Suddenly her body went icy cold. Isn’t that what the Time Out Of Mind—the time leading up to juvie—was about: cruelty beyond comprehension? Willfully, she would not remember; and yet, despite her best efforts, she would always remember.

A psychotic older sister who, in her break with reality, seduced their father, became pregnant, and flaunted that obscene pregnancy within the family, until their mother, driven to the edge of madness, took a carving knife and slit open her daughter’s belly, killing both offending parties. Her father turned on his wife and would have strangled her had Charlie not intervened, bringing the bottom of a heavy iron skillet down on the crown of his head again and again, until it was as flat as the skillet itself. By that time, her mother was barely breathing. Charlie, a minor, entered the juvie system. While she was incarcerated, her mother died, whether by her own hand or not was never made clear to Charlie. No closure for her; none at all, just the swirl of dreadful memories that she had finally, painstakingly collected, locked away in a shadowed corner of her mind. All well and good until the times, such as this, when the lock popped open and the memories flew out like a jack-in-the-box in a horror film, reminding her that Time Out Of Mind still existed.

“What the fuck was in that thing?” Whitman was asking now. “It melted half the goddamn helo.”

“A dicyanoacetylene compound I formulated.” Charlie shook herself to keep her head on straight and her thoughts flowing coherently. The lockbox was back in its shadowed corner of her mind. “Essentially, it’s acetylene in which I replaced a pair of hydrogen atoms with two separate cyanide groups. Burns hot like a sonuvabitch.”

They turned their attention to Flix, who had Dante by the collar of his shirt and was frog-marching him over to them.

“Too bad your cavalry sprung a leak,” Flix said with a dark glint in his eye. “Now you’re never gonna be saved.”

“Lookee here,” Whitman said as he went through the papers Dante was carrying. He held up an open passport. “Check this out.” He showed the passport to Charlie.

“Edmond Dantès,” she said with a laugh. “Really?”

“The Count of Monte fucking Christo,” Whitman said. “In person.”

“I thought you were dead a long time gone.” Flix struck the back of Dante’s head. “What I want to know is if you’re not bringing new girls to el-Habib, just what the fuck are you doing here?”

Chapter 40

40

“Ding dong, the witch is dead!” Trey Hartwell crowed the moment he entered the inner sanctum of the Well.

Albin White, who had been training Lucy, shot her a sideways look, and she silently vanished from the chamber. Then he turned on his fellow Alchemist. “What the hell d’you mean coming in here and blurting out—”

“Lindstrom is out of our lives for good.”