The Devil Dances (24 page)

got lucky.
Most of the men were still busy with the barn-raising as I biked the three miles or so down the road to Abraham Sutter’s farmhouse. The sun was just sitting on the horizon, and I hoped that gave me at least a half hour to do the dirty—assuming the men didn’t return to their homes before nightfall, of course. I’d thought about taking Daisy to cut the time, but I was afraid that having the Jeep parked outside the colony elder’s home would be a dead giveaway that I’d been there, and I wanted to be as discreet as possible.

I was sweating, tired, and feeling vaguely sick by the time I reached Abraham’s house. I kept thinking about Isaac, wondering if the seemingly sweet young man who had given himself to me behind the barn was a murderer and a black witch. If he was, that didn’t say much about my choice of lovers.

Abraham’s place wasn’t terribly different from the Knapp farmhouse, except for the fact that it was virtually uninhabited. Some goats wandered the back of the house, and some chickens were scattered about, but there were no people. Abraham, his wife and three sons, and Isaac, their guest, were all still down at the barn-raising. Abraham had a relatively small family, as the Swartzcopf Amish went, which was the main reason the Sutters put up any newcomers from other colonies—at least that much I’d learned from sitting around the Knapp’s dinner table.

At first, I stood stupidly on the gravel at the back of the house and contemplated which window I wanted to try, then it occurred to me that the Sutters probably didn’t lock their homes up. No one in the colony did. When I checked the back door, sure enough, it was unlocked. I was about to sneak inside the big farmhouse kitchen when my cell went off. I grabbed it to keep it from ringing too loudly and alerting anyone who might be home, or any dogs, and scrambled to hit the talk button. “Yeah.”

“Are you there?” Vivian asked. “Is everything okay so far?”

I’d asked her to go down to the barn-raising with the other women and try and delay the men as long as possible.

“So far, so good,” I said as I looked around the darkened kitchen. “I should be in and out in fifteen minutes, if you can hold them that long.”

“Roger that,” she said in true military fashion, which made me smile. “Call me when you have something.”

We hung up and I put the phone away. The inside of the farmhouse was similar to the Knapp’s setup. There was a dining room with a connected living room that doubled as a meeting hall and place of worship where Abraham could hold Sunday services, if the pulpit was any indication. A bank of stairs led up to the second floor. I went that way, and once upstairs, started going room to room, trying to find the one that most likely belonged to Isaac. It didn’t take long.

The guest bedroom was small and nondescript. It had the Shaker bed I was now all-too-familiar with, a writing desk, a highboy with the requisite washbowl and pitcher atop it, and one full wall of books, mostly classical literature. I checked the first five or six books, and sure enough, I found copies of beefcake magazines stuffed inside at least two. Definitely Isaac’s room. I made a quick job of tossing the room, aiming for being thorough rather than discreet. I ripped the dust jackets off all the books, tore the bed apart, checked the highboy, and stomped the floorboards, looking for loose boards and hidey holes, but nothing criminal turned up—if you didn’t count the skin rags.

I felt both relieved and annoyed. Relieved that Isaac wasn’t so obviously guilty of anything past a lustful interest in male anatomy; annoyed that my hunch hadn’t paid off. I swore softly under my breath. I wished I knew someone I could take those letters to, someone fluent in Pennsylvania Dutch, someone I trusted. I pulled out the crumpled notes I had made and looked them over once more. The next most popular names in the letters were John, Mary, and Abraham. Since Abraham was just next door, I decided to give that room a shot before I left.

There wasn’t much to distinguish it from Isaac’s room. It had all the same furnishings, though Abraham’s selection of books leaned more toward theology and philosophy. Across from the bed was a big wooden cross on the wall—I felt it long before I looked upon it. Behind the bed hung a big, colorful, handmade quilt in a pattern I didn’t recognize, though Vivian would probably know the name of it. It was the only personal item in the room. Other than it, the room could have belonged to virtually anyone in the colony and it didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know.

I checked my watch. I was running out of time. I didn’t think a witch would place his conjuring book on a bookshelf for all the world to find, and I wagered against the highboy, under the bed, or the big trunk in the corner. Those places seemed a little too obvious. I used the athame to slash the mattress, but there was nothing but stuffing and bedsprings there. A search for loose boards turned up nada. Finally, I stood in the middle of the room, getting very pissed very quickly. A part of my brain was telling me that my gut instinct was wrong, wrong, wrong… but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. I tossed the athame from hand to hand. “Think, goddamnit,
think
.”

If I were a Church Elder in charge of an Ordnung and a part-time witch, where would
I
stash my stuff? My eyes roved the walls and fell upon the quilt once more.

“Sonofabitch,” I said as I ripped it down, unfolded it across Abraham’s bed, and slashed the athame across it. There was a spark like I’d struck flint, and the faint burning smell of sulfur. I felt a dull shock go up my arm, and I knew then that I was onto something. I ripped shamelessly at the fabric until a large array of wards fell loose—golden tiger eyes, carnelian beads, moss agate, wolfsbane, all the good stuff—and with them, a few pages from what I had to assume was Abraham’s Book of Shadows—his witch’s bible, so to speak

I looked over the glyphs on the yellowed pages; if I had any doubts that he was connected to Cernunnos, they were gone. I was a convinced man. The god’s little spiral symbols were everywhere on the pages, along with stylized drawings of the Horned God himself and different summoning spells that might be hundreds, or even thousands of years old. I even found angel wards—those little angel poppets that had caused me such a headache only a year or so ago.

