Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 16

Katherine stared at him, sure that it must be a joke or that she had misunderstood. “The cult?” she asked, finally.

“The family,” he corrected. “We are a family in Satan.”

“It can't be!”

“But it is.”

“Michael, you're too sensible to—”

He frowned. “What makes you think that Satanists are not sensible? Do you believe that Christianity holds the only true answers and that the rest of us are madmen? Well, it isn't so, not at all. There, are alternate paths through this life, and we have simply chosen one of them in preference to the road most traveled by.”

She did not know whether he realized he was distorting a poem by Robert Frost, but the irony of the similarity of thought was almost funny. Almost.

“Let's begin,” Michael said.

The others moved toward the center of the circle and began to clear away some of the snow. Still others carried in dry wood which they must have brought along with them, and they began to prepare material for a bonfire.

“Then Alex isn't anything you said he was.”

“Not a Satanist, no.”

“You lured me out of Owlsden on the pretext of—”

“Don't be indignant, Katherine,” he said, smiling benignly on her. “You'll thank me later tonight, when you've been taken into the family.”

“I don't want to be in your crazy family,” Katherine said, taking a step toward him, hoping to plead a case he would listen to.

“Not now, of course. But later.”

“Never.”

“When you've seen Him, when you've understood Him, you will thank me, Katherine.”

She ignored his rantings and said, “I fail to see how you can force me to become a member of the family against my will. When the ceremony is over, what's to keep me from leaving here and going straight into Roxburgh, to the authorities?”

“You won't.”

“Will you — kill me? Like you killed Yuri?”

“Of course not! Yuri got in the way when he wasn't supposed to be. You're different. We want you. And once you've danced with Him, you'll be happy to belong to the family, to be constantly possessed by Him and to face the future as His.”

“I don't believe I'll feel that way at all.”

“Just wait.”

She saw, in Michael's eyes, the flame of the fanatic which cool reason could never hope to quench. Why hadn't she seen that same flame before? Why had she only seen love, affection, understanding and good humor in those incredibly blue eyes? Had he been a tremendously good actor or — and she felt this was more likely — had she been too blind to see anything but what she wanted to see?

As hard as it was to face, that last must be true, for she had not only misjudged Michael Harrison. She had misjudged his friends. And she had apparently misjudged Alex and his friends also. And, finally, she had misjudged Yuri, poor Yuri. She had been so certain that he had been playing a role that she had easily overlooked the real man. He was a college graduate who still believed in ghosts and demons and vampires. That had seemed like such an odd combination that it had to be false, and instead of trying to understand why he should be a man of such conflicting facets, she had discarded the notion that he might really be what he appeared to be.

How could she have been so wrong, so often? In the back of her mind, a tiny grain of an idea began to form, so small she could not make much of it. But she knew that, if she survived this night, she would see that idea flower and would come to understand herself better than she ever had before.

“Already,” Michael said, “you seem softened to the idea.”

“No.”

He looked beyond her, at the members of the family who were making the arrangements. As he did so and his eyes seemed to glaze for a moment in a curious look of mindless anticipation, Katherine steeled herself to break through any interference she might receive, and she ran past him toward the edge of the forest and the open expanse of the ski run which she knew lay just beyond.

She got a dozen steps before someone shouted.

She kept running, pumping her legs up and down, came out of the trees and plowed into the thick blanket of snow on the run, bulled her way ahead despite the resistance she received. Fear drove her, and that might give her an edge over the rest of them.

Hands grasped desperately for her, snagged at her clothes but were torn loose as she ran even faster, sending up a thick, white spray of snow in her wake.

“Damn you!” someone hissed close by her right hand.

She looked over as she ran, and she saw Kerry Markwood keeping pace with her, his face strained tight, lips skinned back over a set of white, even teeth.

When she looked to the left, she saw another young man on that side. He was tall and muscular, easily over six feet and over two hundred pounds, and he did not seem to mind the chase at all. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying it, because he nodded his head and smiled at her as he put on a burst of speed and pulled ahead of her.

Suddenly, the ground turned up, rolled above her, slammed down hard upon her face, placing the sky at her back like a heavy bowl of water.

She shook her head, blew snow from her nostrils and got her hands under herself, palms flat on the snow. She sucked in a deep breath and pushed herself up.

Kerry Markwood and the muscular boy took hold of her, one on either arm, and they would not be shaken loose.

“Damn you,” Markwood said, though not as furiously as he had when he was giving chase.

“Easy girl, easy,” the muscular boy said. His fingers dug into her arm nice spikes into soft wood.

They lead her back to Michael who stood at the edge of the woods, his hands limp at his sides.

“Almost,” she said.

She felt better for having tried something, anything, even though it had not worked.

“Where did you hope to get to?” he asked.

“Anywhere else,” she said.

“Back to Alex?”

“It would be better with him than with you,” she said.

“That's a lie!” he snapped, his face suffusing with blood in the white glow of the flashlight. In his voice, she heard a more obsessive hatred than she had ever heard from Alex Boland. He said, “I told you we wouldn't hurt you.” His voice was so cold and brittle that it frightened Katherine.

She did not respond.

Michael raised his hand and, in one utterly vicious sweep that was too fast for her to avoid, he slapped her across the face.

Her head jerked back. Her mouth sagged open as a flash of white and yellow pain exploded across her forehead. That was the first time she had ever realized that pain had a color. She wondered if there were different colors for different kinds of pain.

The hand came around again and struck her more gently than it had the first time. At least, it seemed to strike with less force, though that might only have been because she was too numb to properly interpret its impact.

However hard it had been, it was quite hard enough, for it knocked her down as if her knees were jelly. The two boys let go of her arms.

“Sisters!” Michael called to some of the women in the cult. “Come fetch your future relative.”

She tried to get up again.

She couldn't manage it.

Darkness fell around her like the great, black wings of a bird, and she did not know anything else that happened for a while…