She had lied to Albin about her trauma in Louisiana: though she had been in the church, she had never been raped by three men. No, she had been given drugs by the tall thin man with the shock of prematurely white hair and piercing blue eyes, the man known as Preach. Then he had taken her into his bed. She had gone willingly. Perhaps that willingness had been a factor of the drugs; she had no way of knowing. Initially she had not been raped; their first coupling had been transcendent. But then it had continued for eighteen straight hours. Although she was still unsure what precisely “it” was. Because at some point during those eighteen hours there had been what she had come to call “the Other Thing,” when she could bear to remember it at all, because there was no word in her experience to describe it. While his penis had plumbed her to her deepest depths, Preach had somehow reached down inside her, pried open her mind, and had read what was there as easily and intently as if he were reading a book. In fact, he called it “Bible studies,” when she had asked him what he was doing. She had lain on her back, naked, spread like a sea star, while he straddled her, his forehead, hot as flame, almost touching hers. She remembered the scratch of his beard against the skin of her chin and throat as he whispered what might have been prayers or curses, in a language unknown to her, possibly to anyone else.

It was rape, no doubt—of her mind as well as her body, which was far worse. The body held no secrets, but the mind was composed of secrets and intimacies humiliating for a lover to know, let alone a stranger.

And there was another thing—a memory that Lucy could scarcely force herself to touch. During this process she was certain she felt another presence, a shadow crouched beside Preach, perhaps part of him, perhaps not, because it was an animal thing, certainly not human, its breath hot with the stench of an abattoir. First she thought she glimpsed the vertical pupils of a goat, then the bared teeth of a lion, then the sinuous coils of a huge snake, sliding over her flesh like an icy wind.

“I will not have that—thing—here.”

Luther’s voice drew her back from the brink of her bayou memories.

“Too late. He’ll be here in seven or eight hours.”

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, Lucy chanted silently. There was a fire in her eyes now, and in her mind a sense of fate drawing her and Preach together again, for the last time.

“You’ve got to stop this,” Luther said.

“Can’t. You know his rules.”

“His rules! Why are we under his thumb?”

“He made us, Luther. He created the Alchemists.”