Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

to keep me from plotting revenge while I followed orders. Why else would he have Baja and Kootch follow me around. I guess a faerie wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did by being an idiot, no matter how the lunatic behaved. I would have to get very nasty to get rid of him. I gave the waiter a look that ran him off.
“What are you going to do about it?” Alejandro asked, alarmed.
“Nothing.” I don’t owe him an explanation.
Alejandro thought differently. “Why not?”
“I’m going to go places where I shouldn’t be and will probably get them killed. I don’t see any reason to stop them from following me, do you?” I snapped.
“They’ll draw the cops to what you’re doing,” Alejandro pointed out. Truth be told I was knee deep in some very strange stuff, and the police are legally obligated to save my ass if anything went horribly wrong. Their preoccupation with Baja and Kootch will keep them from paying too close attention to what I’m doing until I want them to. This is working out pretty well for me. It’s nice to have the back up even if they didn’t know that they were doing it.
“I don’t have a problem with it.” I shrugged.
“If you joined the Children of Orpheus, you would have dozens of brothers and sisters who possess skills to keep the police from learning about anything you’re doing,” he said “And we would always guard your back.
“Go away Alejandro.” I picked up my purse and baton and slid out of the booth. If I wanted to get to the service before it started, I had to leave now. I hurried to the exit with Alejandro dogging my steps all the way to my car. I had gone back to ignoring him, so it was a bit of a surprise to see him sitting in my passenger seat as I pulled the car door closed beside me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
“I figured that there was no point of following you at a distance if you knew that I was there,” Alejandro replied smoothly. “This way is much more efficient.”
“Get out of the car,” I snarled. I didn’t want the Children of Orpheus to make things more difficult for me. If the Immortal Church knew what I was, then they were certainly aware of the Children, and having Alejandro around would make it harder to blend in while I cased the joint and made my plans. Also, I just didn’t like Alejandro. He bugged me.
“No.” Alejandro grinned at me, daring me to do something about it. I seriously considered taking extreme measures, but I caught a passing patrol car out of the corner of my eye, and I was reminded that I might be under surveillance. Anything that I did to get Alejandro out of my car could be documented and used against me in a court of law. I was left to grind my teeth in frustration.
“Fine,” I snarled, jamming the keys into the ignition and giving it a vicious twist. “You’re on your own. If you get into trouble, I’m not going to risk my hide to save your ass.”
“Okay,” he responded with a casual shrug. “You’ve never gone out of your way for anyone before, so I can’t expect you to do anything heroic now.”
I don’t appreciate being called a coward, so I gave him a dirty look and called him a name too filthy to put into print.
The Immortal Church of God was housed in a prefabricated structure made from aluminum and thin steel. The parking lot was nothing but gravel and the peculiar red clay that makes up the earth of this region. It could have been one of a thousand small churches in Georgia, with its simple sign hung over an ordinary door to proclaim what it was.
Faith in the South is like college football. Everyone has their favorite team, be they Baptist, Southern Baptist (yes there is a difference though I can’t find someone to explain it coherently) Lutheran, Catholic, Episcopalian, or what have you. They scream and yell about their favorite preacher, and how good his teachings are. Then they howl their supremacy over all other denominations and how they are the right and chosen people of God, and only they will be allowed to get into Heaven. They often work themselves into a frenzy over it, and once in a great while, they even beat each other up.
I don’t understand the lunacy the mortals feel for the subject. They repress every kind of impulse they have, calling every whim and desire sinful and created by the Devil. That last bit always felt like a contradiction to me. If the Christian God is the creator of all things under Heaven, how is it possible that Satan has managed to do some of the same? By definition, evil is a destructive force, unable to create a damn thing. So it made more sense to me that the Creator would grant us the impulses that lead to procreation, evolution, and competitive survival rather than some belligerent and destructive force known as Lucifer. Don’t get me wrong, I know evil exists, but it has better things to do than tempt humans to engage in pre-marital sex and stealing from the cash register. That sort of thing is all the result of poor socialization.
