“That could be why Rafe’s now bent on using Graham Edwards’s children—with or without his cooperation. He’s going back to the original ritual.”
“We have to find them. We have to—” Nora made herself slow down. She took another deep breath and pressed her fingers together again, testing the shadow walls she’d ringed around Damastes. He lay like a cold stone inside her, quiet for now, but waiting for another chance, another slip.… But for now, she had him. “Let’s watch the video again. No sound this time. I know there’s something there that O’Hagan wanted me to see.” She couldn’t think of him as her father—or even as “Uncle Theo”—and she wasn’t sure what she ought to feel aside from horrified and angry. But she could work with that.
*
The girl struggles at first as they lead her into the room—the details are lost in shadow but for a pillar here, a bit of wall there, as a small fire and a scattering of fat candles in iron candelabra flicker as if floating in darkness. Only an incomplete ring of candles around the altar creates a well-defined aura of illumination. The view swivels to follow the progress of the chanting people who accompany two women in white to the altar dais—and the girl. The camera dwells on her, like an unclean gaze.
With each step, the girl seems to grow weaker, sleepier perhaps. Or hopeless. Her expression moves from fear to submission to emptiness, until the small procession stops beside the candles that illuminate the altar. The older woman—Charlotte—steps into the circle through the gap in the candles. The younger of the two women in white—Nora’s mother, Stella—removes the girl’s thin robe from her shoulders to reveal the lines of blood already decorating her body. Facing the other woman, Stella speaks.
“I give my daughter, Nora, flesh of my flesh, to the service of our great master. For the glorification of Damastes, was she born. For the embodiment of the god, I give her of my own free will, asking nothing for myself.”
“Your sacrifice is acceptable. For your gift, you shall be the favored of Damastes,” Charlotte replies.
Stella bows her head with a solemn smile. Young Nora shivers and makes a frightened small sound, but gives only token resistance as her mother steps into the circle and pulls her along. Nora stumbles as she crosses the line.
Charlotte closes the circle by lighting the final candle, and the light within makes the darkness without deeper, as if the blackness oozes directly from hell. The other members of the procession spread around the altar, still muttering their strange chant. As they pass the camera, a moment’s light illuminates each face—the faces of those who will die in a warehouse years hence, and of the few who will escape. Each expression ecstatic but one: Matt O’Hagan’s, which is pale and cast down. Then he passes into the gloom, just one of the dim shapes that ring the bright altar.
The girl is pushed up onto the altar and made to lie supine. Now she gives no resistance, her eyes dim, unfocused, her body pliant and still while the high priestess and her acolyte draw the last of the incantations and sigils on her flesh in gleaming black powder. The girl seems asleep.…
The chanting rises as Charlotte anoints the knife and hands it to Stella, rises again as the high priestess brings forth a shining object: golden wings surmounting an endless circle filled with a spinning darkness that both draws and repels the eye. Stare too long and the darkness stares back. The shining thing is laid on the girl’s forehead while Charlotte speaks words that quiver on the air and make the shadows squirm like a maggot-rich corpse.
The girl’s eyes flash open, pupils wide and black from side to side.
Charlotte accepts the knife, given by Stella and blooded on her hand. The flames bow down. Charlotte touched the bloodstained blade’s tip to the girl’s forehead—
The girl seizes, bowing upward.
The outer shadows stir and shiver, a single voice threading out of tune through the chanting of the assembled cultists. Matt O’Hagan struggles forward.
“No! You can’t—Stella, no!”
The chanting goes on, never breaking, even as the nearest pair of worshippers turn to grab the man as if they would rend him apart. Their eyes shine in the dark.
Matt struggles violently, lashes out, kicks, and falls, then rises again on the sound of bones breaking, and the chanting finally falters.
“Nora!”
The girl convulses, thrashes against the altar top, foam beginning to drip from the corners of her mouth as her lips pull back in a rictus.
The women at the altar ignore everything but their ritual. Charlotte hands the knife to Stella and smiles, motioning her forward. “Go on.” Then she turns to see the cause of the commotion behind them.
Stella turns toward the camera, toward the girl on the altar—her daughter, sacrifice to Damastes. She steps forward, raising the knife on high, murmuring strange words with the soft expression of a mother singing a lullaby.…
Behind her, Matt swings one of the iron candelabra, clearing a path to the altar as Charlotte steps toward him. He kicks over the candles and swipes at Charlotte, knocking her down.
Flames lick across the ground and spread, climbing every loose fold of fabric they touch. All voices but Stella’s give way to screams and chaos.
Stella holds the knife above her daughter’s chest, staring into the flashing darkness at the heart of the golden object that rests on Nora’s forehead. No amount of thrashing, no amount of tears, blood, or spit that run from her has dislodged it from the girl’s skin.
“No!”
Pandemonium and flame stir the shadows outside the ring of altar candlelight as Stella plunges the knife down—
Matt lunges forward and swings the candelabra one more time, smashes it across Stella’s shoulders, sweeping her away.
Stella screams in fury and pain as she falls behind the altar.
The view rocks, slips, falls …
And only static reigns. Then nothing.
*
It took five minutes of stopping and starting for Nora to get a single clear frame of it, and the squirming of the shadows deep inside her confirmed the idea in her mind: This was something important, something that she’d seen no sign of at the warehouse where Luis Gallardo had died. She pointed at the golden circle-and-wings that contained living darkness. “I’ve seen that before.”
Nora and Selene leaned close to the screen to look at the gleaming shape. The circle wasn’t empty as it had been the first time—the darkness at the center emanated from a glittering dark object that spun like a tiny gyroscope.
“I found that at Charlotte’s house,” said Nora. “But it didn’t have the thing in the middle. I’ve seen the circle-and-wings on the hilts of those knives the Phonoi use, but this one’s like a pendant—no blade.”