Anya shook her head. “Speaking his name would lead him here—and he’s looking for me.”

“You? Why?”

“To kill me.”

Her words shocked Jack. And the matter-of-fact way she said it, as if she’d been dealing with this threat for so long she’d grown used to it, made it all the more believable.

But could it be true? If so, he’d lay off pressing her for Roma’s real name.

“Because you oppose the Otherness?”

“More than that. I stand in its way—in his way.”

Jack wanted to say, You’re a little old lady…how can you stand in anyone’s way? But he hadn’t forgotten how that alligator had been unable to enter her yard. Perhaps she and the others were keeping out the Otherness just as she’d kept out the gator, but on a far greater scale.

This little old lady was a lot more than she seemed. She had power…but from where?

Jack wasn’t going to waste his time asking. She’d already made it damn clear there were things about her and her friends she didn’t want known.

“You stand in his way to…what?”

“To opening the gates to the Otherness. The Adversary will remain in a state of becoming until he succeeds. If he does, he will be transformed and life, reality, existence as we know it will end. He thought he’d found a shortcut earlier this year. You were there and—”

“How do you know this stuff? Or was one of your ladies watching?”

“You might say that.”

Jack remembered gazing down into a bottomless hole…into an abyss glowing with strange lights…a steadily enlarging hole that he feared might devour him and the rest of the world.

Anya said, “The Adversary failed then because he acted prematurely. That shows me he’s anxious to finish his becoming. Since then he and those he has manipulated have doubled and redoubled their efforts to open those gates. But to achieve final success he must kill me or hurt me so severely that I can no longer oppose them.”

Apprehension tightened his shoulders. If the Adversary or the One or Roma or whatever the hell he was called was as dangerous as Anya said, she could be in big trouble. Jack hadn’t known her long, but he’d taken a real liking to this old broad.

“But if he doesn’t know where you are, he can’t hurt you, right?”

She shook her head. “No. He can hurt me. He hurts me all the time.”

“But how—?”

Anya stiffened and grimaced with pain as she sucked air through her teeth with a hiss. She arched her back and reached around to touch her right shoulder blade. Oyv jumped up and started barking.

“See?” she gasped. “Even now he does it! He’s hurting me again!”

Jack was up and around the chair, looking at her back.