OCTOBER 2002

At the heart of the village square, there stands upon a granite plinth the Maiden of War. A sentinel in peasant's garb, she bends her knees in warrior pose, the left leg advanced, the right bracing all her tensile grace. Hair and breasts bound, all her stone muscles flexed. Her sword is ready, the unwavering point aimed towards the castle sleeping in the distance and, beyond it, the beasts that will once again descend from the mountains. She is young and ageless and holds high her shield, an aegis with the face of Baphomet whom she had known, slain, and—depending on the story you hear—loved.

Who is this shield-maiden? Her name has long-buried itself in mystery and myth; this rich soil springs a labyrinthine wilderness of names and origins. Some say she was the only daughter of one of the Four Kings of the region, the youngest of a large royal litter and, because she was female, the least important. While her father's dark gaze shadowed her countless brothers, she slipped noiselessly out of the castle, out of memory, and into the village where she married a blacksmith. Others claim that she was born a peasant and had always lived amongst the common folk as a skilled huntress, evading the sight of kings until she took up the sword her husband had forged for her and slew the great, horned devil with eyes of fire.

And what of this demon from the high Carpathian peaks?

He reveals himself to the world once a millennium to feast upon the rich banquet of souls arrayed before him. In the interregnums between such periods of darkness, he slumbers in a four-pillared chamber beneath the mountains, slowly digesting the meat of his last quarry. The spirits of those trapped in his belly are forever barred from entering heaven. When he wakes, the pillars fall, and the earth shatters. All the waters of underground rivers burst free, flooding valleys and forests. The moon and sun turn sanguine. The clouds rain blood. He brings with him all the legions of Hell: all the strigoi and moroi and their endless hunger, the gnashing, many-headed balauri, and all the malevolent sylphs of the wind.

They scour the earth of all its living flesh; they crown their heads with the skulls of fallen kings.

—

In every incarnation of the tale, the demon encounters the maiden. An inevitable collision. Always they meet, at the crossroads beneath a moonless sky in one version; a ruined bridge in another. Always he is captivated by her rough, impenetrable beauty. A fortress slowly preparing itself for a siege. Always he comes for her, wishing to possess her down to the marrow, to taste and savor her for a thousand years, for there is no love greater than one which will endure millennia. Perhaps this is why she always allows his approach, the wrapping of his claws around her waist, his scorching, Stygian embrace.

The maiden permits the demon one sulfurous kiss before she sinks her sword into his heart.

We do not know if she loved him. In some stories, she is overwhelmed by unholy desire when she sets her eye upon the beast. She forgets her fidelity to her husband. Sometimes this beast is that same blacksmith husband, a cursed man who grows horns and fangs and drowns the world in blood when the day comes and whom she slays with the very sword he made her.

After his death, she weathers the passing of years for his return. Perhaps, nestled in the bloom of her eternal vigil, is the seed of ardor; for what greater love can there be than a love which endures?

—

Even in this century, the villagers remember the war maiden's victory over the damned.

The first day of October is the Feast of Swords. Grandmothers adorn the maiden's statue with delicate wreaths of umbellifer blossoms. The bread maker and his baker's dozen of sons and daughters prepare a king's ransom worth of fried papanașis cloaked in breadcrumbs and powdered sugar for the celebrants. They go door to door to peddle their pastries, earn a lei or two. Perhaps some eggs, some apples. A carafe of goat's milk. There is always something; people are invariably generous on this day.

At sunset, the story begins. The children watch the puppet master's jovial simulacrum of the old tale, and the adults watch a dance. Masked fiends carouse to the sound of drums; songs haunt the shimmering air. Amongst the shiver and quake of colorful, grotesque bodies, the blacksmith, the devil, and the maiden of war engage in a pas de trois by firelight. Always and together, they dance out the story to its end.

But the Feast of Swords has always been a day that ends like every other. After the music finishes, the masked demons pull away their skins to disclose their flushed, happy, human faces. The puppets are put to rest in their leather valise, where they will repose for another year. The maiden of war returns to her house, where she scrubs her face of its theater makeup, puts on a nightdress, and prays to an icon of Mother Miranda. Already her mind is preoccupied with the next morning's chores, the cooking of breakfast, the slopping of pigs.

When she sleeps, she does not dream of demons; she dreams of freshly-baked bread.

