Mordechai didn’t question my lie, just sighed a little. That sigh felt like a knife between my ribs, but I couldn’t find the damned thing! It wasn’t my fault!
“The Hinderer takes many forms in this world, all of them part of God’s plan.” Mordechai’s words were so faint, they almost seemed to be spoken inside my head. I shook myself back to attention, but he hadn’t actually asked a question, so no reply seemed appropriate. “He finds ways to whisper into the ears of the faithful, to worm his way into their hearts. To take root in the innocent and profane the sacred. To play upon the prideful and trap them with their own hubris.”
“Is this what happened in that old house in the photos?” I was desperate to focus on that house, that case. Any case. Mordechai now seemed impossibly old to me, and old in a way that marked him as feeble. I didn’t want to think of him asfeeble. He needed to be strong. Strong enough to take on the job that involved a strange old house that clearly was far away from here, and strong enough to take me with him. Strong enough to take me anywhere that wasn’t here.
“The affliction visited upon that house has many layers. From what the son has told me, it has lasted for at least seven years but is now manifesting in more…obvious ways.”
I felt my brows lift, though I struggled mightily to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, layers?”
“Infestation. Oppression. Obsession.” Mordechai ticked the words off, a somber litany of evil incarnations sent to plague the righteous, each of them a progressively worse form of demonic work, but nottheworst. Infestation was the least intrusive, but perhaps the best known: the haunted house. Oppression and obsession preyed upon the minds of actual people. They saw things, heard things, that shouldn’t be there…and they grew more and more isolated, confused, depressed. Damaged. But these weren’t the terms that made my own heart thump in my chest. Those levels of affliction the rabbi could handle with a phone call sometimes, a visit to the office, or a well-intended prayer. The big house with the flat roof and the strange family didn’t just have a ghost in the attic.
“And possession, finally,” Mordechai said, sounding mournful. “Possession is the most dangerous of all the Hinderer’s work. We cannot always see it for what it is.”
“How many demons are there?” This was important to me, for some reason. Mrs. Klein’s sister had only one demon inside her, but that wasn’t always the case. Still, the most I’d ever heard of was?—
“The son couldn’t say. At least six separate creatures have made their presence known, but he has heard the refrains of many more, the voices of a multitude, in fact.”
“Six.” I didn’t even bother hiding the excitement shimmering inside me now. We’d never taken on six before. I suspected that somewhere, in all those binders on his shelves, Mordechai had confronted multiple demons, but six—six surely was a lot. Six was a television series.
Six would be a fucking joy.
We were back to where we’d started in front of the empty gravestone, and I refocused on Mordechai. Once again, I was struck by his age, his fragility. He wasn’t a small man, but he seemed more bent-over than he ever had, more unsure. “Mordechai?”
I reached out a hand, but he straightened then, eyeing me with a sudden fierceness. “Everything that is good and right has its time in the eyes of the Almighty, Delia. Everything on this earth has been granted by Him, its beginning and its end.”
I frowned. “Okay, but?—”
“You came to me as a gift from the heavens, a gift I sorely needed during a time of great trial. A gift, but a test as well. It was a test I didn’t pass that first day. Or any day since.”
That didn’t sound good. “Um, what are you talking about?”
Mordechai looked beyond me then, into the shadows. “It’s no longer a battle I can put off fighting, I fear. Perhaps no longer a battle I can fight at all.” He sighed, his lips twisting with a hint of bitterness. “I had prayed for more time to prepare you. I just—I needed more time.”
“We’ll have lots of time.” I really didn’t want him to devolve into one of his muttering rambles.
Suddenly, though, the strangeness of our location struck me anew. “Why did you bring me all this way if you just wanted to talk about the guy and his photographs? We could have done that back at your office.” I looked around. “Wait, is someone buried here who’s important to that case? Are there members of the family in this cemetery?”
Still, that didn’t make sense. The house had looked old, fancy, and most importantly, far away from any city. Why would a family who lived on some sort of palatial estate have a cemetery plot in the middle of Holy Angels? A curious excitement had taken hold of me as another thought occurred. “Or did someone they hurt get buried here? Is that why we’re here, to discover why they’re being infested in the first place?”
“There isn’t always an easy explanation,” Mordechai said. His words sounded too far away though, like he seemed far away, as I searched the names on the worn-out headstones, a thousand thoughts whispering to me at once. “Evil can find its way into even the most righteous of hearts and most sacred of places. And sometimes…it has help.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I frowned back at him, startled to find him staring at me. “Then why? You had to bring me here for a reason.”
He nodded. His gaze not leaving mine, he reached into the pocket of his long jacket and pulled out a carved spiral, one I recognized immediately. “Your shofar,” I said. The weirdest riffle of panic sliced through me—panic and anger, too. Mordechai was playing games with me. He’d dragged me two hours out of my way to playgameswith me? “You’re going to blow that here? I thought you didn’t even believe in it.”
Mordechai’s smile was grim as he lifted the horn to his lips. “I’m not playing it for my ears.”
He blew a single, light, clear note.
The sound pierced the twilight air—loud, raw, accusatory. A call to judgment, I thought fleetingly. A call to fight.
For one heartbeat, the cemetery held its breath.
Then it screamed back.
Chapter
Nine
