The Angel Stone

CHAPTER TWELVE

Leon put out a CLOSED sign and reinforced the home-burner spell. He probably didn’t need to bother. Main Street, usually bustling on a Saturday late afternoon, was deserted. Fairwick residents were hurrying home as if afraid of being caught out after dark. Glancing at the lengthening shadows as I closed the blinds, I couldn’t blame them. When I turned away from the windows and saw the six people arranged in a circle of chairs around a single lit candle, which barely kept at bay the shadows in the corners of the room, I couldn’t help wondering if we would be able to stem that outer darkness.

Frank met my worried look and patted the chair next to him. “A bound circle exerts a powerful force, McFay,” he said with a level look. “Don’t underestimate it.”

“Why didn’t you bind your circle before?” I asked Moondance as I sat down between Frank and Jen. “Wouldn’t that have kept Ann Chase from betraying you?”

“A binding is not to be entered into lightly,” Moondance said. “Once we are connected to one another, anything that happens to any one of us will rebound on the others threefold. Ann always said she was reluctant to bind herself to us because we’d all suffer from her arthritis, but now I wonder if it wasn’t an excuse to betray us.” I heard the hurt in Moondance’s voice and remembered how she had watched out for Ann. The betrayal must have hit her especially hard.

“Do you really want to include me?” Phoenix asked. “When I absorbed Jen’s memories I also absorbed her witch’s power, but I’m still bipolar—or maybe even tripolar now.”

“I think Phoenix will prove to be an asset to us,” Adelaide said. “Her brain chemistry allows her to absorb the power of others remarkably well. And as for her mental instability—”

Jen cleared her throat to interrupt. “Who of us doesn’t have a little imbalance here or there?” she said, staring down Adelaide. “Anyway, the binding only lasts for one lunar cycle.”

“Just long enough to take us through Hallowmas,” Adelaide said, returning Jen’s stare with a conciliatory smile that surprised me more than anything else so far. “Are we ready?” Adelaide asked, looking around the circle. We each nodded. When her gaze fell on me, her eyes seemed to shine unnaturally bright. It was only when she looked away that I realized her eyes were filled with tears. Was she trying to find my mother’s face in mine? Was she sorry she had never performed this rite with her?

Feeling my own eyes fill with tears, I took Frank’s hand, which felt warm and strong, and then Jen’s. I was instantly struck by the difference in the energy Jen emitted. I’d shaken hands with her before and noticed she had a grip like a mula bandha lock, but now her touch was tentative, her energy wavering. The nephilim attack had depleted her life force dramatically. For a moment I felt my own life force weaken, but when Frank took Phoenix’s hand, completing the circle, I felt a satisfying click and a pleasant fizzing sensation, as if I’d just had a glass of champagne.

“That’s me,” Phoenix said. “I’ve been riding pretty high since the nephilim attack. To tell you the truth, I’ve never felt so useful in my entire life. You should also get the benefit of my immunity to nephilim incense. On the negative side, I’m probably due for a mood swing in a couple of days. They’re not as bad as they used to be, but I can still get a little cranky around that time of month.”

“Good to know,” Frank growled.

“I can’t say anything positive about my mood,” Moondance grumped.

“Someone’s been imbibing quite a bit of caffeine,” Adelaide remarked.

“Guilty,” Leon said cheerfully. “Perks of the job. I pretty much inhale the stuff, morning, noon, and night.”

“Great,” Frank said. “So we can look forward to sleep deprivation as well as PMS.”

I was beginning to see why witches were reluctant to bind themselves to a circle. I already felt as if I had six warring personalities besides my own inside my head. Talk about being bipolar; this felt like being sept-polar. I wondered suddenly what effect my energy had on the group.

“Ooh,” Jen cooed. “So that’s what an incubus does for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I objected, blood rising to my face. “I haven’t seen Bill or Liam in months.”

“Yes, but you’ve been dreaming of him, haven’t you?” Phoenix said. “I can feel—”

“Are we going to do this thing or not?” Frank snapped.

