“I thought I’d had a stroke! One moment I was standing by that tree. I saw you fly backwards, then the next thing I knew I was on my back and couldn’t speak or move a finger.”

Jack reached a hand down to him. “Can you get up?”

Tom let his son help him to his feet. He brushed himself off and looked around. He felt shaky and a little weak. Well, why not? He was seventy-one and had just experienced the firefight of his life. He’d been in battle before, but against other men, other soldiers. This time…

“Jack! What happened here? Who was that? Was he really walking on water?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

Jack’s eyes were flat. Not hard and cold like before when he looked like murder personified, but Tom sensed that he’d put up a wall.

“What’s going on, Jack? A girl who can control snakes and birds and even flying things from hell—and I’m sure that sinkhole goes straight to hell—and a guy who walks on water…what’s happening to the world?”

“Nothing that hasn’t been going on for a long, long time. Nothing’s changed except you got a peek behind the curtain.”

“What curtain?”

What was he talking about? Had Jack snapped under the stress of what he’d been through…or had he been through something like this before…something even worse?

“It’s over, Dad.”

“What’s over?”

“Semelee, the chew wasps, the guy on the water—”

“But you knew him. You called him by name—Roma, wasn’t it?”

“Just let it go, Dad. Tuck it away and forget about it. It’s over.” He looked up. “Even Hurricane Elvis is over.”

Tom realized then that it had stopped raining. He could still hear the rumble of thunder, but the wind had died, leaving the air deathly still. He followed Jack’s gaze, and through the partially denuded tree branches he saw clear sky, light blue, tinged with orange from the sinking sun.

Over…for a while there he’d thought the storm would never end.

He looked around…at the fallen palms and cypresses, at the slowly sinking houseboats canted in the leaf-and debris-strewn water, at their red decks and the mutilated bodies littering them like jack straws.

Tom’s mouth went dry. “Did we do that?”

“Some of it.” He didn’t seem the least bit fazed. “We can take credit for the holes in the hulls and some of the blood, but Semelee bears the freight for the rest. She’s the one who called those chew wasps out of the cenote and lost control of them. Good thing too. Otherwise they’d be standing here looking at what was left of us.”

Jack picked up one of the shotguns and hurled it far out into the lagoon.

“What—?”

“Evidence.”