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the Benandanti and then betrayed them. It gave her a poignant thrill of nostalgia to think of those two attractive young people with all the world before them. With a final pouff like a kiss she blew out the last candle. Then, gathering her papers, she left the room, to spend the night at a friend’s apartment.
    As for the candles and bowls, and the smirched remains of the Hand of Glory—well, custodians at the Divine were accustomed to disposing of such things.

CHAPTER 3 Oliver and Angelica
    I DON’T KNOW WHAT I was thinking when I dressed for my first day of class. Recalling September in New York, I guess, where the air would have the ringing chill of true autumn. Or else maybe it was some kind of magical thinking already at work inside my head, stirred by that terrible dream of angels in my room, the bizarre and inexplicable reality of the long crimson feather I had carefully wrapped and hidden in the bottom of my knapsack. For whatever reasons, I left my room poorly armed against the numbing heat outside. I wore black velvet trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots and a white cotton poet’s shirt, and a man’s black satin vest, very old and with tarnished silver buttons. By the time I was halfway across the Mall the shirt clung damply to my back. A blister throbbed insistently on the side of my left ankle. The sun beat against my cheeks like hot fists, and for a few minutes I considered returning to my room to change, or just going back to bed.
    But then I saw the boy who’d waved at me the day before, strolling across the parking lot with his Frisbee sticking out of a knapsack. When he saw me he smiled and waved.
    A Sign, I thought. I was always looking for Signs. And so I went on.
    The Department of Anthropology was at the far end of campus. Today all that part of the Divine has been built up, given over to the Bramwell Center for Dysfunctional Study and Thought. But then it was mostly trees, scraggly kudzu-hung locust trees and sumac bushes, with that nasty footing of broken bottles and tattered newsprint that you find in city woodlots.
    I followed a narrow meandering path. All the tropic glamour that had clung to the city last night was gone, burned away by the remorseless sun. The air smelled faintly of garbage. I wiped my face, panting with relief when finally I saw my destination, rising from steaming sumac mounds like Atlantis from the sea.
    I approached it slowly: an ancient building formed of blocks of granite so colossal they might have been stolen from some neglected menhir. Several students lolled on the steps. They had that ruddy heartiness I would soon associate with archaeology majors—sunburned and freckled, hair bleached by the sun, sturdy work boots and fatigues stained red with mud. They smiled but said nothing when I passed, feeling dandyish and stupid in my velvet pants and harlot’s boots. At the door I paused to catch my breath. They didn’t even glance at me as I went inside.
    Edgar Hall was like all the buildings at the Divine. Cool and old and silent, even the loudest of voices hushed by the long high corridors with their aqueous light. I found my class on the second floor, the door propped open with a torn textbook. Like my room at Rossetti, the classroom had high arched windows, though these were of stained glass that formed uninspiring geometric patterns, blue, yellow, red, blue, yellow, red. After the soft green light of the corridor, the riotous colors were painful to look upon. For a moment I stood there, shy, embarrassed by my clothes. I nudged the textbook that held the door open. The spine crackled softly, and a signature of pages slipped to the floor.
    Child Sacrifice in Edessa, A Study in Ritual Infanticide. I kicked the pages aside. When I entered the room, four faces in the front swiveled to look at me, then returned to staring at the runic words on a blackboard.
MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT & RELIGION
    PROF. BALTHAZAR WARNICK
    An unusually small wooden podium had been set