Piercing green eyes like sharpened jade, offset by those dark brows-her features contained even more than she knew. A whiff of that salvation and church scent came wafting by. She had taken her vows as a novitiate seriously at the time. 'Think what will happen on Oimelc when we make love, Lord Summoner.'
'You're not my type.'
'Yes, I am. What kind of errant arcana will run wild then, as I ride you at the Feast of Lights? Did you give all your passion to your familiar, or have you simply buried it?'
The djinn hadn't done as fine a job on the crypts of the mausoleum as they had the House of DeLancre.
Tombs of the Knights Templar were built in an early Norman shape called dos d'ane-the tops triangular with ridge mouldings exiting from an immense stone horned skull. The head at the top is the honored point of the tomb, leading down into the vaults. Jebediah trailed his fingers across the doorway, spelling out necromantic treaties and other symbols of resurrection. The horned skull had once been a sign of mankind honoring the natural order and his place in it before becoming bastardized into the image of Satan. It dipped and opened its mouth. The door shuddered and slid back.
Eidolons, wants, and terrors seethed within. I caught pieces of visions from the last sabbat. They were so strong that it was like being struck with shrapnel. Those forces raged and knocked me backward into the tree. I could sense the murdered members of my coven flowing around me.
Elijah's hatred was as strong now as ever before, although it felt as though Griffin had forgiven me. Bridgett tittered and her familiar Thummim grinned widely, as much lust streaming into the air as anything else. Because she hadn't been a member of the original coven she couldn't feel the power of our binding with the dead. That stink of the church drifted beneath the musk of her sex.
Jebediah grunted and struggled forward against the errant thoughts and hour of death emotions that still eddied about the tombs. Gawain, the most sensitive of us, clamped his hands over his deaf ears and dropped to his knees in the snow, mouth open in a silent groan as that serpent's tongue twisted fiercely. Perhaps he was hearing the shrieks and caterwauls from that night, or maybe something altogether different.
Self dropped from Bridgett's chest and folded around my throat, licking the drops of blood off my upper lip.
The nine murdered coveners whispered and hissed, sounding even more hideous than Arioch's voice of the endless damned.
Jebediah could barely contain his excitement, a nervous jitter in his step. 'Won't it be delightful to see them all again?'
'You're insane,' I said, and he burst out laughing.
We stood before the crypts of our brethren, feeling them in the air around us.
Rachel and Janus, both pregnant, she with their child and him stuffed with the yoke of Fuceas, demon earl in charge of thirty regions. Both of them lying at the feet of Danielle as she tried to carry them to safety, their bloated abdomens bursting.
The triplets Diana, Faun, and Abiathar, caring more for wine and women's roller derby than the teachings of the friars who'd raised them. At once they were geniuses at the craft but also hopelessly divided over their cause. The widening fissure between their conflicting beliefs cost them their lives as the three of them, drunk and brawling that last hour, hip-checked one another into oblivion.
Griffin, Keeper of the Salamanders, a firebug completely intoxicated by flame. He'd finally allowed his appetite to get the best of him and burned down a children's leukemia hospital before arriving late to the sabbat. He'd been the first to die, drooling flame, with my blade between his ribs. The fire had poured out of his chest while his dying angry gaze softened, both of us surrounded by the vengeful ghosts of children.
Elijah, who'd loved Danielle almost more than I had. He wanted me dead as much as he wished to face his namesake, the most holy of prophets.
And retarded giant Herod, the only real innocent, who'd known what would happen long before it did, but none of us had listened.
A slab had been set in the empty tenth vault with Danielle's name chiseled on it, as if Jebediah still wafted for a time when he could recover her from a grave full of my protective charms in Calvary. I didn't need anyone else to raise Danielle. I'd had my chances before and I knew it wasn't worth the price. Like my father, she would never be the same. Too much of her soul had fled, and I didn't dare discover what remained. It might be too much like her to resist. I'd stopped her own teenage sister from digging at her majik-steeped grave, bent on revenge.
Elijah's living hatred swelled in the darkness. Jebediah shoved at the slab and it creaked aside with a hollow roll that echoed throughout the tombs. He reached into the crypt and, like a careful lover, placed his hands gently against a shadow within and drew it into the light. It was a woman's body.
With his split tongue slipping out both sides of his mouth, Gawain made a sound of caution at the back of his throat.
Jebediah's beatific smile grew only mildly more sadistic as he spun to show me his hands, moving his fingers down the cream-colored angles of flesh inch by inch, pressing against golden hair and burrowing as though digging though graveyard dirt.
'What game is this?' I hissed.
At last, after another anxious moment, he revealed the face of my lost love, Danielle.
The edges of my vision turned black, then red, and I crumpled. 'Oh my Christ, you bastard.'
'I got her for you.'
Dani. All our nights together, the wash of the pond, and the shouts of our fathers. My life, my girl in her crypt now as beautiful as ever, somehow remaining as perfect as always. God, I never could have expected this. My broken charms lay strewn about her corpse like the petals of her prom corsage. Even with his new coven it must've taken him a thousand hours of fiddling with my safeguard spells to unearth her. But he'd been willing to do it.
'Aren't you pleased?'
My father skipped from foot to foot, clapping and chuckling as the bells on him rang. He kept going, 'Woo woo, woo woo.' He seemed to recall Danielle as he peered into the tomb, or perhaps he only remembered that part of his life before the paint, back when he lent me the car on Friday nights to take her to the movies. He'd died trying to save Dani as much as me. He'd been damned himself for nearly as many reasons as I'd been, and I wasn't sure which of us had proven to be the greater failure.
Now he had another role to play. Our ill-fated coven deserved a doomed mascot. Maybe he saw himself the way he was meant to be-dead in his coffin, at rest, a fool perhaps but not a harlequin. Gawain tried to calm him, both of them making gurgling noises.
Bridgett said, 'She's not that pretty.'
Jebediah stroked his sparse goatee, his eyes almost bleeding his obsessions without any discernment. Perhaps in heaven one sin really was just as bad as another. But not here, Jesus no.
Dry heaves backed me up to the other side of the crypts. That freezing slate felt white-hot against my neck. I staggered back to Dani, and though my hand trembled I managed to touch her arm. Her flesh was neither warm nor cold. I could barely keep from climbing up onto the slab with her. The ancient words were already on my tongue because I so desperately wanted to raise her now.
I croaked, 'Let her go. Let them all go.'
'That's not what you truly want.'
'Jebediah-'
'I didn't actually bring you back here, you know. You simply accepted your fate as it's entwined with mine. You have the enlightenment and knowledge to aid me in our quest.'
'What quest?' My father shambled along beside me, trying to stroke Dani's hair. 'You don't need me,' I said. 'You have a new coven.'
'Not quite. I've got my eye on a young necromancer who is quite powerful, but remains untested. You'll meet
