Page 49 of Blood Hymn

She comes without a struggle. She thinks I'm taking her somewhere. It's a small room, paneled, with choir robes hanging on hooks along one wall and a window too small for a child to crawl through. I sit her down in a folding chair beside a table stacked with offering envelopes.

"Evie?"

I step back out through the doorway and pull the vestry door shut behind me. There's a heavy iron bolt on the sanctuary side, painted over in white so many times it's barely a bolt anymore. I work it free with my thumb and slam it home.

On the other side of the door, Charlotte starts to call my name.

I don't answer her. I walk to the nearest candle stand, a tall iron one with a dozen tapers burning, and I put my shoulder against it and push it over into the front pew. The candles scatter across the old varnished wood. The velvet banner that caught earlier is already burning in a slow crawl up the wall. I go to the next stand, and the next, and I topple every one of them, into the pews, onto the altar cloth, onto the carpet runner in the aisle. The hymnals catch like kindling. The chapel fills with yellow light and the sound of fire.

Behind the vestry door, Charlotte's voice rises.

I don't look back at it.

Silas is where I left him, sitting against the wall under the broken window with his hands pressed to his side and his head tipped back against the plaster. His eyes are open. He's been watching me.

I kneel beside him in the firelight. I put my hands over his on the wound, and the blood comes warm between all our fingers.

"Can you stand?"

"Help me."

I get my shoulder under his arm. He gets his feet under him on the second try, and he's so heavy, so much heavier than he should be, and we stagger together down the burning aisle past the dead guards and the toppled pews and the scorched banners, toward the open doors and the night.

On the top step, I stop. I look down into the bowl.

The bonfires are still burning on the rim. The water has filled the basin nearly to the church steps, black and still now, with masks floating on it like leaves. Beyond the rim, beyond the ridge, lie the parish and the town and the old Harlowe place with its pecan orchard and its guest house and its family chapel. The courthouse. The sheriff's station on Front Street, and the old jail on the corner, and the room beneath it.

Behind us, the fire is roaring now. It's reaching the roof beams. Somewhere in it, a voice has stopped calling my name.

I turn to Silas. His face is a shadow against the flames, and he's looking down at me.

"Burn it," I tell him. "All of it."

CHAPTER 18

SILAS

Idon't remember the walk up the ridge. I remember arriving at the top of it.

Evie gets me there somehow, half carrying me through the cedars with my arm across her shoulders and her feet bare on the gravel, and props me against the fender of the welding truck. Down in the bowl behind us, Harlowe Chapel has become a torch. Sparks spiral off the burning steeple into the black, and the glow lies across the flooded cemetery like a sheet of copper, lighting every mask still floating on the water.

"There's a transfer tank in the bed," I tell her. "A hundred gallons of gas, at least. The hose reel is on the side."

She's already climbing up to look. "Where first?"

"The Harlowe place." I have to stop and breathe. "Four miles out Parish 12, past the pecan orchard."

It takes both of us to get me into the passenger seat. When she slides behind the wheel, her eyes go once to my hands pressed against my side and to the state of my shirt, and her mouth tightens. She puts the truck in gear without a word.

We come down off the ridge and turn east, and for a mile there's no light anywhere. The whole parish is at the roadblocks, or home in bed, or floating in that basin. Then headlights swing toward us with a siren behind them, and her knuckles whiten on the wheel, and a volunteer fire truck roars past in the other direction toward the glow without slowing. Nobody glances twice at a welding rig on a back road.

The Harlowe place sits at the end of a half-mile drive lined with pecans, planted by some great-great-grandfather who wanted every visitor to understand how much he owned. The branches meet overhead, and in the headlights they form a tunnel, and at its end the house rises white and two-storied, with galleries up and down and eight columns across the front and every window dark.

I haven't driven up this lane in six years. I've watched it through a scope from the tree line more times than I can count.

"Guest house is around back," I tell her. "Start there."

She pulls around behind the big house. The little white cottage where I lived until I was twenty-nine is still standing, where my mother sang to me in Spanish and went silent whenever footsteps came up the walk. The porch has been swept. There are curtains in the windows that were never there before.