"No! You cannot breach the wards!" Crombie protested. "I must do it! Quickly, I need your help, boys!" He held his arms out for support as he hurried toward them with surprising speed, but still far too slowly.

Ben's first thought was that Crombie was nuts, but he also realized that there was no place remotely closer than the rectory for this Alfred guy to have gone for help, or just to sound the alarm, and the fire had clearly been burning for a while, so he might still be inside, in who knew what condition, and the Cup there with him, just as Crombie feared.

Joby was already helping Crombie toward the gate, but if they had to do this, it had to be done faster. Ben ran back and simply hoisted the small man up over one shoulder. "Joby, get the hose!" he called returning to the gate. "Try to train it on the fire."

Joby ran back to twist the faucet on and yank the coiled garden hose toward them.

"Wait," Ben said as Joby reached them. "Soak us down with that."

Seeing the fire now, Joby looked appalled. "You can't go in there!" he said.

"We must!" Crombie protested. "The Cup! We cannot lose the Cup!"

"Hurry up, Joby," Ben said. "Get us wet. We'll be in and out in minutes."

Already lost in planning as Joby complied, Ben hardly felt the water's chill. "Where are you keeping it?" Ben asked Crombie, who endured both his undignified perch and the soaking without complaint.

"In the sacristy, since the incident with Cotter. Just beside the altar."

Good, Ben thought, not far inside the back door. This might be easier than he'd feared. "Okay, that should do," he said to Joby. "Bring the hose, and be ready to hit us again when we come out." He was already loping toward the back steps of the church, Crombie still across his shoulder. "If we're not out in a minute or two," he called back as they neared the door, "break the sacristy window, and stick the hose in there."

Happily, Crombie was so shrunken with age that he weighed almost nothing. Ben was up the steps with ease, and yanking at the door, which wouldn't open.

"It's locked," Crombie said. "The key is back at the rectory. You'll have to-"

Before he could finish, Ben set him down, waited while Crombie steadied himself, then drew back and launched a powerful kick at the door, which broke up like so much kindling, shuddering inward on its hinges. The building sucked a loud breath of air in around them through the doorway, then exhaled a blast of furnace heat that made Ben spin away to shield himself and Father Crombie.

"I'm not sure we can do this," he said to Crombie.

"You stay here," Crombie said, already shuffling toward the door. "I'm the one who must go in. I know the wards."

"No way, Father," Ben grunted, hoisting him again. "You ready?"

Crombie merely nodded his assent.

"Take the biggest breath you can," Ben said, and did the same before charging through the door.

The heat was terrible, but not unsurvivable yet, Ben judged, as he turned, intending to dash across the altar into the sacristy. But there was a man lying facedown in front of the altar, unconscious, if not dead.

"Alfred!" Crombie croaked, and began to cough.

Ben set him on the floor, and shouted, "Don't get up. The air'll be better there." Then he ran to crouch by Alfred, rolling him over to find a knife protruding from his stomach. His wilderness first-aid training rushing back, Ben checked for pulses, and lowered his ear to Alfred's open mouth, but it was clearly too late for this one.

There was no time to wonder who had killed him, or why. Ben ran back to Crombie, coughing now as well, and fearful that their clothes might ignite at any moment. The blaze had clearly started back toward the main doors, but it was racing forward now, probably on the draft they'd created by opening the back door. The altar hangings had begun to smolder "Hurry!" Crombie moaned over the fire's roar.

There was just time, Ben hoped, to get into the sacristy. Once there, he could smash the window and get them out through that.

"Take another breath!" Ben shouted. Crombie did so, but began to cough, and had to try again. Then, with Crombie bundled like a child in his arms, Ben sprinted for the sacristy door, kicked it in without setting Crombie down, and raced inside. Thankfully, the sacristy was still much cooler than the church had been.

He laid Crombie quickly on the floor, and turned to slam shut what remained of the now knobless door behind them, dragging a chair against it to help block out the heat for at least a few more minutes. Crombie was already crawling to his feet, chanting the words that would breach the wards, as Ben grabbed a tall metal candle stand and rushed to smash out the sacristy window, intent on letting in some air and preparing their exit.

Seconds later, as he scraped the frame clean of glass shards with the candle stand, a stream of water came through the broken widow, spattering his steaming shirt. Good old Joby, Ben thought with fierce affection. "We're okay, Joby!" he shouted. "Keep the water coming!" He turned to Crombie and called, "Come here a second!" wanting to wet him down again as well, but the priest just shook his head, continuing to chant.