—

October 1st, 2002. The Feast of Swords begins with the passing of Maria Lupu at dawn. She dies upon a medical cot on the first story of the Florescu house, a clinic built during the early years of the First World War. The clinic housed all the dead and dying soldiers that had returned from the trenches and, a summer later, victims of the Spanish Flu. Now Maria Lupu's ghost joins them. Another mother's death. Another motherless seven-year-old girl. This time, her name is not Odette Florescu but Elena Lupu.

And so the cycle begins again, thinks Odette. Not bitterly—matter-of-factually. Wearily. Victor had woken her up before cock's crow, woke her to the death rattle from the floor below, the angry cries of Maria's husband, the weeping of her daughter. All the noises of mortality strangling the air. Odette is no stranger to them, having become inured to such sounds since her earliest childhood. The songs of death, that exhausting troubadour always playing at her door.

At twenty-seven years old, Odette Florescu is headstrong and Spartan. Tall. The long, black curls of her girlhood are no more; she keeps her hair cut to the level of her jawline. The straw bear which she once adored now lies forgotten at the bottom of the traveling trunk in her bedroom. She wears her left eye in a rope around her neck and no longer believes in ghosts. No longer believes that the bodies in the embalming room might climb out of their freezers and stalk the clay-white corridors of her house. Why should she? She has never seen it happen.

It is the living you must fear, not the dead.

She descends the staircase, sweeps through the clinic proper, not realizing that she is moving with the ballerina's grace inherited from her mother—amongst a host of other qualities. Her mother's eyes and lungs and blood, for instance. Her mother's passionate belief that the show—be it a dance or everyday life—must always go on. Even at this preternatural hour, Odette is fully dressed, wearing her father's trousers and button-up shirt, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, her arms bearing linen for the corpse.

Leonardo Lupu and his daughter had spent the night by Maria's bedside, the former offering fervent prayers to Mother Miranda and the Black God, while the latter held her mother's hand as life seeped out of it. Elena is still clutching it when Odette enters the room. As her father gathers Leonardo's heaving shoulders and guides him out of the house to console him, Odette drapes the linen sheet over the body. She gently untangles the girl from her mother's cold fingers.

"I know," Odette murmurs as Elena lets her mother go with a ragged, tearful gasp. "I know." When I lost my mother, I wept and wept oceans until there was nothing but a desert in me. "Let me help you."

She wipes at the girl's tears with a clean square of cloth.

"It hurts," Elena whispers hoarsely, her thin shoulders curling as her hands rise to press at her heart. She does not have a straw bear to hold onto, as Odette once had, a long time ago. "It hurts here."

Odette pulls away, inwardly searching for the perfunctory words of comfort. Your heart hurting only means that your mother is making space for herself within it, so you can carry her wherever you go. Your heart breaking only means that you are alive.

Everything she thought of sounded naive and infantile. Had such platitudes worked upon her when Odette, herself, had been a newly-motherless child twenty years ago? No—she had swatted them away like flies, quickly learning that, even as a child weaned on fairy tales, she preferred the truth.

"It will never stop hurting," she says softly. "But you will learn to carry it." You will learn to eat and sleep with it, laugh and cry and breathe with it. Already, she is thinking of making breakfast for the girl. Some soup, some bread. A glass of milk. Morning air.

"Look, the sun is rising," she says, pointing to the golden square of light that has slipped like a thief through the window.

Elena nods and rubs at the last tear on her cheek. Already she is learning.

"I see it now."

—

By the time Luiza Cozma arrives at the clinic, Victor has prepared Maria Lupu's death certificate, and Odette has already transported her body into the embalming room. Here, beneath the white glare of the only florescent lights in this part of the village, Odette and Luiza prepare the body for burial. With all the care that mothers give their newborns, they wash the cooled skin with disinfectant, close the eyes, and suture the lips shut. While Luiza flexes and massages the limbs, Odette mixes a solution containing formaldehyde, ethanol, humectants, and water in a tin bucket. She quickly calculates the ratios according to Maria's height, weight, and degree of physical trauma (none) and pours the final concoction into the tank of the embalming machine. The sharp, pickled stink of antiseptic engulfs the room.

"Where is she to be buried?" Odette asks, guiding the nozzle from the embalming machine to Maria's neck, to the incision Luiza has made to the carotid artery for the fluid to enter through. The machine begins its work, feeding the solution into the body, pushing out the blood. "Potter's Field? The church?"

