Alabaster

I. Dry Creek Road

Only a few miles south and west of the sleeping city of electric lights and sensible paved streets, where a crooked red-clay road ends finally before nettle thickets and impassable cypress swamps leading away through the night to the twisting, marshy banks of the Flint River, sits the ruined husk of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Erected sometime late in 1889 by two freed slaves from Alabama, forsaken now by any Christian congregation for more than two decades, it has become another sort of sanctuary. Four straight white walls, no longer precisely white nor standing precisely straight, rise from a crumbling foundation of Ocala Limestone to brace the sagging grey roof, most of its tar-paper shingles lost over the years to summer gales and autumn storms. In places, the roof has collapsed entirely, open wounds to expose decaying pine struts and ridge beams, to let in the rain and falling leaves and the birds and squirrels that have built their nests in the rafters. Here and there, the holes go straight through the attic floor, and on nights when the moon is bright, clean white shafts fall on the old pews and rotting hymnals. But this night there is no moon. This night there are only low black clouds and heat lightning, a persistent, distant rumble somewhere to the north of Dry Creek Road, and Dancy Flammarion stands alone on the cinderblock steps leading up to the wide front doors of the church.

There are two dozen or more symbols drawn on the weathered doors in what looks like colored chalk and charcoal. She recognizes some of them, the one's that the angel has warned her about or that Dancy learned from her grandmother before she died-an Egyptian Eye of Horus and something that looks like a letter H but she knows is really the rune Hagal, a pentagram, an open, watchful eye drawn inside a triangle, a circle with a fish at its center. They're all there for the same reason, to keep her out, to keep whatever's hiding inside safe, as if she were the monster.

As if she's the one the angel wants dead.

Dancy's dreamed of this place many times, a hundred nightmares spent on this old church brooding alone at the nub end of its narrow, muddy road, the steeple that lists a bit to one side, threatening to topple over, the tiny graveyard almost lost to blackberry briars and buckeye, ferns and polk weed. At least a hundred times, a hundred dream-sweat nights, she's walked the long path to this place, and sometimes the doors have no protective symbols to ward her off, but are standing open, waiting for her, inviting her to enter. Sometimes, the stained-glass windows and the empty window frames where all the glass has been broken out are filled with flickering orange light, like dozens of candles or maybe a bonfire someone's built inside the church. Tonight, the windows are dark, even darker than the summer sky.

She sets her heavy duffel bag down on the cinderblocks, which were painted green a very long time ago. Now, though, most of the green paint has flaked away or is hidden beneath a thick crust of moss and lichens. Dancy opens the canvas bag, and it only takes her a moment to find what she's looking for, the big carving knife she's carried all the way from Florida and the burned-out cabin on Eleanore Road. She ties the duffel bag closed again and looks up at the sky just as a silent flash of lightning illuminates the clouds and silhouettes the craggy limbs of the trees pressing in close around the churchyard.

"Please," she says, "if there's another way," and from the other side of the door there are sounds like small claws against the dry wood and a woman's nervous laughter, and Dancy squeezes her eyes shut.

"I don't have to do this," she says, trying to ignore the noises coming from the church. "There must be somebody else besides me, somebody stronger or older or more-"

Something slams itself hard against the inside of the door, and Dancy screams as the carving knife slips from her sweaty fingers-

– and the church doors splinter and burst open, unleashing a gout of freezing, oily blackness that flows down the cinderblock steps towards her. Darkness that's not merely the absence of light, but a darkness so absolute that only in passing has it even dared to imagine the possibility of light, darkness become a living force possessed of intellect and hate, memory and appetite. It surges greedily around Dancy's legs, stickier than roofing pitch, tighter than steel jaws about her calves, and in a moment more it has begun to drag her towards the open doorway-

– and Dancy catches the knife in the last second before it strikes the cinderblock steps, and she shakes off the deception, nothing but some unguarded scrap of childhood fear turned against her. She glances over her left shoulder, wondering if the angel's hiding itself somewhere in the trees, if it's watching just in case she needs help.

You never needed anyone's help before, her dead mother whispers. That night at the creek, the night it dragged me down to the deep place, or that day in the Wood, you didn't need anyone's help with the first two.

"With those first two, I had the shotgun," Dancy tells her, which is the truth, and she wishes that she'd thought to take her grandfather's Winchester out of the cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it to the ground.

It wasn't the shotgun killed them, her mother whispers, her voice like someone who's trying to drown and talk at the same time.

"It helped, I reckon," Dancy says. "It was better than having nothing but this old knife. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not even very sharp anymore."

This time her mother doesn't bother to answer, so Dancy knows that she's alone again, no murdered ghosts and no vengeful angels, and so it's time; she takes a deep breath and stares at the doors to the old church, the peeling white paint and the symbols that have been put there to keep her out. Then Dancy uses the tip of the knife to cut something invisible into the air, something like the sign of the cross, only there are more lines and angles to it. She does it exactly the way the angel said to, her own secret magic to undo all the monsters' hexes, and then the albino girl climbs the last two steps and reaches for one of the rusted iron door handles. She isn't surprised that the door isn't locked.

II. The Retreat to Kearvan Weal

"It was lunacy to bring her here," snarls the Glaistig, Queen Consort to the King of Immolations, and then she bares her teeth and stamps angrily at the rough stone floor of the hall with her goatish hooves. There's still blood in her tangled ash-blonde hair, bloodstains on her long green gown and a few spatters drying on her face. It might only be her own blood, the vampire woman named Selwith Tinker thinks, or it might be the blood of the Glaistig's defeated King. Either way, it hardly seems to matter now.

"Then tell me, my Lady, where would you have had us take it?" Selwith snarls back, staring the Glaistig directly in her simmering yellow eyes, and never mind propriety or inevitable recriminations or the Glaistig's celebrated temper. A nervous murmur begins at one end of the long hall and moves to and fro through the press of bodies, passed from one to another of the creatures who have crowded into the deep rift near the roiling, molten heart of the world. The ragged handful of captains and corporals and sergeants of the Dragon's army who have somehow survived the Weaver's latest and boldest assault upon the Dog's Bridge, all the leathery wings and skittering, jointed legs, the spiderkin and troll wives, the werewolves and demons and sloe-eyed wraith folk. The lucky ones who lived long enough to be driven back by the silver shields and lances of white light, who fled like midnight before an untimely dawn, racing one another across the hublands, over glistening lava fields and dry calderas, through ash storms and oil marshes and steam to the black dunes and beyond, past the shattered foothills and into the deep mountain passes, coming finally to the ancient gates of the Dragon's hall at Kearvan Weal. Now, as one, they cringe and draw back from the Glaistig and Selwith Tinker, from the broken but not yet dead thing lying on the floor between them.

The Queen Consort narrows her eyes and licks at her thin, pale lips. "Should I think you wondrous brave, vampire, for dragging this filth into our last sanctuary? Did you expect there might be some reward for your fatuous audacity? The Weaver's Arch Seraph, and you bring it still breathing here amongst us."

"And I say to you again," Selwith replies, baring her own teeth, her razor canines and incisors, and she leans nearer the Glaistig, "where would you have had me take her?"

"Why is it still living?" the Glaistig asks and kicks viciously at the unconscious form sprawled between them. "That, my dear witless Selwith, is the question which I would put to you in this hour. Why, by all that burns, is this abomination still drawing air? Why have you not divided its wings from its shoulder blades and its head from off its throat?"

Selwith Tinker smiles and takes one step back, then bows her head as she unsheathes her sword and holds it out to the Queen Consort. "Perhaps," she says, "it's only that I had no desire to rob my glorious Lady, newly widowed and so freshly come down from her tower into this war, of the honour of sealing all our fates. Take my own blade, my Queen, and deliver the whole world into the arms of the Weaver."

"Don't mock me," the Glaistig growls, and the folds of her gown shift and flutter furiously. "Whatever favor you may have wrestled from my husband, do not consider it handed down to me."

"I wouldn't dare, my Lady, neither his good favor nor his knowledge of our enemies."

The Glaistig snorts and turns to address one of her court ministers, a tall man in vestments the color of embers and smoke. "What is this fool saying, Bartolomei?"

The minister frowns and glances anxiously from the Queen Consort to the fallen Seraph and back again to the Glaistig. He swallows and clears his throat. When he speaks, Selwith can hear the fear in his voice.

"This is indeed a very delicate matter, your Grace. The Weaver has invested her most terrible magics in the creation of these beings, these fiends that she's set against us. They cannot simply be killed. That is, they can die, yes, certainly, but their deaths, as best we have been able to ascertain, would trigger a sort of, well, let's say a sort of inertial countercurrent. A vortex, so to speak."

