by Laura Bickle
“They say you can never go home again, Bonnet.”
I believed him.
I expected to see dirt roads lacing around pastoral fields, small houses and pockets of forest dotting the land where I’d grown up. I expected the earth to smell clean and cold as it did every winter, with a touch of manure from the cattle grazing behind wooden fences. I expected to see Plain men and women working their chores: hauling wood in wagons, carrying water, carrying buckets of grain to the animals. I expected to feel comforted by the way things had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. I wanted to be immersed in that history again, to be lost in that vast, unchanging stretch of time.
But a plume of black smoke rose from the horizon, staining the blue sky. The lump in my throat grew with each step I took toward home. By the time we reached the gate to the single road into my community, it had grown into a cold stone of dread in my chest.
The gate stood twisted, wide open, the metal wadded up like aluminum foil.
I began to run toward the dark smoke, the frozen earth jarring against my heels. I ran from the dirt road into a field of unharvested blond wheat, stirring in the wind. My first thought had been to find the Hexenmeister, to learn what had happened.
But a barn was burning, and instinct drove me toward it. Orange flames blistered white paint, reaching toward the sky. The barn belonged to one of my neighbors. Most often, barns burned as a result of lightning or accident, when someone accidentally kicked over an oil lantern.
But this blaze was no accident. The doors to the barn were nailed shut with two-by-fours, and it was ringed by men in green uniforms. Soldiers. They held guns, and one of them was coating the base of the barn with gasoline. Sparks and ash blew in the wind. I could smell the acrid gasoline and sweet straw burning.
I skidded to a halt, shocked. I heard hoofbeats behind me, sensed Alex’s shadow on my back.
“That doesn’t look good.” His voice was tight.
“What are they doing here?” I gasped.
“There’s an army reserve base about a hundred miles from here . . . maybe they’re from there. The base certainly isn’t holy ground, so maybe they had to run, find a place to regroup.”
A human-shaped form climbed out from a shuttered window in the barn. It shrieked and writhed in the fire, hissing.
A soldier walked up to the vampire and shot it in the head. Alex and I were too far away to hear voices, but the reports of three sharp gunshots echoed across the field. I jammed my fist in my mouth.
That had no doubt been someone I knew.
“They’re trying to burn the Darkness out.”
I whirled, hearing a faint familiar voice. The Hexenmeister stumped over to us, hunched over a cane. I flung myself into his arms. His beard had grown thin, and the old man seemed incredibly fragile. He smelled of eucalyptus, of medicine. I could feel a tremor in his chest when I hugged him. His face crumpled into a smile when he saw me, and he patted my cheek with a shaking hand. The left side of his face seemed oddly rubbery, and it did not move when he smiled.
“Herr Stoltz!” I cried out, my words tumbling over each other. “You’re free! What’s happened? How is my family? What are the soldiers doing here?”
“Come with me,” he said, his voice thin. “I will tell you everything.”
We followed the Hexenmeister back to his little whitewashed cottage at the edge of our settlement. It looked sadder than it had when I had left, the paint peeling and the fence across the front yard missing a few pickets. A muddy paddock in back held two black horses chewing at a hay bale.
It looked the same except for the tank parked on the road.
I shuddered. Fenrir whined and hid behind my skirt.
The Hexenmeister ushered us inside. There, I could see that things had changed, changed much for the worse.
“I’ll make you something to eat,” he said, stumping away to the kitchen.
Clutter was strewn on the unswept floors: bags of potatoes growing roots through the burlap, uneven stacks of firewood, a spilled tinderbox. But those didn’t disturb me as much as the old man’s worktable.
The Hexenmeister was responsible for creating the hex signs that adorned the barns and houses in our community. We had once believed that they were merely pretty designs, a relic from the old country. But Herr Stoltz had constructed these and the Himmelsbriefen he’d made me with a purpose: to ward off the Darkness. No other Plain communities that I knew of allowed such decoration. But the men in Herr Stoltz’s line had been Hexenmeisters since the time of our people’s emigration from Germany. The old man had kept this tradition alive, and the supernatural defenses it provided.