"Beneath the bone trees," Luiza says decisively, once again rubbing the extremities of the body, this time to ensure the equal dispersion of the embalming fluid. Odette follows suit, pressing palm and heel into the skin, its pallor now turning rosy from the solution, as though it is coming back to life. The wonder of it is enough to distract her from the fetid odor of formaldehyde, of draining blood, and putrefying flesh. "Leonardo wants a casket at the graveyard, but Maria will be safer in the woods."

Over the years, numberless coffins at the graveyard and Potter's Field were exhumed by anonymous hands, the corpses stolen. But grave robbers had not yet struck the bone trees, that secret copse of young silver firs with skull-white bark in the Forbidden Woods. Some bodies were buried here in fetal positions to return to the black loam, to become food for the trees that marked their graves.

"Won't Leonardo object?"

At this, the older woman smiles, gesturing for Odette to help her shift Maria's body to her side, to move her knees up against her chest. "It's for his wife's good. Leonardo Lupu may be a curmudgeon, but he loved Maria. He will see sense."

Luiza Cozma is right, of course. As a matriarch of the village who nurses the sick, tutors the young, and buries the dead, she knows everyone's name. Their desires and dreams, the way they think and perceive the world. A good nurse must have good eyes, Luiza once told her, tapping the corner of her nose. If you have any sense, girl, you'll watch what I do, which is to watch everyone else. Learn their secrets and mysteries.

"Don't you agree, Odette?"

"The bone trees it is."

They continue to work in tandem, in silence. As Luiza mops the blood into the drain, Odette tenderly brushes and braids Maria's bright hair, remembering evenings from her childhood, combing her mother's hair by candlelight as Elisabeta read from a book of fairy tales. Although Odette no longer believes in ghosts, she allows herself to dream. Allows herself to think that her mother's spirit is in this room, now, guiding another mother into the afterlife. Together, they swaddle Maria's stiffening body in a new bolt of linen as though she were newly born and sleeping. A daughter of the earth coming back home.

Later, when the sun is at its zenith, Odette, Luiza and Elena will follow Leonardo Lupu as he carries his wife into the Forbidden Woods. There they will dig a cradle of soil at the base of a silver fir tree, careful to avoid its tangle of roots. Leonardo will lower Maria into the ground as Luiza prays for the Black God to welcome Maria's spirit into His infinite embrace. Elena will sing His glory, her voice vibrant with worship. Leonardo will fall to his knees with his eyes raised to the sky as he invokes Mother Miranda's name.

Odette will say nothing and sing nothing. Except for her father, the other villagers are unaware of her lack of devotion, absent since the day Dr. Victor Florescu plucked the infected eye from her skull. Still, she presses her clasped hands to her forehead in a pantomime of supplication. The show must go on.

—

Now is the golden hour, that time of day when sunlight gleams like butter melting over the horizon, coats the oat grasses with an amber glaze, burnishes the skin. All the edges of things become soft and nebulous in this light, objects slipping into each other like colliding dreams. The world slowly shutting its eyes.

The sentinel appears suddenly in the periphery of your vision, approaching on horseback: a handsome young man in the gray cotton uniform of a World War II cavalry soldier astride a white saddle horse. His hair is spun pyrite, worn long and tied back at the nape of his neck. He scintillates. A living god cast in bronze cantering proudly through the Fallow Plot, past Luiza Cozma's house and towards the Florescu clinic where his fiancée waits for him. His name is Stelian Uriaș, Chief Uriaș's eldest son, and he has come to whisk Odette Florescu away to the village square.

He leaps off his mare, knocks three times on the clinic door, and lights a smoke, knowing that his intended likes to bide her time. When Odette finally appears, his cigarette is down to its last ashes. She leaves the house with aristocratic contempt, like a queen with an invisible retinue. She moves to him slowly, knowing he is impatient. Knows that he secretly enjoys the delay, the kiss at the end of a long hour. The pleasure, my love, lies in the waiting.

She steals his cigarette and presses it to her mouth, taking a long drag until the ashes nearly reach her lips.

"You're wearing a skirt."

Odette stamps the cigarette beneath her heel. "Always a first time for everything." She is wearing a new button-up shirt and the accordion skirt she has borrowed from Luiza. "But this one has no pockets, so I can't bring my gun."

"You can have my revolver. I'll use my rifle."

"Don't be morbid, my love." Just this evening, I would prefer not to think about death. "Nothing bad will happen at the Feast of Swords unless you're a demon."

But Stelian is already wrapping the gun belt around her waist. "You never know. We still haven't found out who took my uncle." He lifts Odette's chin, but she is stubborn, refusing to meet him. "And remember Ilie's boy? The only thing he left behind was his left foot. Remember your mother."