"Please, my Lady," Selwith persists, speaking loud enough that she knows everyone and everything in the hall will hear her. "Honor me this day by striking the death blow with my humble, undeserving-"

"Silence," the minister hisses and snatches the vampire's weapon from her hands. There's a dim, hesitant titter of laughter from somewhere in the crowd which the Glaistig's minister immediately stifles by rapping the butt-end of his staff sharply against the paving stones. "By this childish impudence, you hazard your own undoing, Captain Selwith," he sneers, and a moment later, the sword dissolves into wisps of iron-scented vapor that are quickly scattered by the hot wind blowing through the hall.

"Good sirrah, I meant no offense," Selwith Tinker says, still smiling. "I assure you, I have not this day escaped the Weaver's noose only to lose my head for the sullied honor of a dead king's prized trollop."

And this time the laughter rises like a storm, like an ugly bit of flotsam buoyed on the crest of a wave, echoing off the high obsidian walls of Kearvan Weal. The Glaistig's minister repeatedly strikes his staff against the stones to no avail, and soon the laughter has been joined by hoarse shouts and catcalls and profanities shrieked and bellowed in a dozen black tongues. Selwith stands up straight and spreads her wings, welcoming any reprisals, any challenge after the frenzied retreat from the bridge. Better to end it here, she thinks, than endure another century with the memory of that defeat, the merciless red slaughter as the Weaver's shock troops finally broke the King's lines and surged over the ramparts. Better to die now and be finished and maybe take this preening bitch down with her, than wait for the Dragon to wake or for the Weaver to track them all back to the Weal. She draws a dagger from her belt, steel forged in ages of free night before the coming of the Weaver, before this war, but the Glaistig shakes her head and turns away. The minister steps between them, and Selwith flares her nostrils and looks down at the bright and shining face of the fallen Seraph. She spits, and her saliva sizzles on its armor, the cuirass forged from platinum and gold and the fossil bone of leviathans. She stops smiling and glances up at the Glaistig's minister.

"Then you tell me, Bartolemei, what we are to do with my trophy. Now that we have captured it, can the Weaver's magic be turned against her? Is there in all your vast and hallowed wisdom any antidote for this poison?"

"They've crossed the bridge?" the minister asks instead of answering her. "The Weaver's army is on the hub?"

"What the fuck do you think?" Selwith Tinker snaps back at him and tucks her ebony wings away. The Glaistig's minister nods once, his face gone almost as colorless as the flesh of this new evil the Weaver's conjured, and then he kneels to get a better look at the Seraph.

III. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

Julia Flammarion sits alone in the dingy motel room across the street from the Gulf of Mexico, watching the brilliant winter sun outside the wide windows. There are seagulls like white Xs drawn on the sky. The room smells like disinfectant and the menthol cigarettes the man she slept with the night before was smoking. His name was Leet-Andrew Leet-unless he was lying and his name was really something else. He got angry when she asked him to use a rubber, and he called her a skinny redneck bitch and said he ought to call the police because he knew she wasn't really eighteen, but then he used one, anyway. He was gone when she woke up, and there was twenty-five dollars and thirty-three cents lying on top of the television. She's holding all the money in her left hand, crumpled into a tight wad. Her mother would say this means she's a whore now, even though she didn't ask Andrew Leet for the money and she knows that he only left it to get even with her for making him use a rubber.

The television's on, because she doesn't like the silence, doesn't want to be alone in the motel room with nothing but the sound of her own thoughts and the wind and squawking seagulls and the traffic out on Ariola Drive. Earlier, she turned the volume up loud and left it on a channel that was nothing but news and weather, all day and all night long. Back home, there's no television, and not much of anything else, either.

Julia thinks that maybe she'll use some of the money to buy breakfast at the IHOP a little farther down the strip. She's always wanted to eat breakfast at an IHOP, blueberry pancakes and link sausages and black coffee and orange juice; besides, it isn't enough money for another night in the motel. Not that she needs another night. She's been in Pensacola Beach almost a whole week, a week since the bus ride from Milligan, and she's done almost everything that she came here to do. She's had sex with four men. She's seen two movies in a real theater, Sophie's Choice and Gandhi. She's gotten drunk on frozen strawberry daiquiris, learned to smoke, and she's watched the moon rise and the sun set over the ocean. She bought a yellow Minnie Mouse T-shirt at a souvenir shop and wore it so people might think she'd had enough money to go all the way to Disney World. She hitchhiked back across the three-mile-long Pensacola Bay Bridge and all the way to the zoo in Gulf Breeze where she saw more kinds of animals and birds and snakes than she'd ever really believed existed. She'd bought a red bikini and then spent hours walking up and down the beach, where she found cockles and periwinkle shells and two shark's teeth. She got a sunburn and watched teenagers skateboarding. She'd met a drunk old woman outside a bar who told her stories about hurricanes and her lazy ex-husband who'd turned out to be a homosexual.

Behind her, the angel makes an angry sound like a forest fire, like she's back home and all Shrove Wood is going up in smoke, but Julia keeps her eyes on the pale blue sky and the hungry, wheeling gulls.

"It don't make no difference to me," she tells the angel. She knows it isn't real, that it's only something wrong with her head makes her hear and see angels and worse things than angels, but she also knows it's usually easier if she doesn't ignore them when they speak to her. "You do as you please. I've come this far. I'm not going to chicken out now."

The room fills with a smell like hot asphalt and fresh lemons, but she doesn't look away from the window.

"You're just gonna have to find another crazy girl," Julia tells the angel. "'Cause this one's done with you. You can fly right the fuck back to Heaven or St. Peter or whoever it is you came from and tell them I said to mind their own damn business from here on out."

There's a sudden crackling noise from the television, and Julia almost turns to see.

"You go and break that, I can't afford to pay for it," she says. "Leave me alone."

The angel clacks its teeth together, clack, clack, clack, and the hot asphalt and lemon smell gets worse.

"No," Julia says and reaches for the remote control to turn off the television so that maybe it'll stop making the staticky sound. She presses off, but nothing happens. "Fuck you," she says, and the angel hisses. She prayed that it wouldn't follow her, that maybe it would get lost or distracted somewhere between Milligan and Pensacola, but it didn't. Every single thing she's done the last six days, its been right there behind her. It watched her while she fucked Andrew Leet and those other men. It wandered the theater aisle during Gandhi and Sophie's Choice. It floated above the reptile house at the zoo.

"You ain't been listening to me, but you should. I said you can't have me, and soon enough you'll see that I mean what I'm saying."

The angel screams, and its wings are thunderclaps and St. Elmo's fire trapped there inside the motel room with Julia. But it knows she's not afraid of it anymore, and she knows that it knows. Before she took all the money her mother kept hidden in a Mason jar under the front porch and left the Wood for good, Julia went out to the sandy place where she'd seen the angel the very first time. That was seven years ago, when she was still just a little girl. A wide clearing in the slash pine and briars and Spanish bayonets, and sometimes rattlesnakes and copperheads sunned themselves there. The first time she'd seen the angel, there'd been a huge canebrake rattler stretched out on the hot sand, and the angel had burned it until there was nothing left but charcoal. Before she took the money and set out for Milligan, she went back to the clearing and called the angel and told it that it couldn't have her. She wasn't going to be some sort of saint or nun or something, and she wasn't going to end up like crazy old Miss Sue Anne who lived by herself in a shack on the far side of the deep lake at the end of Wampee Creek. There were crumbling plaster statues stuck up all around the shack, statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and St. Giles, the patron saint of people who are afraid of the night. And sometimes Miss Sue Anne rowed out onto the lake in a leaky boat and said prayers and did root magic so all the evil things God had told her lived in the mud at the bottom couldn't come up to the surface.

"What I said, I still mean every goddamn word of it," Julia says, having to raise her voice to be heard above the television and the racket that the angel's making. "You go find someone else, someone who wants whatever it is you're selling, 'cause you can't have me."

And then the angel tells her what happens to suicides, tells her for the hundredth time all about the special corner of Hell reserved for people who are that cowardly, people who think they know better than God when and where and how they ought to die. And when it's finally finished, the angel slips away, taking all the noise and the strange smells with it. And Julia sits on the edge of the bed, biting her lip so she won't start crying, and she tries hard to think about nothing but blueberry pancakes.

IV. The Soldier and the Angel

The wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon-dreaming the coming of the Weaver, the massacre at the Dog's Bridge and the routing of his armies before the Weaver's Seraphim-stirs in his ancient slumber. His dreams spark and drive the gears of half-forgotten machineries buried in the caverns and tunnels far below Kearvan Weal, and all the world shudders and holds its breath.

