Waking the Moon

save that this was Angelica and at last I would be hers. I felt myself tumbling forward, falling into her arms, into her open mouth, and suddenly my boot skidded across the floor. It was enough for me to lose my balance, enough for my hand to slip from hers so that Balthazar could drag me away.

“Close your eyes!” he shouted. “Don’t look at her, come this way—now!”

I shut my eyes and turned. Balthazar clutched me as we staggered through the darkness. From behind us came a sound that made my entire body shudder, a horrible freezing cry.

“Sweeney, nooo—”

Her voice cut off. I pulled away from Balthazar, shaded my eyes; but whatever had been there was gone. I was on the floor, Balthazar sprawled beside me. In front of the window, the oriental carpeting was bunched up in a blackened heap. I could smell the coppery hot stench of blood. Against the edge of the ruined carpet, a small twisted mass of wires smoldered.

“The orrery,” said Balthazar. He got to his feet and stumbled to the window. I stayed where I was, feeling as though I’d been beaten black-and-blue. My clothes were stiff with blood, my arms scored with raw red lines, as though someone had gone at me with a razor. I thought of the lunula’s glistening edge raised above Hasel, and felt sick.

“She destroyed it.” Balthazar nudged the smoking clump of wires with his foot. His tone was more awestruck than angry, but when I looked at him I was shocked to see his face wet with tears. He pulled his bloodstained sweater over his head and wrapped it around his hand. Then he bent over the charred ruin and picked it up, holding it at arm’s length.

“See what your friend has done,” he whispered. “As above, so below.”

All the shining globes had melted and congealed into a single corroded mass. At one side there was a crescent-shaped hole, like a gaping mouth.

“It is a warning—an unnecessary one—that She has the lunula now; without it She would never have dared attack me here. But it is not whole.”

His finger probed warily at the opening, and I shuddered, absurdly afraid that the smoking moon would bite him. “And that might be what saves us—perhaps, perhaps…”

He stepped to a corner of the window and opened a casement. Leaning out into the night he flung the ruined orrery in the direction of the river, far below. I held my breath, waiting to hear a faint splash or crash upon the rocks. Balthazar seemed to be listening, too; but there was nothing but the sound of wind tugging at the trees. He waited a moment, then with a grimace pitched his sweater out as well.

“There,” he said as to himself. He turned back into the room, wiping his hands on his trousers. When he saw me watching him he started, as though he had forgotten I was there.

I stood, my legs still weak. “Is it—is it over? Is she—is Angelica dead?”

“Dead?” Balthazar’s voice hardened. “Dead? She has never been more alive—not for centuries, not for over two thousand years—”

“We knew that She would return, and so we watched for Her—in all the old familiar places, as the song goes.” He laughed sharply, a fox’s bark. “But I did not drink She would be so bold as to come here. And so I have spent a lifetime waiting for Her—many lifetimes—and it all comes down to this—a meddling child’s foolishness—

“No, Katherine, Angelica isn’t dead. But she isn’t Angelica anymore, either.” His eyes were livid with fury and disdain. “Your friend has been chosen for a very important task, but the work demands some alterations—”

“What did you do to her?” I whispered. “You bastard, what did you do to Oliver and Angelica?”

“What did I do to them?” Balthazar’s face darkened. “What did I do?”

“Tell me!”

“I did nothing, you stupid girl! Angelica has been claimed—by She who has a dozen names in every tongue, by the one we call Othiym—

“For aeons She has been waiting—for the lunula to be found; for the right woman to be born; for the moment when Her talisman and Her chosen daughter would be brought together. And for all those aeons we too have watched, and waited, and searched. We have prepared, as well, in each generation making certain that there would be one young man who might be strong and beautiful enough to win Her, to seduce Her and so weaken Her—and for nothing! Because in the end we have been betrayed. Betrayed by Magda Kurtz, whom I loved as my own—”

He looked away from me. “—as my own daughter. Betrayed by the daughter of one of our most trusted members, and by Oliver’s weakness, and your own meddling in things you cannot possibly understand.”

His hand tightened into a fist as he snarled, “I might have had the lunula, Katherine. I would have had it, there in Garvey House, had you not pulled your friend Angelica from my hands. Just as you pulled me from Her hands a few minutes

The vulpine snarl cooled to an icy smile. He stepped delicately across the floor, once more composed and elegant, and glanced over his shoulder at me.

“Come here, Katherine.”

I stayed where I was, tensed and shaking. “No.”

He stopped and drew himself to his full height. If I had been standing beside him, he would have come barely to my chin. But his face was so ravaged, his eyes so brilliant, that I might have been staring into the terrible visage of some ancient sphinx, might have been looking upon the dark Goddess Herself.

“Come here.”

There was a threat to the words, but more than that, a command; a Power. Even as I willed myself to run, I found that I was walking toward Balthazar Warnick, until I stood beside him at the far end of the room.

“I know everything there is to know about you, Katherine Cassidy,” he said softly. “And that is very little: because to us you are a little thing. Do you understand that? A little, little thing—”

His white teeth glittered as he pinched together his thumb and forefinger to show how insignificant I was, how small and stupid and clumsy, but not useless, oh no! Not that—

“But somehow—” His face tilted to look up into mine, his eyes bleak. “Somehow you have come between those two Chosen Ones—”

The disdain in his voice melted, and while there was no warmth to his words they were no longer hateful. “—and somehow, somehow you saved me, when She would have devoured me.”

He turned to look at the ruined carpet beneath the window, the blackened place where the orrery had been consumed. “And I don’t understand it.” He gazed at me and I shifted uneasily.

“Me neither,” I said.

“I know.” Balthazar gave a low laugh. “That is why I am going to show you something. Something that might help you to—”

He walked away from me and gestured meaningfully. “—better understand us.”

He stopped. Set into the paneled wall was a door. A very old door, fashioned of pale wood and surmounted by an ornate lintel where a motto had been painted in now-faded letters.

OMNIA BONA BONIS

I stared at it in horror, remembering Magda Kurtz, the hellish landscape where she had been thrust by the same man who now held me captive.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Where—where does it go?”

From a pocket in his stained trousers he withdrew an old-fashioned skeleton key the length of my hand. He stared at it, his eyes slitted, then turned and slid it into the door.

“Go?” he echoed. A raging wind ripped the word from him, as before us the door swung open. “It goes where I will it to go—”