Odette extricates herself from Stelian's grasp. "And the grave robbers. The disappearing bodies," she says crisply, readjusting the belt. Because Stelian is a sentinel, he is right about such things, in the same way that Luiza is right about corpses. "Whatever is out there will get us, alive or dead. Gun or no gun."

Stelian nods solemnly, kissing her cheek. "But it is always better to have a gun."

—

They arrive at the village square just as the festivities begin. As Stelian hitches his mare and Odette is smoothing down her shirt, a flock of children runs past them towards the puppet theater. She tries to see if Elena is among them, but they have long swept past her vision, their faces blurred. Stelian wraps his arm around her hips. Together, they move into the circle of color and light; beneath the Maiden of War, couples dance to a spirited, prewar ballad playing on the Volta Graphophone. Stelian tugs Odette into the fold of music. She obliges him, stepping on his toes, twirling clumsily, then, laughing, breaking away from him, goading him into the arms of a grandmother who still remembers the steps to an old ragtime dance.

Flushed with euphoria, Odette almost forgets the weight of the revolver at her hips. She feels as light as a nymph, as insubstantial as a specter. She drifts amongst the color as the evening wears on, watching revelers at play, catching snatches of conversations and secrets. Night falls, the lamps shine.

"Odette Florescu in a dress. I thought I'd never see the day."

She turns to the honeyed voice of the Duke. "Odette Florescu in a skirt, to be exact. Luiza's skirt."

"Ah, I see now. Nevertheless, you look splendid."

The Duke has come rumbling down from Castle Dimitrescu in his wooden vardo, his Emporium of curios and novelties, to set up shop at the outer orbit of the Feast. He seats his massive, cetacean frame comfortably in the back of his wagon, hands resting on the endless rolls and folds of his flesh. At his bare feet is an agglomeration of wonders: diaphanous silks, gold pocket watches of the hunter case type, a Fabergé egg containing a miniature soldier on horseback (a small Stelian for her pocket, if she had pockets). There are pearl necklaces that once belonged to a Romanian countess, a fleet of Underwood typewriters in mint condition, and—more wondrous still—bags of processed flour and sugar, canned meats and vegetables, purchased from the hypermarkets in Bucharest, perhaps from a Kaufland or even a Carrefour. Odette adores the modern, industrial look of them: the lurid, block-lettering, the elementary designs of mass-commercialization. They remind her that there is another world beyond the forest, another century. Unlike everyone in the village, the Duke is free to come and go as he pleases.

He watches Odette with shrewd, active eyes as she picks up a box of American-style cereal.

"That, my discerning young friend, will be fifty lei."

With regret, Odette returns the cereal to its original perch, beside the countess's ropes of pearls. "No pockets, no money. But—" She moves close to him, rests her head against one of the doors of his vardo. There is a wistful expression on her face. "—I'll buy everything if you smuggle me out of here in your wagon."

The Duke takes a puff upon his cigar, a Cohiba Dominican, its peppery aroma engulfing the night. He contemplates her offer seriously for a moment, then rolls the Cohiba's cherry on an ashtray in the shape of a dragon. "I should think not. Unfortunately for both of us, I'm not at all willing to incur Mother Miranda's wrath. Or your fiancée's, as a matter of fact. Speaking of, have you set the date?"

"The date?"

Smiling, he gestures at her engagement ring. "Don't tell me you've forgotten that you've been affianced! The date of your wedding! Inquiring minds would like to know."

Odette looks down at her hand, at the coil of silver adorning her fourth finger. Her cheeks burn.

"Mother Miranda has expressed interest in presiding over your ceremony. The chief's son and the doctor's daughter. That is an aristocratic union in of itself. There are rumors that Lady Dimitrescu herself might attend."

How many times had Odette forgotten? Stelian had proposed to her a month ago in a jubilant rush, in the woods perhaps—or had it been at her bedroom, after the first night they spent together? She had said yes, though she no longer remembers how or why. Perhaps she had been half-sleep then, still believing she was dreaming and that one day she might wake up, ringless and untethered. They had been childhood friends, each other's first love. The natural order of things was to become husband and wife. Here, in this village where time runs in circles, and history repeats itself.

"You look dreadfully uncertain, my dear."

Odette offers him a too-wide smile, an exaggerated shrug. "Fools in love often forget about the particulars," she quips, all too blithely. "We haven't discussed it yet, but we will. Soon."

At this, the Duke takes another drag of his cigar, scrutinizing her through the veil of cigar fumes.

