and your beauty. You will be their leader and their saint."
My brothers one by one came to kiss me. My sisters, who were few in number, planted their kisses on my cheeks as well.
I said nothing. I stood quiet, listening still for the song of the birds in the nearby pines, my eyes drifting now and then to the lowering Heavens and wondering if the rain would come, the rain which I could smell, so clean and pure, the only cleansing water allowed to me now, the sweet Roman rain, gentle and warm.
"Do you take the solemn vow to lead the Coven in the Ways of Darkness as Satan would have it and his Lord and Creator, God, would have it?"
"I do."
"Do you vow to obey all orders sent to you from the Roman Coven?"
"I do ..."
Words and words and words.
Wood was heaped on the fire. The drums had begun. The solemn tones.
I began to cry.
Then came the soft arms of Allesandra, the soft mass of her gray hair against my neck.
"I will go with you north, my child," she said.
I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I threw my arms around her, I held her hard cold body close to me, and I shook with sobs.
"Yes, dear, dear little one," she said. "I will stay with you. I am old and I will stay with you until it is time for me to go to God's Justice, as we all must."
"Then we dance in jubilation!" cried Santino. "Satan and Christ, brothers in the House of the Lord, we give you this perfected soul!"
He threw up his arms.
Allesandra stepped back from me, her eyes bright with tears. I could think of nothing but only my gratitude that she would be with me, that I would not make this awful terrible journey alone. With me, Allesandra, with me. Oh, Fool for Satan and the God Who made him!
She stood beside Santino, tall as he was, majestic as she too threw up her arms and swung her hair from side to side.
"Let the dancing begin!" she cried.
The drums became a thunder, the horns wailed, and the thump of the tambourines filled my ears.
A long low cry rose from the huge thick circle of vampires, and all at once, locking hands, they began to dance.
I was pulled back into the chain they made about the raging bonfire. I was jerked from left to right as the figures turned this way, then that, then broke free and leapt spinning into the air.
I felt the wind on the back of my neck as I turned, as I leapt. I reached out with perfect accuracy to receive the hands on either side of me, then to sway to the right and to the left again.
Above, the silent clouds thickened, curled and sailed across the darkling sky. The rain came, its soft roar lost in the cries of the mad dancing figures, in the crackle of fire and the torrent of drums.
I heard it. I turned and leapt high into the air and received it, the silvery rain floating down to me like the blessing of the dark Heavens, the baptismal waters of the damned.
The music surged. A barbarous rhythm broke loose everywhere, the orderly chain of dancers forgotten. In rain and in the unquenchable blaze of the giant fire, the vampires threw out their arms, howling, writhing, their limbs constricting so that they stomped with backs bent, heels pounded into the earth, and then sprang free, arms outstretched, mouths open, hips churning as they whirled and leapt, and caught in raucous open-throated volume the hymn came again, Dies irae, dies ilia. Oh, yes, oh, yes, day of woe, oh, day of fire!
Afterwards, when the rain came down solemnly and steadily, when the bonfire was no more but a black wreckage, when they all had gone off to hunt, when only a few milled the dark ground of the Sabbat, chanting their prayers in anguished delirium, I lay still, the rain washing me, as I put my face against the ground.
It seemed the monks were there from the old Monastery in Kiev. They laughed at me, but gently. They said, "Andrei, what made you think you could escape? Didn't you know that God had called you?"
"Get away from me, you are not here, and I am nowhere; I am lost in the dark wastes of a winter without end."
I tried to picture Him, His Holy Face. But there was only Allesandra, come to help me to my feet. Allesandra,