Chapter 4

Cynthia

It took me a moment to understand what was on my face.

The blood on my face was warm and wet, carrying the coppery smell I had learned years ago in the old Crescent Sister's preparation rooms, where we washed bodies for burial.

But this blood was not quiet or cool. It was alive-hot and still running, sliding down my cheek toward my jaw.

The Abbott lay on the stone floor. Half his head was missing. His reading glasses had fallen beside him, one lens cracked, sitting in a puddle that spread slowly across the uneven stone. The white ceremony robe I had worn into the chapel was heavy with his blood down the front.

I opened my mouth to scream. No sound came.

Behind me, the old Crescent Sister had not moved. The chapel was perfectly still. Every person in it understood, the way prey understands before it runs, that making a noise now would bring the predator's attention.

Dorian walked toward me.

His shoes made no sound on the stone. Or maybe the ringing in my ears drowned everything.

He stopped close enough that the cold air clinging to his body reached my skin, and he bent down and wiped the blood from my cheek with his thumb.

His fingers were cold. My body remembered that coldness from last night, remembered it and did something I could not forgive. For one breath, I did not pull away.

"Has my fiancée finished saying goodbye to her friends?" His voice was soft. Almost tender. His gaze drifted to the Abbott's body on the floor. He said the word friends with private amusement.

"I am not—" My voice broke apart. "I am not your fiancée." I was shaking hard enough to feel it in my teeth. "I am a Crescent Sister. I will never be anyone's wife."

He tilted his head and studied me with the same detached curiosity he had shown the Goddess's statue last night: interested, but with no trace of reverence.

"I know the rules of the Crescent Sisters," he said. "But your rite was not finished." A slight smile. Not warm. Indulgent. "You should thank me for stopping it. Think of it as my last respect for your faith."

Something cracked inside me then.

He had come into the Goddess's own house. He had killed a man at the altar where prayers were spoken and the dead were blessed. He had interrupted the sacred rite not with words, not with argument, but with a bullet, and now he stood in the blood he had spilled and told me to be grateful.

He did not believe in Her. He had never believed.

The tears came before I could stop them. They ran hot down my face and mixed with the blood he had not finished wiping, and I looked at him through the blur of tears and said the only thing I had.

"You desecrated the Moon Goddess's temple." My voice shook but it held. "She will punish you for this."

He watched me cry. Then he reached out, caught a tear at the edge of his thumb, and rubbed it between his fingers.

"I cleaned up a piece of garbage." He shrugged. "His dirty blood all over this floor—now that desecrates your Goddess."

I knocked his hand away.

The motion surprised us both. My arms were trembling and my vision pulsed red at the edges, a strange heat throbbing behind my eyes that I did not understand. I pushed past him and walked toward the chapel door.

One thought filled my head, repeating until it drowned everything else: This is wrong. I will find the Alpha. Someone will answer for this.

I stepped into the daylight.

The town was full of strangers.

They stood at every corner, against the low walls of the market square, by the well where the women drew water in the mornings. Dark clothes, cold faces, cigarette smoke drifting in the clean air. They did not fit here. They wore the town loosely, temporarily, with no intention of pretending for long.

There was no Alpha coming. There was no one left to call.

A hand settled on my shoulder. The cold of it seeped through the blood-soaked fabric of my robe, down to the bone.

"These men are here to bring you home." Dorian's voice came from behind me. "Pray to your Goddess while you still can. After tonight, the only one you will pray to is me."

His hand lifted. I heard a car door open and shut. An engine turned over. The strangers watched me with the patience of men who knew the door was already locked.

I stood alone in the morning light. There was nowhere left to go.

Then, from inside the ruined chapel, the old Crescent Sister's voice rose.

"May the moonlight guide you home. May the Goddess gather you in silver and in peace."

The death prayer. Ancient words, steady as water over stone. I knew them by heart. I had spoken them over bodies pulled from rivers, over elders who died in their sleep, over an infant who had lived for two days.

Something went quiet inside me. Not peace. The opposite. A strange floating distance, and my own body felt a step away from me.

I turned and walked back in.

The chapel was dim. The Abbott lay where he had fallen. The blood around his head had begun to thicken at the edges. The old Crescent Sister knelt beside him, her voice unwavering.

I knelt with her.

Close the eyes first. But one side was gone. I closed the eye that remained. Arrange the hands over the chest. His fingers were still warm, and I placed them the way the old woman had taught me — left over right, thumbs touching. Wash the wound. The cloth I dipped into the basin came up heavy and red.

I told myself the correct order. I was doing the last duty of the Crescent Sister I had almost become. A Crescent Sister did not fear death. The smell of iron and the ruin of a man's skull would not break me, because I had trained for this since I was fourteen.

The cloth and the water and the prayer, and the blood.

The red rose slow at first, then rushing. The blood on my hands, the blood on the floor, the blood drying on my cheek. All of it seemed to pulse and glow, and a heat I had never felt before pressed outward from behind my eyes, filling my vision until the chapel walls dissolved.

The world drowned in red.