"Of course."

Stelian materializes behind her, encircling a long arm around Odette's waist, murmurs into her hair. "They're going to tell the story now. Our story."

Their story. Seven autumns ago, Odette had played the maiden and Stelian her blacksmith husband at the Feast of Swords. Her memory of it is fragmented. She had arrived late at her cues, and Stelian had spent too much time holding her when the scene demanded it. His father, Chief Uriaș, had played the demon. Had almost kissed her, Odette, the eidetic image of her mother. But he had pulled away at the last moment, shedding the goatskin devil mask he wore to the surprise and delight of the audience. This recollection burns through her like a branding iron.

She does not want to watch the story.

As if understanding he is no longer privy to Odette's rising doubts, the Duke turns to a new customer, and Odette turns to face Stelian. He is heavy-lidded, lips wet from beer. Her fingers rise to the collar of his uniform to fasten the button that has come loose. "I have a better idea."

He presses a sticky kiss at the nape of her neck, just below her ear. "Tell me."

"Take me away from here."

—

This is not the first time they make love, but it is the first time he takes her in the open night, in the apse of the ruined Orthodox Church that lies at the head of the Lone Road. Beneath the hot luminescence of the moon, he kneels before her like an adoring supplicant, lifts the bladed folds of her dress, and venerates the warm skin beneath. The pillars of her thighs, the alcove of her pleasure that he worries with his lips and tongue. Her back flushed against ancient stone, her shirt discarded on the floor, bra loosened, her hips moving to her lover's worship.

Odette closes her eyes and thinks if only someone could watch us. Here and now, when she is sure that no witness will doubt her willingness to play along. To perform the scenes of village life. Birth, sex, marriage, death. She has allowed Stelian to love her, make love to her, which must mean she must want him to marry her, tie her to this crumbling landscape, its withering crops, and decaying houses.

"I want this," she says hoarsely, grasping the rope of Stelian's shining hair as though her hold on him might make everything come true. "I want you." This cloistered life. This sedate, stagnant death.

—

She does not finish. Stelian suddenly pulls away from her, panting heavily. Pupils wide, his hair a wild mane, roughened by Odette's fist. She lets out a soft cry at his departure, slams that fist against the stone behind her. He covers his sweaty hand over her mouth, hushing her.

"Someone is nearby. I heard footsteps."

Odette turns her head, wrenches herself free from his smothering, annoyed that while Stelian was pleasuring her, he was focused on other things, listening to other noises. He is alert, his blue gaze cutting through the darkness. Odette grasps his jaw, makes him look at her.

"It's just you and me, my love."

"Odette." He looks helpless in her clutches, like a bird not knowing if it wants to stay or flutter away. "It's nearly midnight. My turn to patrol the eastern perimeter."

Never make love to a sentinel. Distracted, they will cut the act short, think they are in a war, like foot soldiers in the trenches waiting to die.

"Go, then."

She frees him. As she hooks her bra, Stelian stands before her, torn and uncertain. "Come with me. It's not safe out here."

"You gave me your gun."

"Odette—"

Desperate exasperation in his voice. He does not like it when Odette becomes suddenly closed to him, obdurate. She has trained her eye from him, now searching for her discarded shirt, which she has lost amongst the rubble. When she had run into this place an hour ago, she had unbuttoned it, shed it like snakeskin. Stelian doesn't move to help her, wanting her to look at him and accept his unspoken desire to be her white knight. He wants to gather her in his embrace, bear her away from the darkness.

The clouds in the sky are now shadowing the moon. Odette places a hand on her hip, runs her fingers over Stelian's forehead, brushing away his locks. Her attempt at tender restitution; he will not leave her otherwise. "I won't return to the village with you. I need air. Time to think. But I can forgive you if you do one thing for me."

Stelian traps her wrist in his fingers, presses his mouth against the palm of her hand. "Anything."

"Return to the bone trees in the morning. See if the graves there haven't been disturbed."

He takes both her hands, brushing grateful kisses upon each knuckle, too relieved to question the specificity of her request. "You won't stay too long out here, will you?"

She kisses him. "We'll see each other tomorrow. I promise."

He leaves then, first walking backward so he can keep his eyes upon her. Then, when he reaches the edge of the ruin, he turns and jogs off into the dark. In his wake, Odette folds her hands over her chest, bracing herself against the chill of the deepening night.

—

"It's just you and me now."

A voice, not her own, deep from the tenebrous gloom.

