Waking the Moon

Angelica’s face. So slowly that she scarcely seemed to move at all, she lowered herself to the ground, never taking her eyes from the bull’s; until she sat cross-legged at its feet, her head thrown back. Its dewlap hung above her upturned face. It shook its head, tail flicking at the air as though to drive away an insect. Slowly it raised its head, its huge eyes fixed upon the frozen stars, and lowed: a chilling desperate cry.

As it did, Angelica brought her hands to her throat and then snatched them upward, so quickly that all I saw was a flash of white. I gasped. In her hands she held the lunula, grasping it so that it formed a curved blade like a scythe. Without a word she lunged, slashing at the bull’s throat. She drew back and lunged again, and this time when the animal bellowed the sound was a screaming roar, so loud I covered my ears.

But I couldn’t look away. She struck at it again, and again, and it kept on roaring, its legs buckling as it sank and kicked out at Angelica, frantic with rage and pain. Once it nearly struck her but she pulled away just in time. It staggered toward her, moaning, its head lowered so that its horns formed a dull moon to her glittering crescent. All the while its blood poured from its throat in a dark torrent.

The bull stood weaving slightly as it stared at her, its black eyes no longer bright but shrouded with blood and grit. With a coughing roar it fell onto its side. Its flanks heaved as, with a last strangled bellow, it struggled to lift its head. Finally it was still.

In front of it Angelica was frozen in a half crouch. When it was clear that the animal was dead she stood, her arms held stiffly in front of her. Slowly she turned to face us.

She was all but unrecognizable. Her long hair was clotted with blood, her face and hands and breast covered with it, a black syrup I could smell even from here. A stench that I had never known before but which was somehow, impossibly, familiar. Bile and heat and shit, the faint green fragrance of crushed grass and spring rain. But also the cloying sweetness of spoiled meat, and that unmistakable musky odor that was Angelica, sandalwood and oranges and something else, the salt smells of sweat and the sea. I stared at her in horror, as terrified and repelled as when we had watched Magda Kurtz given to the hollow land. But Angelica only smiled, her teeth red- streaked, and raised the lunula above her head.

She held it by its slender spars, so that it formed a silver arc above her. As I watched it began to glow, until it was not just a piece of glowing metal but something else, something real, its edge still black with blood, but so dazzling, so pure that I couldn’t bear to look upon it; I tried to tear away my gaze but could not. Angelica’s lips were moving although I could hear nothing, only my own breathing and the faint desperate knocking of my heart. From the small curved opening in the pendant flames danced, higher and higher, until they wreathed the entire crescent, until Angelica herself was ablaze.

And then I saw what it was, saw what She was—

The Moon: the real Moon, not the dead stone that whirls blindly in Earth’s shadow but Hecate, Selene, Artemis: the pure and terrible One. She hung above us like a dream, like a doom waiting to fall and crush us—myself, Oliver, Hasel, Baby Joe—all of us frozen. All of us waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be destroyed.

But not me.

I started to run. Someone grabbed my arm—Hasel, though he held me without looking at me, his eyes still riveted on what was before us.

And then, what was before us spoke. “Come to me.”

It was only a whisper, but the night shivered with it, each dried blade of grass trembling as though a hot wind roared down from the sky.

“Come to me,” she said again, and every bone inside me strained toward her. But it was not to me she called.

As though he were walking through deep water, Hasel turned and stepped toward her. She opened her arms to him and he walked straight into them, heedless of the filth and gore that clung to her, the clots of blood thick and black as flies. Behind her the bull lay upon the earth like some fallen monument: black, its horns the color of bone.

She drew Hasel to her and he grabbed her furiously, moaning as her hands moved across his body. He was like a candle flame, small and pale, shining more brightly in the moment before it is extinguished. I could see the lunula, dangling from her right hand. Her fingers tightened and drew the bright crescent across his shoulder. Hasel cried out, his voice torn between longing and pain, and pulled away.

For an instant they stood apart. Hasel reached to touch his shirt, parted the slit-ted cloth and probed there. His eyes widened when he saw his fingers slick with blood.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey…”

Angelica cupped a hand beneath Hasel’s chin. Her lips parted as though to kiss him, but her free hand moved toward his breast, her fingers taut around a blade of light—

“No!”

Oliver darted between them, pushing Hasel aside. With a moan Hasel staggered away from Angelica, clutching his chest. The front of his shirt had been ripped from shoulder to hem, and where the cloth flapped open blood oozed from a long shallow gash across his sternum.

“Oh—God!—Sweet Jesus, I’m fucking bleeding—”

I moved to help him, but fell back as another voice rent the air.

“You said it was me!”

In front of Angelica, Oliver stood with hands clenched at his sides. His eyes were wide and maddened, his face contorted with rage.

“You wanted me!” he shouted. “You said it had to be me!”

Angelica stared at him, the lunula dangling loosely from her fingers. For the first time she seemed uneasy, and her gaze darted from Oliver to Hasel. Suddenly she nodded.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. Quickly she draped the lunula back around her neck, awkwardly brushed a matted strand of hair from her eyes. Before she could move, Oliver grabbed her, his hands stark white against her bloodied arms. For a moment I thought she would pull away from him, but he pushed her roughly to the ground. She did not cry out or try to flee. Instead she stared up at him, her mouth a hard line curving slowly into defiance and a sort of grim joy. Oliver stared down at her, his hands fumbling at his belt. His trousers slid down his legs. Like a clumsy schoolboy he fell onto her, pulling her beneath him as her arms closed around his back.

“No.”

I covered my eyes but still I could hear them, their bodies thrashing against the dead stalks and Angelica’s low moaning whimper, Oliver making a deep grunting ah! ah! ah! as though he were being struck over and over again. In a way it was more horrible than all that had gone before, if only because it was so banal and so joyless, like listening to some machine echo the most precious remembered words of a lover long dead. But there was also something maddening about it: truly maddening. I was seized by a dreadful terror that if I stayed there I would lose my mind, as Angelica and Oliver seemed to have lost theirs.

So I turned to run—and froze.

On the rise behind me stood Balthazar Warnick and Francis Connelly. They might have been two stones set there as sentinels to guard the scene below. In the cold starlight they looked grey and stern: Francis’s mouth curled in disgust, Professor Warnick grim-eyed as he gazed down upon Oliver and Angelica moving in the dust.

As I stared, other things began to appear in the darkness to either side of them. Shapes tall and thin and white as birch trees, and others huge as menhirs, with great upswept wings; and still others the forms of ordinary men and women, seeming frail as porcelain beside those monstrous shadows. From horizon to horizon they stretched in an unbroken line, demons and angels and human men and women. Though they were mostly men. Men old and young and middle-aged, men of every race imaginable, their faces drawn and silent as Balthazar Warnick’s.

I began to shiver uncontrollably. There was no mistaking who they were. They were the Benandanti: Those Who Do Well, The Good Walkers. The chosen ones who for millennia had watched over mankind, benevolent sentries but also jailers, who meted out punishment and torment and death with as much care as they preserved a way of life. As the Furies were known as the Eumenides, The Kindly Ones, so the Benandanti saw themselves as benevolent; but to me they were dreadful even in their stillness.

I turned to look back down upon Oliver and Angelica; and now it seemed that they were not a man and a