come, and I truly hope you continue down this path you’ve set yourself on.”

  Lucy smiled.

  The woman’s home had been, by any measure—including Lucy’s—a disaster. Until the end. Then Lucy thought it turned out quite okay.

  She’d gone there after Daddy died, though not immediately. She tried to find work in her small southern town, but most people looked at her as a pariah. After what happened to her mother, and then the way Daddy died? No one was hiring her.

  She even went to the church.

  It was a small place, of course. Their religious convictions “wouldn’t never appeal to all those uppities,” her father explained.

  Pastor Martin had said he was very, very sorry, but the church just couldn’t take on anyone else. The budget was too tight as it was, and if he bro
ught someone else on, he wouldn’t be able to feed his own family.

  He said they’d take up an offering at Sunday service.

  He took up the offering, but Lucy never saw a nickel, and how much would she really have gotten from the ten people sitting in the pews?

  So, Lucy had left and headed to the only real city she knew about, Atlanta. She spent the first year working two or three part time jobs, but she ran into problems. Lucy’s tics and stutters kept her from being able to work most hospitality jobs, but those were the only places hiring someone with only a high school diploma from a town they never heard of.

  So, eventually, Lucy ended up in the women’s shelter.

  She hated it from the get-go. She looked around and saw nothing but heathens. People on drugs or alcohol or having multiple kids out of wedlock. There were classes and therapists and everything else you could imagine. Her father had talked about it all before, the “ills of society” as he termed it. The ills were people that couldn’t take care of themselves and relied on drugs or booze to hide their failures from themselves.

  “All them city folks gotta do is to turn to the Lord. Once they do that, everythin’ else will be just fine.”

  Lucy tried to preach to them, and when she did, her stutter disappeared. That was the miracle of God. While He may not have helped Lucy when Daddy told her to repent, as soon as she spoke about the Lord, the stutter couldn’t be found.

  Her preaching went nowhere and she was asked to stop by the staff.

  The moment which landed her in Greenbriar Lakes came shortly after that.

  She just hadn’t been able to take it anymore. Watching the people around her destroying their lives. Smoking their cigarettes. Coming in from their ‘jobs’ and Lucy just knew they’d been at bars talking to men and getting loaded.

  Finally, she caught one of the women — her name was lost in the recesses of Lucy’s mind, if it’d ever been there to begin with — smoking those cigarettes. The body was a temple, the Lord made that clear, and here she was just destroying it. Destroying God’s work.

  Lucy didn’t think it was that big of a deal at the time. Certainly nothing like what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah. She just grabbed the cigarette from the woman’s hand and put it out on her face. The woman shrieked and jerked back, but the red flesh still shone like a tiny sun on her skin.

  Lucy liked the way that felt, and she knew God liked her delivering a bit of justice. If they didn’t respect their bodies, why should their flesh continue looking pristine (as pristine as whores and drunks could look)?

  Lucy started walking around the outside, pulling cigarettes from hands and simply grinding them out on whatever piece of the smoker she could get to. Hands, foreheads, eyes, mouths — she didn’t care.

  She went through seven people before the shrieks and cries finally alerted enough of the staff to come stop Lucy’s righteous vengeance.

  She struggled hard against the men and women that came for her. Daddy had made sure Lucy was strong, and the muscle she gained back home (though lean and thin on her frame) never left. She punched, kicked, bit, and raked her nails every which way.

  Eventually, they brought her down to the ground. Her nose and mouth were bleeding, but she felt good for the first time in a long time.

  Daddy told her that God was just, but was also cruel to those who disregarded His laws.

  Lucy would never be the Lord’s sword, but she’d done something good that day.

  The courts looked at it differently. They remanded her to Greenbriar Lakes with no apparent return-to-society date. Lucy went to court without saying a word in her defense. She, essentially, provided no defense, but the court found her incapable of determining right from wrong (a rarity, as Lucy found out).

  Lucy knew right from wrong, though. It was the world that didn’t understand the difference.

  Lucy quickly found out that being released from Greenbriar Lakes didn’t mean complete freedom. She went to what was termed a halfway house, and if God had never tested her before, he was doing so now.

  This place was much worse than the women’s shelter, but Lucy had to remember her goal. She had an important purpose, to usher in the Lord’s sword.

  The halfway house got her a job as a maid at a local hotel. She went to it dutifully every day, speaking to almost no one. Her bosses stayed away for the most part, besides barking orders from time to time about something that needed cleaning.

