Page 93 of The Light Within

An undetermined amount of time passed, with Julien on the armchair staring blankly out of the window, avoiding the bodies’ lifeless eyes, theblood that had now dried in thick clumps, and the smattering of gore across the floor.

A stench already filled the room. Julien’s stomach turned at what horrors they’d have to experience next.

When Cinn returned, he tossed a cardboard box full of cleaning supplies down in front of them. “They don’t bother locking anything here. The guests must be too posh to knick stuff.”

Kneeling down on the floor beside him, Cinn took Julien’s hand.

“Look, I know what you’re feeling. I went through this last year, remember? Only this time, it was self-defence. It was us or them. They made their choice when they broke into our room and grabbed me.”

What Cinn didn’t understand, was that this was less about the fact he’d killed two people—he’d kill them all over again in a heartbeat, for Cinn—and more about the fact he’d lost control of himself. Like last time.

“Darcy suggested you channel some water or some shit. Pressure hose style? Then tell housekeeping the tub exploded. Maybe you could blast it or something?”

“I’m not a Power Ranger,” Julien bit out.

Instead of glowering at him, Cinn burst into laughter. “How doyouknow about Power Rangers? You’ll figure something out. First job, though, is tossing the bodies out the window and stuffing them in Maz before it gets too light. You’ll have to go to reception and get the keys back.”

Julien stared down at his bare feet, sticky from stepping through puddles of blood.

They’d need another long, hot bath after this.

Maz was many things, but built to transport dead bodies was not one of them. The main issue was that she only had room for one body in her boot, meaning the other had to be laid across the back seat. Every time Julien glanced in his rear-view mirror, the black sack caught his eye, a constant reminder of his extra passengers.

They’d set off an hour before check-out, wanting to be well on their way in case housekeeping wanted to talk to them about their flooded room.

They had left it blood free, for the most part. They’d even cleverly explained to the receptionist the smell of chemicals resulted from their attempt to clean up the hot tub explosion.

The journey to the church was painful. Not only was the traffic heavy on the way out of the city, but Cinn kept asking Julien if he was okay again and again, not seeming to accept, ‘I’m fine’ as an answer.

They’d swung by the closed jazz club, with Julien breaking in through the back door to retrieve their possessions from the cloakroom. Then they’d visited a hardware store in the city’s outskirts, where they’d purchased a shovel, for when they found a pleasant countryside resting place for their extra passengers later, deep in rural France.

But first, it was straight on to Moret-sur-Loing, where the church awaited.

It wasn’t ideal attending the house of God with two dead bodies in the back of their car, but really, what were they to do?

Nestled on the edge of the village, they drove Maz up the long, winding road that led to the small building. The church’s steeple, slender and graceful, pierced the pale winter sky, and the bare branches of the surrounding trees, outlined against the pale horizon, framed the scene like an old painting.

The church stood serenely against a backdrop of rolling countryside, its ancient stone walls crowned with a steep, slate-tiled roof dusted with the first hints of snowfall. But not each of its four walls looked the same.

Julien glanced at Cinn, waiting for him to comment on the appearance of the church, make the connection between what he knew about his mother’s death and what he saw in front of him.

To give the church credit, the rebuilding effort had attempted to match the previous architecture, but the contrast was evident: the new sections, though skillfully done, stood out with a slightly fresher hue and cleaner lines, lacking the centuries-old patina of the rest of the church. The once-smooth walls were now a patchwork of restored sections and ruins, where the newer stonework struggled to blend seamlessly with the weathered, original materials.

“Have you been back here—”

“Non.”

Oh, how Julien didn’t want to think about that day, especially after what had just happened back at the hotel. It was one big, cosmic joke.

His mother had grown up in this tiny village, Moret-sur-Loing, describing this church as her childhood sanctuary. But it wasn’t so much the building that she routinely came back to visit, but its priest, Father Gérard.

After the Calamities of Nineteen Sixty-Five occurred, and a small fraction of the world population became moteblessed, an often-studied phenomenon came to light—some communities emerged with denser percentages of moteblessed than others. The village of Moret-sur-Loing was one such location, with Father Gérard one such individual.

“We’re just here to talk to Father Gérard.”

No trips down memory lane,merci bien.

“I should prepare you. The moteblessed wing of the Christian church believes that being moteblessed is a gift from God.”

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