“My sentiments exactly,” Adelaide said. “Let’s get on with it. Moondance, would you do the honors?”

Moondance straightened up in her chair, closed her eyes, and began to chant.

“By all the power of goddesses three

this circle as one shall be.

Till Diana turn her face once round

Our wills together shall be bound.”

A pulse of energy surged around the circle. I felt it throbbing through my hands and saw a bright gold filament enclosing the group. All the individual sensations we’d been experiencing—fatigue, anger, lust, sorrow, hope—all merged into one steady thrum, containing all the disparate emotions and then overwhelming them into one single connection. We were not alone. The golden thread flared brighter, warring against the darkness rising outside the circle. For a moment, I saw the shadows in the corners of the room writhing away from that light, their shapes distorted into hideous monsters, and then the gold light sank into us and the shadows drained away.

Afterward, we laid our plans. We needed the village to celebrate Halloween. Moondance and Leon would rally the townspeople to resist the anti-Halloween fervor, while Frank, Soheila, and I would covertly urge on the students. Adelaide said that she, Jen, and Phoenix would perform a needfire rite—whatever that was. Everyone else seemed to know, and I was getting tired of being the one to ask all the questions. We would enlist the Stewarts and the vampires to patrol the woods on Halloween night to keep the nephilim from breaching our circle, which would form around the old door. I would be at the center of all those circles.

“The nephilim will exert all their power to stop you from opening the door,” Adelaide told me, her eyes fierce now instead of teary. “When you’ve opened the door and gotten to Ballydoon, you must find the angel stone as quickly as possible and return with it to destroy the nephilim. We’ll hold the circle as long as we can, but once it falls, the nephilim will destroy us.”

The only problem was that Nan had been unable to tell me where in Ballydoon I would find the angel stone.

It was dark by the time I walked home. Frank insisted on escorting me all the way up to my door.

“Duncan and his cronies will know what we’re up to,” he said, scanning my front porch. “He’ll do everything in his power to stop us. You’ll have to be especially careful. Reinforce the wards on your house, never let yourself be alone with him, don’t go out alone after dark—”

“Yes, Mom,” I replied.

“I’m serious, McFay. I’ve seen what those monsters can do …” His voice cracked.

I looked up, startled, and saw that his face was completely white. The one time I’d seen him like this was three months ago, when he saw the claw marks that Duncan Laird had left on my face. He’d recognized them as the marks of nephilim, but I’d never asked him where he’d seen the marks before.

“You encountered the nephilim before, didn’t you?” I asked.

Frank glanced away. In the glare of the porch light, his face suddenly looked old. I knew that, like many witches, Frank could have prolonged his life span with his magic, but I’d never really thought about how old he might be.

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was during the Second World War. I was assigned by IMP to work with the French underground. We suspected that there was an officer within the SS who wasn’t … human.” Frank made a harsh sound that it took me a few moments to identify as a laugh. “As if any of them were really human. The sad thing is, most of them were—technically, that is. Some of the worst monsters I’ve encountered have been. But we suspected that this one SS officer was some kind of demon. To find out, we placed an agent inside the SS, a woman called Nataliya.”

I’d never heard Frank’s voice so tender—in fact, I realized, I’d never heard Frank talk about any past relationships.

“She was from a small village in Romania, from an old family of gypsy witches, all of whom were sent to the camps by the Nazis. I shouldn’t have let her go, but she was determined to avenge them, and she was so powerful that I thought she would be okay. Two months into the assignment, she got word to me that she’d learned her officer’s secret. I was to meet her in the woods outside the castle where the officers were quartered. When I got there, I found her nearly dead. She’d been … tortured. She had the same claw marks on her face that you had, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Her mind had been savaged. I tried to use magic to save her. I connected myself to her to sustain her life, and I felt the agony she had experienced. It was as if her mind had been torn to shreds. The pain was so great, I recoiled … I let go of the contact and she died. I let her die.”

