"We're going to resurrect our coven," Jebediah said. "I need them still, and I can't do it alone. The pacts and vows make it far too meticulous and exacting for my talents. You're the Lord Summoner, master of the art. You will help me."
Gawain, dressed in a lavender cloak, his bleached white hair and pale lost face nearly translucent in the night-my friend for a time back when I believed we could be friends-mouthed my name, that serpent's tongue slithering forth and blindly held out his arms for me.
Behind him the harlequin tittered, and I knew I hadn't quite reached the lowest depth yet. His voice was familiar. A shiver quaked through my spine and I slowly turned to face him.
There the fool stood, lips and tongue black, unimaginable weariness written into the painted and ashen lines of his silly white dead face.
Oh God.
My father.
Chapter Four
We circled the altar beside the covine tree, where the original wiccans had respected nature and been crucified for their integrity, bleeding into its roots.
Like a dozen of those forgotten bodies twisted and knotted together, the limbs of the tree grappled in the snow, some branches gnarled and collapsed backward upon themselves, others hanging like weeping willows. The north side of the trunk had been sheared off that night by lightning, and it spawned new mutant leaves that remained green even now as the freezing wind blew.
Our covine tree stood as an ode to irony-our kind had been hanged from it, burned upon it, nailed to it, and still it lived, and still we lived. My father muttered to himself and continually regarded me as if he retained his mind. He wedged his fingers into his ears or puffed out his cheeks as if he were the entertainment at a children's party.
Bridgett enjoyed touching the dead and moved her hands over his white face, kissing and licking his nose, trailing her fingers over his groin. In life my father would have tried to persuade her from her path, but eventually he would have been beaten down by her nature and given in. He always had.
Thummim swung from Bridgett's left breast, and Self dangled from the right, taking turns suckling the witch's teat.
"Sex majik won't work at this stage," I told her.
"In resurrecting witches? No, I'm sure, but when it's needed there's no one with as much natural talent as me."
"So you keep saying."
Piercing green eyes like sharpened jade, offset by those dark brows-her features contained even more than she knew. A whiff of that salvation and church scent came wafting by. She had taken her vows as a novitiate seriously at the time. "Think what will happen on Oimelc when we make love, Lord Summoner."
"You're not my type."
"Yes, I am. What kind of errant arcana will run wild then, as I ride you at the Feast of Lights? Did you give all your passion to your familiar, or have you simply buried it?"
He's hiding it, sweetie, Self said, kissing her breasts. My needs are my own. Let me show you. Thummim giggled and clapped, tickling my second self under his chin as if to say, Yeah, that's my boy.
The djinn hadn't done as fine a job on the crypts of the mausoleum as they had the House of DeLancre.
Tombs of the Knights Templar were built in an early Norman shape called dos d'ane-the tops triangular with ridge mouldings exiting from an immense stone horned skull. The head at the top is the honored point of the tomb, leading down into the vaults. Jebediah trailed his fingers across the doorway, spelling out necromantic treaties and other symbols of resurrection. The horned skull had once been a sign of mankind honoring the natural order and his place in it before becoming bastardized into the image of Satan. It dipped and opened its mouth. The door shuddered and slid back.
Eidolons, wants, and terrors seethed within. I caught pieces of visions from the last sabbat. They were so strong that it was like being struck with shrapnel. Those forces raged and knocked me backward into the tree. I could sense the murdered members of my coven flowing around me.
Elijah's hatred was as strong now as ever before, although it felt as though Griffin had forgiven me. Bridgett tittered and her familiar Thummim grinned widely, as much lust streaming into the air as anything else. Because she hadn't been a member of the original coven she couldn't feel the power of our binding with the dead. That stink of the church drifted beneath the musk of her sex.
Jebediah grunted and struggled forward against the errant thoughts and hour of death emotions that still eddied about the tombs. Gawain, the most sensitive of us, clamped his hands over his deaf ears and dropped to his knees in the snow, mouth open in a silent groan as that serpent's tongue twisted fiercely. Perhaps he was hearing the shrieks and caterwauls from that night, or maybe something altogether different.
Self dropped from Bridgett's chest and folded around my throat, licking the drops of blood off my upper lip.
How does your mother fit into all this? I asked.
Perfectly.
Tell me, damn it.
I have.
The nine murdered coveners whispered and hissed, sounding even more hideous than Arioch's voice of the endless damned.
Jebediah could barely contain his excitement, a nervous jitter in his step. "Won't it be delightful to see them all again?"
"You're insane," I said, and he burst out laughing.
We stood before the crypts of our brethren, feeling them in the air around us.
Rachel and Janus, both pregnant, she with their child and him stuffed with the yoke of Fuceas, demon earl in charge of thirty regions. Both of them lying at the feet of Danielle as she tried to carry them to safety, their bloated abdomens bursting.
The triplets Diana, Faun, and Abiathar, caring more for wine and women's roller derby than the teachings of the friars who'd raised them. At once they were geniuses at the craft but also hopelessly divided over their cause. The widening fissure between their conflicting beliefs cost them their lives as the three of them, drunk and brawling that last hour, hip-checked one another into oblivion.
Griffin, Keeper of the Salamanders, a firebug completely intoxicated by flame. He'd finally allowed his appetite to get the best of him and burned down a children's leukemia hospital before arriving late to the sabbat. He'd been the first to die, drooling flame, with my blade between his ribs. The fire had poured out of his chest while his dying angry gaze softened, both of us surrounded by the vengeful ghosts of children.
Elijah, who'd loved Danielle almost more than I had. He wanted me dead as much as he wished to face his namesake, the most holy of prophets.
And retarded giant Herod, the only real innocent, who'd known what would happen long before it did, but none of us had listened.
A slab had been set in the empty tenth vault with Danielle's name chiseled on it, as if Jebediah still wafted for a time when he could recover her from a grave full of my protective charms in Calvary. I didn't need anyone else to raise Danielle. I'd had my chances before and I knew it wasn't worth the price. Like my father, she would never be the same. Too much of her soul had fled, and I didn't dare discover what remained. It might be too much like her to resist. I'd stopped her own teenage sister from digging at her majik-steeped grave, bent on revenge.
Elijah's living hatred swelled in the darkness. Jebediah shoved at the slab and it creaked aside with a hollow roll that echoed throughout the tombs. He reached into the crypt and, like a careful lover, placed his hands gently against a shadow within and drew it into the light. It was a woman's body.
With his split tongue slipping out both sides of his mouth, Gawain made a sound of caution at the back of his throat.
Jebediah's beatific smile grew only mildly more sadistic as he spun to show me his hands, moving his fingers down the cream-colored angles of flesh inch by inch, pressing against golden hair and burrowing as though digging though graveyard dirt.