  Lucy didn’t really mind the work. She did it by herself, which she preferred. She folded towels, cleaned rooms, picked up used condoms and threw them away, scraped shit off the inside of toilets — everything that no one else in this horrible world wanted to do. But she did it because this wasn’t the end for Lucy. It was the beginning.

  They allowed her to use the Internet at the halfway house, and it took some time to first learn computers, and then the Internet. Lucy wasn’t dumb by any means, but her life hadn’t been cursed with such sophisticated technologies. Daddy said they were the Devil’s tool, and from what she found on them, she agreed. For her purposes, it wasn’t essential that she know everything about the computer.

  She had to use something called a search engine. She needed Christian Windsor’s name, which she had and would never, ever forget. Then she needed time.

  For a solid month, Lucy spent two hours each night on one of the computers the halfway house provided. Sometimes people asked her to get up so that they could use it, and while Lucy wanted to scrape her nails down their faces until their skin fell away, leaving only a bloody mass of meat looking back at her, she acquiesced and gave up the station. It was essential that she stay out of Greenbriar forever.

  God was speaking to her more now — which was great.

  She heard him loudest when looking at pictures of Christian Windsor. Lucy couldn’t print them out and take them to her room like she wanted. That would have been noticed by the nameless staff that walked the halls. She could only look at them on the computer, but when she did, God spoke.

  The man was beautiful. Lucy found herself actually attracted to him in a way that she hadn’t felt for anyone before. Sometimes a stirring even happened in her naughty parts, but she was careful not to act on that. Daddy made it well known that the naughty parts were for excreting waste only, not anything pleasurable. Pleasure wasn’t what God wanted for his children.

  The human species was too sinful to make it to heaven by indulging in mindless pleasure.

  She asked her father once why God made men and women feel for each other. The answer had been obvious, and she was chastised harshly for not seeing it first. The Devil put those feelings there. They had nothing to do with God or His Holiness.

  She knew when she met Christian, she could never express those naughty thoughts. God’s plans for him were much greater than even those he had for Lucy. She wouldn’t sully that, not for anything in the world.

  It took two months to gather the information she needed.

  God’s work could finally begin.

  The longer Lucy stayed at the halfway house, the more freedoms they gave her. She was now able to go out one night a week, from 5:00 to 10:00. She was very careful to make sure she left on time and returned on time, never once going outside of the designated intervals.

  Being careful was essential, especially right now.

  Daddy’s car had still been parked at the church, even after three years. Pastor Martin said no one had used it and they were just waiting for her to come pick it up. Lucy didn’t believe much of what Pastor Martin said, and he charged her a hefty $100.00 to bring it to her, but in the end she got the old car.

  So, she did what anyone with an immense endeavor would do — she began practicing.

  Lucy knew the routes to take, knew the time necessary to get where she needed to go and then return. She traveled them over the course of months, once each week, learning everything about the back roads, highways, turns, and stop-lights.

  Finally, she showed up at the state home where Mrs. Br
own lived. Bradley Brown’s mother, the person who spawned the heathen that nearly killed Christian. Lucy signed in, having researched extensively what was needed to see someone at the residence. Apparently, nothing more than an ID.

  She looked at the blind woman for the first time, hate growing in her heart like a black cloud. This woman gave birth to something almost like Satan. This woman created a creature that nearly destroyed God’s miraculous plan.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “M-m-my name is Lucy.”

  “Why are you here? I don’t know you.”

  The woman wore sunglasses, but Lucy knew underneath those glasses were two dark holes from where her son had scooped out her eyeballs.

  “I w-w-wanted to come say hi.”

  “Well, hi,” the old woman said.

  Lucy made small talk for another hour and then left, barely able to contain her rage. It was, of course, essential that she did.

  When she returned to the halfway house, Lucy understood with certainty that God was directing her path. It would be easy to do what was needed.

  Chapter 4

  One Month Later

  Christian still couldn’t shake what Tommy had told him.

  Everyone was going to leave him, eventually.

  And that made him think about his mom. He knew, factually, that she would die one day, but he had always avoided it as if it were a dead body carrying the plague. He never let it enter his thoughts, not even his mental mansion where he kept everything he encountered.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” Melissa, his psychiatrist, said.

  He sat in her office, having scheduled an emergency appointment the day before — as soon as he left from Tommy and Luke. He needed to talk to someone about this.