“Oh, Frank,” I said, touching his arm. “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“No, you don’t understand. I could have kept her alive, but the pain inside her was so great, she didn’t want to live, and I … I couldn’t bear to let her go on with that pain. The last thing she said to me was angel. I thought she was saying that I was an angel to let her die, but then when I tracked down the marks on her face I found that they were the marks of a nephilim. We couldn’t be sure. The SS officer disappeared. We thought the nephilim were extinct. But I never forgot what those marks looked like”—he turned to me, his eyes dark, bottomless pits—“or what the pain inside her felt like. Those monsters don’t just kill you. They make you wish you’d never been born.”

Frank’s words haunted me in the coming days as I searched through Wheelock’s Spellcraft, looking for a spell to become the hallow door. There were spells on opening doors and closing them, spells to ward your door, and even one to discourage Jehovah’s Witnesses from your door, but nothing on becoming a door. But the thing about Wheelock, I was discovering, was that it seemed to grow as you used it. Every time I clicked on a footnote or opened an appendix, the volume grew to accommodate the new material. As I searched, the book grew and grew, until it resembled a summer blockbuster paperback that had gotten waterlogged from being read at the beach.

In the meantime, the folklore club prepared for its first meeting, and my students clamored for a Halloween party. Did I really have the right to encourage my students to celebrate Halloween if it put them in danger? But short of telling them all to drop out and go home, I didn’t know how to remove them from harm’s way. Besides, along with showing up at my house with supplies of apple cider and cider donuts, they came prepared with a loophole in the administration’s no-party rule.

“As long as an event is for instructive purposes, it’s allowed,” Scott Wilder explained. With the keen mind of a young lawyer, he had combed through the dozens of emails, memos, and minutes issued by the dean’s office. “And Halloween teaches us all sorts of crap about folklore, right?”

“Er, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but, yes, its celebration appears in any number of ballads and folktales.”

“Like Tam Lin,” Nicky added. “That’s when the fairy host rides through the door to Faerie and when the Fairy Queen pays the tithe to hell with a human sacrifice,” she continued. “Hey, why don’t we do a reenactment of Tam Lin? That would totally make our Halloween celebration school-related. Ruby could play the Fairy Queen, and Scott could be Tam Lin.”

“Not if I have to wear a kilt! I went in drag last year and froze my ass off. I don’t know how girls wear dresses in the winter.”

“Leggings,” Nicky and Ruby said simultaneously.

“And Uggs,” Flonia added.

“You could wear woolen socks,” I suggested to Scott, “but I don’t think real Scotsmen wear anything underneath their kilts.”

“No way! They went commando? I’m totally up for it!”

The girls dissolved into giggles at that and I went to heat up some more apple cider, leaving them to flirt and plan their costumes. I liked having the house full of laughing young people. Maybe I should rent out rooms to students—or have monthly dinners. Suddenly I saw myself as a female Mr. Chips, growing old in the youthful company of my students. If I never found my demon lover, would I feel, as Mr. Chips had at the end, that I’d led a fulfilling life?

I found myself thinking such melancholic thoughts more as the autumn nights lengthened and filled with the sound of migrating geese and cold winds from the north. I huddled under warm quilts, longing for the warmth of William Duffy’s body in my dreams. He was there waiting for me every night now. As soon as I walked through the ruined door into the sun-dappled Greenwood, he would reach for me and pull me down to the mossy bed. His hands and lips moved over me as if memorizing my face, my body.

“Aye, lass,” he growled into my neck, “it’s you. I’d know you if I were blind and a hundred years went by. Dinna go this time; it’s so verra cold when you’re gone. Cold as the grave.”

It was cold when I woke up alone in bed. I’d try to go back to sleep, clinging to the dream, its warmth fading as fast as heat left a dying body. Even the sprigs of heather that I still found scattered in my sheets were now dried out. It was as if it had turned to winter where William was, and everything was dying there. I began to feel as hollow and dry as the dead cornstalks in the fields. I suppose it was natural to feel this way at this time of year, when the leaves on the trees changed and the grasses in the fields died and the sun itself seemed to be waning. That’s why primitive man had built bonfires and made offerings to their dead, to assert that the world wasn’t really dying.

