And still she could find no sign of them. She stood for a moment in the lee of a wide, scorched-smelling oak tree and tried to gather her thoughts. Other than the house, which possibility Anne's mind refused to consider, there was only one place they could be. She wiped the edge of her white T-shirt across her filthy face and prepared to turn her back on the moaning adults and the screaming children—only to be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken furiously by a maddened figure shouting and spitting in her face. It took a moment to see Marc Bennett beneath the soot and the distorting terror and fury, and to interpret his words as a demand to know where Jonas was.
Her own fury glared to meet his. She shook off his grasping hands and slapped him hard, and when he took a surprised step backward she leaned into him, ten inches shorter and ready to tear him to pieces.
"You stupid piece of shit," she spat at him. "Your beloved tin-pot god went nuts. He went and sat in your alembic and set the place on fire around him, to see if he could make himself immortal,"
"What are you talking about? What alembic?"
"The steel alembic you have in your basement. The one you use to lock boys in when they misbehave." God, she didn't have time for this. She tried to push past him, but he grabbed her right shoulder again and pulled her back to face him.
"You're the mad one here, you bloody woman. That's Steven's alembic you're thinking of. Now, where the hell is Jonas?"
Anne gaped at him, and her own hand came out to grasp his upper arm. The two of them stood as if they were hanging on to each other for support in the flaring, feverish light of the fire.
"Are you telling me you don't have an alembic?" she demanded.
"You think you know the first thing about us, all the high secrets, don't you? You don't know shit. We don't have an alembic for initiates. We don't need one. The whole place is an alembic." He freed his hand to gesture at the house, and she followed his fingers to see the stepped-up pear-shaped wall of the front of the house, now devoured in flames, and the chimneys at the top gathered together like a stem—or like a plug at the neck of a vessel. As she watched, one of the chimneys teetered, then fell away into the flames.
She swung her gaze back to his face, and when he saw her eyes, he tried to retreat. Her fingers dug in and held him.
"Where would Jonas go?" she demanded.
"What do you mean?"
"His 'power nexus&'—where is it?"
But she knew. Before Bennett opened his mouth, she knew.
"The abbey," he said. "But how—"
She seized him by the lapels of his striped pajamas and pulled his head down until his face was almost touching hers, all the fury and fear of the last weeks lying naked in her face. "If you go there, if you so much as stir from this place, I will rip off your balls and feed them to you."
She saw her string of brutal monosyllables hit home, saw the fear in his eyes telling her that he did not doubt that she was perfectly capable of carrying out her threat. Then she turned and ran, stumbling in the uncertain light and cursing the branches and thorns that caught at her, plucking at her clothes, tearing her skin and slowing her down. Away from the glare of the fire, the sky was growing light, and when she fought her way out of the woods and into the abbey clearing, the day was already there.
So were Jason and Dulcie. They were not alone.
Anne stood, gasping for breath and fighting for calm with streams of black ash and blood-red sweat running down her face, her once-light-gray running pants filthy and torn, her heart pounding from exertion. Seeing Jonas seated on the altar stone, one distant corner of her mind abruptly knew, with the sure revelation of a light going on, that Samantha Dooley had never left Change, that she had given her life to Jonas Seraph's search for Transformation, that her remains now lay beneath the stone that Jonas had patted so affectionately when he first showed his new partner this place.
She was barely aware of the knowledge. The whole of her vision was taken over by the sight of Jonas Seraph, sitting on the newly settled stone, a shotgun resting across his folded knees, its barrels pointed directly to where Jason sat, half turned away from Jonas, his arms wrapped protectively around Dulcie. Anne walked forward slowly, and Jonas saw her.
"You are late!" he shouted furiously. "The fire must be nearly out—I called for you an hour ago,"
Anne tore her eyes away from the two frozen children, and continued up the grassy aisle toward Jonas with her hands out at her sides, fingers splayed and palms down in the gesture of peace.
"I'm here now, Jonas, so you can let the children go,"
He did not seem to be listening; instead, he had begun to stare at her with what looked like reverence. "My vision," he breathed. "A woman in white with the sweat of many colors on her face, giving birth to the golden-haired man,"
"Let the children go, Jonas," she repeated. "They'll just be in the way,"
His focus shifted to her face. "Innocence is needed,"
"Two are needed, not four. I am the innocent here, and all the sacrifice you need,"
"I don't…" he wavered.
Anne took another step forward, talking calmly. "Jonas, the fire is past its peak. You must have the female for your male, the moon for your sun, the mercury for your sulphur. You need me, Jonas. Now or never,"
She reached down for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She wore nothing underneath it but the lumpy buckskin medicine pouch between her breasts.
She kicked off her shoes and moved across the cool grass to stand directly in front of Jonas. Without hesitating, she shoved her thumbs into the waistband of her sweat pants, peeled them off, and dropped them onto the turf. Turning her head slightly to meet Jason's astonished eyes, she said, "Take Dulcie and run," and then she threw herself at Jonas.
Anne's final awareness was of gratitude. Jason ran, with Dulcie in his arms: it was not all in vain.
VII
Transformatio
transform (vb) To change in composition or structure;
to change in character or condition; cf. CONVERT
Procede we now to the Chapter of Exaltacion,
Of whych truly thou must have knowledge pure…
For when the Cold hath overcome the Heat,
Then into Water the Air shall turned be,
And so two contraries together shall meet,
Till either with other right well agree.
Chapter Thirty-two
From FBI documents relating to the Change case, Somerset compound Evidence photograph showing sketchbook belonging to Jason Delgado
At eight-thirty on that May morning the sun had been up for hours, slanting across the hills and fields of southern England, dispelling the dew from the rich grass and the flourishing hedgerows. The air was still, the leaves motionless, and neighboring farmers in their fields and barns only now began to pause and sniff the air, wondering if the slow-moving haze in the air might not be connected to those distant sirens that had awakened them during the night.
The trees around the brick shell that had been a Victorian manor house were scorched and withered from the heat. Those farther away were no longer green but gray, laden down with the dirty snow of ash. The air was heavy with the stink of burning things, timber and foam rubber, plastics and fuel oil, leather and flesh—although whether the flesh was human, animal, or both would not be known for many hours. And now a great number of combustion engines made their contribution, spewing fumes into the sweet May morning, all the petrol and diesel motors that had first trickled, then surged into Change as soon as the camouflaged guards had stood down. Police and fire personnel, ambulances and emergency communications vans, NCIS investigators with Social Services hard on their tail and the media left slavering at the gates to snatch photographs through the windows of the departing ambulances.