I paused at the edge of his worktable. Where I was accustomed to seeing precise calligraphy and flawless geometric patterns, I saw illegible scribbling and brush marks that didn’t fall between the lines. It was as if a child had been painting.
I looked at Herr Stoltz. He was reaching up into a kitchen cupboard. His hand shook too much to remove a can from the shelf. Alex took the can from him, and we exchanged glances over the man’s head.
“Herr Stoltz . . .” I began. “Are you all right?”
He stared at the can of cocoa powder in Alex’s hands. “No, Katie. I suppose that I’m not. Shortly after you left, I went out to feed the horses, fell . . . lay there for an hour before I could get back up.”
Tears prickled my eyes.
“The military medic said it was . . . a blood clot in the brain.”
“A stroke,” Alex breathed.
“Ja,” he sighed. “That was what he called it. A stroke. The Elders no longer saw me as a threat. They simply say that I am a crazy old man, not worth locking up. I cannot even write my own name. Like a child.” He made a face and turned away.
I stared at the ruined paintings. The Hexenmeister’s magic was gone.
Alex led him to the kitchen table, and I automatically set about putting the kettle on. These things felt familiar, and I focused on boiling the water to keep from blinking back tears.
“My family,” I said. “Are they all right?”
I was afraid of the answer, but I had to know.
“Ja. Your sister and mother and father are alive. Though their house is swarming with soldiers.”
I said a prayer of thanksgiving under my breath.
“How did they end up here?” Alex asked.
The Hexenmeister leaned forward in his chair and braced himself with elbows on the table. His watery eyes were unfocused on the blank wall. “After you left, there were more killings. The Wagler and Lapp houses were set upon by vampires.”
I closed my eyes. I knew the daughters of both of those houses well. We went to school together.
“The Elders were forced to admit that the Darkness was upon us. Around that time, the soldiers came. They said that they would try to fight it back, and the Elders had no choice but to agree. We gave them food and lodging for patrolling the night.”
“You told them what you knew about the vampires?”
He nodded and rubbed his swollen knuckles. “Ja. I told them that this was a spiritual evil grown out of control.”
Alex gathered mugs from a cupboard. “We met a man. A scientist. He believes it’s a contagion.”
Herr Stoltz made a dismissive gesture. “The Darkness has been present since the time of Judas.”
“Since biblical times?” Alex asked.
“Ja. Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. He felt remorse, tried to give it back, but it was too late. He hanged himself.”
“I remember,” I said softly. It was a familiar part of the Bible.
“What was not told was that Judas hung himself at the heckling of the angel of death, Azrael. Azrael was one of the fallen angels, who lured Judas to his death and not true repentance. Azrael blocked his path to hell. Unable to go to heaven, Judas rose in Darkness.”
“He became a vampire?” Alex asked.
“Ja. He would never walk in Jesus’ light again.”
“How do you know this?” I asked. I struggled with reconciling the science I had seen with the Hexenmeister’s story. I knew that what we had seen was pure, spiritual evil. And I wanted to know the root of it.
“It has been passed down. For generations. Even Solomon knew of this, before Judas. Much of what he learned about keeping Darkness at bay we still use today.”
Alex walked to the ruined hex sign on the table. “The sacred geometry,” he murmured, tracing a line with a finger.
“What do you mean?” I asked, pouring water from the kettle into the mugs.
“There were several seals tenuously attributed to Solomon. Figures that served various purposes of binding demons and warding off evils spirits. These have . . . some of the same shapes.”
Herr Stoltz nodded. “The old ways endure.” He stared down at his trembling hands. “Endured. But I am afraid that all that is now lost, and what we have will soon burn.”
“No,” I said. “We found an answer.”
His bushy eyebrows drew together. “A way to defeat them?”