"Did you hear that, beast? Did you feel it?" Selwith Tinker asks the Seraph, and it watches her with seething amber eyes, but doesn't answer the question or make any other reply. It came awake sometime during the long night, which has now almost ended, but hasn't yet spoken a word. As this thing is her rightful prize, the Keeper of Keys has permitted Selwith to stand vigil in its prison cell, the filthy hole where it was taken once the Glaistig's ministers and conjurors had concluded their examinations and the Seraph was lifted onto a pallet and carried from the noisy, crowded hall. It has been stripped and flogged and chained to the wall of the cell, its wrists and ankles bound in shackles fashioned from some melding of stone and living flesh that the vampire woman has never seen before and doesn't begin to comprehend. Its great tattletale-grey wings are spread out against the black rock and pinned firmly in place with fishhook spikes of iron and blue flame hammered straight through feathers and muscle and bone. The Seraph's toes can almost touch the floor of the cell, where its spilled blood has gathered in a wide and sticky pool; its blood or whatever the Weaver has given it instead of blood, something the color of gully orchids that stinks of sunlight and ammonia.

Selwith wrinkles her nose, wondering how that blood might taste, how it might feel on her tongue, wondering if tasting it would kill her slowly or all at once. And then the world shudders again, and she sits down on the floor, a safe distance from the Seraph's blood.

"He's waking up," she says. "Is that what she wants, your White Lady, this Weaver? Has her year of butchery and devastation, and your nativity, has all this been merely some great fucking show to get his attention?"

Again, the Seraph doesn't deign to answer her, but it stares down at Selwith Tinker with those blazing yellow-orange eyes, eyes choked with enough pain and hate and contempt that she suspects actual words could never do its thoughts justice, anyway. She thinks they'd be mere anticlimax compared to the force of that stare.

"The cunt," Selwith says, speaking half to herself now. "Well, she's getting her wish, if all this has been only to wake the fucking Dragon. She's getting her heart's desire, and we'll all be getting it right alongside her."

Another purplish drop of the Seraph's blood falls to the floor, striking the pool with a sound like hot steel against anvils, like breaking glass. Selwith forces herself to smile and not turn away from those cruel eyes.

"Between them, beast, what do you think will be left?"

The Seraph grits its teeth and strains against its bonds with such sudden violence that, for a moment, Selwith Tinker beleives it might actually manage to tear itself free. She gets to her feet again, her own tattered wings unfurling, and braces herself against the bars of the cage in case the jailer's devices should prove inadequate after all. But they hold, the fetters and the spikes and chains, and the Seraph gasps loudly and shuts its eyes.

"Come on, you murdering bastard," Selwith growls at it. "I know you can do better than that. The Weaver put everything she's got into you, right? Yeah? So tear yourself down off that wall and let's find out what'll really happen when one of you fuckers finally dies."

The Seraph closes its eyes, and Selwith, unexpectedly freed from the blistering heat of its gaze, finds herself confused and shivering in the darkness. Somewhere beneath the floor, miles and miles below the brittle navel of the world, the Dragon stirs, fully half awake now, and the vampire sinks to her knees. It's almost over, all of it, she thinks, and none of us can change a single thing.

Dust and small shards of rock sift down on her from a fresh crack that's opened in the ceiling, and Selwith looks up at the Seraph. With its eyes shut like that, she might almost believe that it's despaired at last and nothing now remains but a beautiful, empty shell hanging from a wall.

"No," she says. "You're still in there, aren't you, beast? She made you, and the Weaver would never have found the simple mercy to give anything she'd made the capacity for surrender. She'll have seen to it that you'll still be fighting when all the world is nothing but a cinder for the stars to wonder at."

Blood leaks from the Seraph's parted lips, and in the gloom under Kearvan Weal, the silver designs worked into its ivory skin have begun to glow, whorls held within whorls, lunatic tattoo spirals forever looping back upon themselves.

"What's this?" Selwith asks it. "You gonna show me something pretty now?" And she reaches into a pocket of her vest and takes out the flintlock pistol she's carried all the way from the ruins of the city where she was born more than a thousand years ago. The city of scholars and libraries and the knowledge of the world revealed and kept safe for ages beyond memory. One of the dozen or so cities the Weaver razed on her march towards the hub. Selwith has loaded the pistol with a polished bit of melted nickel and iron that fell smoldering from the sky, and she whispers a faithless prayer to all the gods of the wheels, the holy retinue of night and day, twilight and dusk, that there might be some fearful scrap of cleansing magic in the thing. She raises the gun and aims it at the Seraph's head.

"And she would call us monsters," the vampire woman laughs, pulling the hammer back and tightening her grip on the trigger. "Look at me, beast! Look at what your White Lady has made of me!"

The Seraph opens it eyes, twin embers that have become bottomless magma pools, and when it speaks, its voice is a hurricane without wind, a devouring inferno without heat, rolling through Selwith's memories and hopes, her loss and sorrow, through all the dead spaces behind the vampire's eyes. Selwith squeezes the trigger and tries to turn away, but its words have already begun taking her apart, dissolving her like a handful of salt in water. The flintlock pistol explodes in her hand.

"She's coming," the Seraph says. "On the heels of the cockcrow of this last day of all, she is coming."

And hearing that, the Dragon opens its eyes.

V. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

When Julia Flammarion has finished her late breakfast-the stack of blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup and butter and a little dollop of whipped cream on top-she leaves a ten-dollar tip for her waitress and then pays the woman at the register. The cashier tells Julia to have a nice day and come again, and Julia smiles for her and thinks perhaps this is the very last person who will ever see her smile. She leaves the IHOP and walks west on Ariola, back towards the dingy motel room that is no longer hers. She has six dollars and some change remaining from the money that Andrew Leet left on the television. Her whore money. Julia leaves the sidewalk and wanders out between the sea oats and the low white dunes onto the beach. The sun is warm, even though the wind is colder than it was the day before. She pulls the lime-green cardigan tighter about her shoulders and buttons it. It's one of the few things she took with her from the cabin in Shrove Wood. Her mother gave it to her as a birthday present two years ago; there are small pink flowers around the cuffs and the collar, and she didn't want to leave it behind.

Past the motel, Julia comes upon a man sitting on a produce crate in the sand, picking a twelve-string guitar, playing some song she's never heard before, so maybe it's something he wrote himself. She stands there listening, watching his fingers pulling the music from the strings, and when the song's finished, she puts the rest of the money in his open guitar case. He grins and thanks her, this shabby, handsome, easy man, the sort of man that would have made her daddy scowl, the sort he'd have probably called a no-account hippie freak. She wishes that at least one of the men who'd been her lovers over the last six days could have had this man's eyes or his strong, callused fingers or the soft light that seems to hang about his face. Her men were all ogres, she thinks, cursing and pawing at her, slobbering and grunting like hogs when they came. This man would have been different. He asks her name, and she tells him the truth, then thanks him and walks away as he begins playing another song she's never heard. She would have liked to stay and listen to it all and any other songs that he wanted to play for her, but hearing more of that music, she might have changed her mind.

Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. And there are no clouds in the sky today, and she thanks Jesus for there being a sky like that. She figures that he's still listening to her prayers, even if she is a thief and a whore. Mary Magdalene was a whore, too.

Julia finds a cinnamon-colored starfish, wider than her hand and half-buried in the sand, and stoops to look at it. But she doesn't touch it. The starfish might still be alive. Leave it be, she thinks. Let me just look at it a moment more. And she's still looking at it when she hears the angel somewhere close behind her, its wings scorching the day. The starfish begins to steam and writhe in the sand, five arms curling in upon themselves, and the cold gulf water hisses against it. In a moment, it has shriveled and gone as black as the rattlesnake did that morning in the clearing when she first met the angel.

"That wasn't necessary," she says. "Destroying beautiful things isn't going to change my mind," and the angel makes a spiteful, sizzling sound. Then it tells her the day and the hour that the handsome man with the guitar will die, and it reminds her, again, what happens to suicides.

With the toe of her left sneaker, Julia heaps wet sand over the scorched starfish so she won't have to look at it. But only a second or two later, the sea sweeps in and uncovers it again.

"Maybe if you were real," she says, "I might be more afraid of you." She looks up, staring out across the water. There's a yellow fishing boat floating in the distance, a canary speck against all the blue. She wishes it were summer and that the sea weren't so cold.

For the hundredth time, the angel tells her that she's a sane woman, but Julia knows that's a lie.

"Even if it were true," she says, "you might just as easily be a demon as an angel. You sure seem a lot more like a demon to me. Even if you were real, I don't think I'd believe in you. That's still my choice, you know?"

Look at me, Julia, the angel says. Turn and behold me. Look upon me and know that I am but one fraction of the innumerable host of the Ancient of Days.

"Go away," Julia replies. "I don't want to listen to you anymore. You make me angry, and I don't want to be angry at the end."

The angel howls and hacks at the morning air with its four wings like hatchets of flame. The air around Julia grows uncomfortably warm and a patch of the sea in front of her has begun to boil violently.

"It's still my choice," she says again. "Now leave me alone. Go haunt someone else."

Waves rushing up the sand towards her are dappled with the corpses of tiny silver fish and a small crab that have been boiled alive.

"It's still my choice," Julia says for the third time.

