Penny tried to wrench her arm out of my grip. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I wasn’t going to be able to hold her for long if I didn’t do something drastic.
Which was the same choice I’d faced with Ursula. People had died and I’d nearly gotten myself killed because I couldn’t be ruthless with a woman who wanted to murder me.
I leaned my body weight onto her, pinning her arms to her back. I could have broken them, hit her behind the ear, or stomped on her, but I held back, and my refusal to make that choice became my choice. If that made things difficult later on, so be it.
Steve knelt beside her but didn’t cuff her. He pleaded for her understanding, apologized for what he had to do, and generally irritated me by trying to be reasonable with a person who had lost all reason. “Just snap them on!” I barked. I bent her arms behind her back, and he did it.
We heard a car engine rev outside.
“No!” Penny screamed. “Don’t take him from me! You can’t take him away from me!”
I sprinted through the door and across the porch. A dirty white pickup roared across the yard, heading downhill toward the street. It lurched and swerved in the mud. I raced after it.
The truck skidded on a steep part of the yard and slammed against a tree.
I ran around a thicket toward the truck, ghost knife in hand. Maybe the spell was useless against these people, but it made me feel better to hold it. The truck bed was empty, so I circled toward the driver’s side. There was a strange sound, like a high-pitched keen mixed with a metallic scrape. I had never heard anything like it; I figured it was a damaged fan belt.
I reached the driver’s window. The brown-eyed kid was behind the wheel, holding his bloody forehead—the pickup was too old to have air bags.
“Sit still,” I said. “We’re going to have someone take a look at that head.”
He looked at me, his expression still empty. “I’ll kill you,” he said. “If you try to take him from me, I’ll kill you.”
I glanced over at the passenger seat. It was empty. The plastic lining on the passenger door had a discolored patch.
Goose bumps ran the length of my body. The sapphire dog was very close.
I stepped back and looked around. I couldn’t see anything but trees, leafless bushes, and mud. Justy laid rubber peeling away down the street. Steve was running toward me as fast as he could, which wasn’t fast at all. He had almost reached the back fender when he looked toward the passenger side of the truck.
And stopped. He gaped at something on the other side of the truck that I couldn’t see.
I walked toward him. My guts were in knots, but I refused to be afraid. I had come here for exactly this moment.
You’re not trained for this, Catherine had said. It destroys anyone who sees it.
Steve stood and gaped as I came around the back of the truck and saw the sapphire dog.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was walking away from us, and I didn’t think it looked like a dog at all. It didn’t have fur, and its skin was a brilliant electric blue. Its body swayed as it moved, as though it was part cougar and part python. Its four legs extended and retracted in a disturbing, boneless motion, like a set of tentacles or springs. It didn’t have wings, but it did have two rows of dark spots running down its back. A second glance showed that they weren’t spots at all but actually faceted blue crystals embedded in its flesh. Its long, slender, whiplike tail snapped and wavered the way a stream of water might move as it flowed over a pane of dirty glass.
Then it reached a patch of grass about a dozen feet away from us, turned, and sat on its haunches. Suddenly, it looked very much like a dog. Its broad, oversized head tapered at the front to a snout that had no opening. There were more blue crystals on its forehead and around its impossibly narrow neck. Its ears were long and floppy, almost long enough to be rabbit ears. And its eyes …
Its eyes were huge, as large as a cartoon animal’s. Its pupils were shaped like eight-pointed stars, and there were five of them in each eye, all shining gold and arranged in a circle.
It stared at us with an unfathomable expression while its pupils slowly rotated. The effect was hypnotic.
The sapphire dog was beautiful. That’s a simple word I’ve used to describe anything from a new car to a moment of karmic payback, but it could never capture the impact the sapphire dog had on me. Framed in bare trees and mud, the otherworldly beauty of it hit me like a punch in the gut. It didn’t look solid. It didn’t look real. I thought I might be having a vision.
“Lord, thank you for this day,” Steve said. He was a few paces to my right. It took an effort to look away from the animal, but Steve was just as stunned as I was. He stepped toward it, and so did I. I didn’t want him to be closer to it than I was. I didn’t want to share.
The sapphire dog looked at Steve, and I felt a twinge of jealousy—I wanted it to look at me. I wanted to punch the old man in the back of his head and knock him cold, so the sapphire dog would want me and only me.
There was a familiar pressure against a spot below my right collarbone. It meant something, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.
The tip of the sapphire dog’s snout began to recede, the way a person might suck at their cheeks to make them hollow. The snout changed color—first to a dark purple, then to shit brown. A nasty, puckered opening appeared—round, wrinkled, and toothless like a shit-hole.
We were in danger. I remembered that the twinge under my collarbone was a warning that I was under attack. There was a tiny feeling of unease deep inside me, but thoughts of the sapphire dog had crowded it out.
This wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right, and if I didn’t wake up, I was going to be dead.
It lifted its snout toward Steve. I bolted toward him and knocked him into the mud just as the sapphire dog’s long, bone-white tongue snaked out at him.
The tongue passed over us, swiping through the air near my shoulder. I felt Steve hit the ground hard, the air whuffing out of him.
