Moonlight Crusade: Chapter 4, Part 2

Angelica gets a lead on Kyle. Meanwhile, Kyrios has a tense meeting with a superior.

Angelica sat outside Café D’Alsace on 2nd Avenue on the corner of 88th Street in New York the next day. She had ordered caramelized butternut squash and mushroom risotto. As a dedicated vegetarian, she was still free to enjoy food such as this. The sky overhead was cloudy but otherwise this was a fine day.

She put down her utensils as her phone vibrated on the table. She picked it up to see she had received an encrypted message from the police who had been adequately cooperative thus far.

She ran the decryption program and received the following message:

RE: Person of Interest You Asked For

Video(s) Attached

She played the video. It had been taken from a subway station in Queens. It showed a handful of different people waiting for a train on a platform. None of them were distinctive except for perhaps a woman carrying a strange red robe. The young man standing next to her looked quite ordinary.

However, when he turned to look around, Angelica smiled. It was Kyle Falconer. As the video continued, they boarded the train.

Where was he headed?

Another attached video gave the answer. It showed Kyle and the mysterious woman exiting the subway not far from Greenwich Street.

The message had only provided the two videos, meaning if there were any others, they were as yet unavailable.

She looked at the timestamp on the first one. It was a few hours after everyone in Kyle’s group had been butchered. He had somehow survived — or had been involved in the slayings — and now was with this mystery woman. Who was she, and how was she involved in all this? Perhaps she was the true mastermind of the killings and Kyle was her helpless thrall.

In any event, she needed to find them. There wasn’t any more subway footage, so Angelica now believed they were still in Manhattan. However, Greenwich Street covered a lot of ground, and it would be difficult pinning them down without more leads. She had no idea how much time they had before the prophecy came true.

Her phone buzzed again, indicating another message. This one was from headquarters.

Supremo: Rapporto sullo stato. [Status Report.]

She typed her reply.

Angelus: Sto progredendo costantemente. Finirò presto. La profezia sarà contrastata. [I’m progressing steadily. I will finish soon. Prophecy will be thwarted.]

Supremo: Non puoi fallire. Tutto dipende da questo. La volontà di Dio sarà fatta. [You must not fail. Everything depends on this. God’s will be done.]

Angelus: Essere in pace. Moriranno. La volontà di Dio sarà fatta. [Be at peace. They will die. God’s will be done.]

She put the phone back in her pocket and began planning out the rest of the day. She would start by going to the subway station Kyle Falconer and that mystery woman had emerged from after leaving Queens. Hmmm, not quite. First, I’ll have the police meet me there and we can search together.

Kyle Falconer would be found, and Angelica Brassi would have answers. Answers that would hopefully lead her to the rest of the killers.

And they would be stopped before they destroyed everything.

* * *

Kyrios studied a map of New York on his desk in an office of an abandoned warehouse in the city’s Meatpacking District that night. This was crucial to their plan and every eventuality needed to be anticipated.

He was interrupted when Collins walked in. “Sorry ta bother you, but Ducane is here to see ya,” the fair-haired Irishman said.

Kyrios had anticipated this. Their activities couldn’t have gone unnoticed forever. “Send him in.”

“I need no one to let me in,” Ducane said as he came in on Collins’ heels. He was impossible to miss as he towered over Collins’ average frame.

“Leave us,” Kyrios said to Collins who nodded sheepishly and obeyed.

Kyrios opted not to sit at his desk and instead to face Ducane as a man. The two were actually very similar in that they were imposing figures who had no room for humor in their lives.

“I’ll get to the point,” Ducane said. He was a member of the Septim Manzil which was in turn a part of the Guide. But unlike Kyrios and his manzil, he wore a dark European suit which matched his slick, short, pitch-black hair. His chiseled jaw and rippling muscles intimidated most shahid, but Kyrios had nothing left to fear. “Did you really think we wouldn’t notice what you were doing?” he said in his baritone voice.

Kyrios was unphased. “We are shahid. We must feed.”

“Feed?” Ducane spat out the word as if it were poison he hadn’t been expecting in his mouth. “Don’t give me that nonsense! We are civilized. We laid out the rules for the lesser manzil to avoid being hunted by humans. You drain through the Phantom Maw and you don’t kill.”

Kyrios held his hands behind his back. “I believe the rule is, ‘Don’t kill unless necessary.’”

“There is nothing necessary about what you’ve been doing. The Church already hunts us, and you’re going to expose us all to the rest of the world. I’m only going to say this once. Cease your actions immediately.”

“Very well,” Kyrios said. “I shall reign my manzil in.”

Ducane was silent for a moment — probably gauging Kyrios’ honesty. Finally, “You had better. Any more mass killings and you will be sanctioned.”

“You need not worry about that,” Kyrios said, bowing.

Ducane grunted his acceptance and then lumbered out of the room. Kyrios was disgusted by his own deceit, but nothing could be done about it. He wasn’t about to abandon his mission, but neither could the Guide be allowed to know that.

Collins returned to the room looking nervous. As a boy, he had been abused by high-handed Catholic authority figures along with his supposedly friendly priest. That had made him an ideal recruit. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Kyrios said.

Collins wasn’t buying it. “He knows. Mikhail was right. “Oh, God.”

Kyrios got in his face. “God is the source of all our problems. Do not speak that name to me.”

“But we’re going to be sanctioned!”

Kyrios nodded. “Of course. That was always the plan. You’re a fool if you expected to cause World War Three and escape unscathed.”

“I just…” Collins looked away, tension marring his features. “I just wanted to get rid of the Church. They ravaged my homeland. They need to pay. But the rest of us don’t. We’ve already paid.”

“And they will pay. But we must pay an additional price to make it happen. If you travel down this road with us, you must be prepared to sacrifice everything.”

Collins turned his head back to look at him. “Yes, sir.”

Collins left the office and went downstairs. Most of the meat-packing stations had been removed long ago, but some equipment still hung from the ceiling. The remains of sawdust still clung to the floor in uneven clumps.

In the center of the floor, a sort of common area had been set up by the shahid. These consisted of two couches facing one another and flanked by chairs. His brethren lounged here. Chloe sat engrossed in one of her cheap romance novels. Collins didn’t see Mikhail, though.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. Mikhail stood there with an index finger to his lips. Mikhail motioned for them to go to a more isolated corner of the room. When they arrived, he said, “Ducane saw Kyrios?”

“Yeah,” Collins said, not wanting to talk about it.

“We are in trouble,” the Russian said.

“Yeah.” He didn’t want to talk about it!

But Mikhail pressed on. “Some changes need to be made if we’re to survive.”

“What do you mean?”

“For starters, Kyle Falconer needs to be eliminated.”

Collins was not hearing this. “Come on. Ya know Kyrios won’t give the order to take him out.”

A rare smile crossed Mikhail’s lips. “Oh, but he will. Is where you come in.”

Collins knew exactly what he was suggesting. “I could never do that. Kyrios values us, but no one is that forgiving. We’d be killed for sure.

Mikhail was adamant, though. “What do you think will happen if we go through with his plan? We will be sanctioned. You want to avoid, yes?”

“Of course. But the mission — ”

“Will still be carried out. But Kyrios’ methods are liability. I have plan that is much more discreet.”

Collins spent several moments mulling it over. Then, “All right. But only because I don’t want to be sanctioned.”