For now I had to ignore her and concentrate on the words and speaking them correctly.

  Juda stood watching us, his hands down by his sides. He didn’t seem to be upset or angry. Merely interested.

  We paused for the three breaths between the stanzas, then began the second.

  Juda seemed to grow bored. He hung his head, waiting for this to be over.

  I couldn’t see Trevalyan, for Juda stood between me and him. But I knew what he would say in reaction. Keep going. Don’t break the circle! Don’t break the chant!.

  Three breaths, then the third and last stanza.

  Then, silence.

  It was not the muffled silence of a fresh snowfall. I could feel the air almost throbbing in my ears. My own breath was loud. I could hear everyone else’s breathing, too.

  “Speak!” Trevalyan intoned in a voice that commanded. There was power in it that writhed and twisted in the air. “The voice that uses Juda, we command you to speak.” None of the wavering that often touched his voice could be heard now.

  Juda coughed, but his head remained hanging.

  “Speak!” Benedict commanded. “We who are friends of Juda demand to speak to the voice that uses him.”

  “Speak,” Broch called in his deep voice. “The voice that speaks through Juda, come forth.”

  “Speak!” I called, trying to make my voice as commanding and forceful as the others. “For I do not believe you exist and would rather laugh at the vacuum that you are.”

  Juda lifted his head and turned to face me. He wore no expression. Even his eyes seemed blank. “Oh, I exist, child.” Juda’s voice was flat, with barely any inflection. His accent was gone. The patronizing note was strong.

  Ghaliya’s hand squeezed mine, pinching. I barely noticed. “Who are you? What is your name?”

  “Names are for ephemerals who must find meaning or go mad.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought that the voice was very slightly effeminate. A woman’s voice?

  “Names are so that we may know each other,” Trevalyan said.

  Juda swung to face him. “But you do know me, child.”

  “I do?” Trevalyan said with a polite tone. “Enlighten me.”

  “I am all around you, fool.”

  “You speak with Juda’s voice. You might be far from here,” Trevalyan pointed out.

  The voice did not speak for a dozen heartbeats. “I am here,” it said shortly.

  Did it not understand what “far from here” meant?

  I am here. I am all around you. “Are you the town?” I asked. “Haigton Crossing…is you?”

  Juda swung to look at me, once more. “What you call the town is not me. I am me. I am here.”

  “The will of the Crossing,” Benedict said.

  Juda turned to face him. “Will. I will be. I am Will.”

  My heart scurried along. “How long have you been aware?” I asked.

  Broch shook his head, frowning.

  “Long? Aware?” Juda shook his head, even though there was still no expression on his face or in his eyes. “Perhaps you are not the one I wanted, after all.” He moved toward me and I took a half step backward, shocked.

  “Don’t break the circle!” Trevalyan warned.

  I held still as Juda stopped right in front of me. “The one who bore you was weak. She would not do, would not serve, would not hold…not for what is to come.”

  “What is to come?” Benedict said.

  Juda looked at him but did not move away from me. “What you call trouble. Toil and trouble. Terrible times. Dark ages.”

  “What do you mean, my mother would not serve?” I demanded.

  For the first time, Juda’s face showed an emotion. It was as though the longer the voice of the town was using him, the better it got at manipulating more than just his voice. The expression that appeared was a pitiless smile. “She could not stand where you are and do what you have done. She could not reach me. You did.”

  I was trembling and my hands, in Wim’s and Ghaliya’s, were sweating and slippery. I gripped their hands desperately. “You wanted me here instead. You killed her to get me here.”

  “She was weak, but she made sure you were strong. She sought out the one who would ensure it.”

  My father. Something in his bloodline? My mother deliberately searched for him?

  Ghaliya was weeping, her soft sobs tearing at me.

  “Oh, christ on a pony…” I breathed, my heart beating too fast, my breathing shallowing out. I tried to breathe deeply, but the panic hovered too close.

