If I were a Church Elder in charge of an Ordnung and a part-time witch, where would I stash my stuff? My eyes roved the walls and fell upon the quilt once more.

  “Sonofabitch,” I said as I ripped it down, unfolded it across Abraham’s bed, and slashed the athame across it. There was a spark like I’d struck flint, and the faint burning smell of sulfur. I felt a dull shock go up my arm, and I knew then that I was onto something. I ripped shamelessly at the fabric until a large array of wards fell loose—golden tiger eyes, carnelian beads, moss agate, wolfsbane, all the good stuff—and with them, a few pages from what I had to assume was Abraham’s Book of Shadows—his witch’s bible, so to speak

  I looked over the glyphs on the yellowed pages; if I had any doubts that he was connected to Cernunnos, they were gone. I was a convinced man. The god’s little spiral symbols were everywhere on the pages, along with stylized drawings of the Horned God himself and different summoning spells that might be hundreds, or even thousands of years old. I even found angel wards—those little angel poppets that had caused me such a headache only a year or so ago.

  No wonder I couldn’t feel Abraham’s magick, if he was shielding himself this tightly using angel wards—the bastards wreaked hell on my system. He had two wards, little gingham angel poppets fashioned from cloth with eyes drawn on their wings. There was only one type of angel that I knew were like that—Ophanim, the angels that guarded the Throne. They had eyes all over their bodies, and when they looked on a sinner, it turned them to stone, or so the story went. And since we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that really wasn’t good news for anyone.

  “You really are a thug,” came an unexpected voice behind me.

  My hackles stood on end and I had an overwhelming desire to drop to my knees. When my gut tells me to do something, I listen to it. As I crashed to the floor, something sliced the air above me, right where my neck had been micro-seconds ago. It made a shining, crescent-like, whistling arc through the air, and my brain made a few calculations and decided it was likely a small harvesting sickle. I don’t know why that was important to know, but it was.

  I didn’t wait for Abraham to take another swing at me. I elbowed him in the gut as hard as I could and the bastard went down with a yelp of surprise, though he somehow managed to keep his hold on the sickle. I know because as he fell, the hook-like blade ripped the fabric of my coat and caught in my brand new wings. Ironically enough, they saved me from having my spine severed.

  My wings burst through the ripped back of my coat a little like stuffing from a slashed sofa, and Abraham screamed, a high and surprisingly girly sound, and reared back. I turned at the same time, pulling the Tanaka from the holster, and beheld his comically surprised expression. At the same time, my left wing grazed his face, the long guide feathers with their silvery white tips slicing his cheek open like the blade of a Samurai sword, and Abraham painted the white walls of his bedroom with his red blood. I hadn’t planned that, incidentally, but it did give me a measure of satisfaction as I fired blindly in his general direction.

  I never was what you would call a perfect shot, and my wings kind of put me off balance. At least that’s what I told myself when my shot went wild into the wall beside him. I immediately tried to retrain my aim on his chest, but he was too close, and faster than I’d anticipated. The sickle connected with the Tanaka and knocked it from my grip. I saw the gun skitter across the floor and into a corner, but good sense prevailed, and I decided not to dive for it and give him my back.

  His eyes were big and wild, his face darkened with rage. Disarming me had given him some serious balls. He threw himself forward with a shout and sliced at me with the sickle. I stumbled backward awkwardly, but not far enough. The blade caught me across the back of the hand and it was my turn to cry out as I fell backward against the bed, my wings shushing around me. My blood, a little darker and bluer than his, spilled across the floor and started burning into the floorboards where he walked every night.

  “Blood for blood,” I grunted and flipped a thin streak of my cursed blood in his direction. It slapped him across the face and immediately began to burn the witch. Even as Abraham screamed, I saw him reach for an ornate, cross-hilted Celtic athame he was keeping under his coat. I didn’t like other witches’ athames, as they had a tendency to hurt like hell, so made a blind dash for the door.

  Clutching his smoking cheek, Abraham turned and hurled the weapon at me like a circus performer. He was stronger than he looked, and more accurate than I’d expected—but then, I’d really been underestimating him, I decided. The blade caught me in the lower back and knocked me to the floor like a hammer blow. I groaned as I scrabbled up on my hands and knees with the athame rooted in my spine, and as Abraham’s magick flowered out from the cursed blade and into my flesh, my groan slowly escalated into a cry of nauseating agony forced through pain-gritted teeth.

  Abraham stood over me with the sickle in his fist, his face still burning. “You really are the Devil. But, Satan, I will get thee down!” He dropped to his knees, pinning me to the floor by pushing his knee into my back. He needn’t have bothered with the brute force; the athame was sucking all the power and feeling from my lower body, and within seconds, I hardly had enough strength to move, never mind fight him. All I could do was grunt like a victim as he seized my left wing and began sawing at the wingroot with the edge of the curved and fiercely well-maintained blade.

  I whined, jerked, and gagged at the shocking and seemingly never ending waves of agony that assaulted my body. He was a big man, powerful from working the fields all his life. His strength shocked and appalled me. “You dare violate my home, Devil? Well, then, you yourself shall be violated!”