Then: an atom of light at the edge of Odette's vision. The sound of burning. The savor of a freshly-lit Romeo y Julieta, its hazy notes of cedar and leather seducing the dagger of her body, compelling her to confront the stranger. She draws the revolver from its holster, aims it at that dot of fire, the thin serpent of smoke coiling up into the sky. Somewhere nearby, a low, brief laugh.

"That's not going to do you much good, darling. Not against wolves. Not against monsters. Not against me."

The gun flies out of her hand, stopping at an indeterminate point in the air. Above her, the clouds separate, revealing the full, stark face of the moon and the silhouette of a man standing beneath it—a shape from her childhood's most violent memory.

She has seen him once, and only the once, but she has remembered all-too-clearly the wide-brimmed hat, the greatcoat of gabardine, the twin dark lens of his spectacles—the matted, gray hair; the rough growth of beard. Twenty years later, Lord Heisenberg has not changed; it is as though he has stepped out of a sepia photograph, striding heavily across the Lone Road, this tatterdemalion machinist whom she is certain is the originator of all her nightmares and unfathomable dreams. He is a man whom she has prayed to at the black church; she has knelt before his icon, murmuring the invocations she learned by rote, disbelieving his existence until he appeared in the flesh. He is, to her, the truest of the Four Lords because she has seen him with her own eye.

"You were watching us." Just as she had wanted: someone to see that she, too, could live and love the life arranged neatly before her like a row of Tarot cards.

Karl Heisenberg slowly closes the distance between them, shoulders shrugging through cumuli of smoke. "I didn't watch you. I heard you." A grin appears beneath the brim of his hat. "Sounded like you were putting on a show. Too bad your man seemed like he was out of his depth." He sits at the crest of a fallen arch, lifts the cigar to his lips, draws its flavor into his mouth, holding the taste before releasing it in tendrils of pungent fumes. Then again. Even in this shiver of light, Odette can see the rhythmic pull and push of air. I can watch him watch me. I should be afraid. I should be cold.

"He was doing fine," she lies.

"Whatever you say."

"It wasn't meant to be a show. It was meant to be convincing."

A dry laugh escapes his lips. "Try harder next time."

She is not afraid. She is not cold.

"If you name the time and place, my lord."

The machinist shifts forward to the sound of her voice, which is the edge of a dark, unmapped world. She is stepping into his sphere to take a closer look; he allows her to do so. This is the first time he has ever seen her, the daughter of his vassal. In proximity, he can study the mechanisms of her movements as she wraps her arms around the plane of her stomach. Her bare collar bones shifting beneath the moon's phosphorescence. He can see where the resemblance to her father begins and ends. The nose. The hands. The eye. Beyond that, everything else is hers—a thousand new enigmas. Dr. Victor Florescu had spoken of her often, too often, that Heisenberg has wondered if the daughter might become a distraction to the father's work in his nascent rebellion.

What would happen if she disappeared?

Heisenberg draws on his cigar, briefly contemplates the idea of carrying her off, spreading her across the medical table, plunge into each enigma. Disassemble her.

What would happen then?

"Go home," he says, rising to his booted feet. "Your papa's going to worry." Placing the cigar between his teeth, he snaps his fingers, the revolver dropping from its suspension with a metallic clatter before Odette's feet. "Too many monsters and wolves out tonight. And, well, me."

Odette takes the gun, turns it in her hands as though expecting to see something of it transmuted, affected by its brief sojourn through the air. But Karl Heisenberg is not that type of magician; he is another being entire. When she looks up at him, he is holding out her shirt.

"I'm thinking you're going to need this, too."

She takes the shirt, fingers barely grazing the seams of his glove. As he sweeps past her, he tips his hat sardonically, as though he has performed enough damned chivalry for a lifetime. Beyond the steps of the ruined church, Heisenberg disappears into the shadows between trees, leaving the smell of leather and cedar in his wake.

Odette slips her arms through the sleeves of her shirt, slowly buttons it up to her collarbone. She presses two fingers against her jugular and counts her racing pulse. The test confirms her hypothesis: she has never felt more lurid and alive than she has felt tonight.

—

It is a day that does not end like all the others. The music dies, the masked demons pull away their skins to disclose their human faces. The puppets are put to rest in their leather valise for another year. Odette returns to her house, where she sets aside the gun, sheds the layers of her clothes, pours water over her scorching neck, slips into the skin of her bed, naked.

When she sleeps, she does not dream of freshly-baked bread; she dreams of demons.