• 12:20 P.M.

Demi felt the rise of her pulse as the Monasterio Benedictino Montserrat van reached the top of the long mountain road and made a sharp turn into the monastery's restricted parking area. Through the windows she could now see up close the grouping of sand-colored stone buildings she had glimpsed from far below. No longer in miniature, it still looked like an isolated fortress-city, untouchable against the half-mile-high limestone cliffs and encompassing among other things its famed basilica, a museum, restaurant, hotel, and private apartments.

Abruptly the van's passenger door slid open. A young priest stood outside in the bright sun.

"Welcome to Montserrat," he said in English.

Moments later he was leading them across a plaza filled with tourists and then up a series of steps toward the basilica. Beck carried a small overnight bag; the witch, Luciana, her large black purse; Demi, a small equipment bag with photographic supplies and a smaller bag inside it holding personal toiletries, and two professional cameras thrown over one shoulder; one, a 35mm Nikon, the other, a Canon digital.

The priest led them under a stone arch and into the basilica's inner courtyard, which was packed with more tourists. A clock high on the basilica's tower read 12:25. They were precisely on time. Immediately Demi thought of Cousin Jack and Cousin Harold. She wondered where they were-if they were still with the limousine driver and on their way here, or-she felt her stomach clench in a knot. What if they'd been stopped at one of the roadblocks? What then? What would she do? What would Beck?

"This way, please," the priest led them down a long porticoed corridor and past a series of arched stone panels inset with heraldic symbols and what appeared to be religious inscriptions written in Latin. Then she saw it, and her heart caught in her throat. Encased in one of the last panels was the stone sculpture of an early Christian Crusader. Chain mail covering his head and neck, he rested an arm on a triangular shield. Carved into the shield was the balled cross of the Aldebaran. This was the first time she had seen it anywhere outside of books or drawings or the tattoos on the left thumbs of members of the coven. She wondered how long the piece had been there and who else over the years or even centuries had seen it and recognized the sign and knew its meaning.

"Through here," the priest turned them down another corridor, this one narrower than the first and lined with row after row of flickering votive candles. Where before there had been numbers of tourists, now there were few. With every step they were getting farther and farther from the center of activity.

Demi heard her cameras click together as they touched. At the same time she felt an icy chill touch the nape of her neck and then creep across her shoulders. With it came the sound of her father's voice whispering the warning he had written to her about her mother so many years earlier-Do not, under any circumstances try to learn her fate.

Fearfully she looked back. Except for the rows of flickering candles the walkway behind them was empty.

Five more steps and the priest stopped at a heavy wooden door cut into a stone archway. Immediately he turned to a wooden panel set into the stonework next to the door and slid it back. Inside was an electronic keypad. He punched in four numbers, pressed the pound key, then slid the panel closed and turned an iron knob on the door. It opened easily, and he gestured for them to enter. They did and he left, closing the door behind him.

Compared to the noonday brightness outside, the place seemed inordinately dark. Slowly their eyes became accustomed to it. They were in an office of some kind with a number of ornate high-backed wooden chairs lining one wall and a massive bookcase against the wall opposite. An enormous wooden desk and large leather chair behind it sat near a closed door at the far end. The ceiling was high and arched, while the walls themselves appeared to be of the same aged stone as the monastery's complex of buildings. The floor was the same, worn shiny in places by the foot traffic of people and time.

"Wait here please, Demi," Beck said quietly, and then led Luciana toward the door at the end of the room. Reaching it, he knocked, and then they entered and Beck closed the door behind them.

• 12:35 P.M.

Demi waited alone in the dim light and silence; the door they had entered through closed behind her; the one at the far end where Reverend Beck and Luciana had gone out, shut too. Whether they had left to find Dr. Foxx or to do something else entirely she didn't know.

Once more she looked around the darkened chamber. The high-arched ceiling, the high wooden chairs against either wall, the great wooden desk at the end, the stone walls, the worn stone floor. There was history here. Much of it old. All of it Christian. She wondered if her mother had come here so many years earlier. Wondered if she had once stood where Demi did now. In this room, in this dim light.

Waiting.

For what?

For whom?

• 12:40 P.M.

Again she heard her father's warning. With it came something else, the memory of a person she had long tried to keep from thinking about: a bald, armless octogenarian scholar she had met six years earlier at the beginning of her professional career when she worked for the Associated Press in Rome.

A photo assignment had taken her north into Umbria and Tuscany. A free day in Florence had given her the opportunity to explore used-book stores-the same as she did everywhere she traveled in Italy-searching for material on Italian witchcraft and looking for anything that might reveal a boschetto or coven, past or present, that took as its marker the sign of Aldebaran. It was a search that until that day had turned up nothing. Then, in a tiny bookshop near the Ponte Vecchio, she came upon a slim, tattered fifty-year-old book on Florentine witchcraft. Skimming it, she stopped abruptly at its fourth chapter. Its yellowed title page all but took her breath away. The chapter's title was "Aradia" and beneath the printed word was an unmistakable illustration-the balled cross of Aldebaran. Heart pounding, she bought the book immediately and took it back to her hotel room. The chapter, like the book itself, was slight, but in reading it she learned of an ancient and secretive boschetto of Italian female witches, the strega she had told Nicholas Marten about. Called Aradia after a fourteenth-century wise woman who brought back La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion, the boschetto revived a number of ancient traditions-an unwritten body of laws, rites and doctrines-and put them into practice in northern and central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There the chapter ended. The significance of the sign of Aldebaran was never mentioned, nor was word Aradia used again anywhere in the book.

Desperate to know more, Demi went to bookstores and museums and visited occult societies and scholars in the Tuscan cities of Siena and Arezzo. From there she went to Bologna and then Milan and finally back to Rome. In all she found nothing more than a brief note that in 1866 an American writer and historian traveling in Italy had learned that a manuscript containing the name Aradia and describing "the ancient secrets of Italian witchcraft" existed somewhere in Tuscany. He searched for months trying to find it but without success. He did, however, come upon an Italian witch named Raffaella who allegedly had seen it and told him of its contents. His conclusion was that the secrets of Aradia, or at least Raffaella's interpretation of it, were little more than a mixture of sorcery, medieval heresy, and political radicalism. His analysis ended there, with no mention whatsoever of the sign of Aldebaran.