Melchior stirred the noodles in his bowl with growing disinterest. His stomach had been rolling, flipping, and twisting since he’d left the fabricated safety of Ailbe’s cabin. With his insides so committed to its impression of a washer on spin cycle, he didn’t have much confidence in his ability to keep anything down.

Ira seemed to be suffering similarly. He sighed, finally admitting defeat. He pushed the bowl away and shook his head. “I know you made this for us. I’m just-”

“Too nervous?” Melchior guessed. “It’s okay, me too.”

Ira smiled softly. His warm blues eyes drifted briefly to his cat as she lazed on the couch. He’d been seeking her out often, Melchior wondered if he was even aware of just how often he did it.

Ira stuck his hands in the inside of his jacket and withdrew a small package, it was the size of a comb, but considering the strange cloth and twine wrapping--and that all of Ira’s luggage was in the other room--Melchior reasoned that it probably was not just a hair brush.

He tapped it against his palm, staring down blankly at the brown fabric. “Father. . . my mentor gave this to me. He said I’d need it. And, now I’m too scared to open it.” He laughed and set the object down on the table, next to his discarded ramen.

“You’re scared? Of what it is?” Melchior asked.

“I suspect to know what it is.” Ira met Melchior’s gaze with his own, wide, beautifully blue, and mournful. Melchior’s insides twisted again. “I’m scared of what it means.”

“It can’t mean more than what you allow it to mean.” Melchior said because it was easy to say, even if it was worthless.

“I saw your bow.” Ira said. It hadn’t been his preferred weapon, but of course, it was the one Ailbe would have picked for him. Melchior didn’t mind much. He wasn’t without his small throwing knife. He’d found it tucked beneath his neatly folded clothes. He’d left it hidden there as Ailbe had meant it to be. It felt easier than looking at it.

Melchior flushed, wondering what else he’d seen in his bag. Childishly, he worried first about his underwear--until his stomach twisted again, realizing that his pills had been in there, too. “It’s beautiful. Pine, right?”

“Yeah, it is.” Melchior nodded. He’d stained his wood a deep ebony until it glimmered as deeply as the night sky. It was nearly unrecognizable from the stark white wood he’d cut it from.

“Pine,” Ira mumbled to himself. He laughed without humor and ran his fingers through his blond hair. “You know, it has dual meanings.”

Melchior’s heart thrummed in his throat. He swallowed hard to knock it back to the confines of his ribs. “I know.”

Pine was a conundrum because it meant both to last forever and to wilt away. It was ironic and painful, and Melchior thought, quite perfectly beautiful. Like the boy sitting across from him, scowling down at the gift from his mentor.

“When you chose pine, for which did you choose it?” Ira asked.

Melchior sat back in his chair, feeling suddenly tired. He was stuck in the sap oozing from the soft bark of the evergreen. “I don’t know yet.”

Ira smiled in gentle acknowledgment of his answer, and Melchior was reminded of another symbol of pine. Wanting. He turned his eyes away, feeling suddenly embarrassed. Ira seemed not to notice his gaze. “I didn’t choose my weapon. It was given to me, like so much else. Another glorious birthright of being me.” His fingers danced over the wrapping, it rustled beneath his gentle touch.

“What is it, Ira?”

He winced, and Melchior was suddenly reminded of his promise in the tunnel--to call him something else. He seemed a boy divided, and Melchior didn’t know how to ease it. Ira didn’t speak. He peeled back the wrapping.

Melchior saw the blade first. It was too hard to ignore. It shimmered as brilliantly as opal. An Ossein knife. The bone was melded into a handle of light sandy wood. It was wrapped in brown leather to give it more grip.

“Cedar.” Ira answered. He held the knife in his palm, looking quite formidable in their small kitchen.

“Cedar has many meanings, too. I never bothered choosing one. It was done for me.”

“Which vow did it take?” Melchior whispered.

Ira sighed. He looked at his cat with soft blue eyes. “Incorruptibility.”

Melchior didn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say. Ira didn’t either. Something heavy settled between them, soaking up all the oxygen in the room until Melchior didn’t know how to move past it.

Ira reached back in his jacket pocket, shattering the atmosphere that had crystallized around them. He pulled out the letter from the Cardinal and took a deep breath. “Angels watch over us.” He whispered, and then he removed the final piece inside the package.

The Cardinal’s red wax seal glimmered as hauntingly as blood from a fresh kill. Ira picked it apart for seemingly no other reason than just to prolong the silence between them. His fingers shook over the now unassembled letter, but he made no move to unfold the paper.

“Maybe,” Melchior froze under Ira’s wary gaze. He moved forward slowly, “could I read it?” Ira relinquished the note to Melchior with surprisingly less fight than he’d prepared himself for. Melchior thought he’d been prepared for anything until he unfolded the letter written by the Cardinal--and found that it wasn’t a letter at all.