But with the nephilim increasing in power around us, I wondered if such tokens meant anything. On campus, fluorescent-green flyers filled the bulletin boards and plastered walls with new regulations and warnings. BAN HALLOWEEN signs were springing up among the jack-o’-lanterns, black cats, and scary witches in town.

By the Friday before Halloween, I had decided that no matter how much I might need the observance of Halloween to open the hallow door, I couldn’t endanger my students. I decided to compel all of them to go home for the weekend. Looking through Wheelock the night before, I’d found half a dozen homesickness spells to do the trick. One awakened an unbearable craving for your mother’s cooking, and another increased your dirty laundry and made your clean socks disappear. Standing in front of my class, I saw that it would be easy. Although my students affected an attitude of independence and worldly cool, I knew that just below the surface they were still half children. All I’d have to do was remind them of that.

“I thought that today I would read you a story,” I said, taking out an illustrated children’s book.

There were a few snickers and rolled eyes, but when I perched on the edge of my desk and opened the book, holding it out so they could see the pictures, the students scooted their chairs closer into a circle and leaned forward.

I had stayed up all night, looking for the right narrative strategy to send them home. Finally, toward dawn, I realized it didn’t really matter what story I read. As long as I read a story my parents had read to me as a child, they would each hear the story their parents had read to them and they would want to go home. So I read the tattered copy of Tam Lin, with its beautiful watercolors of misty Scottish glens and the deep mysterious Greenwood, of beautiful Jennet Carter in her plaid cloak and the handsome prince she saves from the fox-faced Fairy Queen. At the end, I invested the lines with the compulsion of magic.

“And so Jennet and Tam Lin were married. Together they restored and renamed Carter Hall and they—and their children’s children’s children—lived there, in the home they made together, happily ever after.”

When I closed the book and looked up, I could see in each student’s eyes a fire burning—a home fire, a burning desire to be home.

“The last bus leaves at five,” I said, casually glancing down at my wristwatch. “Travel safely.”

They gathered their books and left in a rush. I saw Ruby talking to Flonia and guessed that Ruby was inviting Flonia to go home with her. Nicky was with them, and I hoped that she would go home with Ruby, too, far away from Fairwick. I doubted that even a homesickness spell would send Nicky running back to the moldering pile her mother and grandmother lived in. She would be safer in New Jersey with Ruby.

I closed my book and rushed upstairs to my office, where I swiveled my desk chair around to face the window that looked over the quad. I raised the sash and leaned my elbows on the sill to watch my students, their brightly hued jackets and sweaters like so many autumn leaves blown by the wind across the darkening campus.

Go home. I willed the spell to spread from student to student. Go home.

My words were picked up by a gust across the quad, spinning fallen leaves into red and gold cyclones to carry a few hundred Dorothys back home to Kansas. The wind I summoned smelled like hot cocoa and fresh-baked apple pie, like fires burning in hearths and the sweater your mother wore on cold mornings to fetch the newspaper. It soughed through the trees with the creak of your front door opening and the whisper of slippered feet coming to greet you. It chased the dark clouds out of the west, releasing a crack of sunlight on the horizon that lit up the tops of crimson trees and the brick walls of west-facing buildings with the golden glow of your mother’s face when she saw you.

What a surprise! She would say. I didn’t know you were coming home this weekend.

I was out of socks, you would say.

Or, The cafeteria food sucks.

Or, Everybody else was going home.

Everybody was going home. I could feel the spell spreading across campus, infecting everyone, even the instructors, with the desire to go home. And, like all magic, it rebounded on me thricefold, so that I, too, wanted to go home.

But where was home?

The empty house on Elm Street? My friend Annie’s house in Brooklyn, where I knew she and her partner, Maxine, would welcome me to their annual Halloween party? Or Faerie, where my demon lover maybe was or wasn’t waiting for me?

I sat at the window until the last light faded from the western sky and the air turned cold.

“Good move,” a voice said from behind me.