"He satisfies the longing souls,
and fills the hungry soul with goodness;
Such as sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death..."
  -- from a Psalm of David
 

They were a fitting sanctuary, the night-shrouded woods. A place of both shelter and comfort when -- as now -- something had gone dreadfully, irreparably wrong. Angelique's feet trod a familiar unmarked path through a carpeting of fallen leaves: they filled the night air with their rich, musky scent and crackled underfoot in chorus with the shrilling insects. But tonight she was aware of none of these things. Tonight she knew only that her plan had gone cruelly awry and that some form of entreaty must be made to her Master now -- this very hour -- if Jeremiah Collins were to live.

She could not let him die. Not now. To break the spell and drive Josette back into Barnabas' arms...

She would not allow that. Not ever. Barnabas was hers now. Her husband. Why, oh why could he not have left well enough alone; left simple-minded Josette safely married to his uncle? Why hadn't Jeremiah remained far away from this place with his bride, instead of returning to accept the foolhardy challenge of a duel with his own flesh and blood? Now...

Now he lay dying in the great house of Collinwood, and everything, all that Angelique had
worked for, was at stake as a result. Somehow -- she wasn't certain by what method -- she had to keep Jeremiah Collins alive. Somehow...

"You," rasped the trees above her, and the leaves below, crisp with autumn, chorused the
accusation. "You have failed once again."

"No," she countered. "I won't allow him to die. Not now. Not when everything is finally right."

"Not right, " they mocked her. "Not right at all. You have failed again. Failed again."

She stopped walking, having reached the shadowed depths of her sanctuary -- a tiny clearing in the midst of the oak and maple trees where overhanging branches formed the dome of a miniature cathedral. Here, many times in the past few weeks, she had come to commune with her familiars, and to seek dark counsel from the lord she served. Here, only here, she was safe from prying eyes and ears; safe from those who might seek to destroy her were they to discover her secret. Even Barnabas...

Where had Barnabas gone? Had he watched when she had escorted the weeping Josette back into the great house? Had he watched his father and the servants carry Jeremiah back to Collinwood?

Had he remained to be reproached for this crime against his own family? Surely not.

She knelt, a rustle of skirts and forest leaves, and fought to calm her ragged nerves; to remember the proper words of the seeking spell.

"Sephana hosta naras haraphaem..."

The words, in a tongue long unspoken on the Earth, fell onto the still night air and died swiftly away again as her hands moved, forming symbols more ancient than the race of man.

"Show him to me," she told the air. "Show me his thoughts."

Her hands fell away from soft witch light, glowing the color of algae on a festered pond,
suspended, waiting, before her. It shimmered, and obeying her command, became the image of her husband, alone in what she recognized as the Old House drawing room. He still held the pistol in his hand, but she could see, even before his thoughts came to her, that his hatred for Jeremiah, so viable mere minutes ago, had melted now into disbelieving horror, loathing and self-pity.

I should have been the one to die, his thoughts lamented, and misery clouded his mind like some pendant vapor. God in Heaven.. .I must be going mad. I must be. Jeremiah. How can I have killed Jeremiah?

With a sweeping gesture, Angelique dissolved his image, content, for now, to know that he was safe. Jeremiah, however, was quite another matter.

A new pool of glowing light took shape at her fingertips, coalescing into Jeremiah's bedfast form. He was still breathing, that much she could see, and he moved fitfully beneath the ministering hands of Joshua Collins, who was trying in vain to stanch the flow of blood from his temple, a flow that had already stained the pillow beneath him a deep, unrelenting crimson.

A voice floated from somewhere behind Joshua--a voice Angelique knew well.
"Let go of me!" it sobbed. "He is my husband now, Aunt Natalie. Please let me go to him!"

Natalie DuPres' graveled voice, half-intelligible behind the door, argued, but to no avail. Over her aunt's strident protestations, Josette burst into the room, only to stop and cry out at a sight for which she had not been prepared.

"Get her out of here," Joshua said without turning, and Natalie, averting her own eyes from the blood-drenched horror on the bed, obeyed, hustling the distraught Josette back out the door.

Angelique had no doubt that Joshua had already sent for the village physician. But he would take time to reach Collinwood. Perhaps more time than Jeremiah could afford.

"I invoke a spell of healing," she murmured as the image began to fade. "Jeremiah Collins must recover from his wound. He must remain the husband of Josette DuPres."

Inexplicably, only silence came in answer to her pleas as the last of the witch light melted into oblivion. The spirits of darkness whose wont it was to grant her invocations had no reply this night, and that was wholly, strangely, discomfiting. In all her experience, they had never before been so utterly quiet. Even the insects had hushed their nightcalling...

"Are you distressed, Angelique?"

She sprang to her feet, so startled by the unforewarned intrusion that she nearly fell from
overbalance. The speaker was standing mere inches behind her in the shadows. How could she possibly not have heard him approach?

"Who are you?" she demanded. "How do you know my name?"

