"Rebecca Orr - Times Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ore Rebecca)

was something like a camera obscura, Benedetta thought. They'd drugged her with opium or that Arab
drug the Old Man of the Mountain used, or something. She was not dead. Angels didn't have scabs on
their knuckles. But perhaps she should play along if the angel had a good excuse for not knowing her
history.

"I'm not the Lord God Almighty, I'm just one of his servants who takes confessions in Purgatory from the
unshrived."

Oh, that's a good one. Benedetta smiled. "I was a young novice in a nunnery who was foully abducted
by the French."

"That's not the entire story," the fake angel said. "You had been sexually active long enough to have had a
child, and you were raped recently. And the man who died with you wasn't your most recent lover."

"Why do you doubt me?" Benedetta asked, genuinely curious.

"Because the Lord tells me you are lying."

"Oh, bullshit."

"That's more how you sounded like when your soul was being brought to Purgatory. As you lay dying."

How do I get out of here? "So, I was kidnapped a couple of months earlier and ran away from those
cruel French to the Lombardians."

"And I don't believe the couple of months. Child, confess and save your eternal soul."

Benedetta wondered what the fake angel got out of lying to her. "Prove this is Purgatory and not Hell,"
she said.

"It would be better if you started telling us about life in the camps," the fake angel said. Benedetta hadn't
felt any doors in her complete circling of the room. Maybe the fake angel got down on a rope from the
area in the ceiling she couldn't see for the smoke or mist or whatever. Mirrors, perhaps they obscured the
openings with mirrors.

Don't panic. Benedetta didn't want to tell the truth, because that's what this creature wanted, and being
trapped in a closed room with no windows and being told she was dead and in Purgatory made her
angry. The anger warred with the panic and left her momentarily confused. "I went with the soldiers
rather than be bored."

"I believe you, my child."

"So you want to jerk off while I tell you about the fucking I did?"

"I'm an angel. I'm sexless."

"Let me kiss the fucking ring." Benedetta grabbed his hand and bit down hard. If she hadn't had her
mouth occupied while he shrieked, she'd have told him that angels don't feel pain, much less have scabs.

Other people in weird clothes rushed through the walls, through the doors Benedetta hadn't felt and