Whitman leaned in, turned him a bit. He peered at the spot Orteño had touched. “It’s a needle mark, Flix. St. Vincent injected you, knocked you out. You were abducted.”

It was then that the convulsions started and, fingers curled to animal claws, Orteño tried to rip his face off.

Chapter 29

29

“You’ve waited long enough,” St. Vincent’s mother had said to him. “It’s time you saw the face of the enemy.”

St. Vincent, sitting in his car, another cigarette dangling between lips, checked his wristwatch. Twenty minutes to go. At the end of that time, whether or not Jonah had called, it would be time to confront Sydny.

He inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and, as the nicotine hit, his memory flowered open to meet his present self. He remembered the evening, unnaturally clear as a bell, with a full moon riding the corner of an animal-shaped cloud.

Sitting next to his mother in the rattling Woody station wagon, he watched the swamps, the hunched trees, freighted with Spanish moss. The stench of sulfur and oil combined to coat the inside of his mouth. After what seemed a long time, they turned off the paved road onto a dirt track, bumping along for a mile or so.

Abruptly, his mother stopped the car and they got out. Thick tendrils of fog curled about their ankles, though all the time they were driving the night had been perfectly clear. He looked up, but could no longer find the moon.

Because his mother needed no light to guide her, he deduced that she had been here before, possibly many times. Turning sharply to their left, he saw pale lights burning through the windows of a house. Not even that; he saw as they came closer that it was more like a shack that was long past its sell-by date.

Inside they were met by a young boy with the disturbing ebon eyes of a crow. Behind him sat a man with prematurely white hair and a horrifying smile. Behind the man, spread across the rear wall more as a fetish than a trophy, hung a great wolf’s head and skin, the teeth and claws painted in primary colors: red, yellow, blue.

The white-haired man had been studying something in his hands, which were folded in his lap. He looked up as they entered. St. Vincent was shocked. He’d been expecting eyes old and rheumy as the flesh around them, but these were the vivid color of a bluebird, alight with the vigor of youth.

“Ruth,” Preach’s voice rumbled like thunder, “you have been expected. Be seated.”

“I prefer to stand.”