And then the angel is gone, and the sea has stopped bubbling. She waits a moment, then glances over her shoulder. Ten or fifteen feet behind her, there's a star-shaped place where the sand has been melted into a glassy crust. Back towards the motel, the man with the guitar is still sitting on his produce crate. He waves at her, and Julia waves back. And then she turns and wades into the surf, grateful now it's so cold that the waves breaking about her calves take her breath away. The sea has already swept the boiled fish farther down the beach. She shuts her eyes and recites the Lord's Prayer. She thinks of her mother and her father and the old cabin in Shrove Wood, and she thinks about the mostly wonderful week she's had in Pensacola Beach and Gulf Breeze, a whole lifetime in only six days, six days and a morning. She reminds herself it's more than a lot of people get, and when the water is as high as her waist, Julia opens her eyes and starts to swim.

VI. The Forsaken Church

After the unlocked doors and the things she saw coiled up in a corner of the foyer, things that might have been dead or might only have wanted her to think that they were dead, Dancy Flammarion stands between the rows of broken and upturned pews, already halfway down the aisle to the wrecked altar. She's surprised that there are so many of them hiding out in the old church and wishes the angel might have been just a little more specific. They line the walls, black figures blacker than the summer night, shadows of shadows, and some of them have taken seats in the pews; several have slipped in behind her, blocking her way back to the doors. They have no faces, though a few of them might have eyes, brighter smudges of shadow set into their indistinct skulls. Some of them seem to have wings, and others move about on all fours like bobcats or coyotes made of spilled India ink, but most of them stand up straight and tall, as if they might fool her into thinking they were once men and women. They whisper expectantly among themselves, and here and there one of them sniggers nervously or grinds its teeth or taps its long claws against the back of a varnished pew.

"Will she kill us all?" one of them asks.

"What? With that silly little knife?" asks another.

"Perhaps we should choose a champion," another of the black figures suggests and several of them begin to laugh.

Dancy licks her lips, her mouth gone dry as dust, and she holds the carving knife out in front of her.

"Will you look at that now," one of them cackles and takes a step towards her. "She's a regular white-trash Joan of Arc, wouldn't you say? Our Lady of Rags and Swamp Gas." And for a time, the old church fills up with the sound of their laughter. Dancy grips the wooden hilt of the knife and waits for whatever it is that she's supposed to do.

"We've been watching for you child," one of the shades says. It's seated very near her, like the silhouette of something that's learned how to be a woman and a wolf at the same time. Its grey-smudge eyes flash a hungry emerald, and when it stands up, it's much, much taller than Dancy expected. "We've been hearing rumors about what happened down in Florida. There was a crow, wouldn't talk about nothing else. Miss Dancy Flammarion, the vengeful right hand of Jehovah, some pissed-off angel's albino concubine. But what the hell, you know? Rumors aren't usually much more than that, especially when you get them from crows. But here you stand, girl, big as life and twice as shabby," and the monsters laugh again.

"What I'm wondering," the wolf woman says, taking a step closer to Dancy, "is how you ever got yourself out of that insane asylum way down in Tallahassee. Or isn't that part of the rumors true?"

Dancy licks her lips again. "I can't fight you all," she says. "I wasn't sent here to fight you all."

More laughter, laughter loud enough to wake whatever dead might still lie sleeping in the overgrown cemetery next to Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. And the thing that is neither a wolf nor a woman, the thing that's hardly anything more than a patch of smoke and depravity and wishful thinking, cocks its head and blinks at her.

"Something else drew you here," Dancy tells it. "All of you. Some-thing born of hurt and ill will, death and the cruelty of men, an old evil which lay a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of the river-"

"She's a regular William goddamn Shakespeare," the wolf-woman shade says, interrupting her, and there's more laughter from the black things that have taken refuge in the abandoned church. "We knew you were a force to be reckoned with, child, but no one mentioned you were a poet in the bargain."

"That's just what the angel told me," Dancy says, wishing she didn't sound so scared, wishing she'd known there'd be so many of them. "Something drew you here. And that's the one I've come for."

"I see," the shade replies and sits down in the pew again. "Fair enough, then. You won't have to wait much longer. She'll be along shortly, that one. In the meantime, why don't you have a seat here and-"

"You can't trick me," Dancy tells the shade and points her carving knife at it.The others laugh again, but not quite as loudly as before. Come and get me, Dancy prays silently, because she knows the angel can hear her, wherever it's gone. Please come now and take me away.

"Why don't you kiss me," the thing on the pew purrs. "You'd be sweet, I bet. I wager you'd be just as sweet as spring water and strawberries. Me, I haven't had a kiss in such an awful long time. Has anyone ever kissed you, Dancy Flammarion? I mean, besides that angel of yours."

Dancy shifts the carving knife from one hand to the other and wipes her sweaty palm on her the front of her T-shirt. The angel isn't coming for her. It led her here, and she followed of her own accord, and now it won't have anything else to do with her until she's finished what it's brought her here to do. The shade's eyes flash brilliant green again, and Dancy shakes her head and continues down the aisle towards the desecrated altar and the pulpit and the benches where a choir once sat on Sunday mornings when the sanctuary was filled with dazzling sunlight and song and a preacher's booming voice.

"Have it your way, kid," the wolf-woman shade calls out after her. "I'll just sit tight and watch the show. But if you change your mind, I'll be right here."

VII. Counsel Among the Dead

In King's Hale, the Glaistig has only just started her prayers of passage and release when the quake begins to rock the tower. She gets slowly to her feet, holding tight to one of the sturdy pediments of her husband's granite tomb, the clat clat clat of her unsteady hooves lost in the rumbling, splitting, cracking din rising up from the tortured earth far below the Weal. She stands alone on the wide funerary dais. Her ministers and astronomers and alchemists, her marshals and magistrates and the High Executioner and her Ladies Who Walk Behind, the Lord Chancellor and all the other members of her inner court are still kneeling at their assigned stations beyond the base of the dais. Their heads are bowed, to varying degrees, anxiously waiting for her word to stand, her permission to vacate the Hale and move to someplace safer.

How much longer before they'd run? the Glaistig wonders. How long before ceremony and protocol wouldn't matter anymore?

The ancient walls of the Hale loom gigantic around her, two hundred feet from the glass mosaics set into the floor to the formerets and buttresses of the vaulted roof. The ceiling has been painted with the constellations of the Midsummer's Eve, yellow and white tempera stars dabbed against a sky of deepest indigo. A precise mural of the heavens so that all the generations of kings sleeping here can always find their way back down to the hub on that one night of the year. Their immense black statues line the walls, watching her, and the Glaistig wonders, too, if there will ever be another Midsummer's Eve and where the ghosts of kings go when their world has died.

"Kypre Alundshaw," she calls out, shouting to be heard above the upheaval, and the Glaistig jabs her glittering scepter of silver and ruby and andesite at one of the alchemists. Alundshaw, a short, balding man missing his left ear and his right eye, nods and begins to rise. But then the tower shakes again and the floor rolls like a stormy sea, and the alchemist, along with most of the other supplicants, is thrown roughly against the shattered tiles. The convulsion passes, but a narrow sort of rift or fissure has opened near the rear of the chamber, and now a geyser of steam and soot spews out from it, the breath of the Dragon himself or only the death rattle of Kearvan Weal.

"Yes, your Grace," Kypre Alundshaw wheezes as he manages to get to his feet, his hands and face cut and bleeding from the broken glass tiles. He brushes sparkling, kaleidoscopic slivers from his aubergine robes.

"You must understand," the Glaistig says, "I would not ask you this question if I did not believe that we have come finally to the hour of our uttermost need and that all other avenues have been exhausted."

The alchemist stops picking glass from his robes and nods his head once. "Yes, your Grace. Certainly. I understand."

The Glaistig takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, letting a few more seconds slip past, and she silently curses the gods of chance and circumstance that she has lived to know how the damned-to-be feel in that last instant before the trespass that will insure their spirits are forever consigned to perdition. She opens her eyes, and steam is still pouring from the crack in the floor; the air has begun to stink of sulfur and rotting eggs.

"The Weaver's constructs, these Seraphim, may not be killed," she says. "This much I understand, and also I understand why. But I have been told there may be another way, something which you've learned from the red witches. I ask you, is this true?"

When Kypre Alundshaw doesn't reply, she strikes her scepter against the dais with enough force that sparks fly from the impact of silver against the flagstones. Alundshaw flinches and immediately looks back down at the floor.

"Alchemist, you will tell me now, is this true? Or have I been wrongly advised?"

"No, your Grace. You have not," the alchemist replies, a quaver in his voice. "There may, indeed, be another way, but it would be a terrible deed if-"

"I am not asking you for a lesson in ethics," the Glaistig snarls and turns back towards her husband's tomb. She places one hand flat on its polished lid and listens to the foundations of Kearvan Weal trembling beneath her.

"No, your Grace, but the consequences-"

"I'm only asking if it might be accomplished," the Glaistig explains, wishing that the heavy lid of the tomb had not been closed so soon, that she could look one last time upon the face of her King and find there the answers she needs. Answers that might save her world without bringing harm to some other universe.

