The Year of the Witching(98)
From the shadows of the ever-night, Lilith appeared.
She stood alone on the threshold. Fog seeped through the cracks in her skull and rolled from the black of her eye sockets. Her antlers arched overhead, a bleached-bone diadem. There were screams as she stepped into the cathedral. Grown men cowered on their knees, pleading with the Father as the witch queen passed them by. Barefoot and open-armed, Lilith walked down the center aisle, picking her way through the throng of beasts and ghouls to the altar, where Immanuelle and Ezra sat, frozen. The other witches moved to flank her: the Lovers on her left, Delilah on her right.
Ezra shifted forward to shield Immanuelle, but she caught him by the shoulder, stopping him. “I have to do this on my own,” she said.
He didn’t back down. “Immanuelle—”
“Trust me. You promised you would.”
Ezra worked his jaw, Immanuelle’s hand still on his shoulder. Then he nodded, and she released him.
Immanuelle pushed herself off the floor and stood on weak knees, facing the witches in full. For a moment they all surveyed one another in silence. Then Lilith extended a hand.
Immanuelle understood her meaning at once: Join us, or die with them.
It was a simple offer, even a generous one. More kind than the fate her mother had met, certainly. Perhaps Immanuelle would be foolish not to take it. After all, the Prophet’s flock had been so quick to see her to her grave . . . Would it be so wrong to save herself and leave them to the same fate they would have damned her to?
Immanuelle’s gaze tracked across the pews, and she took in the faces of the people gathered there—Anna with Honor on her hip and Glory weeping, Abram and Martha, Vera standing resolute and unafraid, people from the Glades and the Holy Grounds and the Outskirts alike. Some of them were innocent, others complicit; still more were caught in the gray between right and wrong. Few were wholly blameless, and none were free of sin. But there wasn’t a single soul in that sanctuary she would condemn to the ruin that now lay before them.
Resigned to her fate, Immanuelle turned back to face the witches. “If this is the end, then I die with them.”
There was a shift in the air. The cathedral gave a little tremor and a cold breeze skimmed past the broken windows, stirring up clouds of dust. The darkness thickened, and the few torches that were still lit flickered weakly, doing little to disperse the night’s shadows.
Lilith didn’t lower her hand.
Instead, in a sweeping gesture, the witch turned to face the flock, surveying the masses with those dead black eyes, taking in the room. Her gaze passed over the Prophet cowering behind the altar, the wreckage and the rubble, the corpses that littered the cathedral aisles.
Then her gaze fell to the Moores. Her hand twisted into a grasping claw.
Anna loosed a little cry, clutching Honor with one hand and drawing Glory into her skirts. Martha threw an arm out to shield them as the witch stepped closer, tears rolling down her cheeks though her expression was stoic. But it was Abram who started forward, limping out into the center aisle to place himself between the witch queen and his family. He stood there, silent and defenseless, leaning hard on his cane. Then, on Lilith’s command, a large, bone-faced hound prowled from the ranks of the legion.
It happened so fast, Immanuelle didn’t have the chance to scream.
One moment, Abram was standing alone in the center aisle; the next, he was pinned to the floor, the beast’s jaws closing around the back of his neck with an ugly, gut-twisting snap.
A great roaring filled Immanuelle’s ears. Darkness crept in from the edges of her vision, until she saw nothing but Abram’s lifeless body sprawled out on the floor. All at once, she was back in the cabin, surrounded by walls carved with plagues and promises. She could see the shadow of her mother, working the curses, carving her fate line by line.
Something stirred deep inside her. The sigil carved into her arm began to burn, bleeding so profusely the blood sloughed off her fingers and formed a puddle on the floor at her feet. A great tremor rattled the cathedral. Immanuelle raised her bloody hands and, with a ragged cry, summoned the power of the plagues.
Delilah was the first to fall.
A red tear leaked from the corner of the witch’s right eye, then her left. Blood pooled in the hollows of her ears, droplets dangling from her lobes like little jewels. Delilah sputtered, coughed, then began to choke, retching up mouthfuls of thick black gore with each convulsion. She broke to her knees, twitched twice, then collapsed motionless to the floor.
Blood.
Immanuelle turned on Mercy next. The witch jerked to a halt in the growing puddle of Delilah’s blood, swayed a little on her feet, then dropped to her hands and knees, as if pushed by some invisible force. She tilted her head to stare up into the rafters, her back arching to a near spine-snapping angle. With a strangled cry, the witch hurled herself forward, and her brow cracked against the tiles with a sickening crunch that echoed through the cathedral. She raised her bleeding head, leaned back, and struck the floor again, and again, and again.
Blight.
Jael stepped forward next, and Immanuelle turned to face her. The witch stopped beside her lover, looking ready to strike. But before she had the chance, the power of the curse moved through Immanuelle again. With a pass of her hand, a tide of shadows washed across the cathedral floor, lashing around the witch’s ankles and clawing up her legs, her chest, her cheeks.
Jael managed a single scream before the writhing blackness devoured her.