tell Sarah.”
That was the last thing I wanted. “No! I’m in no mood for all that fuss. Do not say a word—
“I don’t need to,” Azazel said. “You know Sarah can feel your need even before you do.” He came closer. “You’re weak, and you know it. You’d be worthless if we were attacked. I’m willing to respect your ridiculous wishes as long as they don’t hurt the community. Having you this weak puts us all in jeopardy.”
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of it. And he was right—after the last twenty-four hours, I was barely able to lift my head, much less fly.
“Not the full ceremony,” I grumbled.
“I will tell her to make it very short. Then you need to sleep. Though if the woman is in your rooms—”
“I can find a place,” I said sharply.
Azazel looked at me with the wise eyes of an old friend. “Are you certain Uriel wasn’t right? What do you know of her and the crimes she may have committed? Perhaps you risked everything and saved her for no reason. It would make things much simpler if I finished the job you started.”
“Keep your hands off her!” I said, suddenly furious. I took a deep breath. “She saved me. We keep her here until we decide what to do with her.”
Azazel stared at me for a long, annoying moment, then nodded. “As you have spoken,” he said formally. “Come with me to Sarah before you collapse.”
I didn’t want to move, any more than I wanted to admit that Azazel was right. I wanted to close my eyes and disappear. If I’d had the energy, I would have risen and soared away from everything. But right then I could barely summon up enough energy to walk. I needed to feed, and until I did I was useless.
Once I fed and recovered, I would know what to do with the unwanted woman, would find a place to leave her. Until then I had no choice but to obey Azazel, no matter how much it galled me.
WHEN I AWOKE THE ROOM was dark, and I lay perfectly still, clinging to the vain, eternal hope that this had all been a nightmare. I already knew I was shit out of luck, and I opened my eyes reluctantly, knowing this bizarro world was going to continue.
The women had been very kind. The man, Raziel, had carried me into this huge old house and then unceremoniously dumped me, disappearing before I realized what was going on. The women had gathered around me, making the kinds of soothing noises that always made me nervous, and they herded me up to some rooms where they fed me, bathed me, and cosseted me, deftly deflecting any of my questions, all under the capable direction of the woman named Sarah.
And an extraordinary woman she was. Over six feet tall, she was one of those ageless women who might be anywhere between forty and sixty, with the serene grace and lean, agile body that probably came from decades of yoga. The kind of woman who made me feel lumpy and inadequate. The practice of yoga always seemed to suggest a moral superiority rather than a physical conditioning, and I mentally promised myself that I’d drag out the yoga DVDs that were still shrink-wrapped, sitting on my bookshelves.
No, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going home. That was one thing I knew, amidst all the vast holes in my memory. There was no returning to my comfortable life in the Village. Just as well—I couldn’t really afford that apartment, but it had been so gorgeous that I’d gladly beggared myself for the chance to live there.
Well, maybe if I was going to stay, I’d have Sarah teach me yoga. If it made me look as good as she did at her age, it was clearly worth the effort.
Sarah had silver hair in one long, thick braid, wise blue eyes, and a rich, comforting voice, and when she’d eventually dismissed the other women, some half dozen between the ages of twenty and forty, she’d sat by my bed until I slept. My questions would be answered soon enough, Sarah had said.
For now I should rest.
Which I was quite happy to do. The night before had been endless, lying huddled against Raziel’s blazing body, trying to get comfortable with sticks and rocks and hard earth digging into my soft flesh. Maybe if I slept long enough, this nightmare would be over.
No such luck. When I awoke I was alone, and hungry again. I sat up, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. I was wearing soft clothes, a loose-fitting white dress of some sort, and I remembered the embarrassing battle I’d had with the Step-ford wives when they wanted to bathe me. A battle I’d lost.
I touched my hair, finding it freshly washed but still that disconcerting length. I hadn’t worn my hair that long since I’d attended that lousy high school outside of Hartford, after I’d been kicked out of my expensive boarding school. Not that that was my fault. It had been the one fundamentalist Christian boarding school in the entire liberal, anarchistic, blaspheming state of Connecticut. Clearly I was going to break out as soon as I could.