"I think so," the alchemist says, and she can hear the reluctance in his reply. "The red witches' calculations seem sound enough. We can find no fault."

"And why do you believe that we can trust the Nesmians, Alundshaw? They have ever been enemies of the Dragon. Might not this be some deceit?"

The alchemist glances nervously over his shoulder at the steam billowing from the fissure, then clears his throat. "I need not remind your Grace that the Nesmians despise the Weaver, perhaps even as much as do our own people. In this instance, our enemy has become an ally against a common threat."

"And this sorcery would take them all, not merely that one the vampire has captured?"

"Yes, your Grace. If the process works as the Nesmians have predicted, it would take all of the Seraphim, each removed to another…" and he pauses, as if he's forgotten how to end the sentence.

"To another world," the Glaistig finishes for him.

"Yes, mum," he says. "They would be forever scattered across the celestial planes."

"Beyond her recall?"

"Yes, your Grace. Forever beyond her recall."

The floor groans and rolls again, and the alchemist waves his arms about and shuffles his feet to keep from falling. Near the rift in the floor of King's Hale, the glass tiles of the mosaic have begun to melt, their candy colors bleeding one into the other. And now a second fissure has opened, this one a vertical rent in the northern wall of the tower, wide enough that dim streaks of daylight shine through.

"Is there still time?" the Glaistig asks.

"I believe so," Kypre Alundshaw answers. "The place of sacrifice has already been prepared. We've done precisely as the Kenzia woman has directed. We only await your command."

"Then you tell her to do it," she says. "Tell her to do it immediately. And by the spokes and all our fathers, may the gods show mercy on us in our desperation."

Before the next tremor shakes the Hale, Alundshaw and the other alchemists and the astronomers have filed out of the chamber, and the Glaistig motions for the men and women of her court to kneel once more. She leans against the tomb of the King of Immolations, her cheek pressed to the cool, consoling granite, and, in another moment, she begins her prayers again.

VIII. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

Julia Flammarion swims until the cold has done its job, exactly what she's asked it to do for her, and her arms and legs have grown too stiff and numb to possibly swim any farther. Which means that she'll never be able to swim all the way back to shore, either, so there's no losing her nerve now. It doesn't matter if she turns coward and changes her mind or decides that life as a crazy girl who talks to angels is still better than drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. She squints back towards the beach, nothing visible but a faint white stripe against the blue horizon, and wonders about the handsome man with the guitar, what he thought as she walked into the water in her clothes and shoes and began to swim away. Did he even notice? Is he watching her now? Has he gone looking for help? She hopes not. She hopes that he's still sitting there on his apple crate playing beautiful songs she'll never hear.

"And what now?" she asks the high and unconsoling sun, the sun that might as well be the eye of God staring bitterly down at a fifteen-year-old suicide. The eye of a God who's finally washing his hands of her once and for all. A moment later, Julia gets a big mouthful of saltwater, and it strangles her and burns her sinuses and throat.

"Is that your answer?" she sputters weakly, and the sun continues to hang mute in the cloudless winter sky, however many tens or hundreds of millions of miles away from her it might be.

Much too far to matter, she thinks and shuts her eyes. The cold and the effort of swimming out this far have made her very sleepy, and so maybe that's what happens next. Maybe it's as simple as shutting her eyes and drifting on the swells until she falls asleep. Maybe there will even be one last dream, something warm and gentle that shows her another way her life might have gone, if she weren't insane and had never spoken to the angel that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood. If the rattlesnake had never been burned to charcoal. If the angel had never started telling her stories about monsters. Julia uses the last of her strength to imagine a dream just like that, a very good dream in which she marries the handsome man with the guitar and they have children and even grandchildren, and she grows old and dies at home in her bed with all of them about her. She tells herself that the sound of wings close by is nothing but a curious seagull or a pelican, and only a few seconds later, too exhausted to tread water any longer, she slips beneath the welcoming surface of the sea.

IX. The Demon of HopekillSwamp

She might have had a name once, distant ages ago, before the white men came with their noisy, stinking cities and their clattering railroads and their murderous highways, back when the Muskogee were the only men she'd ever seen and who'd ever seen her. But if she did have a name, she's long since forgotten it. She might have had a mother, too, and perhaps even a father, like all the other things that creep and slither and swim and fly through the bayous and sloughs spread out along the Flint River. The shadow things hiding in the old church at the edge of the swamp call her Elandrion, Daughter of the Great Mother Nerpuz, but she's pretty sure it's just some shit they made up to stay on her good side and Elandrion wasn't ever really her name.

On this summer night, she's resting in the mud beneath a bald cypress log at the very bottom of a deep, still pool, gnawing the last pale shreds of flesh from the bones of a great bullhead catfish. The bullhead was a giant, seven feet from snout to tail, and maybe it lived at the bottom of the pool for twenty years or more before she crept up and wrapped it in her strong arms and cracked it's skull open between her jaws. Nothing in this whole damn swamp that's even half a match for her, not the mud cats or the huge old snapping turtles, not the cottonmouth moccasins, not even the goddamned alligators. Nothing out here she can't make her dinner from, not if she's gone and set her sights on it.

She's using a claw to get at the last bits of the bullhead's brains when she hears the shadows calling out across the night to her, their voices tangling in Spanish moss and the limbs of the trees and dripping down into the black water.

Elandrion, she's finally come. She's here.

She's found us all, Elandrion. She's right here in the church.

For a moment, she considers ignoring them, leaving them to their own fates. She thinks about finishing with the catfish and then sleeping through the scorch of the coming day right here beneath this cypress log. Surely together they can handle one skinny human girl, even if there's any truth to the gossip she's heard from mockingbirds and egrets and a couple of red-winged blackbirds.

The albino girl. She's waiting here for you.

Deliver us, Elandrion.

Beneath the cypress log, she rolls her eyes and picks her teeth. She imagines the shadows doing their best to menace the girl, playing like they're the next worst thing under heaven, and all the while they're whining into the night for deliverance. Ought to leave the lot of them to whatever the kid's got in mind, she thinks, but then she hears another voice oozing down through the stagnant water and the slime.

– an old evil which lay a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of the river-something drew you here-that's the one I've come for-

And under all the bluster, the girl child's so scared she's about to shit herself, but still…

How long since anyone or anything called her out?

How long since anything dared come looking for her?

And, besides, there's really no point denying that she relishes the way the shadow things in the old church simper and bow to her and offer up all their darkest, most laughable prayers. Once, they even lured a couple of teenagers into the church and then kept them there for her. When she was done with them, the shadows buried what was left in the overgrown cemetery. It'd be a shame if the rumors were true and the albino girl went and killed them all off.

She has a knife, one of the shadows whimpers.

Elandrion, she's something terrible. Something mad. There's angelfire in her eyes, Elandrion.

She squints into the silt and gloom at the bottom of the pool, considering that last part and recalling that one of the egrets said something about angels, something about purifying fire. But she hadn't given it a second thought. Egrets say all sorts of crazy things.

– something drew you here-that's the one I've come for-

She pushes the bullhead's stripped and needle-spined carcass aside and disturbs a fat, tasty-looking slider concealed inside a thicket of eelgrass. Any other time, she'd have snatched the turtle as it tried to slip away to find some other hiding place. But she hesitates, listening to the voices filling the Georgia night, and the slider escapes. But that's alright, she tells herself. The albino girl will fill up the empty nook in her belly that the turtle would have occupied, that nook and then some. It's been years since she last tasted human flesh, which is almost as sweet as the wild boar piglets she finds in the swamp, from time to time.

Will you squeal for me, sweet angel child? she thinks and grins there beneath the cypress log. Will you squeal just like all the little pigs?

And then she kicks off with her broad feet and rises slowly towards the shimmering surface.

She who has no name, not that she can recall, the one the cowering shadows in the church call Elandrion. The ancient she-thing that the black-brown men and the pink-white men out gigging frogs or checking their traps for muskrats and beaver have glimpsed, moving swiftly between the trees. They've called her lots of things-the demon of Hopekill Swamp, witch, haint, monster, freak, the gator woman. They have no end of names for her. At least the red-brown men knew better than to give her any name at all.

She squats in the water lilies and rushes at the edge of the pool, considering once more everything the birds have said, the careless chatter of warblers and blue jays. The air is still filled with the whispered calls of the cringing church shadows. And that other voice, which must be the girl's, frightened but bold, the voice of someone who believes things she's better off without. Then, the one whose name is not Elandrion gets to her feet and, moving quickly on her long legs, follows a deer trail out of the swamp and up to higher, drier ground, and every living beast and insect falls silent as she passes.

