He slipped on his jacket. "We wait here."
Ginger's head popped up above the grass line like a platinum gopher. "What are you talking about? We've gotta get moving." She tugged at Horace's reins, but he would not budge. He stood on the pinnacle of the hill as if he were a statue.
Alex shook his head, and he pressed his hands to the ground. He was smiling. "No. We wait here. On the hill."
I bit my lip. Perhaps the stress of running from vampires for the last several weeks had caused Alex to finally lose touch with reality. Perhaps he had some desire to make a last stand. I confessed to myself that I felt like that often. I hadn't been baptized, so I wouldn't get to heaven, but it was sometimes peaceful to imagine not existing in this chaotic world any longer. I didn't think I'd be sent to hell, but I just wasn't sure.
In any event, I wasn't quite ready to test theology.
"Alex," I said. "We need to go if we're to have any chance of-"
"Do you trust me?"
He crouched on the top of the hill, looking at me with an infuriatingly jovial smile. I felt myself frown, but I reached down for his hand. Behind me, Ginger sighed and scrambled up the grass bank.
We sat on the crest of the little hill, looking down, as dozens of glowing eyes converged upon us.
"We're screwed," Ginger said.
I didn't disagree with the sentiment.
Those luminous eyes drew near. I counted more than two dozen pairs. My heart hammered, and my mouth felt sticky and dry. I fingered the rough edge of my makeshift weapon. I might be able to kill one vampire with it. Not dozens.
Jagged silhouettes of people pulled themselves from the grass, like spiders extricating from webs. I braced myself, clutching my puny staff. Their eyes swept up the hill. I expected them to rush to us like water in a trench after a rainstorm.
They reached up with pale fingers that smelled like metal. Their lips drew back, hissing, and I could see the thirst in their eyes. But they made no move to climb the hill.
I sidled closer to Alex. "What's stopping them?"
"Holy ground," he said, grinning.
My brows drew together. I didn't understand. I saw no sign of any human habitation here. No church. No graveyard. Just this oddly shaped hill that rose up out of the field.
"How?"
Ginger started laughing behind me. She turned on her heel and surveyed the sad little hillock. "I see it now," she said. She huddled in closer with us when a vampire snarled at her.
"See what?"
"We're on an Indian mound," Alex said. "A holy site built by any one of a number of tribes in this area. They were used as burial mounds, ceremonial sites, astronomical measure- ments . . . some, we have no idea what for."
"How did you know?" It looked like just a rill in the land to me. A bump.
"See how it's sorta shaped like a snake?" He gestured to the west. "It's hard to see underneath the tall grass, but notice how it undulates in the ground?" He swished his hand back and forth like a snake swimming, and I could see some of the suggestion of a reptile in it.
"I saw a mound one time that was shaped like a big serpent eating the moon." He cocked his head and started to walk off down the snake's back. "I wonder if this one is like that . . ."
Ginger snagged the back collar of his jacket. "No exploring in the dark with the monsters down below."
"What do we do now?" I leaned on my staff. The hissing and bright eyes below were unnerving. Pale fingers combed through the grass.
Alex sat down. "We wait for morning."
I sighed and knelt down to pray. I could feel the chill of the earth beneath my knees, dew gathering. My skin crawled at the thought of the creatures, only feet away. I shut my eyes, trying to prove that I trusted God. He had kept us safe so far. He would keep us safe as long as it suited his purposes.
That was part of what I believed-what the Amish believed. We believed in Gelassenheit-surrendering ourselves to God's will. It was difficult, at times like this. I struggled to keep my eyes closed, seeing crescents of light beneath my lashes; I could not quite make myself trust the darkness.
"Unser Vadder im Himmel . . .
. . . dei Naame loss heilich sei . . ."
"Damn. I wish I had a harmonica," Alex grumbled.
CHAPTER TWO
One does not sleep in the presence of evil. Not when you can see it and it can see you.
We sat on the top of the hill and watched the stars spin overhead. It's funny the way that they shone as they always did. I took some comfort in that, that heaven was still the same as it always was. Watching, but remote.
The all-purpose prayer of the Amish was the Lord's Prayer, recited in Deitsch. It was vanity and belligerence to ask God for anything. But I couldn't help it. I had too many questions:
Is this the end of the world, as you meant it to be?
Where is the Rapture, this thing that was spoken of so often by the Englishers?
Did you forget us, or did you deem us unworthy?
I knew that God was still here, that his power was felt on the evil in the world. Holy symbols and places kept us safe from the plague of vampires that had been released weeks ago. We didn't know how or why. I had heard snippets from Ginger's cell phone and radio. We had been safe in my little Amish settlement. We had believed ourselves to be protected from evil. That we were favored among God's people.
We had committed the sin of pride.
The evil infected our community. Ginger, Alex, and I had fought it, in our own ways. We had the help of the village Hexenmeister, the man that Alex called our "wizard," the man who painted our hex signs and who had the authority to write Himmelsbriefen.
And it wasn't just the evil of the vampires. It was the evil of man. The Amish Elders, in attempting to quash panic, kept a stranglehold on the community and denied the truth. Ginger, Alex, and I had been shunned, thrown out of Amish land and into the world to certain death.
I missed home. I missed my mother, my father, my sister. I wondered if they would survive. If the Hexenmeister, who had stayed behind, would be able to protect them. My vision blurred when I thought of them, and I wiped away tears with my knuckles. I was not the only one who had lost.
Alex knelt at the edge of the hill, sharpening his knife with a rock. The flash of the silver illuminated a hardness in his jaw that I had come to recognize when he was thinking of those he'd loved who had been killed. I didn't ask about his old girlfriend, Cassia. We were both, in many ways, forced to move past that.