By the light of the moon

toward Jilly, an apparition as real in blazing summer
sunlight as any that had ever haunted beneath a moon, reaching out
with her right hand as she approached, as though seeking aid.
    No more able to move than if she had been rooted to the ground,
Jilly shrank from the ghostly touch, thrust out her bleeding hand
to ward off contact, but when the dead woman's fingers touched her
hand – with a sense of pressure, coldness – the
apparition vanished.
    'It's going to happen today,' she said miserably. 'Soon.'
    'Happen? What?' Dylan asked.
    Far away a man shouted, and another man answered in a shout.
    'They've seen us,' Dylan said.
    The vast aviary of the sky contained just one bird, a circling
hawk gliding silently on currents high above, and no birds erupted
into flight from the grass around them, yet she heard wings, at
first a whispery flutter, then a more insistent rustle.
    'They're coming,' Dylan warned, speaking not of birds but of
assassins.
    'Wings,' Jilly said, as the whisking thrum of invisible doves
rapidly grew more turbulent. 'Wings.'
    'Wings,' said Shepherd, touching the bloody hand with which she
had tried to fend off the dead woman, and which she still held out
before her.
    The chop-chop-chop of automatic gunfire, real to this
place and time, was answered by the more deliberate crack of
high-powered rifles that only she could hear, by shots fired in
another place and in a time yet to come – but coming
fast.
    'Jilly,' said Shepherd, startling her by the use of her name,
which he had never before spoken.
    She met his lotus-green eyes, which weren't in the least dreamy,
nor at all evasive as they had been in the past, but clear and
direct and sharp with alarm.
    'Church,' said Shepherd.
    'Church,' she agreed.
    'Shep!' Dylan urged, as bullets kicked up plumes of dirt and
torn grass from the hillside less than twenty feet below them.
    Shepherd O'Conner brought here to there, folded the sunshine,
the golden grass, the flying bullets, and unfolded a cool vaulted
space with stained-glass windows like giant puzzles fully
solved.

42
    The nave of this Spanish baroque church, huge and old
and lovely – currently undergoing a little restoration
– featured a long central barrel vault, deep groin vaults on
two sides, and a long center-aisle colonnade of massive thirty-foot
columns that stood on ornately sculpted six-foot pedestals.
    The crowd in the church, perhaps three hundred, was dwarfed by
the space and by the dimensions of the architectural elements. Even
dressed in finery, they could not compete with the colorific
cascades of light flung down upon them by the backlit western
windows.
    The pipework of the scaffolding – erected for the
restoration of the painted-plaster frieze that enhanced three walls
of the nave – blocked little of the jewel-bright glory of the
windows. Incoming sunlight pierced sapphire, ruby, emerald,
amethyst, and adamantine-yellow shapes of glass, scattering gems of
light across half the nave and dappling portions of the center
aisle.
    Within ten racing heartbeats of arrival, Dylan swept the great
church with his absorbent gaze, and knew a thousand details of its
ornamentation, form, and function. As testament to the depth of the
baroque design, knowledge of a thousand details left him as
ignorant of the structure as an Egyptologist would be ignorant of a
newfound pyramid if he studied nothing more than the six feet of
its pinnacle not buried in Sahara sands.
    Following a quick survey of the church, he lowered his attention
to the pigtailed girl, perhaps nine years old, who had been
exploring the shadowy back corner of the massive nave into which
Shepherd had folded them. She gasped, she blinked, she gaped, spun
around on one patent-leather shoe, and ran to rejoin her parents in
their pew, no doubt to tell them that either saints or witches had
arrived.
    Although redolent of incense, as in Jilly's visions, the air
shivered neither with music nor with a tumult of wings. The
hundreds here assembled spoke in murmurs, and their voices traveled
as softly as the fragrance of incense through these columned
spaces.
    Most of those in the pews sat in the front half of the church,
facing the sanctuary. If any had been turned in their seats to talk
with people in the rows behind them, they must not have glimpsed
the infolding witchery, for no one stood to get a better look or
called out in surprise.
    Nearer, tuxedoed young men escorted late arrivals down the
center aisle to their seats. The