Always in trouble, my mother had said in disgust, praying over me loudly. I always got the feeling that she never prayed for me in private—that her loud exhortations were for my benefit and mine alone. I was a miserable daughter, she told me, always spitting in the face of society, always talking too much and pushing against the status quo. Was that what had got me here? And where the hell was
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling dizzy for a moment. There were shoes on the floor, and I slipped my feet into them, then winced, kicking them off again as I rubbed my heel. I had a blister there, left from those miserable shoes—
That was flat-out impossible. A blister healed in a few days, but it took months to grow my hair this long. Months that I couldn’t remember. Maybe I hadn’t lost huge blocks of time after all. The idea was reassuring, but it held its own kind of freakiness. None of this was making any sense, and I needed it to, quite desperately.
Sarah would tell me the truth if I asked. Unlike the man, she wouldn’t just brush off my questions, ignore my doubts. The warmth and truth of Sarah was palpable, soothing. I needed to find her.
I didn’t bother searching for a light beside the high bed; I didn’t bother with the shoes. The door was ajar, a sliver of light beckoning, and I started toward it, feeling only slightly uneasy. I’d seen those movies, read those books. Hell, written those books, where the stupid heroine in her virginal white goes wandering where she shouldn’t, and the homicidal maniac appears out of nowhere, complete with a butcher knife or an ax or a fish spike.
I shivered. People got murdered in their beds, too. Staying put wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
The outer room was empty. Hours ago this had been filled with women. Now it was abandoned, thank God, leaving me to my own devices, to find my own answers.
I looked down at my flowing white dress. Yup, virgin sacrifice stuff, all right. At least I was a far cry from a virgin—if they wanted to cut out my heart as an offering to the gods, the gods were going to be mighty pissed. Though in truth, that part
All the women had been similarly dressed, in some variant of flowing white clothes. They all had long hair, loose and natural, and they’d been warm, welcoming. Stepford wives. Had I been abducted into some kind of cult? Next thing I knew we’d be singing hymns and drinking Kool-Aid.
I shivered again. The women hadn’t looked like mind-sucked idiots. My imagination was running away with me, and no wonder. Somewhere along the way I’d fallen down the rabbit hole, and nothing made sense anymore.
The hallway was as deserted as the rooms, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be shepherded back to the bedroom with a bunch of platitudes. On the other, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, or whether Freddy Krueger was about to appear.
I looked around me. The interior of the house was interesting—it look like an old California lodge from long ago, with bronze art-deco sconces on the wall that made me think of Hollywood in the 1930s. There were overstuffed leather chairs and mission-style tables at various intervals down the long hall, with an ancient Persian runner in the center of the highly buffed floor, and a sudden horrifying suspicion came to me.
Things were bizarre enough already—if I’d somehow managed to travel through time, back eighty years to the early part of the last century, I would be extremely annoyed. That was the problem with time travel—no one ever asked if you’d be interested. Just a flash of lightning and you were gone.
I remembered a flash of lightning, on a New York street. The vision was swift and fleeting, and then I was back in this weird old house, looking for serial killers.
No, time travel was out of the question. I simply refused to consider the possibility. It was as absurd as some of the half-remembered fantasies that played in the back of my mind. Wings? A body with fire beneath the skin? A vampire?
I became aware of a sound, quiet, muffled, a soft chanting not unlike the voices I’d heard on the beach—the sound those men had made as they’d tried to drown my rescuer and I’d gone splashing into the surf like a complete idiot to save him. I listened carefully, trying to make out the words. It bore no resemblance to any language I’d ever heard, just a strange, almost melodic thread of noise.
Well, if they were getting ready for a virgin sacrifice, at least they weren’t planning to slice and dice me. Besides, there was something infinitely soothing about those voices, something that drew me toward them.
I began to move down the halls, silent on my bare feet, and at each juncture I took a turn unerringly. Me, who could never find my way through the haphazard streets of the Village no matter how long I’d lived there. I didn’t stop to question it—I just kept going. Maybe I’d been given superpowers, like a decent sense of direction. Anything was possible.
The sound never grew louder, never softened. I could hear it inside my head, feel it underneath my skin; and when I finally stopped outside an ornately carved set of double doors, I knew I’d found answers.
I paused. Something stopped me
