Bright blots sparked in front of her; she heard a sound like when she’d listened to a conch shell back at Lenore’s place. That’s what the ocean sounds like, her mother had said, but now she’d never hear the ocean. She wanted to see her mother, and now she never would. He would kill her like he’d killed those other girls.

But she wasn’t a girl. She was Pin, a fourteen-year-old boy. She dropped the poster and turned to flee, reaching for the shiv in her pocket. Henry grabbed her wrist.

“It’s part of the Ceremony,” he explained, so close that she could feel his warm breath at her temple. “I protect them. So we don’t forget.”

Still grasping her, he stooped to pick up the fallen poster, set it tenderly on the altar, then reached beneath the altar. She watched numbly, too terrified to scream.

He straightened and held out a shapeless, dark mass—a burlap sack. He let go of her wrist, pushing her against the sawhorse so she couldn’t run, and dug into his pocket to produce a pencil nub. He set it on the altar, then pulled something from the sack and handed her a small square of cardboard.

“Sign your name,” he commanded.

“No.”

“You have to—it’s part of the Ceremony! All brothers of the Black Brothers Lodge have to sign their names!”

Pin blinked, confused. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill her—maybe it really was a ceremony. She picked up the pencil stub, glanced aside to see Henry nod eagerly. Carefully she wrote Pin Maffucci at the bottom of the square. “So—am I a Gemini now?”

“That is never for you to say that!” Enraged, he snatched up cardboard and pencil, tossed them into the burlap sack, and kicked it back beneath the makeshift altar. “Never!”

He gestured wildly at the poster of Elsie Paroubek. “You are not to have touched her! You are not to speak her name! You—”

“Henry!” Light slashed through the darkness, blinding Pin, as a man’s heavily accented voice called out in alarm. “Henry, who in hell is this?”

A tall figure moved behind the flashlight’s beam. Henry’s friend, she realized—the night watchman, Willhie. The man who’d gone to Decatur.

“Willhie!” cried Henry. “You’re back. Sack,” he added, glancing at the floor.

“Who is he?” demanded Willhie, and Pin flinched as he drew closer, pointing the flashlight at her face. “Who are you, boy?”

“A friend, Willhie,” Henry insisted, “he’s—”

She whirled and bolted out of the barn, the sound of pursuing footsteps echoing across the plank floor behind her.

Chapter 55

Chapter 55