"There!" Crombie called, stepping forward to open the ornate metal box at which his chant had been directed. But when the doors parted, he only stood and gaped.

Ben rushed to his side, and saw the box was empty.

"We're too late!" Crombie gasped. "It's gone!"

Ben had never heard him sound so desolate.

"Jake! Gabriel, we need you!" Swami shouted, running down the street in tears. It had come-the bad thing he had always feared-without any warning! "Merlin! Help!"

The two archangels, dark and light, appeared simultaneously ahead of him, already deep in urgent conversation.

"Try to find the Cup," Swami heard Jake say as he ran toward them. "Until we know where it's gone, I've nowhere to send these people."

"Jake!" Swami began as he reached them, but Jake held up a hand to silence him, and Gabriel swept Swami into a comforting embrace as he and Jake continued talking.

"The Cup may not reveal itself to me," Gabriel said, "especially if I am-"

"No more of that!" Jake cut him off. "I understand your concerns, but we must try, or all is truly lost. Take Swami. It isn't safe to have him here now. Not with what he knows. His gift should be of help to you. The Cup will reveal itself to him if anyone, but he will need a guard."

"No one will guard him more fiercely than I," said Gabriel, "but we both know it will be no quick or easy task. Can you preserve this place until my return?"

"With Merlin's help, perhaps," Jake said. "What choice have we but to try?" A faint smile brushed his lips. "Lucifer's dogs will find a small surprise awaiting them. The enchanter is already preparing it. Our Master bade me let them enter, He did not say how I must allow it. Go now. There is no more time. They come."

When Ben's face left the window, Joby tugged the hose closer, trying to get more water to them, but instead, the flow abruptly dribbled to nothing. Joby looked back to find the hose kinked in the rectory gate. He tried whipping it straight from where he stood, but couldn't, and rushed back to straighten it by hand. He had just bent down to do so when the church behind him groaned ominously. As Joby turned to look, a roar like jet engines swept through the chapel, and all the windows blew out at once in gouts of flame. Joby whirled away as burning debris rained down upon the churchyard. When he turned back, flames belched from the sacristy window as well.

"Ben!" he screamed, running toward the church with the hose, but the heat made him pull up short. "BEN!" he screamed again. Still clutching the now working hose, he forced himself a few feet nearer, just as Ben came hurtling from the engulfed window with Father Crombie in his arms, both men wreathed in flames As Ben hit the ground, he rolled himself and his passenger around in frantic, writhing arcs, trying to quench their cloaks of fire. Joby ran farther forward, suddenly heedless of the heat, training his hose as best he could on the moving target until Ben suddenly lay still far enough from the building for Joby to close the distance.

Joby rushed to stand over them with the gushing hose, uttering a wordless shout of terror as he saw how badly burned they were. Father Crombie lay facedown, his clothes half-gone, his once pale skin angry red and charred to black in places. Ben lay beside him faceup, eyes open, breathing raggedly. His once bronze hair was sooty black and altogether absent from one side of his head. That half of his face was a swollen ruin of blistered meat. Of his shirt, only one sleeve and the shoulders remained. The torso this revealed was a charred and oozing wreck. His jeans were scorched but still intact. His tennis shoes looked melted to his feet.

"Oh God, help!" Joby shouted, still dousing them with his pathetic stream of water. "Ben!" he sobbed. "God help me! What do I do?"

"Get help," Ben rasped, beginning to writhe again. "Hurry," he groaned.

Joby dropped the hose and ran toward town, wondering why no one had gotten there yet. Couldn't they see the church was burning? Only then did he see the smoke and flames that billowed up from several more locations around the tiny village.

"This is what I've been warning them about!" Agnes shouted into the phone, crouched in her bedroom closet as all hell broke loose outside. "But would anybody listen? Now look! There are buildings burning all over Taubolt! It would be almost satisfying if half of them weren't mine! Yes! You heard the sirens! Can't you see the smoke? Well, look outside, for heaven's sake! Those kids are going to burn this place to the ground, Karl!" She looked annoyed as Karl buzzed nonsense at her from his end of the line. "Of course it's kids, Karl! What adult could move around so fast? They're probably riding on those damn skateboards!"

As Basquel soared toward Taubolt's outskirts, the sight of steam and smoke rising in pale columns over several ruined buildings lifted his spirits even higher, and he picked up speed, eager to wreak still more havoc on the Creator's offensive little preserve.

News of the Cup's unexpected departure had sent an almost immobilizing wave of shock through Hell, then a helter-skelter scramble to mobilize. Sitting through Lucifer's dreary session of instructions about who to look for first, and how to strike at whom, and whom not to strike at, et cetera, et cetera, had been the most infuriating bore. Talk about hurry up and wait! Who'd ever thought that they were going to get in at all? The least he could have done was let them at it.

