Midnight

"Your…?"Meredith stared, choked up. Mrs. Flowers had opened her enormous purse and was now proffering a rather thick al -black object to her.

"It Stillhas power,"the old lady explained as Meredith took the thing in two shaking hands, as if receiving a holy object. "I just turned it on and it was working. And now I’m on the Internet!" – proudly.

Meredith’s world had been swal owed up by the smal , grayish, antiquated screen. She was so amazed and excited at seeing this that she almost forgot why she needed it. But her body knew. Her fingers clutched; her thumbs danced over the mini-keyboard. She went to her favorite search page and entered the word "Orime."She got pages of hits – most in Japanese. Then feeling a trembling in her knees, she typed in "Inari."

6,530,298 results.

She went to the very first hit and saw a web page with a definition. Key words seemed to rush out at her like vultures.

Inari is the Japanese Shinto deity of rice…and…foxes. At the entrance to an Inari shrine are…statues of two kitsune…one male and one female…each with a key or jewel carried in mouth or paw…These fox-spirits are the servants and messengers of Inari. They carry out Inari’s orders….

There was also a picture of a pair of kitsune statues, in their fox forms. Each had a front paw resting on a star bal .

Three years ago, Meredith had fractured her leg when she was on a skiing trip with her cousins in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She had run straight into a smal tree. No martial arts skil s could save her at the last minute; she knew she was skiing off the groomed areas, where she could run into anything: powder, crud, or iced-over ruts. And, of course, trees. Lots of trees. She was an advanced skier, but she had been going too fast, looking in the wrong direction, and the next thing she knew, she was skiing into the tree instead of around it.

Now she had the same sensation of waking up after a head-on into wood. The shock, the dizziness and nausea that were, initial y, worse than the pain. Meredith could take pain.

But the pounding in her head, the sickening awareness that she had made a big mistake and that she was going to have to pay for it were unbearable. Plus there was a curious horror about the knowledge that her own legs wouldn’t hold her up.

Even the same useless questions ran through her subconscious, like: How could I be so stupid? Is this possibly a dream? and, Please, God, can I hit the Undo button?

Meredith suddenly realized that she was being supported on either side by Mrs. Flowers and their sixteen-year-old, Ava Wakefield. The mobile was on the cement floor of the basement. She must have actual y started to black out.

Several of the younger kids were screaming Matt’s name.

"No – I – I can stand up alone…"Al she wanted in the world was to go into the darkness and get away from this horror.

She wanted to let her legs go slack and her mind go blank, to flee…

But she couldn’t run away. She had taken the stave; she had taken the Duty from her grandfather. Anything supernatural that was out to harm Fel ‘s Church on her watch was her problem. And the problem was that her watch never ended.

Matt came clattering down the stairs, carrying their seven-year-old, Hailey, who continual y shook with petit mal seizures.

"Meredith!"She could hear the incredulity in his voice. "What is it? What did you find, for God’s sake?"

"Come…look."Meredith was remembering detail after detail that should have set off warning bel s in her mind. Matt was somehow already beside her, even as she remembered Bonnie’s very first description of Isobel Saitou.

"The quiet type. Hard to get to know. Shy. And…nice."

And that first visit to the Saitou house. The horror that quiet, shy, nice Isobel Saitou had become: the Goddess of Piercing, blood and pus oozing from every hole. And when they had tried to carry dinner to her old, old grandmother, Meredith had noticed absently that Isobel’s room was right under the dol -like old lady’s. After seeing Isobel pierced and clearly unbalanced, Meredith had assumed that any evil influence must be trying to travel up, and had worried in the back of her mind about the poor, old, dol -sized grandmother.

But the evil could just as easily have traveled down. Maybe Jim Bryce hadn’t given Isobel the malach madness after al .

Maybe she had given it to him, and he had given it to Caroline and to his sister.

And that children’s game! The cruel, cruel song that Obaasan – that Inari-Obaasan had crooned. "Fox and turtle had a race…" And her words: "There’s a kitsune involved in this somewhere." She’d been laughing at them, amusing herself! Come to that, it was from Inari-Obaasan that Meredith had first heard the word "kitsune."

And one more additional cruelty, that Meredith had only been able to excuse before by assuming Obaasan had very poor sight. That night, Meredith had had her back to the door and so had Bonnie – they had both been concentrating on "poor decrepit old Grandma."But Obaasan had been facing the door, and she was the only one who could have seen – must have seen – Isobel sneaking up behind Bonnie. And then, just as the cruel game song told Bonnie to look behind her…

Isobel had been crouching there, ready to lick Bonnie’s forehead with a forked pink tongue…

"Why?"Meredith could hear her own voice saying. "Why was I so stupid? How could I not have seen from the beginning?"

Matt had retrieved the BlackBerry and read the web page.

Then he just stood, fixed, his blue eyes wide. "You were right,"he said, after a long moment.

"I want so much to be wrong…"

"Meredith – Shinichi and Misao are Inari’s servants…If that old lady is Inari we’ve been running around like crazy after the wrong people, the hired muscle…"