I clasped his hands and drew him to his feet. I led him beneath the stairwell, where no sunshine could reach. I wanted him to see me as I now was, glowing in that darkness.
The old man took a step back, stumbled, nearly fell.
His voice was soft and wondering. “Now it is your turn to tell me what happened.”
***
We told him all of it, in bits and pieces punctuated with chewing stale bread and reheating hot cocoa. The Hexenmeister listened in wonderment, occasionally taking my hand to squint at it in sunlight and then moving it into shadow.
“This elixir,” he said. “You brought it with you?”
“Ja,” I said. I pulled my jar out of my backpack, and Alex brought his from his coat pocket. We set them on the kitchen table and stared at them.
“Do you think that they will accept it? Or will the Elders deny it?” I asked.
The Hexenmeister shook his head. “I do not know. But we should do our best to protect it.” He lifted one of the jars and took it to a shelf. He tucked it behind a half-empty jar of white paint, placed a tin bucket over it, and nodded to himself. “No one will think to look for it there.”
I held the remaining jar between my hands. Light from the setting sun passed through the window and illuminated the cloudy fluid. “Herr Stoltz, do you want the elixir?”
He stared at the jar, then at us. “I can’t rightly say now, one way or the other. I need to pray upon it. The soldiers, I think, will be very interested in what you have. And that is probably for the best.”
I lifted my chin. “I want to see my family.”
“Ja, I will take you to them. You are still under the Bann, remember. They may not speak to you. But know that you will meet the soldiers before you will see them. And you will have to explain what you have done to yourselves to all of them.”
I nodded. I was ready to take the consequences of my decisions, for good or for ill.
I pulled my hood over my face as we headed outside. The light was fast draining from the day, and I wanted not to be recognized. Herr Stoltz had taken Horace to the pen with his own horses. Fenrir insisted upon following us, ducking under fences and inhaling the strange new scents of the place.
The land looked much the same as I remembered: thick furrows in fields, simple houses and barns. There were a few green army vehicles dotting the landscape, and I saw soldiers gathered outside, drying their clothes on my neighbors’ clotheslines.
“Being forced to quarter soldiers is unconstitutional,” Alex muttered. “They got rid of that with the British.”
“Times are more desperate now,” the Hexenmeister reminded us. “I suspect that most of the Plain folk view this as simple hospitality.”
“But how will they view it when the food runs out?”
“I think that the Elders hope that the soldiers will move on before then. They are desperate for any protection that can be offered, but have no solution or even any leverage to ask.”
“Gelassenheit,” I said darkly.
“Ja, Gelassenheit.”
We approached my house and my heart soared. I could see lights in the windows, replacing the glow of setting sun. For the first time in many months, I had the sense that everything was going to be all right if I could just reach the light.
My pace increased and I began to run. I felt a smile spread across my face, and I couldn’t wait to feel my family in my arms again. Surely they would be happy to see me and would not enforce the Bann. Everything else had gone to pieces. I couldn’t imagine them following a rule for a time long past.
“Bonnet!” I heard Alex shout. I ignored him, running toward my silhouette of a house. My hood fell from my shoulders and my breath grew fast in my throat.
“Katie.” I heard a voice that wasn’t Alex’s, and the ominous click of a rifle.
I slowed, breathing hard.
I turned around, face-to-face with the barrel of a gun.
And Elijah.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Elijah stared down the barrel of the rifle at me, his eyes large and round. His jaw flexed before he spoke again:
“Katie. What are you doing here?”
“I’m home. And I’ve brought a way to fight the Darkness.” I lifted my head. This was just as much my home as his. I would not allow him to take it from me.
“Stay where you are.” His eyes narrowed.
“I’m not a vampire,” I insisted.
The last of the light drained from the sky, and I know that he saw. I could feel the light rising in my face, see the green glow reflected in a skiff of ice at my feet.
“What are you?” he breathed.
I swallowed. I didn’t know how to explain it to him. “I’m just . . . changed.”
“Not human.” His finger flexed on the trigger.