X. Rites of Blood and Fire

Never before has one of the red witches been permitted within the walls of Kearvan Weal, and now not one but two of them have come, have been welcomed through its gates, after they slipped across the Dog's Bridge on horseback only four days before the Weaver's army streamed over the vast span of bone and wire. That alone is enough to make Kypre Alundshaw suspicious of their intentions and allegiances, despite the things he's told the Glaistig. That these two somehow managed to survive the journey from their far distant temples on the river Yärin, that they traveled the Serpent's Road unmolested, must either stand as evidence that they're in league with the Weaver or that their stone idols have more power than the alchemists of the hublands would ever have dared believe.

Evil times demand strange alliances, the alchemist reminds himself and wipes sweat from his forehead before it can drip into his one eye. It's very hot in the small chamber that has been prepared for the Nesmians' ritual, a great fire burning inside a brick-lined pit set into the floor at the center of the circular room. There's a low stone table pushed against one wall, its upper surface freshly engraved with runes that few, if any, men can read, and there's a long iron sluice running from the table to the fire. Everything's exactly as the red witches have asked, and Alundshaw whispers a hurried prayer that he hasn't simply invited some greater atrocity into their midst. The chamber is crowded with all the court astronomers and the other alchemists who have accompanied Alundshaw in his descent from King's Hale.

He begins to speak, but then there's a loud grinding sound from the bowels of the Weal, and the floor rumbles treacherously under them.

"Alundshaw, there's no time left for you to waste," Pikabo Kenzia says impatiently. "The Seraph is free, and already the Dragon's waking beneath our feet." Her violet eyes glimmer in the firelight, and Alundshaw tries hard not to let his dread of her show. Both women wear the simple crimson robes and grey-green skullcaps of their order, but he's well aware that Kenzia is no common adept, that she's next in the line of succession to be Mother and Voice of all the red witches of Nesmia Shar. She's a beautiful, fearsome woman, a warrior and accomplished sorceress, an uncompromising zealot and a scheming politician, and Alundshaw knows that she was counted a worthy adversary by the King of Immolations. The unruly tangle of her chestnut hair, just beginning to go white at the temples, puts the alchemist in mind of a lion's mane, and, gender aside, the comparison seems all too apt.

"Do you have the feather?" she asks, and he takes a paper envelope from a vest pocket and passes it to Pikabo Kenzia, almost dropping it before she takes it from his trembling fingers. She scowls at him and opens the envelope; inside is a single feather pulled from the wing of the captured Seraph.

"Will it be enough?" one of the astronomers asks her, a nervous old bastard whose name Alundshaw can never recall.

"Possibly," Pikabo Kenzia replies, holding the large grey feather up in front of her face. "Probably. Regardless, I suppose it will have to be, won't it, Ezcha?" and then she turns to face the other Nesmian, a much younger and plainer woman with none of Kenzia's fierce presence.

Ezcha doesn't reply, but merely smiles and nods her head before she goes to stand beside the stone table. "We should hurry," she says. "I'm ready," and the witch removes her crimson robe. She's wearing nothing beneath it, though her skin has been painted with elaborate runes which match the ones carved into the table. Ezcha folds the robe neatly and lays it on the floor, then takes off her cap and places it on the floor, as well.

"You will return these to my sisters," she says to Kenzia.

"Ezcha, you know that I will," the elder Nesmian replies, and Ezcha nods her head again. Then she climbs onto the table and stands at the mouth of the iron sluice, facing the fire.

Pikabo Kenzia takes a deep breath and draws a dagger of black volcanic glass from her own robe. "I would ask that you all leave us now, excepting, of course, Lord Alundshaw. He may remain, if he so desires. I would not wish your Queen or her agents to harbor notions that we're working some secret enchantment against her."

Kypre Alundshaw hesitates, not wanting to be alone with these peculiar women and their heathen ways, but then he motions for the others to leave the room, and, relieved, they obediently file through the door to wait together in the cramped antechamber.

"You will not speak," Kenzia says to the alchemist, and the tone in her voice is enough to prevent him from even asking why. The red witch closes her eyes a moment, then opens them and glances up at the naked woman standing alone on the table.

"We ask nothing of you, daughter, that you have not already pledged," Pikabo Kenzia says, then looks down at the dagger in her hands. "You are brave, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture. By your sacrifice might this world be saved. By your grace and willing death, might others live."

And if he were not now too afraid to move, Alundshaw would join the rest and damn his mistrust and the Glaistig's suspicions. Well, I can shut my eyes, he thinks. If nothing else, I can at least shut my eyes.

"The body of woman is like a flash of lightning," Kenzia says, "existing only to return to nothingness. Like the summer growth that shrivels in winter. Waste thee no thought on the process, for it has no purpose, coming and going like dew."

I can shut my eyes.

And the floor rumbles again.

"Like a wall, a woman's body constantly stands on the verge of collapse," Pikabo Kenzia continues, speaking faster now, as if she's afraid there won't be time to finish. "And still and always, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?"

The woman on the table spreads her arms wide, as if in welcome, and Alundshaw can see that there are tears in her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks. Pikabo Kenzia leans towards the fire pit and drops the Seraph's feather into the flames. For only an instant, the fire burns a brilliant, exquisite blue, and the chamber is filled with the screeching of eagles and a blistering wind that reeks of gunpowder and battlefield carrion.

Don't watch it, Alundshaw thinks, his mind gone desperate and wild. Don't see what's coming, but he can't seem to remember how to shut his eyes.

The awful grinding sound comes again, and this time bits of masonry are shaken free of the walls and the stone table wobbles.

"Leave this place forever, you murdering son of a whore," the red witch growls and swings her black dagger around, slicing her companion's belly open. "Be gone, and take all your foul brethen with you!" Ezcha's blood spills into the sluice, and hisses when it reaches the fire. She screams, and the second time Pikabo Kenzia's blade sinks deep into the younger witch's gut, the alchemist finally finds the will to close his eyes.

XI. The Dirty Work of Angels

The shadows gathered in the old church on Dry Creek Road have kept Dancy busy for the better part of an hour. Rushing her suddenly from behind, their not-quite insubstantial fingers tearing at her shabby clothes or snatching strands of her white hair, then darting away to safety again. They've taunted and jeered and mocked, hurled threats and mildewed hymnals, and they've promised her, again and again, that she won't live to see another sunrise. There are scratches on her arms and face, the best they can manage with their shadow claws and teeth, a few drops of blood to whet their appetites for what's to come. They've backed Dancy all the way down the narrow aisle to the pulpit, where she stands with her back to the altar, her carving knife held out and glinting faintly by the unsteady glow of their will-o'-the-wisp eyes. She's noticed that their eyes have gotten a lot brighter, as if tormenting her has stoked some furnace hidden within them.

"Would you run, child, if you could?" the wolf-woman shade asks Dancy, and then, addressing all the others-"Brothers and sisters, if we took pity on this poor, misguided ragamuffin and let her leave now, would she even have the good sense to go, before Elandrion gets here?"

For an answer, there are ugly gales of laughter, hoots and whoops and uproarious fits of giggling.

"Do what you like," Dancy tells them. "I'm not going anywhere until I've done what I came here do to." But this only makes the shadows laugh that much louder.

"Oh, little girl," the wolf-woman shade snorts, "you're so preciously earnest. Such a stalwart little urchin, you are. It's a crying shame there's just the one of you. A pity you won't last longer. If only we could bottle you, I dare say none of us would ever go hungry again."

And then Dancy hears something behind her, and she looks over her right shoulder to see the monster glaring down at her from the pulpit. Its gnarled fingers grip the edges of the lectern, fingers that end in sickle talons, and they sink into the rotten wood as though it were clay.

"You're Elandrion?" Dancy asks it, turning to face the monster, and it grins and stands up straighter, though its bandy hind legs and thorny, crooked spine hardly seem suited to standing upright at all. It's so tall that its head almost scrapes against the sagging sheetrock a good ten or twelve feet above her.

"That's not my name," the monster replies. "I let them call me that, but you, you should know better than to believe I have a name." And Dancy thinks the monster's rheumy mud and blackwater voice must be the very soul of the swamp, this swamp and every other swamp and bog, every single marsh and slough that has ever been since the first morning of Creation, the creeping, impenetrable spirit of every quagmire and bayou and bottomless, peat-stained lake. Since the days of dinosaurs and screeching pterodactyls and dragonflies big as herons, this thing must have lain waiting for her in the wet places of the world, biding its time, murmuring her name in its sleep.

It's too much for me, she thinks, but Dancy knows her angel believes otherwise and has no intention of coming for her until the monster's dead.

"Am I?" it asks, feigning disappointment, and the monster grins even wider than before. "But I've heard so many stories. All the birds know your name. The birds, they think you're the goddamn Second Coming or something. Yeah, they tweet and twitter and squawk your name just like you're the bloody Virgin Mary her own damn self, come down from Paradise to put matters right."

