Alabaster

"No, your Grace, but the consequences-"

"I'm only asking if it might be accomplished," the Glaistig explains, wishing that the heavy lid of the tomb had not been closed so soon, that she could look one last time upon the face of her King and find there the answers she needs. Answers that might save her world without bringing harm to some other universe.

"I think so," the alchemist says, and she can hear the reluctance in his reply. "The red witches' calculations seem sound enough. We can find no fault."

"And why do you believe that we can trust the Nesmians, Alundshaw? They have ever been enemies of the Dragon. Might not this be some deceit?"

The alchemist glances nervously over his shoulder at the steam billowing from the fissure, then clears his throat. "I need not remind your Grace that the Nesmians despise the Weaver, perhaps even as much as do our own people. In this instance, our enemy has become an ally against a common threat."

"And this sorcery would take them all, not merely that one the vampire has captured?"

"Yes, your Grace. If the process works as the Nesmians have predicted, it would take all of the Seraphim, each removed to another…" and he pauses, as if he's forgotten how to end the sentence.

"To another world," the Glaistig finishes for him.

"Yes, mum," he says. "They would be forever scattered across the celestial planes."

"Beyond her recall?"

"Yes, your Grace. Forever beyond her recall."

The floor groans and rolls again, and the alchemist waves his arms about and shuffles his feet to keep from falling. Near the rift in the floor of King's Hale, the glass tiles of the mosaic have begun to melt, their candy colors bleeding one into the other. And now a second fissure has opened, this one a vertical rent in the northern wall of the tower, wide enough that dim streaks of daylight shine through.

"Is there still time?" the Glaistig asks.

"I believe so," Kypre Alundshaw answers. "The place of sacrifice has already been prepared. We've done precisely as the Kenzia woman has directed. We only await your command."

"Then you tell her to do it," she says. "Tell her to do it immediately. And by the spokes and all our fathers, may the gods show mercy on us in our desperation."

Before the next tremor shakes the Hale, Alundshaw and the other alchemists and the astronomers have filed out of the chamber, and the Glaistig motions for the men and women of her court to kneel once more. She leans against the tomb of the King of Immolations, her cheek pressed to the cool, consoling granite, and, in another moment, she begins her prayers again.

VIII. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

Julia Flammarion swims until the cold has done its job, exactly what she's asked it to do for her, and her arms and legs have grown too stiff and numb to possibly swim any farther. Which means that she'll never be able to swim all the way back to shore, either, so there's no losing her nerve now. It doesn't matter if she turns coward and changes her mind or decides that life as a crazy girl who talks to angels is still better than drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. She squints back towards the beach, nothing visible but a faint white stripe against the blue horizon, and wonders about the handsome man with the guitar, what he thought as she walked into the water in her clothes and shoes and began to swim away. Did he even notice? Is he watching her now? Has he gone looking for help? She hopes not. She hopes that he's still sitting there on his apple crate playing beautiful songs she'll never hear.

"And what now?" she asks the high and unconsoling sun, the sun that might as well be the eye of God staring bitterly down at a fifteen-year-old suicide. The eye of a God who's finally washing his hands of her once and for all. A moment later, Julia gets a big mouthful of saltwater, and it strangles her and burns her sinuses and throat.

"Is that your answer?" she sputters weakly, and the sun continues to hang mute in the cloudless winter sky, however many tens or hundreds of millions of miles away from her it might be.

Much too far to matter, she thinks and shuts her eyes. The cold and the effort of swimming out this far have made her very sleepy, and so maybe that's what happens next. Maybe it's as simple as shutting her eyes and drifting on the swells until she falls asleep. Maybe there will even be one last dream, something warm and gentle that shows her another way her life might have gone, if she weren't insane and had never spoken to the angel that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood. If the rattlesnake had never been burned to charcoal. If the angel had never started telling her stories about monsters. Julia uses the last of her strength to imagine a dream just like that, a very good dream in which she marries the handsome man with the guitar and they have children and even grandchildren, and she grows old and dies at home in her bed with all of them about her. She tells herself that the sound of wings close by is nothing but a curious seagull or a pelican, and only a few seconds later, too exhausted to tread water any longer, she slips beneath the welcoming surface of the sea.

IX. The Demon of HopekillSwamp

She might have had a name once, distant ages ago, before the white men came with their noisy, stinking cities and their clattering railroads and their murderous highways, back when the Muskogee were the only men she'd ever seen and who'd ever seen her. But if she did have a name, she's long since forgotten it. She might have had a mother, too, and perhaps even a father, like all the other things that creep and slither and swim and fly through the bayous and sloughs spread out along the Flint River. The shadow things hiding in the old church at the edge of the swamp call her Elandrion, Daughter of the Great Mother Nerpuz, but she's pretty sure it's just some shit they made up to stay on her good side and Elandrion wasn't ever really her name.

On this summer night, she's resting in the mud beneath a bald cypress log at the very bottom of a deep, still pool, gnawing the last pale shreds of flesh from the bones of a great bullhead catfish. The bullhead was a giant, seven feet from snout to tail, and maybe it lived at the bottom of the pool for twenty years or more before she crept up and wrapped it in her strong arms and cracked it's skull open between her jaws. Nothing in this whole damn swamp that's even half a match for her, not the mud cats or the huge old snapping turtles, not the cottonmouth moccasins, not even the goddamned alligators. Nothing out here she can't make her di

She's using a claw to get at the last bits of the bullhead's brains when she hears the shadows calling out across the night to her, their voices tangling in Spanish moss and the limbs of the trees and dripping down into the black water.

Elandrion, she's finally come. She's here.

She's found us all, Elandrion. She's right here in the church.

For a moment, she considers ignoring them, leaving them to their own fates. She thinks about finishing with the catfish and then sleeping through the scorch of the coming day right here beneath this cypress log. Surely together they can handle one ski

The albino girl. She's waiting here for you.

Deliver us, Elandrion.

Beneath the cypress log, she rolls her eyes and picks her teeth. She imagines the shadows doing their best to menace the girl, playing like they're the next worst thing under heaven, and all the while they're whining into the night for deliverance. Ought to leave the lot of them to whatever the kid's got in mind, she thinks, but then she hears another voice oozing down through the stagnant water and the slime.