Chapter 1: The Bell Tower
The tower had been calling to me for weeks.
Not in the literal sense—I wasn't that far gone yet—but in the way forbidden things always called to me. In the way they whispered from the edges of my vision when I walked past the old church on my way to nowhere in particular. In the way my skin prickled every time I caught sight of that crumbling stone skeleton jutting up against the sky like a broken finger pointing at God.
Tonight, I finally answered.
The chain-link fence around the back of the church property was more suggestion than barrier. Rust had eaten through most of the links, and the gate hung crooked on its hinges, yawning open like it had given up years ago. I slipped through the gap without even having to duck.
My boots would have been smarter. But boots made noise, and noise meant getting caught, and getting caught meant the whole thing would be over before it started. So I'd left them in the car, along with my jacket and my better judgment, and now the frozen ground bit into the soles of my bare feet with every step.
Good. I wanted to feel it.
The grass crunched under my toes as I crossed the forgotten courtyard behind the church. Dead leaves, dead weeds, dead everything. The kind of place nobody bothered to maintain because nobody bothered to look at it. Perfect.
I tilted my head back and studied my target.
The bell tower rose maybe sixty feet, its stone face pockmarked and weary, ivy crawling up one side like varicose veins. The windows had been shattered long ago—probably in the same earthquake that had silenced the bell—and the gaps stared down at me like empty eye sockets.
Most people would see a hazard. A condemned structure. A lawsuit waiting to happen.
I saw a ladder.
The moon hung fat and low, painting everything in shades of silver and shadow. Enough light to see by, not enough to be seen. I'd timed it right.
The door at the base of the tower was locked, of course. But locks were just puzzles, and I'd always been good at puzzles. I pulled the bobby pin from my hair—the only useful thing I'd ever learned from my mother—and went to work.
Three minutes later, the lock clicked open.
The door groaned when I pushed it, the sound echoing off stone walls inside. I froze, heart hammering, listening for any sign that someone had heard. The church was dark and silent. The priest's residence, a small brick building attached to the back of the sanctuary, showed no lights in its windows.
Nobody home. Or nobody awake, anyway.
I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me.
The darkness was total. Absolute. The kind of dark that pressed against your eyeballs and made you wonder if you'd gone blind. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust, feeling the cold seep up through the stone floor into my bare feet.
Then I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight.
The beam cut through the black like a knife, illuminating a narrow spiral staircase that wound upward into nothing. The steps were stone, worn smooth in the center from centuries of feet—priests and bell-ringers and probably a few trespassers like me. Dust coated everything, thick and gray, disturbed only by what looked like animal tracks.
Rats, probably. Or maybe something worse.
I grinned and started climbing.
The stairs were steep and narrow, barely wide enough for one person. My bare feet slapped against the cold stone, the sound swallowed by the thick walls. The air grew colder as I ascended, and thicker, heavy with the smell of old dust and older secrets.
My head was still swimming from the vodka I'd downed at the bar. Or maybe it was swimming from something else entirely. Hard to tell anymore. Hard to care.
The staircase opened onto a small landing, and I stepped out into what must have been the bell chamber.
The moon poured through the shattered windows, casting jagged patterns of light across the floor. Red and blue and green—the remnants of stained glass still clinging to the frames, transforming the silver light into something otherworldly. The effect was disorienting, beautiful, like standing inside a kaleidoscope.
And there, in the center of the room, hung the bell.
It was massive. Bronze, or something like it, green with age and tarnished with neglect. The earthquake had done a number on it—a long crack ran down one side, splitting the metal like a wound that had never healed. The clapper hung loose, disconnected, useless.
I reached out and touched it.
The metal was cold. Colder than the air, colder than the stone, cold enough to make my fingers ache. I pressed my palm flat against its surface and closed my eyes, trying to imagine the sound it must have made once. The deep, resonant toll that had called people to prayer for centuries. The vibration that had shaken the very stones beneath their feet.
Now it was just silence. Just a broken thing in a broken tower, waiting for someone to notice it was gone.
I understood that better than I wanted to admit.
The wind howled through the windows, sharp and bitter, whipping my hair around my face. I should have been cold. I was cold. But the vodka was still doing its work, and the thrill of being somewhere I shouldn't be was doing the rest, and I felt alive in a way I hadn't felt in months.
I walked to the edge of the bell chamber and looked out.
The town spread beneath me like a circuit board, streetlights flickering and car headlights tracing slow patterns through the darkness. From up here, everything looked small. Manageable. Like a game I could pick up or put down whenever I wanted.
I wondered if God felt that way. If He looked down at all of us scurrying around like ants and felt nothing but mild amusement. Or maybe mild boredom. Maybe that's why He'd stopped answering prayers—He'd just gotten tired of the repetition.
Or maybe there was no God at all, and the only thing looking down at us was empty sky.
I leaned against the crumbling stone and let the wind bite my cheeks. My feet were numb now, the cold having worked its way up through my ankles and into my bones. I should go home. I should climb back down those stairs, lock the door behind me, and pretend this never happened.
But I didn't want to go home. Home was a studio apartment with thin walls and a landlord who didn't care if the heat worked. Home was an empty bed and a ceiling I'd stared at for so many hours I'd memorized every crack. Home was the place where the boredom caught up with me, where the restlessness settled into my chest like a stone.
Here, at least, I could pretend I was somewhere else. Someone else.
I pulled the flask from my back pocket and unscrewed the cap. The vodka burned going down, but it was a good burn. A familiar burn. I took another swallow and then another, until the edges of the world started to soften and blur.
