Note: One night, when I was feeling particularly unfocused and without direction, just before I went to sleep, I prayed for guidance. That night, I had this dream. I wrote it down exactly the way I dreamed it. The message seemed pretty clear: "Trust Me."

The Butcher was coming.

Malachy knew even before the whispers reached his ears, because of the tension in the air, the electric bustling of the grown-ups, the fear that spread through them as they milled about like cattle in the slaughter sluice.

Father, calm as always, pushed through the throng toward Malachy. Bodies buffeted him from every side, jostled his prayer books, skewed his prayer cap to one side. He pushed it into place with one hand and pulled Malachy out of the current of bodies with the other.

"They're here," said Father. "They've just breeched the gates."

Malachy's throat tightened. "Is it true what they say? That he drinks blood? That he eats our people's hearts?"

Father hunched a shoulder. "It's bad enough, but perhaps not quite as bad as all that."

"Is she with him?"

"So the scouts say. But his troops concern me more."

The Butcher's mother was as feared as her son, perhaps more so, for it was she who had fanned the fires of hatred in him. Folk said she had suckled him on the blood of Malachy's people. If he was a monster, and totally without mercy, it was she who had created him.

Father laid a hand on Malachy's shoulder. "I have a task for you, son. I must gather the men and women. I need you to find the other children and lead them to safety."

Malachy nodded. With the Butcher at the gates, he was not sure where safety lay, but now was not the time to tell Father that.

A quick hug, and Father was gone. Malachy heard the thud of battering rams against the doors of the Great Hall and ran for the lower levels.

The children were not in the greenhouse, nor in the common rooms, nor in the dining areas. He found Sol in the library, and Sarai in the art room, and Jothan in the gaming room. The rest he found in the music hall, where the orchestra director was trying to maintain an atmosphere of normalcy, tapping his wand on his music stand in a futile attempt to be heard above the hubbub of excited young voices.

The commotion gradually subsided as first one child, then another, saw Malachy grew silent. He wondered what they saw on his face. Fear? Determination?

"Father is gathering the grown-ups," he said to the conductor. "I'm to take the others."

He could see the question on the man's face--take them where?-- but all the conductor said was, "I'll join the other adults upstairs, then." He laid his baton gently on his music stand and slipped out the door into the main corridor.

Malachy had wondered if the other children would follow him. He was, after all, neither the eldest nor the strongest. But they laid down their instruments and followed him. One, Devora, carried her clarinet in one hand and, with the other, took the sweaty hand of a little girl clutching a bedraggled rag doll.

From above, Malachy could hear the sounds of clanging swords and tramping feet. There was no place left to go but down, so down was where he led them. As he neared the escape tunnels, he heard the brash voices of the Butcher's men and turned back sharply. There was no way out. There was nothing left but to find a hiding place.

One door after another was opened and rejected, until, at last, they were trapped between the sound of invaders above and the sound of invaders below. Malachy whispered a prayer and opened the final door. It led to a storage room filled with shelves and old furniture, ruined tools, and boxes of detritis. Beside the door was a broad glass window. Malachy's stomach sank, but he herded the others in and settled them in a crouching row beneath the window. He turned off the light and closed the door behind them.

He had hoped for darkness, but light streamed from somewhere behind them. The Butcher's men would be sure to notice. Frantically, he scanned the room for the source of the light and found a small round lamp imbedded in one corner near the ceiling. He scrambled onto the frayed back of a plaid cushioned chair and tried to unscrew the bulb, but the glass was set in smoothly against the wall, and there was no purchase for his fingers.

He cast about for something to cover it with and found a roll of thick black tape on a dusty shelf. He could cover the light, he thought, and the room would plunge into darkness, a darkness, he hoped. as thick as God's Shadow.

But when he had covered the light, he realized there must be another source, for the room was lighter than ever. Heart pounding, he searched the room for this new source of light. He felt the eyes of the others on him, hopeful, fearful, trusting...

Down the corridor, doors opened, closed. Boots stamped. There were harsh voices, and laughter.

There was no time. And the room had grown brighter than ever. The doorknob jiggled, and Malachy dived behind the plaid chair.

He had failed. Tears stung his eyes as he thought of the Butcher, and of the Butcher's mother, and of what would be done to the children Father had placed in his care. Crouching behind the chair, the dust of decades in his nostrils, Malachy wept silently and did the only thing left to him to do. He prayed. He prayed as he had never prayed in his life.

The door opened, and the room was bathed in light. The Butcher stepped in. Two feet from his boots, Devora clapped her hand over her mouth, and the little girl beside her buried her face in her doll's hair. The Butcher stepped right over them and gave the room a cursory glance. His men milled around him, stepping over and around the children who lined the wall beside him. Motes swirled in the light around them, light as bright and beautiful as God's Shadow.

"This is the last room," said the Butcher. "We can't have missed them." With a roar of frustration, he swept the debris from the shelf in front of him. "Find them!"

Malachy stepped out from his hiding place and saw the realization wash over the faces of the other children. The Butcher could not see them. They were invisible. Or perhaps they had been taken from this world into another, parallel one.

In his mind, Malachy could see his father and the other men huddled in the sanctuary, praying. The great doors swinging open, and the invaders bursting in and seeing...nothing. An empty room. And throughout the fortress, the same scene played over and over again. empty rooms, and Malachy's people, cloaked in their prayers, and Malachy's prayer among them.

As the Butcher and his men streamed from the room, the children stood and ran after them, laughing and dancing around their enemies, unseen.

Only the Butcher's mother remained behind. She could see him, Malachy realized. And realized something else, too. He was not afraid. She looked at him for a long time, and the years and the hatred fell away from her, until it was as if she had never been anything but a kindly woman with wild hair and a wolf's tooth necklace. She knew. She knew what had happened, and why. And she had been transformed by it.

"You will be a great spiritual leader among your people," she said, smiling, and he knew that she was seeing his future, all their futures, perhaps. " And when it is over, you will know it has been worth all you have given up."

She smiled and turned away, and Malachy followed, enveloped in the shining light of God's Shadow.