Dance with the Devil

something, anything, even though it had not worked.
        “Where did you hope to get to?” he asked.
        “Anywhere else,” she said.
        “Back to Alex?”
        “It would be better with him than with you,” she said.
        “That's a lie!” he snapped, his face suffusing with blood in the white glow of the flashlight. In his voice, she heard a more obsessive hatred than she had ever heard from Alex Boland. He said, “I told you we wouldn't hurt you.” His voice was so cold and brittle that it frightened Katherine.
        She did not respond.
        Michael raised his hand and, in one utterly vicious sweep that was too fast for her to avoid, he slapped her across the face.
        Her head jerked back. Her mouth sagged open as a flash of white and yellow pain exploded across her forehead. That was the first time she had ever realized that pain had a color. She wondered if there were different colors for different kinds of pain.
        The hand came around again and struck her more gently than it had the first time. At least, it seemed to strike with less force, though that might only have been because she was too numb to properly interpret its impact.
        However hard it had been, it was quite hard enough, for it knocked her down as if her knees were jelly. The two boys let go of her arms.
        “Sisters!” Michael called to some of the women in the cult. “Come fetch your future relative.”
        She tried to get up again.
        She couldn't manage it.
        Darkness fell around her like the great, black wings of a bird, and she did not know anything else that happened for a while…

CHAPTER 17
        
        Fire.
        Heat, little smoke.
        Figures moving in the rippling currents of hot air, distorted like figures in funhouse mirrors…
        Voices.
        Singing? No, chanting.
        Katherine came fully awake and found that she was sitting in the snow not half a dozen steps away from the bonfire. The heat from it had flushed her face. Her hands were behind her, as if propping her up, but when she tried to move them, she found that they were tied together rather securely. The circulation in her hands had been affected, and her fingertips tingled unpleasantly.
        “How are you feeling?” Michael asked, appearing suddenly before her and smiling as if they were still close, as if nothing untoward had past between them.
        “You hit me.”
        “I truly do apologize for that,” he said, the smile fading to be replaced by an expression of shame.
        “I'm sure.”
        “But I am!” he said. “You see, I was so certain you would welcome the family, be enthusiastic about joining it. I was willing to accept a slight rejection. But a major denial got to me. Again, I apologize.”
        “You're insane.”
        He laughed again. “Why? because I believe in Satan? You really don't think that He will show up tonight, that He will rise out of the earth to dance with you.”
        “No. Not for a minute.”
        “But He will. And once He has, there will be no more misunderstandings between us.”
        She said nothing.
        He stood up. “I have to begin the main part of the ceremony now. Are you comfortable enough?”
        “Untie my hands.”
        “In a while,” he said.
        “When?”
        “When the dance begins.” He turned and walked away from her, took a position in a circle of crimson cloth which had been stretched out in the snow on the north side of the fire.
        Katherine wondered if anyone in Owlsden could see the glow from the fire, then decided there was no hope of that. It was not only shielded by the trees on this side of the ski run and the trees on the other side, but by the dense sheets of snow as well. If they stood by the windows for an hour, they would be lucky to see even a spark. Michael had been careful to place this devil's dance farther away from Owlsden than the previous three had been.
        Michael had begun to chant, his arms raised in a pleading gesture to the leaping flames before him, his toboggan hat off, his yellow hair lying wetly across his broad, handsome forehead.
        The other cultists seemed absorbed in the crazy rituals, and Katherine wondered if it would be possible to rise up and edge carefully backwards into the shadows of the trees, out of the circle of the bonfire's glow. If she could slip out of their sight, she could go any of half a dozen