  “Anna,” Juda said.

  I looked at him, my eyes too wide, my heart thundering in my ears.

  It really was Juda. The entity, the will of the town, was gone. For good? Juda was watching me, a great weariness in his face. “Tell it to leave,” he said. “I remember it all now. It showed me what I did. You can dismiss it. It will listen to you. Tell it to go and I will tell you everything.”

  “Do what he says,” Trevalyan called out. “Command the voice to depart, and return when you call it.”

  I swallowed, and tried to regain an even breath—one that would let me speak.

  “Breathe, Anna,” Benedict said softly. “We have you. Nothing can reach you while the circle is whole.”

  My breathing slowed. I grew aware of my wet cheeks and the way the tears were growing cold on my skin. “Is the voice listening?” I asked Juda.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I command you, will of this town, the thing that is here and everywhere, leave us now. I will call for you another time. Until then, go.”

  “You will have need of me, child. Do not forget my power.”

  “Go!” I screamed.

  Juda’s head dropped to his chest.

  My breath hitched as I watched him.

  He lifted his head once more. It was Juda looking at me with his rich black eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Now I can use…” He lifted his arm, let it drop. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and shivered. “I’m sorry,” he told me. “It drove me to it. It would not stop talking to me, telling me what to do. I couldn’t sleep. On the solstice, when the veil is so thin and the voice so loud…I couldn’t stand it anymore.” He hung his head, and this time, I knew it was shame. Guilt.

  Then he wheeled around to face everyone in the circle. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  Olivia was weeping.

  Trevalyan’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “It wasn’t you.” His voice was broken.

  “It was,” Juda said. “I was aware the whole time. I just wanted it to stop and that was what I had to do to make it stop. But…” He took a deep breath, which escaped him in a billow of steam. “…it will come back. Now Anna is here, it wants to command, to control.”

  “Control me?” I breathed, horrified.

  “All of us,” Juda said. “It wants to help. It wants us to live. Now Anna is here, it can do that. It all starts with her.”

  “Don’t break the circle,” Wim whispered.

  I realized my hands had gone slack. Like my jaw. I tightened my grip once more.

  Juda turned slowly, looking at everyone. “I don’t want to hear the voice anymore.”

  “We’ll find a way to silence it, Juda,” Trevalyan said quickly.

  Judah shook his head. “You can’t. Not even you, dear old friend. Even now, it is whispering in my mind, like thoughts I can’t turn off. Coaxing, entreating, threatening. Bellowing, so that I can’t sleep. Now I know it isn’t just my mind, I know it can only be silenced in one way. I look forward to the peace.”

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket. Benedict’s knife was in it, the one Juda had used to kill my mother. He raised it to his throat and slashed, the well-worked muscles in his arm driving the blade deep.

  Olivia and Ghaliya screamed as the blood sprayed across the white snow. Everyone cried out, words of protest or disbelief, as Juda sank to the snow and grew still.

  The hard lump in my throat made it impossible for me to utter a sound. If not for that I would have descended into hysterics. That, and the desperate grip of my daughter’s hand on mine.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We buried Juda in the field behind the old community hall. It was unhallowed ground, but Trevalyan spoke words over the earth and said the spirits would not mind. I didn’t think Juda would mind, either, for the deer liked to crop the grass there, and the trees surrounded it on two sides. The greenway was right there beside it, too.

  As we could not explain to any authority that would let us bury him in a proper cemetery how Judah was nearly two hundred years old but looked like a thirty-year-old man, we’d had to bury him there.

  The only identity paper we could find among Juda’s possessions was a worn, faded Persian birth certificate, with hand-written Arabic script in blotchy ink, covered in flourishes.

  We added a headstone that Hirom carved out of a piece of teak and put Juda’s name, but no dates.

