When there was no answer, her little face grew alarmed. “Cannisss!” she stage-whispered and waved for her sister to come, as she crawled into bed and hugged close against Ysabella.
In the front room, McGlazer came to stand close to Bernard. “You’re an atheist, right?”
“Well…yeah, sure.”
“I’m…not so sure myself anymore,” McGlazer confided.
“You mean, about God?”
“Lately…this job seems forced. Dishonest.”
Bernard nodded knowingly. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know exactly. It just didn’t feel true anymore, the prayers and scripture. It didn’t feel like any of it was…making its way to a god.”
“Yet here you are, saddled with the job of minister.”
“I can’t do this anymore, Bernard. And I know I’m going to disappoint a lot of people. As I have in the past.”
“This isn’t the same as alcoholism,” Bernard said. “And it’s not…a hat you lost somewhere, that you can find or replace.”
“Any advice?”
Bernard thought for a minute, nodding with empathy. “One thing I’ve learned from Stella. Regardless of what’s ‘true’ about spirituality, there’s a lot of power in ritual and ceremony. I think it has something to do with focus and the subconscious—but I know it works.”
“Where does that leave me and my sad little crisis of faith?”
Pondering, Bernard glanced toward the bedroom and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s not as big a problem as you think.”
At Emera’s insistence, the women, all except Jill, had gathered on and around the bed, all making contact with the crone, all holding hands.
Jill put her arms on the shoulders of DeShaun and Stuart. “That’s a whole lot of what you call ‘goddess power’ there, boys.”
“What about you?” Stuart asked.
“I’m on it.” Jill whisked away to the kitchenette and returned with a deep pot. She smiled at the boys as she sat cross-legged near the bed and put her percussionist skills to work, pounding a soft steady rhythm that summoned ethereal feelings.
“Maybe we should go try to find Ysabella’s friends,” Bernard said.
* * * *
Violina absently wondered what tune it was that played incessantly inside her skull while she was prepping the church basement.
Lush and insistent, orchestral yet soothing, Violina knew it would come to her if she stopped thinking about it. Her subconscious would continue to dig, as it did now for the sigil in the Polaroids she had purloined from the Cronus County evidence tombs.
She cast a new circle for her new purpose. Ceremonial candles lit, she switched off the electric light at the stairwell and crept back to the rear chamber in the dim flicker.
Using a brush with bristles made from the hair of a black horse, Violina dipped into the bowl and repainted the sigils that had been so recently blasted away. She had studied the police Polaroids and repeatedly drawn them on a notepad until she could flawlessly reproduce them from memory.
Not that she couldn’t wash away any mistakes and restart—but that was such a waste of blood.
Ideally, she would have had an assistant for all that she had to do next. But there hadn’t been time to bend Maisie to her will properly, and even if there had been, that would leave the problem of finding a blood source. Still, she would need someone to do the messier work that lay ahead.
Humming the mystery music to warm up her vocal cords, Violina took a moment to admire the dead girl lying crumpled on the floor, even to mourn her a bit. Left pale by the draining of her blood, Maisie reminded Violina of the fairy-tale naïf Snow White, who had also fallen to the wiles of a wicked witch.
Violina grinned at the Disney image. Women of absolutes: good or evil, with no gray area. If not for that, it might be easier to recruit so-called baneful witches, and then to change the world.
She considered the incessant earworm for a moment, and it hit her, drawing a fittingly wicked laugh—“Orinoco Flow,” by Enya.
She chased it away and began to chant something else from memory, a Latin rite of transmigration.
Hands upraised, she slowly spun left, calling out the incantation with purpose and echoing volume.
Counting seven revolutions, Violina stopped and faced the blood sigil, pleased to see an eldritch red glow cracking around the edges.
* * * *
The glow, which began at the edges of the sigil, quickly grew brighter until all detail was lost, leaving only an shimmering portal into the InBetween.
“I grant you, Conal O’Herlihy, earthly manifestation here! Now!” Violina made an insistent summoning gesture, her tone commanding and assured.
Soon a nebulous shape formed in the opening, growing in size and detail until cruel and wary eyes, set in hazy features, peered out on her. “What is this?”
“Pleased to meet you, Conal O’Herlihy. I’ve heard so much.”
“Do not trifle, fool.”
“Now, let’s not be like that,” Violina said. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
“First, the price.”
“That’s the beauty, dear Conal. The price is part of the benefit.”
The spirit began to fade away.
“You and your followers, back in this plane physically,” Violina explained. “And quite immortal.”
“Why would I wish to return to the limitations of the physical world?”
“No need to be coy, old boy,” Violina laughed. “You wander aimlessly in the emptiness, lamenting your failures here. You miss the solidity, the definiteness of the living world.”
Conal’s silence was encouraging.
“Flesh is more easily controlled,” she continued. “And more amusing.”
“I worked to preserve our bodies in the fungus. But they were destroyed.” Was O’Herlihy showing the regret of his failure?
“In this time, magic is no longer so well-suppressed. And I’m a more powerful witch than you can even imagine.”
Again, Conal was silent.
“You’ve been tied to those flimsy old mushroom bodies and this musty ruin for so long. Imagine being something stronger.”
“You do sing a siren song.”
“No crashing against the rocky shores, Conal. I will make you powerful and terrifying, and you’ll only grow stronger, feeding off your victims. You and all your poor, displaced followers.”
“And in these great and terrible bodies, we’ll be expected to serve you in
