Sheriff Pearson nodded, and when different people started to ask questions or argue or whatever, the sheriff lifted a hand to stop them. Then he nodded again to Natividad. “You’ll draw your circle. We’ll start in fifteen minutes.” Belliveau began to interrupt, but the sheriff stared him down effortlessly. “We’ll move as fast as we can,” he said flatly. “Grayson Lanning didn’t want Miss Toland to leave Dimilioc House. He’s going to come after her soon enough, I figure. We don’t want half a circle.”
“Damn black dog son of a bitch,” Belliveau muttered.
“Don’t say that!” Natividad told him instantly. “Really, don’t. Black dogs walk so close to the edge of Hell anyway. Never damn a black dog, it could happen, do you see? And Grayson’s not your enemy.”
Belliveau looked first taken aback, and then embarrassed. Father McClanahan said, “Good advice for us all, isn’t it?”
Denoux added to the older deputy, “Don’t be an ass, Frank. You know nobody would be left alive in this town – hell, this county – if it weren’t for Grayson Lanning and Dimilioc.” He gave Natividad a firm nod and added, “We do know who the enemy is, miss – and who it isn’t.”
Sheriff Pearson lifted a hand to reclaim all their attention, then turned to take a map from one of the young men. He flattened this out to show Natividad. The deputy had drawn a neat circle across the map in red ink, centered on the church and cutting ruthlessly through all other property. Natividad wished she’d thought to say not to use red. But the map was good. And red ink could stand for cheerful things just as easily as it could stand for blood, if she was careful how she thought about it. The map would do. She nodded.
Lewis was tiny. But when you had to go from one house or shop to another and draw pentagrams on all the windows; when you had to brush snow out of the way on all the streets between and draw lines along them; when you had to climb over fences and pick your way across a stubbled, snowy field and then across a frozen creek, it all made the town seem much larger. She already knew she wouldn’t have time to make little aparatos for people to wear. Just laying the mandala and setting up the big crosses would take all the time there was.
Especially with the snow coming down so hard you could hardly see one building from the next. Natividad hadn’t ever imagined snow could fall like this, in whirling curtains, so thick you could hardly see through it, driven by an icy wind that cut like a silver knife. Anything could be hidden behind that blowing snow. The three deputies might have shotguns, but they only had regular ammunition. Silver was expensive, Denoux said, and they’d used a lot during the vampire war, and if they wanted more, they had to buy it themselves. She bet now they wished they had.
But there was only a little way to go to find the place they would set up the first cross. This proved to be a nice warm home with a woman and a lot of children. Natividad liked them all immediately. She accepted a wedge of ginger cake the woman pressed on her – it had a wonderful cinnamon cream with it, dolloped on with a generous hand.
She let the children watch as she set up the first cross, off-center in a fancy, formal room right at the front of the house. It was a good cross, almost as tall as Natividad herself, made of some soft gray wood. It might have been plain except for the care with which it had been made. Its maker had wound a thin silver chain in a spiral around the horizontal crosspiece and painted, in silver paint, “I will fear no evil, for God is with me,” in elegant calligraphy down the front. A stand for the cross had also been supplied, but of course Natividad did not need to use the stand – she set the cross where it needed to go and drew the beginnings of her protective circle out to either side of it, and it stood firmly when she took her hands away.
“Leave somebody to watch to make sure nobody moves it before I’ve finished,” Natividad told Sheriff Pearson, while the magic she’d begun buzzed in her ears and sparkled along her nerves. “It’ll stand forever then. Nobody will be able to knock it down while the circle holds.”
“And a fine conversation piece it’ll be,” commented the woman who owned the house. “But don’t be telling the brats it can’t be knocked down; they’ll take it as a challenge, won’t they?” She wasn’t exactly smiling, but Natividad thought she liked the cross. “Don’t you fret, young lady: no one will overset your cross. Is that done, now?”
“Almost,” Natividad murmured. She drew pentagrams on all the windows of the house, filling the signs with moonlight as she went, and then for fun demonstrated to the children how they could now throw a ball or toy against a window and it would only bounce off, the glass ringing like a bell.