  “You’re… violating… your own children!” I screamed back, and then my voice was cut off as Abraham snapped back the bone with a wet, crackling noise. With strength and determination, he ripped my left wing off in an inkblot-on-wall shower of dark blue blood.

  Darkness poured into the corners of my eyes and a part of me prayed for blessed oblivion, an escape from this torture before he started on the right wing. But praying, I soon discovered, was futile. And as Abraham hacked down into the second wingroot, the part of my brain still processing the pain and humiliation of this act tried unsuccessfully to shut down my body.

  Abraham, I had decided, wasn’t evil. Evil was simple and criminally easy to understand. Evil was all about chaos and disorder. Rather, he was one of those desperate, stupid men who were so very dangerous to themselves and others. Such men didn’t run on evil; they ran on self-righteousness, which was infinitely more destructive. Self-righteous men waged crusades and ripped cities to the ground. They burned heretics and made gods of themselves.

  “You…” I managed to get out, “you called Cernunnos. I know what you did. You called it… you killed Caleb… and Elsie…”

  He stopped, his work mostly done, my right wing hanging by a literal thread. “Wonnernaus, English. What business is it of yours? You had no right coming here, prodding into Swartzcopf business.”

  I shook my head as best I could. “You can’t call a god like that… without consequences.”

  “The god does my bidding. I control the god!” Enraged, he ripped my remaining wing away so I screamed and my vision swam with glowing streaks of redness. “We were dying out before the god! The Swartzcopf way was dying! I fixed that! I brought our people back from the brink of extinction!”

  “You killed Caleb!”

  “Caleb was dead to us already! I tried to make Elsie understand that, but the old woman was as unmovable as a mule! Our people will be strong again! Our people…!”

  “Those aren’t people, you stupid man!” I cried. “What you are making aren’t men! Cernunnos will use them to take the world. He’ll destroy it…”

  “What do I care about the English world with its murderers and fornicators?” he said, grabbing the hilt of the athame in his hand, no doubt with an intention of ripping me wide open. “I care only about the colony!”

  “There won’t be a colony, Abraham!”

  “I control the god! The god does my bidding!”

  Christ, was he really this stupid? Pain and rage animated me, and like that first time, with Cernunnos, I felt a dull whooshing noise and suddenly Abraham was blown back against his own blood-splattered wall. I was fortunate in that the act also pulled the cursed knife from my back.

  Suddenly I could breathe, move, again. I tried to scramble to my feet, but my injuries and the blood loss were too much, and I wound up crawling out the door. I had to get out of here, had to warn Vivian that they were onto us. It had become my sole reason for living…

  Abraham appeared several seconds later. I assume he must have used the water in the pitcher to put himself out, or some form of dark magick, because he was still smoking even as he stalked me down the hallway. And when I dared glance over my shoulder, I saw he was clutching the big cross from off the wall in his steaming, bloodied hands. The sight of the cross struck me with an almost debilitating, heart-pounding fear like a bad, B-movie vampire. Whatever else Abraham had become, he was still a believer in God, and that gave him the advantage over me.

  His voice rang out: “Most glorious God, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Come to the assistance of men whom God has created to His likeness and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the Devil…”

  I clawed desperately at the hardwood as Abraham’s exorcism prayer began to sink its terrible, preternatural claws into me. Each word was like a small, ten-penny nail being pounded into my flesh, slowing my progress and making me grunt under the relentless spikes of pain. I felt each word go into me like a hammer blow. Each word pinned me to the earth a little bit more. I was only three or four feet from the stairs. I knew if I could make it, I could throw myself down them. Then, maybe, I’d have a chance in hell of escaping. Probably not, but it was the best I could do, and in the end, I just needed to get away from that damned cross, that holy man and those prayers.

  “The Holy Church venerates thee as her guardian and protector; to thee, the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of Peace to crush Satan beneath our feet…”

  I gasped as something that felt like invisible cat claws raked down my back. The pain animated my whole body, worse than having my wings cut off, worse than anything I’d ever felt, making me flail like a fish out of water. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t think. My fingernails gouged the hardwood under my chin in my mad panic to escape. I knew those spiritual claws weren’t real, not in the physical sense, anyway, that it was just the prayer, the exorcism, but that realization didn’t make it any less painful.

  “…that he may no longer retain men captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us; take hold of the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan…”

  I was two feet away, but I could feel my limbs turning to lead, the pain suffocating me. I could feel the prayer pinning me to the floor the way it was meant to. I trembled and scratched in blind defiance, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “… bind him and cast him into the bottomless pit so that he may no longer seduce the nations.” Standing over me, Abraham said in a hoarse, resonating voice, the voice of a man used to being heard in big, wide-open places, “Daemon, return thee to hell!” He laid the big cross between my shoulder blades.

  He might as well have dropped a cartoon anvil on me. I screamed, and then darkness slowly overtook me at last.

  They say sound is the last to go. I heard my cell phone going off, probably Vivian to tell me she’d been overrun by the Swartzcopf men, but I was in a place of pain and suffering where I no longer had any power to do much of anything.

  It wasn’t like in the movies. I didn’t pass out cleanly and stay out for hours. That might have been nice.

