“I don’t fucking believe it! What happened? How?”

“H-he grew . . . or something and snapped his cuffs,” she said. “By the time anybody realized what was happening, he’d smashed the glass with the table.”

I looked down. My body was shriveling.

“How did he get out of a police station?!”

I could hear her frustration. “I don’t know,” she said. “He just ran and before we knew it, he was gone.”

“And he was bigger?”

There was a long pause. “Yeah.”

“Is Norris there?” I asked. I needed a ghoul’s perspective and help.

I waited.

“Norris here. What can I do for you, Mr. McDonald?”

“I know you can’t talk in front of the humans, but I need you to spread word among the ghouls about this guy. I don’t want him stopped or even touched.”

At the door Mo’Lock looked as confused as Norris sounded.

I went on. “Just do it,” I said. “If I know these bastards like I think I know them, he’s heading straight over here to finish me off. Let him. It’s the only chance I have.”

Norris agreed. I hung up.

I could tell by the look on Mo’Lock’s face I wasn’t doing too well. I looked at my arms. I was so drained I could see my joints and my skin had begun to wrinkle and sag in between the gaps of bone. But what appeared to be aging, I feared, was much worse. My skin took on a gray hue and a smell rose from it like death. I wasn’t aging, or just being drained. I was rotting away, right where I stood.

I didn’t have to understand the exact hex to know I’d be dead in less than an hour if I didn’t do anything, but I couldn’t move my feet. It was like they were cemented to the floor.

“Mo’Lock,” I barked. “Go into the garage and see if you can find me some kind of tool like a rake or a hoe!”

Mo’Lock nodded twice quickly and then ran back through the hidden door leaving me alone in the room with the circle and the faces. I was hardly aware of the flecks on my skin being pulled by a gentle current into the sockets and mouths. I scanned the faces, stretched and tacked, looking for anything common among them, but there was nothing. They were the faces of men and women and of varying races. The only thing they shared was a horrible death.