“You can beat this, dude!” Steve whispered.
“Hush, Steve,” Violina ordered.
The truck driver’s mouth obeyed, and Dennis took another unsteady step, despair replacing anger on his face. “Goddammit. I’m…sorry…”
Steve shook his head minutely, as tears streamed from his eyes.
Dennis closed his, as his body lunged behind his arm. Steve didn’t even have the pitiable release of a death cry.
For some reason, Violina allowed Dennis to make it for him.
* * * *
“That was not the kind of magic I expected,” Doris said, “though I’m not complaining.”
Kerwin had pulled down his collar and removed his hat. He even glanced at himself occasionally in the visor mirror, still unsure, but well on the other side of his immobilization. Every few minutes, he used his scarf to wipe his eyes.
“He once managed a rock band, you know,” Doris bragged. “Mister Personality—and I do believe he’s back!”
Kerwin looked almost panicked as he raised the larynx speaker. “I was a dick.”
Both women laughed at the strange abruptness of the statement as filtered through the prosthesis. Kerwin’s body rocked. He too realized the humor.
“Maybe you should fix that next,” asserted Brinke.
Kerwin looked needfully to Doris, as he had done for two years now, finding a spark of courage and inspiration to ignite his own. “I can try.”
Thunder, only an insinuation before now, sounded low, loud and close, an instant after the lightning.
It was red, just as it had been behind the thick cloud cover. But seeing these sharp, jagged bolts only a few dozen yards away was far more alarming.
* * * *
It only took about three minutes of watching the witches, piled around Ysabella’s bed and deep in whispering trance, for the males—McGlazer, Bernard, Stuart and DeShaun—to realize they were nonessential personnel.
“Perhaps we should drop by the party at the Community Center.”
Stuart and DeShaun perked up at McGlazer’s suggestion, then Stuart glanced forlornly at Candace.
“Maybe she’ll make it later, dude,” said DeShaun. “She won’t be mad at you for going without her.”
Stuart looked at his friend, inviting further encouragement.
“It’ll be us two Halloween hell-raisers one more time.” DeShaun extended a fist for Stuart to bump. “The life and death of the party.”
Stuart smiled and knuckled up. Both gestures carried a note of sadness.
“We need costumes,” Bernard said.
McGlazer looked at Bernard like he was a stranger. “Who possessed you?”
“Come on, I can be fun.”
McGlazer led the way to the door. “I suppose we can thank Candace and Emera for that.”
“Yeah.” Bernard smiled at his womenfolk.
“Keep an eye on her, boy,” Stuart told Bravo.
Chapter 22
(Stop Me) At The Edge
Dennis dragged Steve’s hitching, pulsing body out of the way, looking at the dying trucker with all the sorrow and regret his enslaved face muscles would allow, refusing to close his eyes.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Violina inspected the dripping blood sigil Dennis had just completed, dabbing a droplet with her pinkie.
Dennis stood a couple of feet away. Close enough to kill her—if only he could—and sobbed. He wanted a drink of Diamante’s more desperately than he had in nearly a year.
Violina took a roll of duct tape and a folded sheet of clear plastic from her bag. “Tape this over your beautiful work of art there.” She looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain.”
As Dennis performed the task, Violina drew the robe over her head and laid it across the nearest gravestone. She stepped to the center of her circle and raised her hands to the sky.
Still in control of his eyes, at least, Dennis could have looked at her shapely naked form but didn’t.
Violina spoke magic words, projecting her voice like a seasoned stage actor. Instantly, the wind whipped up, blowing the plastic cover of the sigil wildly, along with Dennis and Violina’s hair.
Violina slowly spun to the left, repeating the words.
Thunder rumbled. The lightning came in prolonged crescendos, diffused by the thick clouds that enveloped it.
Violina thrust her left hand toward the bloody symbol. Its edges began to brim with a sinister, scarlet glow.
Dennis closed his eyes and thought of McGlazer’s account of being possessed, how it felt and how he had fought it, to no avail.
Violina screamed the old words at the sky, then balled herself up in a kneeling fetal position, rocking and whispering.
“You’re a shitty interpretive dancer,” said Dennis.
Violina’s concentration did not waver. She lifted the wooden bowl in one hand, its phallic pestle in the other. “Conal O’Herlihy, I open for you and your followers a gateway to this world!”
She spat in the bowl and squatted to pour Steve’s blood in it from the goblet, then stirred in the powdered pumpkin seeds and mushroom. “Come as flesh. Come as death. Come as demon.”
She thrust the bowl toward the sky to meet the rain.
The lightning behind the clouds formed a sky-wide face of gleeful wickedness. Its rumble was a laugh of triumph.
“Come now!” Violina lifted the bowl again in her left hand, while extending her palm toward the sigil. “Come through me!”
On Bennington’s monument, the sigil’s glow flared, then shrunk to a million bright pinpoints that made Dennis’s eyes hurt. Intertwining streams of void-black and crimson-red lightning shot forth, entering Violina’s palm. The witch herself radiated pulses of blackness, her eyes like red spotlights.
The rain increased, pounding the grass and gravestones like falling glass. The wind blasted at an angle, driving the stinging droplets harder still.
The sky fired an identical stream of dark energy that hit Violina’s bowl. Some sinister circuit was completed. Violina screamed in pain, then laughed like mad, vibrating with the clash of opposing and complementary energies.
The surge ended, leaving Violina steaming from head to toe. The bowl’s contents burned with a white flame.
“Come now!” Violina spun fast, swinging the bowl like a discus to spread its flaming mixture into the air, just as a hurricane gust descended to spread it across the land like a malignant pollen.
Violina fell onto her back, and Dennis was glad to see that she hit her head. Yet the ground was
