Mollie shivered. How was it suddenly so cold out here? She crossed her arms. Hugging herself in a pointless attempt to ward off a bone-deep chill, she said, “No, no, no, no fucking way am I going back to that hellhole, not in a trillion years.”

… a howling newborn, twitching on iron spikes while men and women tore into the baby fat like wolves devouring a felled deer …

Ray raised his hands, palm out. “If you want to understand what happened to you and your family, and if you want to prevent it from happening again—and I know you do, Mollie—your only bet is to come to New York with us.” He took a deep steadying breath, as if preparing for something he didn’t do very often. “I have … There’s a lot on the line, okay? So I am asking you, one human being to another, to come to New York and hear us out. Please?”

He even ventured a smile. It was about as attractive as a cheap toupee on a hairless cat. But … goddamn. He really meant it. This was personal for him.

What if she’d known somebody had the power to prevent the rage-riot in the barn? What if somebody had had the power to prevent her brothers from pounding each other’s faces into hamburger? She would have pleaded, too.

Mollie sighed. “Do you really know what’s going on?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how to stop it?”

He hesitated. “Not yet. But we’re working on it.”

Well, at least he was honest.

“Very well. One red-eye express to New York, coming up.”

She was so exhausted and emotionally wrung-out that creating another fold in space felt like trying to do a push-up with her tongue. But she managed to create a doorway to a Manhattan taxi stand on the third try.

After a moment’s resistance, a shimmering doorway appeared in midair. A whiff of exhaust wafted through the portal. Traffic noise was light this time of night, but the loud rambling of a drunk echoed down the steel canyons. The hotel bellmen unloading luggage from a late-arriving tour bus stepped around the hole in space as deftly as though it were nothing but a dog turd on the sidewalk. New Yorkers: it was impossible to faze them. Mollie supposed that when you lived just a few subway stops from Jokertown you either got accustomed to the weird stuff pronto, or you moved.

Huginn and Muninn went first, followed by Moon. The dog hopped lightly from the moonlit gravel drive of an Idaho farm to the halogen glare of a New York sidewalk. Billy Ray waved her forward and followed so closely—practically grinding against her—that she couldn’t have left him behind if she wanted to. But she was too tired to try.