Dancy backs slowly away from the thing behind the pulpit, sparing a quick glance at the shadows. They've all fallen silent now, but have moved in closer to her. They loom up around her, stretching themselves tall and thin, made bolder by the monster's words, by the sight and stench and sound of it.

"No, you're something special," the monster says, and it's wide, unblinking eyes remind Dancy of hardboiled eggs-no pupils or irises in there, just those two bulging white balls poking out below its scaly brow. They loll lifelessly from one side to the other as it speaks and leak viscous rivulets into the hair sprouting from its gaunt cheeks.

"I remember one like you, long time ago, five hundred fucking years if it's a day. A red Indian boy, but I don't recollect what they called him. He came looking for me, too. Thought he was toiling for the gods, just like you. I still got a few of his teeth stuck up under a rock somewhere."

"I didn't walk all the way out here just to listen to you talk," Dancy says, gripping the knife as tightly as she can and wishing again that it were her grandfather's Winchester shotgun, instead. The monster stops grinning and hunches down so the end of its flat nose is only inches from Dancy's face.

"No, I reckon not," it snarls, and she can feel its voice rattling about inside her chest. Dancy thinks it's probably some sort of miracle her heart's still beating after the force of those four words inside her.

"You come here to lay me low," the monster says, "to show me what for and make the night safe for decent folks, ain't that about right."

"Something like that," Dancy tells the monster the shadows call Elandrion, the thing her angel had no name for. It flares its nostrils and sniffs the air around her.

"Then I guess we'd best get to it," the monster sighs and stands up again. "I got other business this night besides killing you."

All the shadow things suddenly withdraw, pressing themselves flat against the crumbling walls of the church or retreating into the foyer or the exposed rafters. And Dancy Flammarion stands her ground and waits for the monster to make the first move.

XII. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

Held fast in invisible currents, Julia Flammarion drifts away from Santa Rosa Island towards deeper water. She's almost weightless now, suspended here in the twilight realm between two worlds; above her, the clamorous lands of sunlight and seagulls, and far below her feet, the silent, lightless lands of cold abyssal solitude. There were a long and terrible few seconds of panic when she opened her mouth and the sea rushed past her teeth, forcing its way down her throat, flooding her lungs and stomach. Her head and chest seared with that alien, saltwater fire as her life streamed so easily from between her parted lips, racing back towards the shifting mirror surface, a dancing line of bubbles like the silvery bells of jellyfish. But then the panic passed, because the dead don't need to breathe, and the pain passed, too, and now there's the most perfect peace she's ever known. Dimly, Julia thinks she must be sinking, and more dimly still, she wonders if the angel was right after all and maybe the gloom below her is only the yawning entrance of the burning Catholic hell that awaits all suicides. Not that she ever really doubted it, but it would be nice to learn that it was all bullshit, her mother's god and Jesus on his cross and the angels and all the rest. It would be nice to float a bit longer, neither quite here nor quite there, not dead and not alive, and then her consciousness pulling free at last and nothing to take its place but compassionate oblivion.

She would ask no more of heaven than that.

Julia's eyes flutter open as something that might have been a fish darts quickly past her face.

So, she thinks, at least I'm not alone.

And she's hoping that the fish comes back, that there might even be more than just the one, when a point of blue-white light appears in the murk far below her. Hardly more than a flicker at first, but then the water around her grows suddenly warmer, buoying her upwards as it rises, and the flicker blossoms into a dazzling wheel, so wide she can hardly even see its edges, spinning counterclockwise in the deep.

And then the wheel of light is gone, just as abruptly as it came, but the sea about Julia no longer seems peaceful or merciful or kind. And even half-awake, half-awake at best, she knows without knowing how she knows that something has come out of the wheel. The same way she knew she wasn't alone that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood, the same way she always knew whenever the angel was about to start talking to her. And the panic returns, much worse than before, because this isn't simply pain or death, this is something unseen rising up towards her, and if there were a patron saint of suicides she'd pray that the unseen thing is only a shark or a barracuda, some great eel or stingray or sawfish, only sharp teeth and snapping jaws to take her apart, to tear her limb from limb and be done with this slow death.

And then she must be more than half-asleep, because the sea has vanished, and Julia Flammarion is walking through the Wood on a sunny autumn day, late afternoon, only an hour or so left until dusk, and the fallen leaves crunch beneath her shoes as she follows Wampee Creek towards the small waterfall and the crystal-clear pool that fills a wide sinkhole. When she was younger, she swam there on very hot days, swimming naked beneath the pines and wax myrtles, the air all around filled with the joyous, raucous calls of birds and frogs and insects. She stops beside a familiar tree, wondering if it's all been nothing more than a daydream, her stealing the money and running off to Pensacola, the men and the movies and the drunk old woman whose husband left her because he was gay, nothing but something she wished that she had the courage to do. Julia laughs and leans against the tree, laughing that her imagination could ever get away from her like that, laughing because she's relieved and feels silly and because it's good to laugh here in the fading October sun and the long, familiar shadows. She sits down and wipes her eyes, and that's when Julia notices the albino girl walking towards her up the creek, the legs of her baggy overalls rolled past the knees.

Somewhere nearby, a crow calls out hoarsely, and the girl looks up. Julia can see that her eyes are pink, and her hair as fine and pale as cornsilk. The girl, who can't be more than five or six years old, is holding a fat bullfrog in one hand. She sees Julia, too, and she smiles and begins splashing through the creek towards her.

"Look, Momma," the girl says, holding up the bullfrog. "Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?"

Look, Momma…

And Julia knows perfectly damn well that the albino girl's only mistaken her for someone else, and in a few seconds more, when she comes closer, the child will realize her mistake. But then the girl stops, the creek flowing about her bare legs, and the bullfrog slips from her fingers and swims quickly away.

"Momma?" the girl asks, looking down at her empty hand and then back up at Julia.

I'm sorry child, Julia starts to tell her, but I ain't your momma. I ain't nobody's momma, but then the girl turns and begins splashing away down the creek towards the sinkhole. Julia stands up, ashamed that she's frightened the kid, even if she's not sure why. She starts to call out to the albino girl, wants to tell her to be careful because the rocks are slick and it's not far to the falls and-

– there's only the caressing sea again, pressing in on every inch of her, the half-lit sea filling her, drowning her because she's asked it to, the agreeable, indifferent sea washing her away-a handful of mud, a pinch of salt, blood and a bit of sand, but there's nothing of her that won't dissolve or disperse. Only a passing moment's sadness that the autumn day by Wampee Creek was merely some smidgen of delirium coughed out by her dying mind, her life's last cruel trick, when it's only her and the sea and-

No. Her and the sea and just one other thing, whatever it was came slithering up out of the wheel of light before her dream of Shrove Wood and the albino girl. The thing that isn't a shark or a barracuda, that it isn't anything that belongs here. Nothing she can see, but Julia feels it, like tendrils of scalding water twining themselves tightly about her legs, forcing her back up towards the surface. And then its inside her, burning, prying her body and soul apart to find some slender crevice in between.

A pillar of fire dragging her to life again.

A child with white rabbit eyes.

And still and always, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?

Blood and thunder, fire and a mad woman with a knife.

Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?

The briefest flicker of blue-white light, a searchlight beacon hiding itself in her womb, where no one will ever think to look.

The body of woman is like a flash of lightning…

There are arms around Julia, then, the strong arms of a man hauling her up and out of the angry, cheated sea, the man's voice shouting for help, the voices of other men and the slosh of salt-water breaking against their bodies and the hull of a boat painted yellow as sunflowers and canary birds. And before Julia Flammarion blacks out, she sees the boat's name printed boldly across its bow-Gulf Angel.

XIII. The Weaver's Retreat

The Glaistig, Queen of Immolations, stands with Kypre Alundshaw on the barbican overlooking the gates of Kearvan Weal. She led the alchemist here from the outer courtyards, despite the protests of her architects and engineers, who argued that the earthquakes might have weakened the tower. But it looked sound enough to her, and from the barbican she can see between and beyond the steep walls of Wailer's Gash and out onto the plains beyond. She has borrowed one of the astronomer's telescopes, and with it the Glaistig can clearly make out a cloud of ash-grey dust heading into the rising sun. Both the Nesmians' horses, though only one of the red witches would be returning to their far-away protectorate on the river Yärin.

"Have you found her, your Grace?" Alundshaw asks, and the Glaistig nods and passes the long brass telescope to him.

And then Kypre Alundshaw can see her, too, the dust-haze trail marking Pikabo Kenzia's progress across the barren hublands. He wishes that he knew one of the heathen prayers, so that he might offer it up for her safe return home. She left the Weal without the body of her companion, which has now been bound in a gravling's winding-sheet and will be buried in the catacombs below the keep.

"She kept her word, Alundshaw," the Glaistig says, the hot wind through the Gash rearranging her reddish-blonde hair and the folds of her long gown. "With luck, she'll reach the Dog's Bridge before nightfall."