“Angels, what am I looking at?” Melchior mumbled.

Although it was obvious, he was staring at a map of New York. The boot-like state was a sleepy blue, cut deep with red highway veins. Pockets of purple marked out lakes and rivers resting along the land. Melchior knew the high slopes of the Adirondack Mountains. He recognized the ravines of Lake Seneca and her sister glacier lakes. What he didn’t remember from his Saint John’s private school education was the giant black X’s scrawled in thick black ink periodically across the providence.

Ira peered across the table. His shoulders slumped and then tensed. “What are all those spots?” He questioned.

He tapped his finger along the page, over a pocket of four markings. “There seem to be a ton here, in Catskill.”

Melchior counted seven X’s dotted over the center of the Catskill Mountains.

“Cats-kill? Well, that’s foreboding.” Melchior muttered hopelessly.

Ira rolled his sky eyes, not completely unkindly. Maybe he was warming to Melchior’s childish whims. Maybe he was just tiring too quickly to keep up the fight against him. “Cat-skill.” He enunciated clearly.

“Strangely, that really doesn’t make me feel better.” Melchior huffed, they both sounded like ways to describe the painful mutilation of a little mouse.

“I guess we’re due for a camping trip, huh?”

“I guess so,” Ira agreed with uncertainty. “Whatever the Cardinal laid out for us, it’s more of a start than we had.” Melchior had a horrible sinking feeling that there wouldn’t be a pot of gold beneath this rainbow.

“Why did the Cardinal lay anything out for us?” Melchior puzzled. “I didn’t get the impression that he believed in us.”

Ira paused, fitting his thumb nail between his teeth. “Pilgrimages are meant to be done alone, but receiving instructions on your task is allowed. Angels, this whole thing is a little stranger than the average test. That we’re partners at all, even. So, I guess the Cardinal is just. . . giving us our instructions.” He seemed unsure. Melchior tried to catch his eye, but he seemed lost in a spider web of thought.

“He gave us our instruction in the courtroom. This is something else.” Melchior pointed.

“I don’t often have the answers people want when it comes to these sort of things.” Ira laughed bitterly.

Melchior paused. He seemed to be accomplishing nothing but looking a gift horse in the mouth and souring the mood between them. So, he tried to think of anything to say, and settled on, “Should we go?” He pointed over his shoulder awkwardly at the front door of their apartment.

Ira laughed, and the sound flushed Melchior with heat. “What? No, it’s already dark. Catskill is a two hour drive--at least. We should rest tonight and head out early in the morning.”

“Oh, right.” He rubbed the back of his head. Why did Melchior have such a pesky habit of saying completely thoughtless things in front of the beautiful boy.

“I’m glad.” Ira murmured. “That you want to go now. Maybe you aren’t completely crazy.”

“Uh, thanks--I think.” Melchior grabbed Ira’s discarded bowl and carried it along with his own back to the kitchen sink. He stared at the drain for a long while, trying to decide if it would keep in the fridge overnight.

“I’ll eat mine later.” Ira spoke. He was perched in the doorway, holding his mewling tabby in his arms. “Father Pine left some money in my luggage, but I predict exorbitant taxi fees in our future. I don’t want to budget for more ramen.”

Melchior must have been staring because Ira turned pink. “What? I’m trying to prevent food waste. It’s a serious problem.”

“Oh, no, sorry.” Melchior blinked, shaking his head. He laughed. “I was just thinking of our deal.”

“We have a deal?” Ira quipped. He nuzzled his forehead against the soft side of his cat.

“Yeah, I promised to call you something else, didn’t I?” Melchior teased. “I just thought of an idea.”

Ira scrunched up his eyebrows quizzically. “Angels, I take it back. He is crazy.” He turned his face down into his tabby’s fur, but not before Melchior saw the small smile tucked into the corner of his lips. “I’m taking the couch, no objections.”

𓆙

When he couldn’t sleep, he liked to watch the stars. Melchior perched himself in the thick rim of the windowsill. With cramping legs, he pressed himself against the cold glass, just to observe that New York city had no stars in the sky. They liked to keep theirs in high-rise penthouses between premieres parties. The world hanging over the glistening chrome landscape was barren, dark, and hopeless. It did not sooth his current mood.

His defenses cracked, splitting like a great cavern. It swallowed him whole, dragging him into the dark depths where he found that beneath his perfectly polished mask of calm, he could hate things.

The city was too loud. Melchior had the thought occasionally since leaving the New Hampshire wood. Sparingly, as in every waking moment. A car horn blared on the street below, causing Melchior to wince. He held his palms flat against his ears, trying to muffle the machine’s wail into the chilled midnight mist.

