“That wasn’t a suit.”

“Bullshit.”

Jack focused those eyes on him. “Do I look like I’m bullshitting?”

“No.” Doug swallowed. “And to tell the truth, afterward I got to thinking either that’s the most convincing rubber suit on earth or I was face-to-face with a real live demon. So I kept telling myself that nothing like that ever existed in real life, so it had to be a suit.”

“What happened when they put you up against the bars? Did it take a swipe at you, try to grab you?”

“No. It pretty much ignored me. It seemed more interested in getting out of its cage.”

Jack simply stared at Doug.

“What?” Doug asked.

Jack shook his head. “When you get back home, do yourself a favor and buy a lottery ticket. If your luck’s still holding, you’ll wake up a multimillionaire.”

He stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, and returned with a metal can and a flashlight.

Nadia remembered something. “Jack, is this the creature you told me about this morning—the source of the drug?”

“One and the same.”

“I think I saw it when I was peeking through a crack between the boards over our windows. I saw them loading a big blue-black creature in a steel cage onto one of the trucks.” And she remembered thinking at the time it had to be some sort of gimmick attraction because nothing that looked like that should be living and breathing on this earth. “That… that was real?”

Jack nodded. He squatted outside the car and began refilling the empty Snapple bottles from the big metal can.

Oh, no, Nadia thought, fighting a surge of panic as she watched him. He’s not really—

But he was. Oh, yes, he was. The smell of gasoline was unmistakable.

Dizzy, she closed her eyes and hung on, wondering what had happened to her world in the past few days. She felt as if she’d tumbled down a rabbit hole into a nastily surreal Wonderland. The molecule she’d been assigned to stabilize had turned out to be an illegal drug, her fiancé had been abducted, a man she’d known for years and deeply respected, had even made love to, had ordered her death, and then he himself had been murdered. And now she was parked in a rest stop helping a man she barely knew make Molotov cocktails to go after some awful creature from a nightmare.

Nightmare… that’s where she was right now.

She wished she’d never heard of Jack. If she hadn’t hired him, maybe none of this would have happened.

She opened her eyes again and looked at him. “You’re really going to chase after that thing? Alone? In the dark?”

He nodded. “Not exactly my idea of a fun time, but…”

“I’ll go with you,” Doug said.

Nadia wanted to punch him and scream, How can you be such an idiot? but held her tongue when she saw Jack immediately shake his head.

“This doesn’t involve you.”