It was the flames ripping into the altar from behind, the blaze bursting through the wall in a cough of heat and ash, blackening and blistering the thin wall, licking at the suspended cross.

Bodies ran into the church entrance, the black townsfolk, yelling, “Fire! Fire!”

Sheriff Ingalls, his deputies, and SAIC Macklin followed, looking up at the blazing altar, finding Solomon and Blackwood with Pastor Eppert and his wife in their arms, dragging them out.

“What happened?” exclaimed Macklin.

Solomon could not answer. How could he put words to it?

Blackwood said, “Make sure there is no one else inside!”

The lawmen responded to that, racing toward the sacristy as the church filled with searing heat.

Blackwood and another man carried Mother out, while Solomon got Pastor Eppert’s arm over his shoulder and walked him into the street.

They laid them down on the sidewalk a safe distance away, where other folk tended to them. Solomon looked up at the black smoke billowing out of the rear of the church. He found Blackwood and put his hand on the British man’s chest, pushing him away from everyone, needing answers.

“What was that?” he said.

Blackwood said, “A slave demon. Possessed the woman. Exploited her and the pained souls who built this church.”

“Why?”

Blackwood looked at him as though the answer was plain. “Because it could. Drawn by the legacy of suffering of this place. This is a vindictive spirit. Sorcery of death, injury, and revenge.”

Solomon was going crazy. Either that or Blackwood already was. “The slave demon is a white woman?”

“That is the face it showed me. Evil comes to you in a familiar form.”

Solomon looked at the whites who had moved across the street, drawn by the fire. He turned back to Blackwood.

“I need to know what this is. You burned down a church. We’re going to have a riot here.”

“That is what it wanted,” said Blackwood. “To cause an uprising that would consume the town.”

“You’re damn right,” said Solomon. “You want blood in the streets, just set fire to a black church.”

Blackwood said, “The corrupt site had to be cleansed. Abdiel would have returned—”

“I don’t give a hot damn about that, what am I gonna do right here, right now?”

Solomon stepped back from Blackwood. He looked at the street again. The black congregants held each other, most of the women weeping anew, the men becoming angry. The whites that had crossed the street stood near them, looking concerned, almost reverently so. The destruction of a church—even one that wasn’t theirs—was an affront that affected them deeply.

Then Solomon saw the ten or so people who remained on the other side of the street—literally and figuratively. The unrobed, uncaring Klansmen.

Solomon remembered something Blackwood had said that night in the woods, after the Klansmen fled the hanging site in the dark.