His voice canted oddly when he spoke. "Surely you know me," he said. "Our paths have crossed before."

She backed away, uncertain why she found his proximity so unsettling. "I don't know you," she breathed. "I've never seen you before."

He smiled, his expression visible only because an errant cloud had chosen that moment to part company with the moon, and in that brief light she found his piercing eyes, raven hair and perfect features were indeed familiar. She'd dreamed of some one like him once, many years ago, when as a child she'd fallen ill with a raging fever that had taken her very near to...

Death.

"I see you do remember," he said, and held out a consoling hand when she started, disturbed at his instantaneous knowledge of her thought. "You needn't fear," he soothed. "It is said they only see me who are dying. But it is not always so."

In spite of his assurance, Angelique took yet another furtive step backward. "Then why have you come here?"

"To you? Because I heard your invocation to heal the one for whom I've come. I cannot permit it to be granted."

"Jeremiah..." It was an obvious conclusion at which she was nevertheless shocked. "No... You can't..."

That maddening smile said more than words, and foolishly, Angelique allowed panic to overcome her better judgment. "You're wrong. Jeremiah will not die," she insisted. "The Master will grant my desire. I know he will."

He withdrew his hand, and it became, somehow, a gesture of resignation. "Your misguided
loyalties will do nothing to change what is to be."

"Misguided? But he is your Master as well!"

Knowingly, the visitor shook his head. "Death, Angelique, has but one Conqueror, and He is not your master."

Abruptly, her resolve melted into desperation. "Please... Please don't take Jeremiah Collins. His death would destroy everything I've worked for!"

"Perhaps, dear Angelique, you ought to re-examine to what ends you work."

Resentment tinged her reply. "I work to my own ends."

"Yes."

He left that single accusatory word suspended between them for what seemed, to Angelique, an eternity. But when at last she broke the silence, it was with new-found anger.
"I won't allow you to take him. I will invoke the healing spirits until they have done my bidding."

"They will not answer you."

"But they must answer. The Master has commanded them to obey, and his power is far greater than yours. "

"Power? He has no power that the Master of all things has not permitted him to hold. For a time, he shall be sovereign of this Earth. But one day, even he shall be mine."

"That can never be. How can he die? He commands all things!"

"All things and nothing. The lord of lies deceives even himself."

"But I have seen his power. All of time is his."

"I am time. And I am not his."

The visitor turned to take his leave, and Angelique stepped forward as though to stop him, only to find, when she reached the place where he had stood, that he was no longer there.

"You cannot take him!" she cried into the empty air. "I won't allow you to take him!"

The words of the invocation fell rapidly over one another then, and she signed, calling for the
demons of healing to come and grant her plea. Again and again, she repeated the summons, but nothing came to her in answer. The silent tree trunks mocked her, as smug in their immovable countenance as the visitor had been in his.

The pall of failure loomed over her again; the growing dread that Jeremiah would become the innocent victim of her passion for Barnabas Collins. It was a consequence she had never foreseen, and one she would never cease to regret if fate permitted it to come to pass.

"Why do you deny me?!" she cried into the air when again it failed to obey her. "What power can possibly have frightened you so?!"

When still nothing responded, she signed again to form the witch light, to once more show her the great house and the room in which Jeremiah lay. But somehow, even this simple spell was thwarted now. The light disdained her fingertips, and would not come.

Swearing a curse from which even hell's demons would have shied, she rushed from the clearing, and heedless of overgrown brambles that tore at her skirts in her haste, ran all the way to Collinwood.

Cold hung in the foyer of the house; neither fire nor lamplight warmed the empty drawing room. In a flurry of tattered silk, Angelique hurried up the stairs, praying to a lord who had still not answered that Jeremiah still lived. She flew into the corridor -- and stopped there, brought up short by something that blocked her way to Jeremiah's room at the far end of the hall.

She'd mistaken it at first for a pillar of sunlight from the window, but knew that was impossible.. it was after midnight. Then the thing had moved, and she saw that it had eyes, a head, shoulders, hands.. .the semblance of a human, though it was not at all human. She knew what it was; knew that it had come from the realm of One she despised above all others. It stood directly in her path, looking at her, and its eyes burned terror into her soul.

"You are not wanted there," it said.

Tears born of fear and remorse nearly robbed her of a voice. "You have to let me stop him," she pleaded. "Don't you understand? Don't any of you understand? I never meant for him to die! It was my fault, all of it, my fault. It isn't right or fair that Jeremiah should be made to pay for what I've done. Please, please let me..."

The shadow, carrying the lifeless chill of a thousand tombs and the death scream of as many souls, flew from the corridor's end, swept over her and was gone. With it, the pillar of light disappeared to leave Angelique alone with the burden of her guilt.

From Jeremiah's room came Josette's tearful scream, and moments later the voices of Natalie, Andre, Joshua and the family who had gathered to console her.

They never heard the bitter sobbing of one who mourned, far down the corridor, alone.