Malach did not answer. The two dogs, having drunk their tipple, had come to him and were leaning their large lion heads on his side.

Althene said, "What does Rachaela fear?"

"Nothing," Rachaela said harshly. "I warned them in the beginning. Ruth is a demon."

"But you don't believe in demons," said Althene.

Her black eyes had a different power. It was there nevertheless.

Rachaela looked away. "I've never believed any of it, yet I'm caught up in it."

Sasha said, "Don't be afraid, Rachaela."

Rachaela shut her mouth tightly. It would be unwise to argue. She had never been able to talk to any of them. The conversations were carried on on a plane that had to do with psychology and the spirit, bypassing conscious feeling and need. It was happening again.

What did Ruth matter?

Demon child. Black queen.

Let Malach hunt her, out in the checkered forests of London's day and night.

In her room Rachaela put on a symphony by Shostakovich, but it had too much eerie strength. She was becoming nervous of classical music, which opened so many mental doors unbidden.

Instead she switched on her television. The newscaster was speaking of a riot somewhere, and she watched with a calming sense of detachment.

The house was now curiously full.

It had been injected with new blood. The wiring sang.

Why did Camillo conceal himself, or did he?

Rachaela took off her clothes. She sat naked in a chair, brushing her hair before the blind mirror of the television.

"… body, which was discovered in woods near the sight of the fire, is thought to be of the young woman police have been trying to trace. The girl, aged between sixteen and nineteen, was found in bracken by two cyclists. She is thought to have died during the night."

A man appeared in a blank brown suit. Someone must have told him about the pixilation of his previous garment.

"Yes, we're pretty certain this is The Vixen. No, there were no signs of violence. It seems likely she took her own life."

Rachaela's vision and hearing apparently fused with darkness, or else time jumped. Suddenly the screen was full of another event. The Vixen and her death were gone.

In a wood. Ruth… a suicide under the trees.

No. It was not true. No.

The telephone… the telephone and the helicopter. Malach had come. Somehow, somehow the media and the law had been deflected. The Scarabae—cared for their own.

CHAPTER 15

UNDER THE TREES LAY A HOT unbreathing shadow. The day was stormy, the sky a dense blue-gray against which the green of the leaves became an acid lime. The graveyard stretched a long way, broken now and then by upflung angels and the dark lines of conifers. Already a few cones had fallen from the chestnuts, perfect as artifacts. Flowers stood in vases dying on the graves, a death for a death.