Kallaystra and her little team, of course, had been allowed to leave right away. Privileges of the elite and all. Yes, her little flood of operatives had apparently done their job, but the way she'd crowed and preened about it had been positively revolting.

As Basquel glided toward the nearest buildings, he was overtaken by a sudden wave of vertigo and a terrible sense of weight, as if he were falling, which he realized with a shock, he was! Instinctively, he braced against the impact as he plowed into the ground, utterly dumbfounded to find himself suddenly . . . corporeal!

"What on earth?" he blurted out, doubly stunned to hear his own quite audible voice! He had made no decision to materialize! How could this have happened? Worse still, he found that he could not dissolve back into his ethereal form. The weight of his obese bulk alone seemed crushing-the physicality left him near to retching. He stumbled to his-all Hell's gates!-his feet, and staggered desperately away from the village, knowing that he mustn't be caught like this by anyone. Incarnate, he was utterly vulnerable to . . . well, to all sorts of unthinkable outcomes!

"Basquel!"

The sound of Kallaystra's voice made Basquel flinch. He feared to be caught incarnate even by her-perhaps especially by her. They'd never been that fond of each other. What if she took advantage of his helpless condition?

"Basquel, you fool," Kallaystra said when he ignored her summons, "come this way. We are ordered to retreat!"

"Where are you?" Basquel called, humiliated by his inability to see her disembodied form with his own disgracefully material eyes. "What has happened to me?"

"You've been forced to materialize," Kallaystra replied, cruel amusement all too evident in her voice.

"How?" he wailed, still struggling away from Taubolt. "By whom?"

"By Michael," Kallaystra growled, "and his host of Morningstar's Children."

"They are here, then?" Basquel blurted out, anger leaping up through the fear and confusion in his breast.

"They are here," Kallaystra's voice intoned from somewhere very near now. "And, as you see, some of them are still powerful. A few steps more, and you will be clear of their spells, however. Follow my voice."

Even as her last words were spoken, he felt the dead weight of his unwanted flesh begin to lessen, and then, to his immense relief, he was free, dissolving ecstatically back into mere thought, will, and vapor once again.

He could see her clearly now, not ten feet in front of him, still looking smugly satisfied at his recent discomfort. This so annoyed him that he might have blasted her with more than mere enmity if not for the presence of so many others all around them.

"Commanded to retreat by whom?" he demanded instead. "I've no desire to go anywhere until these half-breed vermin have been exterminated. I thought we'd gotten the last of them centuries ago."

"So we had assumed." Kallaystra frowned. "But they've been here all along, it seems, hiding in the Cup's shadow, as always. Their ability to force us into flesh changes everything. Lucifer commands our return to Hell to regroup and amend our plans."

"Very well," Basquel sighed, as if merely humoring her with compliance, though she was right. This latest development would require some whole new approach.

As Molly examined the happily marginal fire damage to her store, her disciples began gathering to support her and report on the evening's other disasters. Two shops on Main Street had also been firebombed, though, like Molly's place, they'd been saved from more serious damage by the swift work of Taubolt's volunteer firemen. With poorly disguised satisfaction, Alicia had arrived to inform them that Sam Cotter's so-called mission had been set ablaze as well, shortly after the two shop fires had started, and had burned halfway to the ground. Of Cotter himself there was no sign, and rumors were already circulating that blamed him for having set all five blazes himself.

"What kind of idiot would burn his own place down?" Margery wondered aloud.

"They think he may have done it to throw suspicion off himself," Alicia answered smugly. "They say he bought a lot of paint thinner at the hardware store earlier tonight."

"Then he'll be charged with murder," Sharine said. "What an awful thing about St. Luke's. You should see the mess up there. It's a total loss." She shook her head. "They're saying that man who runs the junk shop was stabbed inside before the fire. And that poor old priest! Everybody says he was the kindest man in town."

"Do they think the other one will live?" Lolly asked sadly.

"No one's saying," Sharine answered, "but I saw them put him in the helicopter." She blanched visibly at the memory. "He looked dreadful."

Just then Carolena arrived in a breathless rush. "Molly! There are people falling from the sky!" she exclaimed in hushed excitement, as if afraid of being overheard. "Naked people! I saw one! With my own eyes! Not more than fifteen feet in front of me!"

"You saw what?" Molly asked. "Calm down, dear, and make some sense."