The breeze carried past his window’s threshold. The summer air was perfumed with car exhaust and cigarette smoke. It rolled his stomach, and he was glad to have skipped dinner. Melchior unfurled from the perch he’d made. He began to slide the glass shut to stop the headache before it got too unpleasant.

“I think the city is pretty at night.” Ira said from the doorway. Melchior turned to look at him, frozen with his fingertips on the edges of the glass pane. Their gazes entangled, Ira’s heart thrummed harder in the still air between them. “Your eyes,” Ira said slowly, “they reflect the lights so brightly.”

“I’m sorry.” Melchior squeezed his eyes shut. His heart spun behind the tight embrace of his chest cavity. He knew how he looked in the dark--like a monster. The city’s hue burned orange against the inside of his eyelids.

“It’s pretty, too.” Ira murmured softly. “Like stars.”

Melchior was suddenly dizzy. From the cough of engines below or from the curious blue stare leveled at him. He didn’t know which, or even what to say. And he was rarely speechless, even when he really should be. Melchior peered at him with a glowing green gaze and decided it would simply be best to change the topic. “Are you going to bed?”

Ira shook his head. It seemed that sleep evaded both of them. “I’m gonna run out. Get some stuff for Peter. Will you watch her while I’m away?”

Melchior didn’t mention his concerns, of which he had many. It’s getting late. How will you find a taxi? What if you run into trouble--it all sounded like words from a mother or a lover, and Melchior had barely been holding onto Ira’s better side.

“Okay,” Melchior said, “but take your knife--please.”

“I’m not going to run into a Beast on thirty-second street.” Ira rolled his eyes. Melchior slipped from his seat and strolled across the room until he was just an arm’s stretch away.

“It’s one in the morning, I meant for the muggers.” This close, it became suddenly obvious that Ira was shorter than him. By only a few centimeters--and yet it felt like the space between moons. He glanced up at him with wide blue eyes and laughed.

“Sure, mentor Mel.” Ira teased. His tensed shoulders sloped into something almost at ease as he turned to leave the room. Ira paused at the kitchen table. He scooped up his knife with careful fingers and wiggled it with emphasis at Melchior. “Be back soon.” He called. The apartment door shut softly behind him.

Melchior was a terrible babysitter, he realized. Peter had been anxiously pacing since Ira left them, and she seemed wholly uninterested in his offering of cold ramen noodles. It had put them an unsolvable impasse.

Melchior returned to his bedroom, keeping the door ajar so that he could keep a keen eye and ear on Peter as she paced the apartment searching for Ira.

He fumbled for his unpacked bag on the floor, digging until he found his vial of pills. It was full, for now. Panic gripped him, rolling his stomach. He didn’t know what to do if he ran out.

He didn’t want to think about what would happen. He cracked open the top and poured a couple in his mouth. The capsules stuck to his dry tongue, and he forced them down bitterly.

The medicine hit his stomach, and then it began to ache in protest. Melchior held the back of his hand to his mouth, weakened by dizziness. He slumped on the foot of the bed, falling backward with a huff. He pressed his knuckles into his teeth until his sickness eased. Tentatively, Melchior let his body begin to relax. He spread his arms out over his head.

From the foyer, she yowled distantly.

“Peter, if you put in a little more effort--and I don’t mean to ignore your feelings--but I feel like we actually have a lot in common. We could be good friends, if you gave me a chance.” Maybe Ira was on to something. Melchior was crazy. Here he was, with three months left, and he was pleading with a cat to be kinder to him. She meowed unhappily from the foyer, and Melchior sighed. “I’m not too excited either.”

Melchior rolled over on his side. He looked past the edges of the bed to stare out on the dark city. He’d never closed the window, the sounds and smells and sights poured in against his will--but he felt powerless to get up and shut it.

“Do you like the way the city looks at night, Peter? Maybe it’s an acquired taste. The city, I’ve never liked it. I was raised here, but it doesn’t feel like home.” Those six years locked beneath a cabin in the woods had been kinder to him than a childhood raised the Brisbane way.

The only peace he’d had during that time was in the pity his oldest brother held for him. It was that same feeling of pity that saw Melchior absolved from the rules, why he’d been there that night six years ago.

It was strange. Melchior had thought about that one night more times than he’d tied his shoes or combed his hair. And it always came up as a black lump of coal in his head. He could roll it between his fingers for hours, but it would always be shapeless and staining. He hadn’t seen it coming then, and he couldn’t see it now. All he could recall was the sound of his brother’s wailing and the warmth of his own blood as it ran down his arm.

Maybe he could blame him. Maybe he should blame himself. He didn’t know. All that remained besides a curse growing in his body was this now; he missed Ishmael. Weakness festered beneath his skin, and in the brief moment that he engaged it, it began to build like the rapids behind a cracking dam. Before he could stop it, it began to spill until he couldn’t even hope to control it.

