“Ooh,” Jen cooed. “So that’s what an incubus does for you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I objected, blood rising to my face. “I haven’t seen Bill or Liam in months.”
“Yes, but you’ve been dreaming of him, haven’t you?” Phoenix said. “I can feel—”
“Are we going to do this thing or not?” Frank snapped.
“My sentiments exactly,” Adelaide said. “Let’s get on with it. Moondance, would you do the honors?”
Moondance straightened up in her chair, closed her eyes, and began to chant.
“By all the power of goddesses three
this circle as one shall be.
Till Diana turn her face once round
Our wills together shall be bound.”
A pulse of energy surged around the circle. I felt it throbbing through my hands and saw a bright gold filament enclosing the group. All the individual sensations we’d been experiencing—fatigue, anger, lust, sorrow, hope—all merged into one steady thrum, containing all the disparate emotions and then overwhelming them into one single connection. We were not alone. The golden thread flared brighter, warring against the darkness rising outside the circle. For a moment, I saw the shadows in the corners of the room writhing away from that light, their shapes distorted into hideous monsters, and then the gold light sank into us and the shadows drained away.
Afterward, we laid our plans. We needed the village to celebrate Halloween. Moondance and Leon would rally the townspeople to resist the anti-Halloween fervor, while Frank, Soheila, and I would covertly urge on the students. Adelaide said that she, Jen, and Phoenix would perform a needfire rite—whatever that was. Everyone else seemed to know, and I was getting tired of being the one to ask all the questions. We would enlist the Stewarts and the vampires to patrol the woods on Halloween night to keep the nephilim from breaching our circle, which would form around the old door. I would be at the center of all those circles.
“The nephilim will exert all their power to stop you from opening the door,” Adelaide told me, her eyes fierce now instead of teary. “When you’ve opened the door and gotten to Ballydoon, you must find the angel stone as quickly as possible and return with it to destroy the nephilim. We’ll hold the circle as long as we can, but once it falls, the nephilim will destroy us.”
The only problem was that Nan had been unable to tell me where in Ballydoon I would find the angel stone.
It was dark by the time I walked home. Frank insisted on escorting me all the way up to my door.
“Duncan and his cronies will know what we’re up to,” he said, scanning my front porch. “He’ll do everything in his power to stop us. You’ll have to be especially careful. Reinforce the wards on your house, never let yourself be alone with him, don’t go out alone after dark—”
“Yes, Mom,” I replied.
“I’m serious, McFay. I’ve seen what those monsters can do …” His voice cracked.
I looked up, startled, and saw that his face was completely white. The one time I’d seen him like this was three months ago, when he saw the claw marks that Duncan Laird had left on my face. He’d recognized them as the marks of nephilim, but I’d never asked him where he’d seen the marks before.
“You encountered the nephilim before, didn’t you?” I asked.
Frank glanced away. In the glare of the porch light, his face suddenly looked old. I knew that, like many witches, Frank could have prolonged his life span with his magic, but I’d never really thought about how old he might be.
“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was during the Second World War. I was assigned by IMP to work with the French underground. We suspected that there was an officer within the SS who wasn’t … human.” Frank made a harsh sound that it took me a few moments to identify as a laugh. “As if any of them were really human. The sad thing is, most of them were—technically, that is. Some of the worst monsters I’ve encountered have been. But we suspected that this one SS officer was some kind of demon. To find out, we placed an agent inside the SS, a woman called Nataliya.”
I’d never heard Frank’s voice so tender—in fact, I realized, I’d never heard Frank talk about any past relationships.
“She was from a small village in Romania, from an old family of gypsy witches, all of whom were sent to the camps by the Nazis. I shouldn’t have let her go, but she was determined to avenge them, and she was so powerful that I thought she would be okay. Two months into the assignment, she got word to me that she’d learned her officer’s secret. I was to meet her in the woods outside the castle where the officers were quartered. When I got there, I found her nearly dead. She’d been … tortured. She had the same claw marks on her face that you had, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Her mind had been savaged. I tried to use magic to save her. I connected myself to her to sustain her life, and I felt the agony she had experienced. It was as if her mind had been torn to shreds. The pain was so great, I recoiled … I let go of the contact and she died. I let her die.”
“Oh, Frank,” I said, touching his arm. “I’m sure you did everything you could.”
“No, you don’t understand. I could have kept her alive, but the pain inside her was so great, she didn’t want to live, and I … I couldn’t bear to let her go on with that pain. The last thing she said to me was angel. I thought she was saying that I was an angel to let her die, but then when I tracked down the marks on her face I found that they were the marks of a nephilim. We couldn’t be sure. The SS officer disappeared. We thought the nephilim were extinct. But I never forgot what those marks looked like”—he turned to me, his eyes dark, bottomless pits—“or what the pain inside her felt like. Those monsters don’t just kill you. They make you wish you’d never been born.”
Frank’s words haunted me in the coming days as I searched through Wheelock’s Spellcraft, looking for a spell to become the hallow door. There were spells on opening doors and closing them, spells to ward your door, and even one to discourage Jehovah’s Witnesses from your door, but nothing on becoming a door. But the thing about Wheelock, I was discovering, was that it seemed to grow as you used it. Every time I clicked on a footnote or opened an appendix, the volume grew to accommodate the new material. As I searched, the book grew and grew, until it resembled a summer blockbuster paperback that had gotten waterlogged from being read at the beach.
In the meantime, the folklore club prepared for its first meeting, and my students clamored for a Halloween party. Did I really have the right to encourage my students to celebrate Halloween if it put them in danger? But short of telling them all to drop out and go home, I didn’t know how to remove them from harm’s way. Besides, along with showing up at my house with supplies of apple cider and cider donuts, they came prepared with a loophole in the administration’s no-party rule.
“As long as an event is for instructive purposes, it’s allowed,” Scott Wilder explained. With the keen mind of a young lawyer, he had combed through the dozens of emails, memos, and minutes issued by the dean’s office. “And Halloween teaches us all sorts of crap about folklore, right?”
“Er, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but, yes, its celebration appears in any number of ballads and folktales.”
“Like Tam Lin,” Nicky added. “That’s when the fairy host rides through the door to Faerie and when the Fairy Queen pays the tithe to hell with a human sacrifice,” she continued. “Hey, why don’t we do a reenactment of Tam Lin? That would totally make our Halloween celebration school-related. Ruby could play the Fairy Queen, and Scott could be Tam Lin.”