  After the ceremony, which was simply everyone standing around the grave, telling stories about Juda, I found Trevalyan standing at the corner of the crossroad. He was staring at the pink stain on the snow in the middle of the crossroad. We had dumped more snow on it and then shoveled all the snow away when that had not worked. The new snow that had fallen had soaked up the blood that had reached the road beneath. We’d left it there for even more snow to cover.

  He glanced at me. “It’s an omen,” he said.

  “It’s just blood,” I told him gently and bumped his arm with my elbow. “Don’t get morbid.”

  “The Will of the Crossing said bad things—”

  “I remember,” I said quickly. “But it also said that now I was here, it could do things.”

  “Protect us. Save us,” Trevelyan said.

  “A thing that can make a human kill another, just to bring a third human into their sphere of influence does not have our best interests at heart.”

  “It might,” Trevalyan said. “It isn’t human, whatever it was. It has a different way of looking at an individual life.”

  “This individual human doesn’t find that a comfort,” I told him. “It wants me, whatever it is. That is why I must leave.” It wasn’t the first time I had said it.

  “You don’t have to.” Trevalyan’s face crumpled for a second, then he forced his expression to a neutral one. “We…I will protect you and Ghaliya. All of us will. You don’t have to go.”

  I bent and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, but I won’t ask that of you.”

  He hugged me, and held me for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat, brushed himself off, straightened his back and looked around the crossroad. Everyone was taking their time returning home. They were talking, lingering.

  “Time for a pipe or two,” Trevalyan declared. He stepped into the crossroads, heading for the cross-corner. He took a bowed path around the bloodstain.

  I caught Olivia’s eye. She nodded and finished speaking to Wim. Wim waved to me as he headed for his house.

  I crossed the road and stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the inn, and moved down it toward the front door.

  On the other side of the road, Broch stood with his arms crossed. He lifted his hand as I glanced at him.

  I turned and waved back.

  Then he shook his head and walked away.

  I pushed open the door to the inn and stepped inside.

  Hirom and Frida were sitting on the stairs. Frida looked like she had been crying.

  I stopped in front of them. “You’ll both be fine,” I assured them. “You were there when I talked to everyone else. No one has to cook for everyone, anymore. Everyone will pay a monthly fee and be free to use the kitchen as they need to. The inn can keep going.”

  Frida nodded, but she didn’t look reassured.

  “It’s just…there’s always been someone like you here,” Hirom said. “Long as I can remember.”

  I had a feeling that he could remember quite a long way back, too. I put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s what the town was counting on. That custom. Now it must change.”

  “I get that,” Hirom said. “I just don’t like it.”

  I don’t like it either. The voice whispered in the back of my brain. I ignored it, and leaned in around the dining room arch and picked up my bags and backpack that I’d left there earlier. I also slid my arm through Ghaliya’s pack.

  Neither of them had moved from the stairs.

  “It was good to meet you, Frida,” I told her. “And you, too, Hirom. I will always remember your whisky.”

  He grimaced. “I slipped a bottle into your pack.” Then he got up. “Can’t stand this…” he muttered and stalked across the hall and into the bar.

  Frida gave me a tremulous smile, her eyes shiny with tears, and went upstairs.

  I went out the front door once more, even though it would be quicker to use the side exit in the bar. I moved around the inn to the parking lot on the west side.

  Olivia’s big baby-blue Continental was there, with the engine running, and steamy exhaust rising up from the wide exhaust pipe. Olivia stood by the car, waiting. She spotted me and got in and closed the door. I didn’t blame her, because it was cold.

  The trunk lid popped, so I dumped all the bags into it and closed it once more, then looked around.

  Benedict was sitting on the steps up to the side door.

  My heart gave a great leap. I tried to ignore the fizz in my veins. I turned away from him and drew in a deep breath and bellowed, “Ghaliya!” into the frosty air.

  Fifteen seconds later, I called again.

  “Coming!” Ghaliya called from the other side of the road. She crossed over, and into the parking lot, where I stood.

  “Where were you?” I demanded.