From what I have seen of the modern Christian, very few open the Bibles they clutch in their sweaty hands. They rely solely on the wisdom and intelligence of their leaders to do their interpreting and thinking for them. It is an unforgivable practice in an age and country where literacy is a right, not merely a privilege of the wealthy. If a person can read, they should tend to their own souls, seeing to their preacher for guidance and not grant the fool blind obedience. Anyone remember Jonestown? Nearly a thousand men, women, and children died of poisoned fruit punch because no one bothered to stop and ask, “Does that nutter Jim Jones sound a little paranoid to you?” Of course there were more complicated issues involved there, but blind obedience was a huge part of it.
The tires of my sports car kicked up orange dust in a cloud around us as I searched the crowd of cars for a place to park among them. There were a few last minute stragglers arriving in the nick of time for church services. The men were dressed in white slacks and yellow dress shirts and the women wore white blouses and long yellow skirts. None of them so much as glanced at us as they hurried to the doors as if they were the most important thing in the world.
I found a place to park on the far edge of the lot away from the door and the gravel path that served as a driveway. I didn’t like that it was so far away from my escape routes, but I decided that it couldn’t be helped. I got out of the car and tucked the spring batons in the band of my jeans under my shirt. This crowd had already tried to kill me once, and so I wouldn’t want to provoke them by flashing weapons. Of course their weapon of choice had been holy water, so I could safely assume that they weren’t smart enough to search me.
Alejandro watched me go through the motions with a slight frown darkening his face. I had stopped acknowledging his presence an hour ago, so I didn’t pay attention to his disapproval. I got out of the car, trusting that he would follow me, and not caring if he didn’t.
“What are we doing here?” Alejandro hissed as we walked to the church door. “These people want to kill you, and you’re just going to go sit in the chapel with them?”
I looked at the building and thought that it would be a miracle if these people had anything that remotely resembled a chapel. “I’m going in to have a look around. If they’re going to keep coming after me, I’d like to get a rough head count of the number of people I’d have to kill.”
I didn’t actually have any intention of killing anyone in the church other than their leader. Even after all the battles and needless slaughter I’ve witnessed over the years, I still don’t have the stomach to commit mass murder. Luckily, cults are just another kind of gang. You take out the leader and the rest of the group falls apart because no one else knows how to tell them what to do. Eventually they’ll scatter and join more reasonable faiths, or they’ll commit mass suicide in some psychotic display of devotion. Either way, my job would be over.
The comment was meant to shock Alejandro and it worked. He gaped open-mouthed at me as the implication of what I’d said washed over him. “Are you insane? A large percentage of this church is innocent women and children! How can you justify murdering them?”
“First of all, being female does not make a woman less capable of evil and brutality. Anyone who thinks otherwise is probably a man and is asking for what he gets. Second of all, this is a religious cult full of true believing, rabid, fundamentalists. These people hate anyone that isn’t one of them, and they never stop. They either die off, or they perpetuate their insane belief systems by passing them onto the kids. Discriminating according to age and gender is stupid and dangerous.” I know it was mean of me to say such things to Alejandro, but I couldn’t resist it. The horrified expression on his face was priceless. Besides, if he was as studious a member of the Children of Orpheus as he claimed, then he should know that I don’t do things like infanticide. Sure I’ve gone on rampages before, but I’d been provoked by rape, murder, and pillaging. I have never killed an entire community because they posed a mild threat to my personal comfort. I simply fake my death and get out of town. It’s a method that is easier than confrontation.
The inside was as plain and unremarkable as the outside. The massive interior had been portioned off with cheap sheet rock and pleated plastic partitions. They’d hung up the traditional portraits of Jesus depicted as a handsome Norseman in clean white robes rather than a real Jewish carpenter. I always laugh at the obviously racist images of a man who had devoted his life to peace. It made me wonder how these people would respond if they knew that their lord and savior had been small and brown and malnourished. Jesus hadn’t been ugly, but he hadn’t been remarkably attractive either. He was…ordinary for the time. It was just as well; he hadn’t had the time or practical use for women anyway.
Each door was hung with iron crosses, which explained why Bres didn’t come in here and do his own dirty work. Faeries cannot cross thresholds hung with iron. I have no problems of that nature so in I went. The chapel was located in the center of the church and its shabby walls were too short to reach the high ceiling overhead. They