A second wave of love-struck longing washed over me, but this time I recognized the twinge under my right collarbone. My iron gate, one of the protective sigils on my chest, was trying to block a magical attack.
These weren’t my feelings. I had to focus on that. The animal—no, the predator—across from me was trying to control how I felt.
It turned its attention on me. I rolled to my knees in the freezing mud and cocked my arm to throw the ghost knife. Its eyes widened.
I threw the spell.
The sapphire dog seemed to move in three directions at once. It slid to the left and right at the same moment, and shot straight up from the ground. It was almost as if it was a still image that had split apart.
The three afterimages vanished. The ghost knife passed through empty air.
I jumped to my feet, stepped between Steve and the ghost knife, and called it back. Hopefully, he wouldn’t see.
The sapphire dog was gone. Although it had split into separate still images before it vanished, there were footprints in the mud heading to the left and right for a few feet. Damn. At least it wasn’t cloning itself.
I scanned the area around the house. The predator was nowhere in sight. I ran around to the other side of the truck, but it wasn’t there, either.
I laid my face against the cold metal cab. I felt empty. I had a raw, hollow space inside where my adoration for the sapphire dog had been. I knew those feelings weren’t mine. I knew they’d been forced on me, but I still felt their absence as a terrible ache. And I knew that, because of them, I’d missed my chance to kill a predator.
Steve was still on his back in the mud. He stared up at the overcast sky and muttered to himself.
A few seconds ago, I’d been about to put his lights out, and I’d been partly protected by the iron gate Annalise had given me. How much worse had it been for him?
I heard a crash from inside the house. The front door was still standing open, but I couldn’t see Penny. Damn. Of course she couldn�
��t just wait quietly to be taken to prison.
I kicked the bottom of Steve’s shoe. “Get up,” I said, my voice more harsh than I’d intended. “You have to call those ambulance assholes for the kid in the truck. You have to take your cousin to jail, too.”
I jogged toward the house. The predator might have hidden inside. I didn’t think it was likely, but I had to check. It’s what I was there to do, after all.
Penny was not in the living room, but the axe still lay where she’d dropped it. I stepped carefully inside. I couldn’t see anyone, but I did hear the far-off rasping of metal on metal.
I walked toward the sounds. The throw rug in the middle of the floor and the dingy brown sofa were coated with a fine layer of white cat hairs. Beside the sofa was one of those structures built of flimsy wood and cheap gray carpeting that are supposed to be fun for cats. This one was four and a half feet tall and three feet around.
A dead cat lay on the floor beside it. It had been stomped on, probably by someone with a heavy boot. Someone like Penny.
The kitchen was also coated with cat hairs. The smeary fridge had book reports and pop quizzes held on with magnets. The kid out front was a straight-A student—exactly the sort I used to beat up in my own school days.
Maybe, just maybe, the white stain on his face was temporary.
On the far side of the fridge was a set of stairs leading down to the basement. The sound of metal-on-metal sawing was coming from there.
The wooden stairs creaked under my weight. “Get out!” Penny screamed. “Get out of my house!”
The basement had a concrete floor and a low ceiling. There was a long workbench at one end and a stretching mat at the other. The mat had been repaired many times with duct tape.
Penny was beside the workbench. She’d managed to clamp a hacksaw into a vise and was rubbing the chain of the cuffs up and down the blade.
“Your son is outside,” I said. I had a pretty good idea how she would react, but I had to be sure. “He’s hit his head and is bleeding pretty badly.”
“Get out!” she screamed again.
“An ambulance is on the way to pick him up.”
“Get out of here before I kill you!”
Just as I’d thought. When she’d screamed not to take “him” away, she was talking about the sapphire dog, not her own son. It had touched her face and made her fall in love with it. It had fed on her.
She fumbled for a screwdriver on the bench. Her hands were still pinned behind her, and her charge was awkward and slow.
I yanked the screwdriver out of her hand and kicked her behind the knee. She fell onto the padded mat. I took a claw hammer off a hook on the wall. “That was a pretty little animal, wasn’t it?”
“Are you a fucking moron? It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. If you try to keep me from it, I’ll chop you into tiny pieces.”
“Yeah, sure. It needs a ride out of town, right? I’ll bet it wants to go to a city. Right?” She didn’t answer, but the hateful look in her eyes was all the confirmation I needed. “Now listen to this: I’m going to put you in the back of Steve’s car. If you fight me”—she began cursing at me, so I raised my voice—“if you fight me, I’ll break both your legs.”
I slammed the hammer on the concrete floor. She stopped shouting.
“Then,” I continued, “you won’t be able to take anyone anywhere, and the sapphire dog will find someone else to be with. Get me?”
She glared at me, her breath coming in harsh gasps. Just the idea of losing her precious pet made her eyes brim with tears. “Bide your time,” I told her, “or you’ll lose any chance you might have had.”
Penny let me lead her out of the house to Steve’s car. He told her an ambulance was on the way to check her son over, but she didn’t even look at him. She didn’t care. She sat in the back and I closed the door.
