Waking the Moon (19 page)

No, something else would have driven them to Angelica; the world was full of beautiful girls who were not marked for the
Benandanti.
What Magda sensed in her was an overwhelming determination, a great and terrible
will.

Will toward
what,
Magda had no idea. Probably the girl herself didn’t even know—not yet, at least. But when she found out, all hell would break loose. Magda stared at her thoughtfully as Angelica went on.

“… spent some time with my cousins in Florence and then …”

It wasn’t just her beauty: she projected such raw pure
energy.
Nearly everyone stared at her. A few, men and women both, quite literally stopped in their tracks to stare. As though some great icon—the Sphinx, Venus de Milo, Greta Garbo—had strolled into a cocktail party and mixed herself a drink.

And, while she seemed to pay no heed to this constantly changing backdrop of admirers, Angelica di Rienzi noted every single one of them. Magda was sure of it.

“And then one night I got a phone call from Balthazar …”

Balthazar?
Since when did undergraduates call him Balthazar? Angelica reached out to stroke Magda’s bare arm, the girl’s touch like warm oil poured across her skin. Magda shivered.

“… and I love it, I just
love
it …”

Magda closed her eyes. The girl’s perfume enveloped her, a sweet warm fragrance like sandalwood and oranges. Like the sun burning down upon those tiny wild hyacinths that grow beneath endless blue Aegean skies—

Kirkotokous athroize te mani Grogopa Gnathoi ruseis itoa

—like the sweet smoke drifting up from the mountaintop, the
kouroi
gathered there and harrowed in the dusk like grain …

“So I like, really think that I’ll
find
myself here.” Angelica laughed and let go of Magda’s arm. “I’m sorry to go on like this! But your work really has meant so much to me.”

…
Othiym haïyo
…

Magda drew back as though she had been slapped.

What the hell is going on?

But Angelica had noticed nothing. Her huge emerald eyes were fixed on Magda. She opened her hands and held them palms upward as she recited in a low voice, “‘
I have made you a lioness among women, and given you leave to kill any at your pleasure.’”

“What?” demanded Magda.
“What did you say?”

Angelica dropped her hands. “From your book.” She looked confused. “I mean, I
think
that’s where it’s from. I’m sorry—was it, was I—did I remember it wrong?”

Magda drew her clenched fists to her breast.

“No,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
Who
is
this girl?
“It’s—it’s not from my book. It’s from the Mysteries of Eleusis—I mentioned them in there, but I never quoted that verse. I never quoted it anywhere.”

“Oh. Eleusis. The corn thing.” Angelica gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I must have read it somewhere else, then.”

Her voice trailed off and Angelica suddenly looked away. Magda followed her gaze.

On the other side of the reception room there was a stir, as people turned and craned their necks, to watch someone arguing with a gentleman by the front door. Magda heard tittering, a single raucous shout. Several students cheered drunkenly. Magda stood on tiptoe, trying to see over the crowd.

In the smoke-filled entrance to Garvey Hall stood a tall unsteady figure, wearing what appeared to be white robes—no, a
sheet
—no,
two
sheets, and one of them patterned with lurid purple daisies—draped around his torso and across his head like a hood. As she stared the figure straightened and pulled a small white rectangle from somewhere within his makeshift toga. Magda recognized the same heavy embossed card that had been issued as invitation to every Molyneux reception she had ever attended. With a flourish the sheet-clad figure presented it to the man at the door. The guard peered at it suspiciously, then waved the newcomer through. The boy walked into the main room with his head bowed, face still hidden by white and purple folds. Whistles and catcalls filled the air.

“Check it out!”

“Hey, Ah—lee—
VER!

“Ah—lee—
VER
!” chanted a group by the bar. “Ah—lee—
VER
!”

The boy in the toga drew himself up. He gave one shoulder an exaggerated shake, like a stripper shedding her costume, and threw his head back. A flurry of long ebony hair fell around his shoulders. Angelica gasped.

“Friend of yours?” asked Magda.

Angelica nodded, covering her mouth and then exploding into laughter. “I—I can’t
believe
it—”

“Very nice,” Magda remarked.

