I started his car and said, "Church."
Power of God, murder, and death resisted time. At the edge of the covendom-a radius of three miles from the temple at the center of Jebediah's estate-sat the ruins of the church, half hidden in the snowbound, overgrown thickets.
The belfry appeared scarred by lightning, and two of the three bells lay in the dirt and ice, the third precariously balanced on the rotted cedar shingles of the peak. Birds, animals, and men had nested here in previous winters. Most of the pews and railings had been piled into the middle of the altar for a bonfire, but only been used little by little over the years. Several of the small, stained-glass windows were boarded over but the huge gaping holes in the ceiling remained, with snow wafting about in the shadows.
The crucifix hung by only its bottom bolt, the cross askew but not inverted, hanging sideways. People like the Rumsey's would have thought you'd need to pray to Satan bowing before a black altar, chanting scripture backward, stepping on the holy wafer, and committing sodomy in the pulpit in order to be a witch. That's why they had been used so easily, blind without any form of truth to follow except one based on ridicule of Catholicism; and so the power remained with Catholicism.
Cotton Mather had gotten it wrong again when he wrote, "The witches do say that they form themselves much after the manner of Congregational Churches." The mocked have the strength of the martyred.
Moonlight beat down, and the walls looked as though they'd sweated blood.
The pew where I'd held Dani while she died had been smashed for kindling. I scrawled fiery symbols in the air and the wood lit with the flaring, golden smudges of her murder. I dug through the debris and held the splintered section of stained wood to my chest and wept like a madman, as if she were still with me.
The dust and layers of years peeled back one after the other, down to the marrow of my life. Her blond hair splayed against my thigh, some of the curls torn out by the roots, other patches black and fried. Her broken nose and torn face ran red over my lap.
I'd had to fight back thoughts of resurrection. She coughed and gagged my name, and we whispered the prayers we'd learned in Sunday school together as shrieks echoed for miles across the covendom, the rest of our brethren dying. I kissed her gently, covered with the bite marks of my father, and even in those last moments she sought to soothe my sorrow. Her mouth moved, making plaintive, affectionate sounds. My second self kept his claws to her throat, feeling the pulse steadily fade. I would have relinquished every ounce of majik I'd possessed if only Archangels Michael and Gabriel and the other Cherubim would have held back Azreal from his course as the angel of death. Danielle sputtered blood and tried to smile while I begged forgiveness, and her broken fingers reached for my cheek.
Azreal sneaked beneath my hands and took my love from me.
Give it a rest, Self said. You're stuck in a rut, always living out this same moment.
Break free, leave her where she lies. Go with the penguin. You just need to get laid. Forget about her already.
Say that again.
What?
Say it again.
He blinked and licked his lips. He scurried forward, climbed my shirtfront, hugged me, and moaned.
The mocked have the strength of the martyred.
It was like Jebediah to leave the church standing, willfully disregarding it, repressing the reality of that last night in an attitude of dismissal. To raze it would have been an acknowledgment, and any acknowledgment would have been considered defeat.
He'd been slow in gathering the new coven, much more patient than I would have expected. Ten years making the careful correct choices, whatever he thought they might be. Bridgett proved to be a perfect underling for his consideration. There were many mad and sacrilegious nuns, but few were as beautiful.
I worked through the thickets on an uphill grade, past the pine and sage and several varieties of hazel. Snow burned with the witching moon. I fought through the brush until I broke into the open fields. I approached from the northeast, the symbolic dividing line between the cardinal point of hell's north and the righteous east, and I found a hundred-foot length of wrought-iron spike fencing unconnected to anything else, barring my way.
A gate swung wide a few yards farther on. Once it had been called the devil's door, traditionally opened after baptisms to let demons and original sins escape. Jebediah used it to force the conveners to walk the powerful northern path. It was merely another symbol of darkness, but one grounded in true faith. Jebediah and I had spent years quarreling over such tokens and trivia of belief. It's why I was still alive.
Instead of entering through the gateway I climbed the twelve-foot-high fence and kept heading northeast on as straight a trail as I could.
Until I finally came home to the House of DeLancre.
A stranger might think he'd stumbled on a cathedral built by the worshipers of a hundred different religions. There were signs and meanings nearly obliterated in their fusion of architectural design, but the latent forces remained incredibly powerful. Worlds within worlds, histories and mythologies merging and mating. Flying buttresses expanded out across neo-Roman ramparts. Three-tier elevation dropped off to two and hopped to castle-like cube stairways leading to four- and five-story towers. Basque and Romanesque styles melded with Gothic spires, and occasional dormers and gables faced into each other from across the open quad at the center.
Baroque stone and glass mounted the night surrounded by a canopy of gargoyles and other winged figures. Inside, rooms were shaped as hexagons, seals of Solomon, and pentacles, with many other chambers cut into the Sephiroth and Sephirah angelic symbols, other cabalistic sigils, ancient runes, and swastikas. Corridors dead-ended one day and opened into living quarters the next. Windows had been calculated to throw shadows on the fields spelling out ancient prayers to gods only half believed to be gone. Standing in those shadows on holy days could kill a man or drive him insane with a head full of barely heard whispers. Other secret areas could only be reached by climbing certain roofs and ascending ladders from the outside.
Solomon had commanded the djinn to complete David's temple, and according to the Bible there was neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was building. Now that Jebediah had mastery over Iblees, the djinn had continued work on the estate.
Scars remained though, despite the years of rebuilding. Cracks in the foundation, rips across the stone buttresses as if massive talons had scraped and scrabbled for purchase, and tattered chunks of roofing where the House of DeLancre would never again heal.
Pierre answered the door.
The weight of centuries stooped his shoulders and smeared his features across his face like an insect wiped against a pane of glass. His lips nearly drooped off his chin, his Adam's apple nestled so deeply in his chest that it bulged far below his collar. His eyes were so empty that they appeared flat and black as shale.
Dust covered Pierre's bleached flesh, hair, and butler's suit almost as though he'd been laid aside in a closet and only recently brushed off and returned to the world. He would never play the lute again. Too many portions of his soul had been flung far and wide.
Here was the progenitor of the DeLancre family.
At first, a decade ago, I'd believed him to be a reincarnate-a soul trapped by the sins of his sadistic reign over the Basque. PierredeLancre presided as a witch-trial judge in France and sent six hundred people to the stake. He compiled accounts of alleged activities at sabbats.