No wonder I couldn’t feel Abraham’s magick, if he was shielding himself this tightly using angel wards—the bastards wreaked hell on my system. He had two wards, little gingham angel poppets fashioned from cloth with eyes drawn on their wings. There was only one type of angel that I knew were like that—Ophanim, the angels that guarded the Throne. They had eyes all over their bodies, and when they looked on a sinner, it turned them to stone, or so the story went. And since we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that really wasn’t good news for anyone.

“You really are a thug,” came an unexpected voice behind me.

My hackles stood on end and I had an overwhelming desire to drop to my knees. When my gut tells me to do something, I listen to it. As I crashed to the floor, something sliced the air above me, right where my neck had been micro-seconds ago. It made a shining, crescent-like, whistling arc through the air, and my brain made a few calculations and decided it was likely a small harvesting sickle. I don’t know why that was important to know, but it was.

I didn’t wait for Abraham to take another swing at me. I elbowed him in the gut as hard as I could and the bastard went down with a yelp of surprise, though he somehow managed to keep his hold on the sickle. I know because as he fell, the hook-like blade ripped the fabric of my coat and caught in my brand new wings. Ironically enough, they saved me from having my spine severed.

My wings burst through the ripped back of my coat a little like stuffing from a slashed sofa, and Abraham screamed, a high and surprisingly girly sound, and reared back. I turned at the same time, pulling the Tanaka from the holster, and beheld his comically surprised expression. At the same time, my left wing grazed his face, the long guide feathers with their silvery white tips slicing his cheek open like the blade of a Samurai sword, and Abraham painted the white walls of his bedroom with his red blood. I hadn’t planned that, incidentally, but it did give me a measure of satisfaction as I fired blindly in his general direction.

I never was what you would call a perfect shot, and my wings kind of put me off balance. At least that’s what I told myself when my shot went wild into the wall beside him. I immediately tried to retrain my aim on his chest, but he was too close, and faster than I’d anticipated. The sickle connected with the Tanaka and knocked it from my grip. I saw the gun skitter across the floor and into a corner, but good sense prevailed, and I decided not to dive for it and give him my back.

His eyes were big and wild, his face darkened with rage. Disarming me had given him some serious balls. He threw himself forward with a shout and sliced at me with the sickle. I stumbled backward awkwardly, but not far enough. The blade caught me across the back of the hand and it was my turn to cry out as I fell backward against the bed, my wings shushing around me. My blood, a little darker and bluer than his, spilled across the floor and started burning into the floorboards where he walked every night.

“Blood for blood,” I grunted and flipped a thin streak of my cursed blood in his direction. It slapped him across the face and immediately began to burn the witch. Even as Abraham screamed, I saw him reach for an ornate, cross-hilted Celtic athame he was keeping under his coat. I didn’t like other witches’ athames, as they had a tendency to hurt like hell, so made a blind dash for the door.

Clutching his smoking cheek, Abraham turned and hurled the weapon at me like a circus performer. He was stronger than he looked, and more accurate than I’d expected—but then, I’d really been underestimating him, I decided. The blade caught me in the lower back and knocked me to the floor like a hammer blow. I groaned as I scrabbled up on my hands and knees with the athame rooted in my spine, and as Abraham’s magick flowered out from the cursed blade and into my flesh, my groan slowly escalated into a cry of nauseating agony forced through pain-gritted teeth.

Abraham stood over me with the sickle in his fist, his face still burning. “You really are the Devil. But, Satan, I will get thee down!” He dropped to his knees, pinning me to the floor by pushing his knee into my back. He needn’t have bothered with the brute force; the athame was sucking all the power and feeling from my lower body, and within seconds, I hardly had enough strength to move, never mind fight him. All I could do was grunt like a victim as he seized my left wing and began sawing at the wingroot with the edge of the curved and fiercely well-maintained blade.

I whined, jerked, and gagged at the shocking and seemingly never ending waves of agony that assaulted my body. He was a big man, powerful from working the fields all his life. His strength shocked and appalled me. “You dare violate my home, Devil? Well, then, you yourself shall be violated!”

“You’re… violating… your own children!” I screamed back, and then my voice was cut off as Abraham snapped back the bone with a wet, crackling noise. With strength and determination, he ripped my left wing off in an inkblot-on-wall shower of dark blue blood.

Darkness poured into the corners of my eyes and a part of me prayed for blessed oblivion, an escape from this torture before he started on the right wing. But praying, I soon discovered, was futile. And as Abraham hacked down into the second wingroot, the part of my brain still processing the pain and humiliation of this act tried unsuccessfully to shut down my body.

Abraham, I had decided, wasn’t evil. Evil was simple and criminally easy to understand. Evil was all about chaos and disorder. Rather, he was one of those desperate, stupid men who were so very dangerous to themselves and others. Such men didn’t run on evil; they ran on self-righteousness, which was infinitely more destructive. Self-righteous men waged crusades and ripped cities to the ground. They burned heretics and made gods of themselves.

“You…” I managed to get out, “you called Cernunnos. I know what you did. You called it… you killed Caleb… and Elsie…”