It was a clumsy effort at drag, but credible. Just a raw gash of lipstick and two streaks of rouge and some kind of bright blue eye shadow. But even this crude effort could not hide how good-looking he was—indeed, the makeup gave him an eerie, almost otherworldly, prettiness, as off-putting in its way as Angelica’s beauty. He walked with great dignity through the cheering students who gathered around him. No mincing or prancing, no sheepish grin. He looked like the biblical harlot from some early Cecil B. de Mille epic, and while a few of the older guests were scowling, most laughed, or at least pretended to.

“Who is he, Angelica? Do you—”

Magda abruptly shut up. The girl’s lips were parted, her eyes glowing. Whoever this boy was, Angelica was staring at
him
the way everyone had been gazing at
her
all evening. Magda touched the lunula at her throat and bit her lip.

Of course. This was the
other
one, the boy she’d glimpsed last night.
Oliver,
the naphaïm had named him; and now across the parquet floors snaked a conga line led by a half-dozen drunken boys in evening dress, yelping, “Ah—
lee
—VER! Ah—
lee—
VER!”

“He’s—very good-looking,” said Magda. But Angelica only smiled, a look of perfect seigniory, and continued to stare.

And that was when Magda saw the pattern, the secret behind the Sign. That beautiful boy, this beautiful prescient girl; all of Angelica’s pure fiery will turned onto nothing but
him.
The oldest story in the book, that was all it came down to. Nothing more.

Magda turned. As quickly as they had gathered to lionize him, Oliver’s admirers had fallen away. Now he stood by himself, holding the crumpled sheet to his chest in a surprisingly delicate manner. He was gazing abstractedly at the ceiling, where the Venetian glass chandelier swayed slightly. Oliver moved with it, arm raised. His eyes were closed and he was singing to himself. He appeared to be stoned out of his mind.

“… so I better go now. It was wonderful meeting you.”

With an apologetic smile, Angelica started to walk toward Oliver. Magda watched her go. From a hidden recess, the string quartet began to play an austere arrangement of “Pavane pour une enfant defunte.” In spite of herself Magda felt her eyes well with tears.

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

Sudden fury lanced her. All of her hopes for the Sign, all the divided energies of the
Benandanti
and her Mistress—and they came down to
this,
some adolescent passion! She stared at Angelica and thought of all that golden energy, just waiting to be released in a dorm room with some horny zonked-out
kid.
It was insane! Almost without thinking, Magda darted forward and grabbed the girl by the shoulder.

“Angelica! Wait—”

Angelica stopped, taken aback.

“Angelica—I—I just wanted to—”

That was when Magda saw them: Balthazar Warnick and his young stooge Francis. Even from here she could see Warnick’s sapphire eyes glittering, his fixed smile as he nodded to a passing colleague. Then he turned, and his gaze locked with hers. In an instant she realized what her recklessness had cost her.

They knew.

Magda could tell by Balthazar’s eyes, and by something else: an abrupt though subtle shift in the air, as though a window had been opened to let a freezing wind vent through the smoke and laughter. The names of the two innocents were no longer a secret. The
Benandanti
had learned of her betrayal.

“Angelica! Wait—” Magda put every ounce of her will into the command. The girl gazed at her, puzzled. Around Magda’s neck the lunula burned like a heated coil.

“Tell—tell me your name again,” she ordered. Angelica frowned. “Please!
Tell me your name.”

Angelica glanced over her shoulder, looking for the boy in the makeshift toga; but beneath the chandelier the floor was empty. She turned back to Magda. “Angelica di Rienzi.”

“Angelica—”

The lunula was a white-hot collar about Magda’s throat. She could scarcely breathe, scarcely find the energy to speak. The air buzzed with static electricity; she felt a burst of nausea as before her everything spun into a sudden tumultuous brilliance, jagged rays of white and crimson distorting her view: a terrifying prismatic radiance that did not illuminate but disturbed the outlines of everything about her. Light and color pulsed and throbbed and even seemed to produce a
sound,
an anguished shriek like a razor drawn across a whetstone. A few yards away, two shimmering forms moved through the luminous maelstorm.

“That’s right. Angelica di Rienzi,” the girl said softly.

