The Year of the Witching(97)
“Blood for blood.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The maiden will bear a daughter, they will call her Immanuelle, and she will redeem the flock with wrath and plague.
—FROM THE WRITINGS OF MIRIAM MOORE
IMMANUELLE CAUGHT THE gutting knife—one hand wrapped around its hilt, the other around the bare blade—stopping its descent just a split moment before it carved into her chest. With all the strength she had left to summon, she ripped it from the Prophet’s hands.
The congregation roared with horror. The guards sprang into action, flooding the aisles, their fingers curled over the triggers of their rifles, which were all trained on Immanuelle. There were simultaneous shouts for them to fire and stand down, but Immanuelle paid them no mind. She raised the gutting knife and slit the sleeve of her dress clean open. Then—in a series of five vicious cuts—she carved the reversal sigil into the bare flesh of her forearm.
Time fractured before her eyes. The pain of the cuts began to build, becoming almost more than she could bear. A series of violent spasms racked her, forcing her to her knees, and as she struggled and writhed in the throes of her agony, the altar began to shudder along with her—stones shifting, its corners crumbling.
Immanuelle tilted her head up, looked toward the cathedral windows, but to her horror the darkness remained unbroken. She searched the distant sky for signs of daybreak—a glimpse of sunshine, a ray of moonlight, the blue beginnings of early dawn—but the night was unchanged. The sigil hadn’t worked. She’d failed.
The cathedral gave a violent shudder. Rubble ricocheted down the steps and skittered into the aisles. The floorboards buckled and the windowpanes rattled in their casings. Overhead, the rafters shifted. Dust and debris rained down. The flock panicked. Screams rang through the cathedral and children shrieked for their mothers. A few men fled to the doors, but the rest cowered in their pews, doing what little they could to shield themselves and their families from the falling wreckage.
Immanuelle stared down at her bleeding arm, willing the power of the sigil to work, trying to call the plagues back to her. But to no avail. Bethel was lost.
The Prophet staggered backward, pale and slack-jawed, stumbling on his robes as he fled behind the altar. The walls began to shudder more violently, threatening to cave in, and a single word rang through Immanuelle’s mind: Slaughter.
As if on cue, the windows of the cathedral shattered, the panes blasting inward in a storm of glittering stained-glass shards. A river of darkness rushed into the sanctuary.
And with the night came the legion.
The first of the beasts flew into the cathedral, swarming its eaves as the flock screamed and cowered below. Fanged bats roosted in the rafters; a wake of vultures circled viciously above. Storms of droning locusts spilled in through the broken windows and ravens rushed through a crack in the roof, cawing and shrieking as they poured into the sanctuary.
The congregation descended into screams and chaos. Some charged toward the doors; others took shelter in the shadows beneath the pews, desperate to escape the horde swarming overhead. A few of the Prophet’s guardsmen raised their weapons, defending the flock with bullets and bolts. But their efforts were futile. The onslaught raged on.
The land-bound creatures followed the winged legion, rushing in through open doors and shattered windows. There were women helmed with the heads of hounds, spiders as large as lambs that scuttled beneath the pews. The legions of the dead—the blight-struck, the lost souls, the flame-mangled victims of purgings past—staggered down the aisles.
Upon their arrival, the true bedlam began. Mothers fled with their children; men rushed the broken windows and doors only to be barred by the teeming horde that circled the walls and forced the flock back to their pews with bared fangs and hooked claws.
Then the witches entered.
First came the Lovers, Mercy and Jael, walking hand in hand down the center aisle, the hellish throng parting to make way for them. Then Delilah, who scrabbled from a rift in the ground beneath them, emerging sludge slick and wild-eyed, the floorboards rotting beneath her feet as she stood.
The cathedral began to shake again, this time so violently Immanuelle feared the roof would collapse. She searched the shifting crowds, desperate to spot Vera or the Moores, but she couldn’t find them amidst the mayhem. The quaking continued. Grown men were thrown off their feet as pews toppled. The Crusader’s Sword fell from the wall behind the altar and shattered, mere inches from the spot where the Prophet cowered. Immanuelle tried to cling to the altar but couldn’t get a grip on the blood-slick stone, and she tumbled into the aisle below.
A boy stumbled over her. A woman crushed her hand underfoot. She was nearly trampled by an apostle fleeing a snarling wolf, when she felt a hand on her arm, dragging her backward to safety.
Ezra.
Immanuelle heard a deafening roar, and a rafter collapsed, crashing to the floor where she’d lain just moments prior. It crushed the hapless apostle and the wolf stalking him instead. The force of the beam’s fall sent Immanuelle and Ezra sprawling back in a cloud of debris. Ezra sprung to his feet in an instant, dragging her up by the elbow and into the safety of the altar’s shadow.
The cathedral stopped shaking, and the legion went still. Ezra drew Immanuelle closer, and the two of them watched in horror as the front doors of the cathedral swung slowly open.