  Instead, I came to several times. Each time I did, I could hear voices—men talking over my prone body, discussing what to do with me. One of the voices was Abraham’s, and he was directing the other men in his colony to take my cell phone, tie my hands, and take me to the town center. There, he said, they would sacrifice me to Cernunnos, and deliver Vivian unto him as his bride. Several of the Swartzcopf reached down to haul me up by my bound hands, big, powerful, work-hardened men who had no trouble dragging me away, and I’m not exactly a flyweight.

  The cross was gone, but the shifting, quivering pain, and weakness in my body remained, making made me black out again. Shortly thereafter, I was aware of them carrying me down the stairs and through the front door. I even grunted as they dropped me on my belly in the back of a flatbed wagon as if I were a big bag of flour. When the horses started up and the wagon began to lurch, taking me toward the town center, the pain was redoubled and I passed out again. Eventually, though, someone threw a bucket of very cold well water over me, and that brought me around once and for all.

  I sat up too quickly, my head throbbing. We were parked in the town center, and the whole landscape spun crazily for a moment, making me sick to my stomach even as cold droplets of water rolled off my face and into my collar.

  “Welcome back, Daemon,” Abraham said in what I felt was an annoyingly gloating voice. He stood beside the wagon while one of his men carefully bandaged his burned hands. The right side of his face was still gashed open, and much of his beard had been burned away by my fire, but he didn’t seem to notice that. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

  I shifted around with my hands tied uncomfortably behind my back and tossed my cookies in response, which made Abraham and his men step back a little. But I didn’t have much in my stomach—Coke and Snickers, mostly—so it was a little anticlimactic. I tried to sit up so I wasn’t kneeling in my own vomit, but my body was having none of that at the moment. I hurt all over, and I felt about as weak as a kitten.

  “Abraham,” I gasped out in a last-ditch effort to talk the man down, “think about what you’re doing. Think about the harm…”

  “You don’t think I have considered every solution?” He spread his bandaged hands like he was going to bestow a benediction over the whole proceedings. “This is the only way to maintain our way of life. But that’s something you and your English world fail to understand…”

  “Murdering people?” I said, eyeing him savagely. “Letting your daughters be impregnated by that thing…?” I was prepared to rant some more, but I spotted another wagon pulling up, bearing a heavy load of Swartzcopf men—colony elders, I think, John Knapp among them. Sitting in the back of the wagon and bouncing around the flatbed was Vivian, hunched over, her arms tied behind her back the way mine were.

  They pulled up alongside our wagon. “Viv, you okay?” I asked her.

  There were streaks of dirt on her face, her hair was snarled, and gravel was sticking to her cheeks. Several of the men sitting with her had deep red scratch marks down their faces. I imagined the catfight she’d put up before the men had overwhelmed her and it made me proud.

  “Y-yeah,” she said uncertainly as the men manhandled her into the flatbed beside me and she struggled to find a comfortable position that wouldn’t aggravate her bound arms. “I’m okay, Nick. They threw me around a little, but I’m a tough bitch. I’ve had worse done to me.” She lifted her chin bravely and I saw the angry, determined flare of her eyes through the mask of dirt and dust on her face. But when she looked me over, some of her courage flagged. “How about you? Jesus, what did they do to you?”

  “I’ll survive,” I told her and coughed up a glob of blood, which didn’t help my case much.

  “What the hell happened to your wings?”

  Before I could answer her, Abraham interrupted. He was carrying the cross again, which he lifted before him like a defiant Joan of Arc about to meet an army of enemies head on. The sight of it kept me down on my knees, my eyes averted, but Vivian screamed like Abraham had scalded her with boiling oil. “We have decided that John should dispatch you, Devil, and deliver your concubine to the god as his wife. You’re to be taken into Mulberry Grove, to the altar of the Horned God, and slain.”

  He transferred the cross into the hands of one of the other elders, a short, portly man named Eli, if I wasn’t mistaken. Eli settled on a crate near the head of the flatbed, the cross in both hands, and gave us a dire look that suggested we better not give him any trouble.

  I looked over at Abraham. “Can’t do it yourself, witch? You need a god to repopulate your people and minions to do your killing for you? Isn’t there anything you can do for yourself?”

  Abraham narrowed his eyes as he rubbed at his bandaged hands. “I thought you might appreciate spending the last few moments of your accursed life with your mate. Be happy I’m giving you that, Devil,” he said and spat on me. As his phlegm raced down my face, I glanced beyond him and saw John standing near the horses. I expected the same look of crazed obedience on his face as Eli, but he surprised me by discreetly winking.

  I looked back at Abraham and said, “Fine. We’ll do it your way, witch.”

  Vivian and I leaned against each other for support as we bumped along the rocky ground between the trees of the grove on the way to the altar. John Knapp drove the horses and Eli sat over us in the flatbed, wielding the cross like he was carrying a sword. Abraham and his supporters had stayed on the edge of the grove, cowards that they were, but I could hear their collective prayers going up. Their voices were faint, but their faith strong enough to keep the two of us weak and bundled down together. The cross and prayers hurt, despite the fact that my physical injuries had all but healed themselves at this point.

 

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