Magda summoned all her strength. “Angelica di Rienzi.” She could hear Francis’s heavy tread. Quickly Magda reached for a stray curl upon the girl’s forehead, plucked a single bronze strand and snatched her hand back.

“Angelica Di Rienzi: In hoc signo vinces. Othiym, haïyo
!” She opened her fingers: the hair flickered into a wisp of flame and white ash. “I would like you to have this, Angelica.”

With one smooth motion Magda pulled off the lunula. She held it in front of her and gazed upon it for the last time.

All the brilliance that had filled the room now seemed to radiate from the shimmering crescent, so that nothing but shadows surrounded herself and Angelica. From somewhere very far away she heard murmuring, a woman’s voice raised in lamentation. The shadows grew thicker. For an instant Magda had a glimpse of the new moon rising above a stony outcropping, the scarlet arc of George Wayford’s throat against the earth. Before the vision could fade she slid the lunula over Angelica’s head.

“I’m very glad you enjoyed the lecture,” Magda said loudly as Balthazar and Francis Connelly swept up behind her.

“What?” exclaimed Angelica; then
“0w
!—it’s
hot
!”

“But now you’d better
go
—”

Magda pushed the girl toward the bar. In a daze Angelica stumbled past Professor Warnick and his companion, then on through the diminishing crowd, her fingers splayed across her throat. For once no one took any notice of her.

“Magda.”

Magda could smell Balthazar before she turned to greet him: that deceptively serene mixture of Borkum Riff and chalk and moldering books. “Balthazar,” she whispered.

The small slender man shook his head. In his pearl grey morning suit and ascot of pale green satin, he looked like a darkly elegant cricket.

“I was so—
surprised
—to learn you were still among us. I thought your flight was today.” His tone was mocking but also wistful.

“I changed it.”

He took her right arm, Francis her left. “You changed a few other things as well,” Balthazar murmured as they assisted her through the crowd. “News of your recent fieldwork reached me only this morning. I had no idea your interests had—expanded—so far beyond ours.”

Gently but irresistibly they steered her toward the same door where Harold Mosreich’s nuns had gathered earlier. Magda looked away so they couldn’t see the fear in her eyes. Her throat and breast felt scorched. Without the lunula she felt utterly exposed, as in a nightmare of facing a lecture hall naked, her students gaping in disbelief. As Balthazar and Francis led her through the darkened doorway she whimpered.

Here the sounds of the reception were abruptly silenced. They were in one of the service wings of Garvey Hall. The narrow passage was dark and cool, the floors smelling of disinfectant and neglect and giving a hollow echoing tone to their footsteps. A chill wind moaned querulously as it plucked at Magda’s bare arms. When they turned a corner her captors’ hold on her grew tighter.

“Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

They faced a wide stairway that curved upward through several stories until it disappeared into utter darkness. From far overhead came the rattle of an unlatched window. As Warnick and Francis dragged her up the steps she pulled back with all her strength.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Forget it, Magda,” spat Francis. “We know all about you, we—”

“Francis!” Warnick’s commanding voice rang out. Francis fell silent and glared sullenly at Magda. Balthazar shook his head.

“Forgive me if our methods seem a little crude, Magda. But we just can’t afford to let you go.”

“Where—” she began; but Balthazar hushed her.

“I was terribly, terribly sorry to lose you to Berkeley,” he said, his voice so regretful that she glanced at him hopefully, half-expecting to see tears in his eyes. There were none, but the look he gave her was immeasurably sad. “And now this—losing you twice … Oh, Magda—”

They stopped, halfway up the stairs. Francis stared pointedly into the darkness and glowered. But Balthazar gazed at Magda, his handsome features disarmingly youthful as ever. To her amazement she saw that now his eyes
were
brilliant with tears. She could feel his hand trembling even as he held her unyieldingly. For a moment she thought he was going to stand on tiptoe to kiss her. Instead he turned away.

“This is a great disappointment,” he said, and pulled her after him.

“Please, Balthazar, can’t you tell me—”

Her words broke off as she stumbled onto a landing. They stood at the entrance of another dim hallway. Seemingly endless ranks of closed doors lined each side of the corridor. There was a smell of stagnant water, the faintest whiff of gasoline.