The bell loomed behind me, silent and waiting. I turned and pressed my back against it, letting the cold metal seep through my thin shirt. The vodka was warm in my stomach, but the bell was cold against my spine, and the contrast made me shiver.
I closed my eyes.
That's when I heard the footsteps on the stairs.
My eyes snapped open. The footsteps were slow. Deliberate. The sound of someone who knew exactly where they were going and wasn't in any particular hurry to get there.
Shit.
I pushed off the bell and looked around for somewhere to hide. There was nowhere. The bell chamber was circular, open, exposed. The only exit was the staircase I'd just climbed, and whoever was coming up it was between me and freedom.
The footsteps grew louder.
I considered my options. I could try to bluff my way through. Pretend I was supposed to be here, that I had every right to be standing in this condemned tower in the middle of the night with vodka on my breath and no shoes on my feet.
Yeah. That would work.
Or I could own it. Confess everything and hope for mercy.
Or I could just stand here and see what happened. Let the chips fall where they may. That was more my style anyway.
The footsteps reached the landing and stopped.
Father Emilio Rojas stepped into the moonlight.
He was taller than I expected. And younger. I'd seen him around town, of course—everyone had. The priest who walked everywhere, who always had a kind word for the old ladies on their way to Mass, who never seemed to sweat even in the dead of summer. But I'd never been this close to him before. Never seen the tired lines around his eyes or the way his hands hung at his sides like they didn't quite know what to do with themselves.
He was wearing black—jeans and a sweater, not the clerical collar I'd expected. Off duty, I guessed. Or maybe just trying to blend in.
His eyes found me immediately. Of course they did. I was the only thing to find in this empty room, standing next to a broken bell with a flask in my hand and guilt written all over my face.
We stared at each other for a long moment. The wind howled through the windows. The moon cast its jagged colors across the floor.
"You're trespassing," he said finally. His voice was quiet. Calm. Not angry, not surprised. Just stating a fact.
I shrugged. "So are you."
A flicker of something crossed his face. Amusement, maybe. Or annoyance. Hard to tell in this light.
"I live here," he said. "This is my church."
"Technically, it's God's church." I took a sip from my flask, watching him over the rim. "I don't see Him anywhere."
Father Emilio's jaw tightened. "What are you doing up here?"
"Enjoying the view." I gestured vaguely at the windows, the moon, the town spread out below us like a promise. "It's beautiful, isn't it? In a creepy, condemned sort of way."
He didn't answer. He just stood there, watching me with those tired brown eyes, and I felt something shift in my chest. Something uncomfortable. Something I didn't want to examine too closely.
"You should leave," he said. "Before someone calls the police."
"Are you going to call the police?"
"No."
"Then I think I'll stay." I pushed off the bell and walked toward him, my bare feet silent on the cold stone. "Unless you're going to make me leave."
He didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just stood there like a statue, letting me approach until I was close enough to see the stubble on his jaw and the way his breath fogged in the cold air.
"You're drunk," he said.
"Observant."
"You're going to get hurt."
"I'm already hurt." I smiled, but it felt wrong on my face. Too sharp. Too brittle. "That's the whole point."
Something flickered in his eyes. Something that looked almost like recognition.
"I know you," he said slowly. "You're Lysandra Vane. You work at the bookstore downtown."
"Lys," I corrected. "And yeah. That's me."
"Your mother used to come to Mass."
"Before she died, you mean." I took another sip from my flask. "Yeah. I remember. She dragged me here every Sunday for years. I hated every minute of it."
"Why?"
The question caught me off guard. I blinked at him, trying to figure out if he was messing with me.
"Why did I hate it?"
He nodded.
I thought about it. Really thought about it, the way I tried not to do anymore. The smell of incense. The droning hymns. The way everyone looked at me like they knew something I didn't, like they had access to a secret I'd been locked out of.
"The hypocrisy," I said finally. "Everyone pretending to be good when they're just as fucked up as everyone else. Sitting in those pews like they're better than the people outside, when they're the same. Just... the same."
Father Emilio was quiet for a long moment. The wind howled. The moon shifted behind a cloud, plunging us into shadow.
"Not everyone is pretending," he said.
"No?"
"No." He met my eyes, and there was something raw in his gaze. Something honest. "Some of us are just... trying."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I said nothing. Just stood there in the darkness, feeling the cold seep into my bones, feeling the vodka warm in my stomach, feeling something else entirely—something I couldn't name—bloom in my chest.
"Let me walk you home," he said.
"I don't need a babysitter."
"I know." He stepped back, giving me space. "But you're barefoot and drunk, and it's freezing outside, and I don't want to spend the rest of the night wondering if you fell in a ditch somewhere."
I laughed. Actually laughed, the sound surprising me. "That's very pastoral of you."
"I try."
I looked at him—really looked at him. The tired eyes. The gentle hands. The way he stood there like he had nowhere else to be, like I was the only thing in the world that mattered right now.
"Fine," I said. "But I'm keeping the flask."
"I wouldn't dream of taking it."
He turned and started down the stairs, and I followed. My bare feet slapped against the cold stone, and I felt lighter than I had in months, like something heavy had been lifted off my chest.
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what any of it meant. But as we descended into the darkness together—the priest and the heretic, the broken and the doubting—I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.
Curious.
And curiosity, I'd learned long ago, was the one thing that could keep me going when everything else failed.
The door at the bottom of the tower creaked open, and the night air hit my face like a slap. Father Emilio stepped aside, letting me pass, and I felt his eyes on me as I walked out into the cold.
"Same time next week?" I called over my shoulder.
He didn't answer.
But I could have sworn I heard him laugh.