"The fairies!" Carolena gasped, still at half a whisper. "I've seen one too! It happened just after the fires started. He looked very disoriented. His back was turned. I don't think he saw me!"

For a moment, everyone stared at her as if she'd belched up a toad.

"I'm serious!" she protested. "Why would I make up such a ridiculous story?"

The ladies looked from Carolena to one another, as if waiting for someone to decide how they should react.

"I knew it!" Alicia said at last. "First those children, now this! I knew it was real!"

"The new age of enlightenment has dawned," Molly said, looking back gravely at her damaged store. "For every gift there is a price. The goddess has exacted her price this evening, and these are but the birth pains as Taubolt brings its gift into the world."

Joby rode beside Ben's stretcher, hardly able to endure the sight of his friend's ruined face, yet unable to look away. Crombie had been declared dead at the scene by the nurse accompanying the paramedic on the helicopter from Santa Rosa; his body would be transported by ambulance, along with Alfred's, to the morgue in Heeberville.

One of Taubolt's two fire trucks had come racing uphill toward the burning church before Joby had run half a block for help. Moments later Jake had appeared, looking desolate, and bent over Crombie's body with tears in his eyes. Then he'd gone to Ben, touched him briefly, and whispered something Joby hadn't been able to make out above the clamor of the fire and those fighting it. Ben's moaning had fallen off then, but Jake had turned to look at Joby as if he were among the burned as well, and said, "There's no more I can do for him. The helicopter's on its way. Stay with him, Joby." Joby had nodded, wondering where else Jake imagined he might go.

When the building was clearly beyond saving, two of the volunteer firemen had come to sit with Joby, sadly explaining that they'd been fighting other fires before anyone had noticed smoke at the top of the hill as well.

"We'll find the bastard who did this," one of the men had said at last.

"Okay," Joby had murmured without looking up from Ben's unconscious form.

Now Ben lay before him under heavy doses of morphine for the pain and sedatives to keep him from twisting off the stretcher. With such burns, they hadn't wanted to strap him down. The paramedic and the nurse hung back politely, quietly monitoring Ben's condition, occasionally checking his IV drip, but not otherwise intruding on Joby's helpless vigil.

Besides the burns, they'd told him, there were head injuries from the explosion and severe respiratory damage. It was amazing, they'd said, that Ben had managed to remain conscious at all, much less get himself and Crombie out the window as he had. "He must be in pretty awesome shape," the paramedic had said encouragingly to Joby shortly after their takeoff. "He was," Joby had replied, then quickly amended, "is," recalling Ben's radiant face earlier that night, after drinking from the Cup. Joby was glad now that Ben had been the one to drink. Perhaps it would help him live.

"Arthur," Ben moaned without opening his eyes. "Arthur!" His voice was a saw blade drawn through chalk.

Joby didn't know what to make of the call at first. Then remembering that Arthur was Hawk's real name, he leaned closer to be heard above the muffled throb of rotors, and asked, "You mean Hawk, Ben? Hawk will see you at the hospital."

"Arthur!" Ben rasped again. Then his eyes opened, and a kind of clarity seemed to resolve behind the ruin of his face. "Joby?" he croaked.

"Hey, Ben," Joby said, managing to smile, longing to take Ben's hand but not daring to touch the burns. "Were you asking for Hawk?"

"You look . . . like shit," Ben wheezed, an attempted smile cracking the seeping wreckage of his mouth.

Joby shoved a fresh upwelling of grief and revulsion aside and said, "Been a rough night, but we're almost there, Ben. You're doing great."

"Crombie?" Ben asked.

"He's okay now," Joby dissembled.

Ben nodded slightly, exhaling like a chorus of whispered violins. For a moment after that he just stared into space, then croaked, "You made my life . . . all the magic in my life, Joby." Ben closed his eyes again "I love you both. . . . I always have."

Frightened by what he heard, Joby leaned closer still, and said, "Laura's going to meet us there, Ben. They called her. She's driving to the hospital."

"She's yours," Ben wheezed. "She always was." He opened his eyes again and stared hard at Joby. "Why won't you ever let her love you?"

Joby struggled just to hold himself together, until Ben looked away, trying to smile again. "I held it, Arthur," Ben exhaled with a look of joy that seemed utterly impossible on that face. "It let me drink. After all this time . . . all I've done. I never thought-" Suddenly, he gasped in pain, the sound like milkshake slurping through a straw. Ben's eyes flew wide as he struggled to draw in another breath that sounded worse. He began to writhe again, and gasped, "I can't . . ."

The nurse and paramedic rushed forward, pushing Joby back.

"Intubation," the nurse ordered with quiet urgency.