The alchemist lowers the telescope and rubs at his eye. "With luck," he says, "the Weaver's army will have all gone before her and the path will be clear."

"Would that she might have at least accepted an escort," the Glaistig sighs, almost whispering now. "They've bought us precious time, Alundshaw."

The alchemist places the looking-glass to his eye again, and it only takes him a moment to find her this time. He watches and contemplates sacrifice and the time that has or hasn't been bought by the death of the woman named Ezcha.

And the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the alternating bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon lies coiled in its fiery abscess, long miles below Kearvan Weal. He's awake now, fully and truly awake for the first time in more than a hundred millennia, and he listens to the witch's horses, rough hoof beats against lava flats and the lonely roads of the blistered back country. He listens to the Weaver's forces somewhere out beyond the conflagration forever dividing the hublands from the rest of the world. Ten-thousand marching soldiers, twice that many cavalry, twenty-thousand horses, the wagons and battering rams and siege engines, and the Dragon is beginning to understand why, with victory within her grasp, the Weaver has chosen to flee.

As her Seraphim were banished by the magic of the red witches, he easily snagged the soul of one exorcised angel, mere moments before it winked out of this existence and into another-hooked it snug and screaming on a mountainous thumb claw. Now the Dragon lies in its bed of fire, considering this frail creature of light and hate, this simple device which has brought so much pain and suffering and fear, this deadly toy the Weaver has stitched together from memory and nightmare and her own insanity. It would be such a simple undertaking, the fabrication of an angel, the Dragon thinks…

The wheels turn.

And far out on the Serpent's Road, atop a barren hill, the Weaver licks her wounds. She keenly felt the moment when her Seraphim were ripped from the disc of the world and strewn across the cosmos. She felt it like a knife driven through her skull and can only begin to guess at the power that might have ever accomplished such an exile. Beneath the rising sun, her white hair hangs about her face, tinged pink-orange, and the gem set deeply into the flesh between her pale eyes glows a bitter crimson. The sulfurous mists shrouding the stays and towers of the Dog's Bridge are underlit by the wide sea of fire between this innermost wheel and the hublands, and the Weaver begins to doubt she'll ever lead another charge across the bridge.

And the Dragon picks her angel apart to see what makes it tick.

The Glaistig's hooves stamp restlessly against the flagstones, and the alchemist lowers the telescope.

"Now that they are no longer in the world, these angels," she asks him, "do you think she'll try again?"

Kypre Alundshaw considers the question, then considers his reply twice as long. "The Weaver," he says, "like her Seraphim, is an alien to our lands. We have undone one weapon, but we must begin to consider what other infernal beings she might spin. We cannot know her mind, any more than we can know the mind of the Dragon, your Grace."

For a moment they stand together atop the barbican, listening to the wind roaring through the Gash, through the mountains and around the jagged edges of the Weal, and then the Glaistig shivers, and the alchemist leads her back down to the courtyards.

And, blind to wars and the sacrifices that may end them, if only for a time, the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned…

XIV. The End of the Beginning

Dancy sits on one of the old marble headstones in the overgrown cemetery and watches the church burn down. She didn't start the fire; she isn't exactly sure what started the fire, but she knows that it's probably for the best. Fire will make the earth here pure again, her mother's ghost whispers from beneath a tangle of blackberry briars. Fire will burn out all the evil, and good green things will live here again.

Dancy keeps waiting for her mother's ghost to evaporate and the angel to show up and take her place. It usually happens that way, first her mother and then the angel. Sometimes, she actually prefers the angel. There's a loud crack, and Dancy looks up to see that the roof has collapsed completely. The sky is lit with a flurry of red-orange cinders as the last of the shadows, freed from the inferno, escape into the night. That's okay. She didn't come for them. Where they go and what they do, that's none of her concern. Someone might almost mistake them for smoke, streaming up and out of the flames. One passes directly over her head and vanishes into the thick wall of live oaks and magnolia behind the little cemetery. The shadow's screaming, so maybe it believes it could die in the fire. Maybe it's even afraid, Dancy thinks, and then she thinks about all the places a shadow can hide.

Those are the souls of bad people, Julia Flammarion assures her daughter. They were never baptized or they died without making confession, so they can never go to Heaven. Some of them were pagan Indians, and some of them were murderers and thieves and drug addicts.

Dancy glowers at the blackberry thicket where her mother's hiding, not so sure she believes that God would turn an Indian into one of those shadows just because it never got the chance to be baptized. That sounds even less fair than most things seem to her, but she knows there's no point arguing with her mother.

Dancy glances up at the eastern sky above the tops of the trees, and there's the faintest pink and purple hint of dawn. The heat from the fire is keeping the air around her warm, so at least she doesn't have to worry about the dew or the morning chill. Then she remembers her knife, that she hasn't even cleaned the blade the way the angel has told her she should always do. She looks down at the monster's dark blood already gone to a crust on the steel and frowns. She'll have to find a stream or a pond somewhere to wash it clean, as clean as it's ever going to get. She wipes it once against the leg of her jeans, but hardly any of Elandrion's blood comes off the carving knife.

"Is it over?" Dancy asks her mother. "Do you think that was the last one?"

I ain't the one you ought to be asking that question, her mother replies, then rustles about in the briars like a raccoon or a possum or something.

"Sometimes I think I'm crazy," Dancy says.

You fight those thoughts, her mother says, sounding angry now. That ain't nothing but the demons trying to slow you down, trying to confuse you and slow you down.

"Is that what she was?" Dancy asks her mother. "Elandrion. Was she a demon?"

There's a long silence from the ghost of Julia Flammarion, then, and Dancy sits on the headstone listening to the roar and crackle of the burning church, to the screams of fleeing shadows and the uncomfortable, rustling sounds the trees are making, as if the fire frightens them.

No, her mother says. You remember what I taught you about the Watchers, the Nephilim? And Dancy says that yes, she remembers, even though she really only half remembers.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them.

"So Elandrion, she was one of the Watchers? She was half angel?" Dancy asks and wipes the knife against her pants leg again with no better results than the first time.

They have many other names, her mother says, and then the blackberry thicket grows still and silent.

But the monster told Dancy that she should know better than to believe it had any name at all. She considers telling her mother that it said that, then decides she doesn't need to hear anything more just now about all the ways the evils of the world will try and de-ceive her.

She touches the tacky bloodstain on her jeans, the small smear the knife's left behind, and suddeny she's back inside the church and the fire hasn't started yet and the monster isn't dead. She's just buried her knife in its throat all the way up to the hilt, and it looks surprised, more surprised than hurt or scared or anything else. Blood that's black as molasses runs from between its sharp yellow teeth. She pulls the knife free, and the shadow things howl their disbelief as she raises her arm to plunge it in again, meaning to cut off the monster's head, just like her angel told her she ought to do.

But it's speaking again, strangling on its own blood, but she can make out the words clearly enough. And Dancy's hand hesitates, halfway down to the monster's windpipe.

"Now I see," it says. "Yeah, that's a damn good trick. That's an amazing fucking trick, hiding there in her skin, and I don't think she even knows-"

But then the knife comes down again, comes down so hard it goes in all the way to the monster's spine, and Elandrion closes its empty, boiled-egg eyes and doesn't try to say anything else at all. It's body shudders, and Dancy smells smoke, and then the shadows begin to scream-

She opens her eyes, disoriented and almost tumbling off the edge of the headstone, wondering how long it's been since she shut them, if its only been a moment or an hour. She glances back at the eastern sky, and it's not much brighter than the last time she looked, so it couldn't have been very long. There's an angry sound behind her, and she knows that it's the angel.

"I don't want to do this anymore," she tell it, as though what she wants might actually matter to it. "I've killed three of them now. Find someone else to chase down all the rest. I'm done for."

But she knows better, that there's a long road ahead of her, whether she's had enough or not, and she sits on the headstone and listens to the fire and the panicked cries of the shadow things. But mostly she's listening to what the angel's saying, how she's got to walk east, towards the scalding summer sun, and somewhere out there she'll find a gas station and a hand-painted sign that reads "Live Panther-Deadly Man Eater" in tall white letters. The angel tells her to kill everything and everyone she finds there, whether it looks like a monster or not.

And she nods her head, because she knows she'll never say no, and it doesn't matter how many monsters she has to kill. Because her mother's told her time and time again about seeing the gates of Hell and all the demons swimming beneath the sea that tried to make sure that she drowned herself. So she knows there are worse things, no matter how tired she might get.

She sits on the headstone for a few more minutes, until the angel is finished talking about the "live panther" sign and leaves her alone. Then Dancy stands up and slips the scabby knife into the waistband of her jeans. There will be somewhere nearby she can scrub it clean again. She picks up the heavy duffel bag and stares at the blazing ruins of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church just a little longer before she leaves the cemetery, careful to shut the squeaky wrought-iron gate behind her, and Dancy Flammarion follows sunrise down Dry Creek Road, just the way her angel said she should.