Longing, fear, anger, resentment, despair, it welled up inside of him deep where he kept it, it rose to the center of his chest--and it crystallized there. A massive lump pressing his organs aside. He couldn’t gasp in air around it. He couldn’t dislodge it no matter how hard he banged his fist against his ribs.

It tasted like hatred. The way the air smelled after Ailbe killed the Ze’ev stalking their cabin. It felt like ice and licked like fire. Melchior rolled into himself, pulling his legs to his expanding chest. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and wished he was home. If he had one.

He missed the smell of pine sap. He missed the howl of owls and the choir of crickets. He even missed Ailbe. Most of all, he missed the stars. The sky hung as bleak as a corpse over his head, containing nothing but the silver moon. It seemed like a reminder that he was watching the sand fill up the bottom chamber of an hourglass.

Melchior blinked. He flinched as the warm tears pressed from his eyes to roll down his cheeks. When had they begun to collect there? He wiped them away with the sleeve of his shirt. He’d taken advantage of Ira’s absence to exchange his jacket for a long sleeved pajama shirt, and it was still far too hot, but now he was glad for the extra fabric.

Melchior focused past the salt brimming along the line of his eyes, distorted beneath the reflection. The city glistened like stars dropped along the earth. “It’s almost pretty.” He murmured begrudgingly.

The mattress dipped beneath her. With a curious mewl, she sniffed at his wet cheeks. Peter had finally come away from the door. Melchior smiled and scratched her chin. She made a gentle murring sound, and he felt similarly content.

The pills in his blood and the events of the day began to burden him. Melchior’s tired eyes began to drift shut. The sounds of cars faded away beneath the gentle purrs. And Melchior fell asleep.

𓆙

Melchior stirred to the smell of coffee and the noise of shuffling. Gentle morning sun filtered into the room from the wide open window. He rolled over on the bed, spreading his flat palms across the comforter.

“Peter?” He whispered groggily. She didn’t answer, of course.

“She’s eating breakfast, or I think she would have stayed in bed with you all day. Do you always get along so great with animals?” Melchior startled to hearing any other than Ailbe’s voice. He quickly looked over his shoulder, where Ira was slumped against the doorframe, arms folded neatly over his chest.

His blond hair was brushed, his black Deacon attire was without a single ruffle--but he still seemed tired and sluggish. His wide blue eyes were set over deep purple half-moons. And they were still trained on Melchior’s face. Why? Oh, he’d been asked a question. Melchior mulled it over in his still-waking mind.

“Most I met tried to kill me.” He said before his groggy tongue could think better of it. Melchior blinked. Why had he said that? It was only half true anyway. What hunted him could look animalistic, but it wasn’t of this world.

Ira raised an eyebrow. He laughed, maybe dismissing this as another of Melchior’s ill planned jokes. “Okay, so someone isn’t a morning person. Don’t worry, that’s why I bought coffee.” He pointed over his shoulder at the kitchen. “Get ready. We have a big day ahead.”

Melchior watched as Ira made his way back to the kitchen, waiting until he was fully gone to slip from his bed. Melchior wasn’t self-conscious, and he wouldn’t have minded if Ira glanced in, but he still made an effort to shut the bedroom door. The lock clicked into place, and Melchior pulled off his shirt.

The tattoo set in the layers of his mahogany skin stared back at him, rolling his stomach. Melchior grew hotter in the face, recalling the events of the previous evening. The nun had seen it. Then, he was ruined. No, he was okay. It was just a little--or maybe she had seen more. No, she couldn’t have, or the Cardinal would already be upon him. His mind ran like a rat on a wheel until he was dizzy. Ira had seen it, too. He hadn’t said anything, and he very much seemed the type to speak his mind. Maybe he didn’t know what it meant--that wasn’t possible. All Progeny spoke the language.

Melchior bowed his head and sent a prayer to the angels. “Can your immortal Saint forget his Hebrew?” He whispered.

If Ira Rule ever set eyes on his branding, he would know what it said, and he would look at Melchior for what he was: a mongrel. Or what he was becoming: a monster.

Melchior pulled on his simple black button-up. The standard uniform for all Deacons, before they earned their blood. He rolled the sleeves down over his wrist so he could play pretend as a Deacon of the Progeny.

If he could navigate breakfast, he’d fully set himself to the task ahead. The day was only just beginning, but Melchior already wished it would end. He was scared. Of most things, but mostly now of following the Cardinal’s trail into the mountain. He couldn’t bring himself to be prepared for anything that might lay ahead, or bare that thought that nothing would, and they’d be starting from scratch. But for now, all that Melchior had to brave was convincing Ira that he liked coffee, too.

8 | Melchior Makes Molehills Of Mountains

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