A bright glowing shape lurched across my peripheral vision, accompanied by gray fur. A shot rang out, and Elijah was sprawling on the ground beneath Alex, with Fenrir growling at him, teeth bared.
“Are you all right?” Alex asked me.
I ran my hands over my body, checking for holes, shaking. I found none. I could not believe that Elijah would shoot me. I gritted my teeth down on the contempt I felt for him. He was my Judas. It was prideful to think that, but I felt in my gut that it was the truth. “I’m all right.”
“Stop struggling, boy.” The Hexenmeister stooped down to pick up the rifle. “You don’t understand what’s happening here.”
I heard the clomp of boots. Soldiers were streaming from my house, guns at the ready, shouting.
Alex raised his hands in the air, and I imitated him. “I guess we’re going to have to start explaining. Yesterday.”
The Hexenmeister toddled out in front of us, waving his arms. “Don’t shoot!” The soldiers swarmed around him, snatched the gun from him, and had him down on his creaking knees before I could blink.
I was shoved to the ground amid furious shouting. I screamed at Fenrir to run away. I saw the blur of his fur in my peripheral vision, hoped that he would melt away into the darkness before someone shot him.
A face in a helmet appeared before mine, and a flashlight shone in my eyes. “Identify yourself!”
My voice was thin and bruised. “I’m Katie. I live here.” I made sure to show him my teeth.
I was hauled back on my knees, facing the soldier. He wore more metal decorations on his jacket than the others. A patch on his breast read CAPT. SIMMONDS.
“Somebody get a Geiger counter over here!” he shouted. He turned back to me. “Are you radioactive? Do you know what that is? Did you get bitten by a vampire?”
“No,” I said, spitting dirt out on the ground. “I brought an elixir. A vaccine.”
Simmonds rocked back on his heels. “A vaccine?”
“Ja.” I slowly pulled back my hood and rolled back my sleeves to show him my glowing flesh. “The vampires cannot harm us.”
Simmonds stared at me for a lo
ng minute. “Get her up and bring her to the barn for interrogation. And somebody get me a goddamn Geiger counter.”
***
Under the Bann und Meidung, a person would simply be ignored by their community. Shunned. No offers of help or food or shelter or familial warmth. I always thought that the Bann was a terrible thing, one of the worst things that a human can do to another.
But there was no malicious intent to harm under the Bann.
This was much, much worse.
The soldiers took Alex and me back to the barn that I’d used to kennel dogs. There were no dogs there now. I could only hope that they had been taken to the house. The hex sign that Herr Stoltz had painstakingly painted above the barn door had peeled away. There was only the shadow of stylized doves remaining. My heart sank knowing that he could never repaint it and restore the protection that it had offered.
Green trucks were parked in the barn, covered with tarps. And another tank. The place no longer smelled of sweet straw and dog food; it smelled of gasoline and gunpowder. Green boxes with stenciled letters were piled up along the walls, with guns leaning against them.
The soldiers separated Alex and me. I craned my neck to watch them take him to a stall in the far corner of the barn. They put me in a different stall at the front with a grim-faced guard.
These men all looked the same to me in their green uniforms. I wondered if we Amish all looked the same to the English in our dark clothes, bonnets, and white shirts. I wrapped my arms around myself, waiting for them to decide what to do with us. Waiting to explain. I could hear the Hexenmeister’s low voice as he spoke to Simmonds just out of my line of vision. I heard Alex arguing in the back.
I sank down and sat on a bale of hay. In the dim shade, I was conscious that my hands glowed. I caught the guard looking and deliberately stuffed them in my pockets.
And I waited.
The man, Simmonds, finally came back. This time, he brought a man in a plastic suit and white hood who was holding a machine that clicked more quickly than a clock. “Stand up,” he ordered.
I complied. He ran the wand of the machine over me. I flinched away from the staticky noise, but it didn’t hurt.
The man with the machine took off his hood. “She’s not hot.”