“I think he broke her nose, Spyder,” the boy told the white gorgon, and she’d knelt, too, made Robin move her hands and frowned. There was a small and perfect cruciform scar between the gorgon’s eyes, softest rose against the snow, and it had almost seemed to glow when she leaned close to look at Robin’s nose.

“Yeah, I guess you do,” the gorgon said, and then they’d helped her stand and followed the pretty boy, haughty swish and fake fur, across the empty parking lot.

Where the highway cut deep into Red Mountain, the weathered gash down through its Paleozoic bones, shale and chert and iron-ore ligaments, Robin switched her headlights on. The sun was gone, burned down to a molten sliver, orange-red streak in the western sky as she crested the mountain and started down into the wide valley below. The city twinkled and glittered in the fresh night, the uneven cluster of electric light and the garish ribbons of I-65 and I-20.

She’d been concentrating on nothing but the cherry-red taillights of the eighteen-wheeler in front of her, ignoring the oily flow of images that had begun to play behind her eyes, the memories past vivid that ate into her cool, her queen-bitch deceit, like nail polish remover through Styrofoam. She felt dim relief to see the city, to know that Spyder and Byron were so close now.

“Don’t let it freak you out,” Spyder would say, “they’re only flashbacks. They can’t hurt you.” But Robin knew better, knew that Spyder knew even better than her.

Outside, it was getting colder, but she had the window down, anyway; she hated to drive alone now, especially after dark, paced the Civic to keep up with the speeding patches of traffic. The heater was blowing full tilt, but her lips and ears and the tips of her fingers were still painfully cold, and her breath fogged like cigarette smoke. She leaned over and punched the eject button on the Civic’s CD player and it whirred and spat out the PJ Harvey disc she’d been listening to for the past twenty minutes. She’d begun to imagine, to suspect, that Polly Jean’s jangling voice was mocking her own jangling nerves, and she searched through the loose CDs in the passenger seat for anything calmer, found Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and loaded it into the empty tray.

In the last four or five straining seconds before the disc cued to the first track and the music began again, Robin clearly heard the quick, dry scritch across backseat vinyl, the weighty thump of something heavy falling to the floorboard directly behind her. But she did not jump or cry out, did not turn to see, but pressed the black toe of her boot to the accelerator and passed the truck, stayed even with its cab all the way to her exit.

Three days spent piecing together the ceremony, a blurred chain of days revisiting volumes on peyote religion and the general use of hallucinogens in shamanism; library tomb dust and Robin curled into a corner of Spyder’s old sofa, the books scattered around her like fallen megaliths. Spyder had not dared to interrupt when her parents called, again and again, looking for her, or even to remind her that she’d forgotten to eat.

But the books contained only the smallest portion of what she was looking for, disappointing syntheses of the contaminations of Christian missions and older aboriginal ritual. The Ghost Dance, the Kiowa Half Moon Ceremony, and the Cross Fire Ceremony; revelations of the Creator’s Road, the narrow way, old men’s visions of the life of Christ and figures in the sky: celestial landmarks for the Spiritual Forces, the Moon, the Sun, Fire. Her head filling up and up until her temples ached with contradictory instructions and still, the keen awareness that none of these could be their ceremony, the dawning certainty that she had to find it inside herself. Make it new, not so different from what the Sioux and Caddo and Comanche had done, but a synthesis of her own instead of bits and odd pieces cribbed from obscure ethnographies.

Through all this, Walter had hovered at the dim edges of her awareness, as if, found guilty of some crime, he was merely awaiting sentence, the ugly consequences of his indiscretion. Sometimes he sat across the room from her, alone and watching, and sometimes he paced anxiously through Spyder’s house, impatient, barely comprehending her obsession and insistence on detail, on any ritual at all, for that matter. If he spoke, either Spyder or Byron was usually there to tell him to shut up, leave her alone, go home now, Walter.

And she’d known that they were all, even Spyder, just a little bit afraid of what she was setting in motion, of what she would soon ask them to do. These three, who had taken her in and shown her how to fill in the emptiness, had midwifed her rebirth from that suburban zombie hell; had shown her what they knew of darkness and light and the graying shades in between, of the power to be gained by living through death without first having to die. Grave robbers and self-styled ghouls, cemetery children, daemon lovers, eaters of every opium and lotus, and now they were afraid, these three beyond fear or dread, and it gave Robin the slimmest satisfaction, that she could be so powerful, and that she could, at last, give something back.

Four days after Walter had brought the grocery bag of peyote buttons to Weird Trappings, she’d finally called them all together, had given Byron a list of things they’d need and her Visa card, Spyder’s car keys. And then she’d asked Spyder to find her something to eat, had soaked in a tub of hot, soapy water, rose-scented bath salts, while Spyder scrambled eggs and fried slices of baloney, brewed strong black coffee in her noisy old percolator.

And Walter and Spyder had watched while she ate, Robin stray-cat ravenous after days of Cheetos and candy bars, and his eyes had seemed to follow every forkful from the plate to her mouth. But she was past being annoyed by Walter’s gnawing adoration, too exhausted to object or care. When she’d finished, Spyder had rubbed her neck and shoulders, strong hands kneading away the kinks and knots, and they’d talked about other things until Byron had come back: a shipment of animal skulls that had come into the shop that morning, a documentary Walter had seen on cable about the Knights Templar.

It had been dark an hour when Byron finally returned, found them in the living room listening to Bach, and he’d sent Walter back out to the car for the bags while he’d bitched about a cashier at the supermarket who had looked at the credit card and wanted to know if he was Robin Elizabeth Ingalls.

“Did you get everything on the list?” she’d asked, and he’d rolled his eyes.

“I’m not totally fucking incompetent.”

“If I’d thought that you were, Byron, I’d have gone myself.”

Revived by her bath and the food, by Spyder’s gentle ministrations, she’d finally felt the first twinges of excitement, adrenaline promises and a tightness deep in her belly. When Walter came back in with the bags, she had him set them down on the floor, and she prowled through them, one by one, checking their contents against the list in her head. And yes, Byron had found everything she’d asked for, the spices and salt, the paints and olive oil and two dozen white candles.

“Okay, Walter, if you’d please take this all down to the basement now…” But then Spyder’s eyes had gone wide, lightning swift passage of dread across her face before she’d turned suddenly away, and Robin had known that look, that special silver panic that rode piggyback on her madness, that flashed itself like a warning display. She’d glanced at Byron and known that he’d seen it, too. Spyder walked away from them, stood by a window and stared out at the dark between them and the house next door.

“Spyder? What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”