I smiled at that. I had always dismissed Desmond Locke as a religious fanatic, doing what he was told within the confines of the religion with which he held sway over my father, but it seemed there was more to him than just that. Desmond Locke was a freethinker and, in the eyes of his own religion, a bit of a heretic.
Locke raised his gun once again, but not at us, the barrel instead pointed straight up into the air. He wagged the firearm back and forth. “I trust I can dispense with this, Miss Belarus?”
“Preferably,” I said.
“Good,” he said, sliding the gun inside his jacket. “Dreadful things. Necessary at times, I suppose, but dreadful nonetheless.” He turned away from us without looking back and once more started down the center aisle of the church.
I looked to Rory, then Marshall, who half looked like he was ready to run for the doors. I raised my hands out in front of me, palms down.
“Steady,” I whispered. “Whatever these people are, we need to see this through.”
Marshall made to argue, but Rory elbowed him.
“Relax,” she said. “I’ve got your back.”
“You didn’t a second ago when there was a gun pointed at us,” he grumbled.
Rory went to argue back, but I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Save the bickering for home,” I said. “The gun’s put away. That’s a step in the right direction, yes?”
This seemed convincing enough for Marshall, and he walked off after Desmond Locke, Rory and I falling in behind him as quick as we could.
Marshall’s eyes fixed on the rows and rows of shelves off to our right as we continued down the aisle.
“So is there, like, an Arc of the Covenant down here?” Marshall asked.
Mr. Locke turned to look back at him. “I’ll have to check,” he said, “but I doubt it.”
Halfway down the waist-high wall of dark wood to our left, Locke swung open a hinged half door and ushered us into an area beyond it that was fill with a desk, several plush leather chairs, and a couch that sat to our right. He stepped behind the desk, gesturing to the empty chairs directly across from it. Marshall and I took the chairs while Rory sat on the edge of the couch, perched and ready for action at a moment’s notice.
“So why have you brought us here?” I asked.
“Do you know how your father and I met?”
I shrugged. “Bible study camp?”
Locke laughed. “No, not that young, I’m afraid,” he said. “I was already in my late twenties and working for this organization when we he and I met. I learned of him because the Libra Concordia keeps its ears to the ground when they hear rumors of strange things happening in the world.”
“Like when the image of Christ appears in a tortilla out in New Mexico?” Marshall asked.
Locke nodded. “Or a weeping statue of Mary or any variety of such things reported to us, yes.”
“Sounds tedious,” I said.
“Truthfully?” he said. “It is. But if discovering the great mysteries of the world were easy, everyone would take to our calling. Sadly, our numbers are few.”
“But why come after my father?” I asked, steering him back to the point of his original question.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Forgive me. I first came to New York decades ago, chasing down a particular story that was passing in hushed whispers throughout the churches here—that of a young boy who claimed he had seen an angel.”
I tried to hide any reaction to his words. “My father’s gone on and on about that all my life,” I said. I left out the part where only this past year I learned it had been the work of Stanis saving him from Kejetan’s cronies. Still, Locke definitely had my interest. What I needed to know was how much he and his Libra Concordia knew about the truth of it all. “Forgive me if I seem a bit bored hearing about my father’s angel again.”
“Your father was a persuasive man,” he said. “More so back then. By the time I tracked him down, and he told me his tale, I knew I had met someone special.”
“I won’t argue that,” I said. “Every girl thinks her daddy is special, after all.”
“Naturally,” he said with a patient smile. “But the Church’s official stance on miracles such as a visitation by the divine is a bit dismissive. They know there are those among their flock who simply make up stories or, in their fervor, believe they have actually seen such things. The Church doesn’t usually move on something until a whole village has seen a weeping statue or some such thing. But with my grander interests, well . . . I like to give even the craziest of tales due diligence. See how they play out.”
“You don’t sound like you believe in miracles,” I said.
Desmond Locke shrugged. “In my profession, you see proof of what falls in line with the arcane more than you do the divine.”
“And you don’t consider any of that miraculous?” I asked.
Locke shook his head.
Marshall cleared his throat and spoke. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “Did you just make that up?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “That honor belongs to Arthur C. Clarke.”
“But Mr. Blackmoore is more or less correct,” Locke pointed out.
“Care to explain?” I asked.
Marshall paused for a moment in thought before speaking. “Back in the good ole witch-burning days, people took the things they couldn’t explain and called them magic. Eclipses, magnetism, earthquakes. But over time, as we’ve discovered the how and why of things through science, the magical mystery of it all is sort of rolled back.”
“Precisely,” Locke said. “To my way of thinking, magic is simply a science we have yet to fully understand.”
“But what does that have to do with my father and angels?” I asked. “Angels still fall in the miracle category, right? Divine servants of God and all that?”
“And there’s the thing,” Locke said, leaning forward in his chair, whispering conspiratorially to me. “I don’t think your father saw an angel. I think it might have been something else.”
“Such as . . . ?” I said, holding on to the arms of my chair, my stomach clenching as I feared hearing Stanis’s name come from his lips.
“Of that I am not quite sure,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “That is where you come in.”
“If you’re so concerned about Alexandra’s father and what he saw, why not ask him?” Rory asked.
“Religion is an easy way to find the unexplainable at times,” Locke said. “I studied your father for years as we became friends. His belief in this divine angel was so strong that I was always reluctant to broach discussion of magic with him. I thought that if it was magic that was surely at hand, it would reveal itself over time, but your father never spoke of it.”
I laughed at the idea of my father’s having any working knowledge of the arcane world.
“But then,” Locke continued, “strange things started happening around him. The death of your brother, Devon, in that building collapse, the damage to the burial site beneath your family home, the damage tonight in your great-great-grandfather’s studio, and I thought to myself that perhaps your father wasn’t the best person in the family to be asking questions to.”
I shrugged and put on my best innocent face. “I know even less about my father and angels than you probably do,” I replied.
Desmond Locke’s eyes ran slowly over my face, no doubt looking for some hint of deception, but I didn’t think he’d find one. Technically, I knew nothing of my father and an actual angel. Had Desmond Locke been asking specifically about a gargoyle, my face might have told a different story, but I simply stared back at the man.