“Why? Because it’s a ‘brother’?”

Oz didn’t flinch from the term. “In a manner of speaking.”

Jack leaned back against the door frame. This was beginning to make some sense, but not much.

“This is all related to the Otherness, isn’t it.”

That got a reaction. Oz did a long, slow owl blink and sat down. He motioned Jack toward the room’s other chair but Jack shook his head.

“What do you know about the Otherness?”

“I’ve had a couple of people lecture me on it.”

The Otherness… a force, another reality, inimical, implacable, impinging on this world, hungering for it. It had spawned the rakoshi and had almost killed him—twice. Still he didn’t quite understand it, but he believed. After what he’d seen since last summer, he had no choice.

“And I’ve been up close and personal with a few rakoshi.” He gestured through the door, toward the tents. “Your cast of characters out there—they’re all…”

“Children of the Otherness? Not all. Some are merely accidents, victims of genetics or development gone awry, but we do feel a certain kinship with them as well.”

“And you?”

Oz only nodded, and Jack wondered how the Otherness had marked him.

He took a gamble and said, “How did Dr. Monnet learn about the rakosh?”

“He received a call that—” Oz broke off and exhibited his crooked yellow teeth in a sour smile. “Very clever.”

Jack pressed. “A call. Maybe from the same person who tipped you off about where to find the rakosh?”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”

Jack was pretty sure it was perhaps yes. Which gave everything that was going on a shape, the semblance of a plan: save the rakosh; cull a chug from its blood; spread that drug everywhere to cause a slow tsunami of violence and chaos.

And chaos was a bosom buddy of the Otherness.

“Does Monnet know about the turnaround in the rakosh’s health?”

Oz shook his head. “Not yet. He finds its blood… interesting. He’s terribly distraught over the fact that he’s losing the source of that blood.” He smiled. “Somehow I just haven’t got around to telling him yet.”

Leave him twisting in the wind, Jack thought. Serves him right.

“You seem to be remarkably well informed about this,” Oz said. “But I don’t sense that you are one of us. How does an outsider come to be so involved?”

“Not by choice, I can tell you that. Just seems that everywhere I turn lately I keep bumping into this Otherness business.”

“Does that mean that you were here in Monroe last month when something… something wonderful almost happened?”

“Don’t know about you, but I don’t call a house disappearing ‘wonderful.’ And it didn’t ‘almost’ happen—it’s completely gone.”

“I was not referring to the house but to what took it.”

“Yeah, well, you might have a different opinion about that if you were there.” Jack studied Oz’s bright eyes. “Then again, maybe you wouldn’t. But we’re straying from the main subject here. It’s got to go.”