Waking the Moon

Angelica laughed at each pronouncement. I said nothing. The effort of trying to maintain my poise had given me a headache. And it seemed like a bad omen, to be skipping class on my first day at college. The heat blurred my vision. My velvet pants felt as though they’d been dipped in hot wax. In the nether distance, the soaring towers of the Shrine shone like glimpses of some watched-for shore. It all made me light-headed. Not giddy, but a cheerless dizziness, as though I had opened my front door at home and somehow found myself at the edge of some windswept chasm.

“Reardon Hall. Designed by Emmet Thorson, the pedophile—he hanged himself in the foyer after it was completed,” Oliver announced as we approached a small Palladian-style building. “Same architect as designed Rossetti—”

“What’s a Molyneux scholar?”

Oliver halted, teetering on the curb with one grimy wing tip toeing into the grass. He stared at me nonplussed.

“I mean, is it some secret thing?” I went on. “Like I’m not supposed to ask?”

Oliver and Angelica exchanged a look. After a moment Angelica said, “Well, yes, it is. It’s a—it’s something they test you for, before admitting you here.”

“But I never—I mean, they didn’t ask me. I don’t think. Is it like an advanced placement thing?”

Oliver pursed his lips. “You sacrifice some accuracy in describing it that way.”

I tried not to sound petulant. “So what’s the big deal? I mean, Warnick was talking about it in class. It can’t be that secret.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” Angelica said slowly. The warm wind stirred her tangle of curls. She brushed the hair from her face and turned, sighing, to stare at Reardon’s neoclassical facade. “Some of it’s hereditary, a legacy—I mean if your father went here or something. It’s more like—well, like Skull and Bones. Have you ever heard of that? At Yale?”

“Sure. If you’re a member and somebody asks you about it, you have to leave the room.”

“Right. It’s more that kind of secret—”

“But what do they test you for?”

Angelica smiled wryly and shrugged. A few yards away, students lolling on the steps of Reardon were starting to gather their books and knapsacks, extinguishing spent cigarettes or lighting new ones. “I have to go. You’re in Rossetti, aren’t you? I saw your name on a dorm list. I’m on the third floor. You want to meet for dinner?”

“I guess. But—”

“The reception’s at seven,” said Oliver. He ducked his head, making agreeable noises as three white-clad friars rushed past us. “If we get separated, we’ll all meet there.”

Angelica laughed—a surprisingly loud and heartfelt laugh, not at all what you expected from such a carefully assembled beauty. She shook her finger at me and said, “Well, Sweeney, let’s you and me not get separated. I’ll wait for you outside the dining hall—”

She turned and hurried off, head bowed so that all I could see was her flag of shining curls.

“Come on,” Oliver said. He was staring after Angelica with a hungry expression, but he sounded relieved. “The coffee’s pretty good at the Shrine cafeteria. Then we can hit Dumbarton Oaks.”

“Let me make sure I got my wallet—”

Oliver drew a wad of bills from his shirt pocket. “Don’t worry about it.”

He spun around, like Puck in a play, and added, “Don’t sweat this Molyneux thing. Nothing but legacies. Alumni stuff, old school tie, you know. Another Old Boy Network—they’re just Very Old Boys, that’s all. Come tonight and you can see for yourself, okay?”

His blue eyes were intensely earnest, almost pleading. I smiled gratefully and nodded.

“Sure,” I said, and flapped the front of my shirt to cool myself. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Oliver grinned, walking backward and gesturing wildly as he began once more to lecture me on the plight of the city’s Dutch elms. I was so busy watching him that I almost didn’t notice the two figures that stood watching us from the curb. A diminutive man in black and, behind him, an almost grotesquely tall figure in an ankle-length black monsignor’s cape, the hood pulled so close around its face that its features were lost to sight, except for the malevolent glitter of a pair of huge and watchful eyes.

CHAPTER 4 The Lunula

MAGDA FOUND THE LUNULA on her first dig—not her first archaeological foray, but the first one she supervised. Not coincidentally, it was the first excavation she had carried out without any direct regulation by the Benandanti. She was twenty-six years old at the time, in the postgrad program at UC Berkeley, heavily involved with her doctorate and the work that a few years later would become Daughters of the Setting Sun. She had gotten some funding through UC Berkeley, but most of it was to come from a wealthy patron named Michael Haring.

He was the CEO of an American automobile corporation: forty-two years old, Harvard-educated, never married. Magda met him at the Divine, at a reception in his honor. Michael Haring was one of the Benandanti, though his provenance was industry rather than the more rarefied realms of the university. Still, he had donated funds for several expeditions and financed the renovation of the reading room at Colum Library. He collected Neolithic art, concentrating on those tiny bronze figures of animals that were often found in Celtic graves and burial pits. He also collected young women, and was especially partial to the dark-haired Ivy League types who reminded him of his own youthful dreams of a career in classics.

“That’s him?” Magda was still young enough to be impressed by someone whose picture had appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “Michael Haring?”

The man next to her nodded. “Sure is. They put a little plaque in the reading room with his name on it. But hell, he could have rebuilt the whole building.”

“No kidding.” Magda moved away, thoughtfully sipping her Tanqueray and tonic.

For almost two years now she had been seeking financial support for an excavation in northern Estavia. She had received the promise of small grants from the Divine and UCLA, and even a tiny stipend from the National Science Foundation. But both her supporters at the Divine and those at UCLA’s Department of European Archaeology felt that her proposed work was not important enough, dealing as it did with a site associated with a minor European goddess cult.

“Why don’t you go with Harold Mosreich to Yaxchilan?” That had been Balthazar Warnick’s suggestion. “He thinks that one of the stel? there has a connection with the main pyramid at Chichen Itza. Plus he has that National Geographic film crew—you know, ‘Mayan Adventure!’ or something like that.”

Magda shook her head. “The Mayans are overdone. This is something new, Balthazar,” she said fervently. “We both know that. Why won’t you back me?”

Balthazar had been her advisor since her freshman year. Even then she’d wondered what someone like Balthazar Warnick—a world-renowned antiquities scholar, the man responsible for cataloging the Metropolitan Museum’s Widdecombe Collection of Cycladic Art—was doing teaching an introductory anthropology course, even at a place like the Divine. Especially at a place like the Divine.

She’d found out, of course, when he’d tapped her for the Benandanti. Since then she and Balthazar had butted heads more than once, most recently over her decision to leave the Divine for UC.

“Not the place for a scholar of your rank.” Balthazar never raised his voice, but his mouth had been tight as he rifled through a stack of photographs, the most recent mailing from the Chichen Itza site. “California! Jesus, Magda, you tilt this country on its side and everything loose rolls into California! There’s nothing out there but hopheads and surfers and rioting students. How are you going to get any work done?”

She’d gone anyway. She never told Balthazar that part of Berkeley’s appeal—part of the appeal of the