A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds by Tom Piccirilli

and burned down a children's leukemia hospital before arriving late to the sabbat. He'd been the first to die, drooling flame, with my blade between his ribs. The fire had poured out of his chest while his dying angry gaze softened, both of us surrounded by the vengeful ghosts of children.
    Elijah, who'd loved Danielle almost more than I had. He wanted me dead as much as he wished to face his namesake, the most holy of prophets.
    And retarded giant Herod, the only real innocent, who'd known what would happen long before it did, but none of us had listened.
    A slab had been set in the empty tenth vault with Danielle's name chiseled on it, as if Jebediah still wafted for a time when he could recover her from a grave full of my protective charms in Calvary. I didn't need anyone else to raise Danielle. I'd had my chances before and I knew it wasn't worth the price. Like my father, she would never be the same. Too much of her soul had fled, and I didn't dare discover what remained. It might be too much like her to resist. I'd stopped her own teenage sister from digging at her majik-steeped grave, bent on revenge.
    Elijah's living hatred swelled in the darkness. Jebediah shoved at the slab and it creaked aside with a hollow roll that echoed throughout the tombs. He reached into the crypt and, like a careful lover, placed his hands gently against a shadow within and drew it into the light. It was a woman's body.
    With his split tongue slipping out both sides of his mouth, Gawain made a sound of caution at the back of his throat.
    Jebediah's beatific smile grew only mildly more sadistic as he spun to show me his hands, moving his fingers down the cream-colored angles of flesh inch by inch, pressing against golden hair and burrowing as though digging though graveyard dirt.
    "What game is this?" I hissed.
    At last, after another anxious moment, he revealed the face of my lost love, Danielle.
    The edges of my vision turned black, then red, and I crumpled. "Oh my Christ, you bastard."
    "I got her for you."
    Dani. All our nights together, the wash of the pond, and the shouts of our fathers. My life, my girl in her crypt now as beautiful as ever, somehow remaining as perfect as always. God, I never could have expected this. My broken charms lay strewn about her corpse like the petals of her prom corsage. Even with his new coven it must've taken him a thousand hours of fiddling with my safeguard spells to unearth her. But he'd been willing to do it.
    "Aren't you pleased?"
    My father skipped from foot to foot, clapping and chuckling as the bells on him rang. He kept going, "Woo woo, woo woo." He seemed to recall Danielle as he peered into the tomb, or perhaps he only remembered that part of his life before the paint, back when he lent me the car on Friday nights to take her to the movies. He'd died trying to save Dani as much as me. He'd been damned himself for nearly as many reasons as I'd been, and I wasn't sure which of us had proven to be the greater failure.
    Now he had another role to play. Our ill-fated coven deserved a doomed mascot. Maybe he saw himself the way he was meant to be—dead in his coffin, at rest, a fool perhaps but not a harlequin. Gawain tried to calm him, both of them making gurgling noises.
    Bridgett said, "She's not that pretty."
    Jebediah stroked his sparse goatee, his eyes almost bleeding his obsessions without any discernment. Perhaps in heaven one sin really was just as bad as another. But not here, Jesus no.
    Dry heaves backed me up to the other side of the crypts. That freezing slate felt white-hot against my neck. I staggered back to Dani, and though my hand trembled I managed to touch her arm. Her flesh was neither warm nor cold. I could barely keep from climbing up onto the slab with her. The ancient words were already on my tongue because I so desperately wanted to raise her now.
    I croaked, "Let her go. Let them all go."
    "That's not what you truly want."
    "Jebediah—"
    "I didn't actually bring you back