  “Rebooting the router,” Ghaliya said. “Someone has to do it… Do we really have to go, Mom?”

  I sighed. “I explained why, last night. I really don’t have the energy to go through it again. Please, just get in the car.”

  “But no one knows how to run the network!”

  “They’ll figure it out,” I said tiredly, aware that Benedict was close enough to hear every word we were saying.

  Ghaliya made a fist with her hands. “I don’t want to go.” Somewhere in the last few days she had removed the nose ring. I only noticed it now. Her blue hair laid flat, instead of in spikes.

  “Ghaliya…”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “But I like it here. I like everyone. And you’re…a witch or something, which is so cool, and you should stay here and get better at it, and I could run the network. Besides, your cooking is amazing now. And…and I like my bedroom!”

  Her tears fell, and I had to close down my thoughts, and ignore my aching heart. “I’m sorry, Ghaliya. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. For the good of the people here, I have to leave, and so must you, because you’re my daughter, and the Town might come after you if I’m not here.”

  “But everyone says it doesn’t matter!” Ghaliya cried. “Trevalyan says there’s things they can do to make sure you’re okay!”

  I pressed my lips together, and waited until I thought I could speak without my voice shaking. “But we can’t ask that of them,” I said as gently as I could. “We can’t ask them to take that risk. Do you really want everyone here, everyone that you like, to be in danger because you want to stay?”

  “You don’t know that they’d be in danger!”

  “I don’t know that they won’t be,” I replied. “And that’s why leaving is the only option. It’s the only sure thing.”

  Ghaliya’s shoulders slumped. She’d run out of arguments. She stalked over to the car and got in. I winced as she slammed the door.

  Benedict got to his feet, and came over to me.

  I held myself still, schooling my face to give away nothing. I took in his appearance one last time; the thick, dark brown hair, his straight brows and the planes of his cheeks. His eyes.

  He gave me a small smile. “My family has a tiny house in Rome, which has been handed down for generations. There is a room in the house where we have stored old scrolls and codex going back centuries. Many of them came out of Pergamum, when it was a medical center, around the time of Christ. Many of them are Arabic, filled with eastern medicine.”

  “You’ve read them?” The idea of reading books from the first century sent a small, warm finger up my spine. Oh, how awesome that would be!

  “I read some of them, when I was much younger,” he admitted. “But I haven’t been back to Rome in…quite a while. But something I learned from those readings….”

  I waited.

  “Did you know that ‘Thamina’ means ‘precious’ in Arabic?”

  I shook my head.

  “And ‘Ghaliya’, the name you thought was pretty,” he added. “It also means ‘precious’ in Arabic.”

  I let out a gasp.

  “Your family bloodlines run through the women,” he said. “Whether you knew it consciously or not, your instincts have always known it.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  Benedict picked up my hand. My flesh sizzled where he touched it. His hand was warm and large. “I would have you stay, too, Anna,” he said very softly. “I would have you stay so that I have time to show you that you can trust me.”

  “Because trust is hard to earn,” I whispered, my eyes stinging.

  “And easy to break,” he finished. “Unless there are other bonds there to strengthen it.” He gave a sigh. “You and I are both old enough to know that those sort of bonds…they take time. We’re too scarred, too wary.”

  He bent and kissed my cheek. I could feel the touch of his lips even after he straightened and let go of my hand.

  “Have a good life, Anna,” he told me.

  “You, too.” My voice was hoarse. And before I made a fool of myself, I moved around the car and got into the passenger side and shut the door.

  Olivia looked at me. She didn’t smile. “Ready?”

  “No, but let’s go, anyway.”

  Ghaliya made a soft, despairing sound in the back seat.

  ●

  Our departure was undramatic. Olivia turned the big car onto the main street, rolled it slowly to the crossroads, where she cautiously stopped and looked both ways. No one was standing on the sidewalks. The town was as still as it had been the day we’d arrived.