Forbidden by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online

need you to help me think this through. And I can help you stay alive. Because I’m telling you, if they find either of us, we’re dead.”
    “You said it’s a vial of blood,” she said. “Whose? Why would an old man say that about your father, and why does the guard want it? Why didn’t the old man just give it to them?”
    “I don’t know. Shhh.”
    Across the car, the young man glanced at them. The woman reading the paper had begun to tear one of her fingernails with her teeth. Rom was sure they hadn’t overheard, and that they had fears enough of their own to keep them occupied.
    The train came into the station. “We get out here.”
    She hadn’t asked yet where they were going, and he hadn’t told her.
    They passed through the station toward the gate, their gazes flicking along the platform to the other end where two compliance officers stood in conversation. Ducking low, they hurried past the gate and filed up the stairs to emerge on the street. Lamplight reflected in yellow pools on the pavement. The air was heavy, promising rain.
    “We’re going to the basilica, aren’t we?” she finally said.
    He nodded.
    “Isn’t there anywhere else?”
    “Not at this hour. Which is why no one will be there.”
    Overhead, the sky broke. Rain began to fall in light, smattering drops, and then in the onslaught of a downpour. Together they ran across the street, past the wan lamplight, through the darkness to the looming form of the basilica.
    He still had the key from the funeral service earlier today; it was routine for him to pick it up in advance so he could come in early and practice. Sometimes, if he had extra time, he lit the candles upon the small aisle altar for Avra. The clerics would say the candles didn’t fulfill her need to attend services in person, and they were surely right. But he had done it now for years in secret because she’d asked him to. Besides his mother, there was no one he honored as much as Avra, for reasons that not even he understood.
    They entered through the small wooden side door. Inside, the cavernous space of the basilica echoed with the sound of the groaning hinges. The stained-glass depictions of Sirin and Megas seemed oppressively bleak despite their clear eyes, recast in the last few years in the pale, icy blue coveted by the Brahmin royals.
    He relocked the door behind him. The sound of the bolt sent a hollow echo like the closing of a vault through the cavern of the sanctum.
    “This way.” He led her to a narrow door at the side, opened it, and flicked the switch on the landing. Electric light, sallow as the streetlamps and only half as strong, barely lit the old stairwell. They descended past the first landing and the second, and then into the basement corridor past an old service elevator. He stopped at a storeroom midway down. Any farther and they would end up in the ancient crypt. Avra would not be able to endure that.
    For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure he could, either.
    The room was long—long enough to have two doors on the hallway—and stored several stacks of folding chairs, spare seven-branched candelabras, boxes of candles. And there was the casket from the funeral earlier today. It lay atop its metal carriage against the far wall.
    He turned away, unnerved by it now in the feeble light.
    He dug several vanilla-wax tapers out of a box, set them in one of the candelabras, and lit them with one of the candle lighters from the corner. He flipped off the room light so that the coffin lay in darkness.
    “Better?”
    Avra stood in the circle of the candlelight, looking completely lost. Rom took a chair from a stack, set it down, and opened it for her. But instead she just stood there, holding the box with the blood.
    “We can never go back, can we?”
    “I don’t know.” He took the box from her and set it on a small table next to the candelabras, noting that her hands were positioned as if she were still holding it. A moment later, she lowered