Steve rubbed his face. “We have a jail cell in the basement of the town hall. Sheriff uses it sometimes. The mayor’s on her way here with the key.”
“Good.” As long as she hadn’t picked up the predator’s knack for walking through solid objects, Penny would be out of the way for a while.
“Now. What in the Sam Hill was that thing?”
Before I could answer, the ambulance arrived. Steve waved Bushy Bill and Sue toward the crashed truck.
“That’s the first I saw of it,” I said.
“It … it was beautiful. And it vanished into thin air, didn’t it? I felt …”
“You loved it,” I said. “You loved it and you wanted it all to yourself.”
He squinted up at me. He’d come into contact with the world behind the world, and he didn’t even know what questions he should ask.
Information shared is information leaked. But he’d seen the predator, so he already had the most damning information. And I knew he would talk to Penny soon enough; I didn’t want her version of the sapphire dog to be the only one he heard. I had enough enemies as it was.
I said: “This is how it started last year with my friend. Understand? There was a creature that could make certain things happen. In my friend’s case, it healed his back and let him walk.” There was no need to mention Hammer Bay, so I didn’t. “This is something else, though.”
“I loved that animal.”
“It’s not an animal,” I told him. “It’s smart. It may be smarter than us.”
“By golly,” Steve said. He rubbed his neatly shaved chin. “Today I don’t think that would be too hard.”
“Not any day for me,” I said. “I’ve never been smart. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have to kill it.”
“Can’t we just capture it?” I could see the wanting in his expression.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. Steve winced at my language, and I was glad I hadn’t said what I’d originally meant to say. “Look at your cousin. Was she a bad mother before today? Did she hate her son?”
“No,” he said. “She loves that boy.”
“Yesterday she loved that boy. Today all she can think about is that damn sapphire dog.” That seemed to stagger him, but I wasn’t finished. “And you already know that Clara and Isabelle killed each other over it, don’t you?”
Steve stepped away from me, his shoulders slumping forward as if he suddenly bore a heavy weight. “Oh my heavens.”
“Maybe it’s temporary,” I said. He shot a look at me; he hadn’t even considered how long it would last. Of course, I’d seen predators at work before, and when they destroyed people, they didn’t do it on a temporary basis. “But our first job has to be to find that thing and kill it.”
“You made it vanish,” he said. “What did you throw at it?”
Now he was asking for too much information. “A credit card.” I pulled my MasterCard out of my pocket and showed it to him. “I scared it off. I don’t think it knows very much about this world.”
“Who brought this devil into our world?”
We were getting close to another subject I wanted to avoid. If Steve started talking about Jesus, I wouldn’t be able to turn him away from it, and judging by the way he talked to the paramedics, he had a lot of authority in this town.
Annalise had explained that predators and magic had nothing to do with God or hell, angels or demons. Magic was a way of controlling reality, and predators were just what the name suggested—hungry things from a place outside, sometimes called the Empty Spaces and sometimes called the Deeps.
If Steve started telling the people of Washaway that they were facing a devil, they might try to protect themselves with prayer and crosses, which was as effective as stopping a sniper’s bullet with a hopeful thought.
“It’s not a demon,” I told him. “It’s an alien.”
“Oh.”
“It didn’t come here in a ship. It’s just here. And it’s been here a long time.”
“It has? Where?”
“In Regina Wilbur’s house.”
“Regina? Why, she …”
; His voice trailed off. I could see him reconsidering everything he knew about her in light of what he’d seen today. “But she doesn’t have a mark on her face.”
“No,” I said. “She’s kept it prisoner. It’s been hidden on her estate for all this time. But it can affect us at a distance. I think it did exactly that to her for decades. And I think it’s getting stronger.”
“What do we do?”
The paramedics were loading the boy into the ambulance. Sue had a bandage on her wrist; from the way the kid was lunging and snapping at them, I guessed he must have bitten her.
“How many roads lead out of town?”
“Just two,” he said. “This one, which leads to I-5, and Littlemont Road, which goes past the Breakleys’ to the pass.”
“We need to block them off. The predator is trying to get to a heavily populated area. Can you block the roads without causing too much suspicion?”
“No,” he said, “but the state police can. I’ll tell the mayor to call. Heck, considering everything that’s happened, it would be suspicious if we didn’t block them. But we’re going to do more than that, aren’t we?” He looked stricken and miserable. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
“We’ll try,” I said. “And help is coming.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Just tell me one thing, son. You didn’t cause this, did you? You didn’t let this thing loose on my town?”
The question startled me, although it shouldn’t have. “No.”
He sighed in relief. He believed me, although I had no idea why. “I’ll take Penny …” He trailed off as a battered yellow pickup screeched to a halt at the edge of the road. “Looks like you’re going to meet the mayor,” Steve said.
The driver’s door opened and a burly, gray-haired woman bowled out. She wore a Santa cap and a red-and-green coat covered with snowmen. She bustled up the hill toward us.
Steve turned to me. “What should I tell her?”
“You know her. I don’t. Would she believe the truth?”
He sighed. “Not a chance on God’s green earth.”
“Like I said: you know her. Tell her what you have to.”
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