Joey started giggling. “Oh, fuck me,” she chortled. It was bordering on hysterical. “I’m giving you the award for Most Understated Assessment of a Fucking Insane Person, Billy Ray.”

Billy Ray’s eyebrows drew into a line and for a moment, Michelle thought there might actually be a fight.

“Can we please table the whole beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other thing right now?” Barbara asked. “Let’s get Mollie in here and figure out what our next move is.”

“I’m done,” said Mollie.

But Babel wasn’t paying attention to anything Mollie said. She just used Mollie to get what she wanted, to send her people around the world, like Mollie was some kind of charity taxi service, and then she couldn’t even have the courtesy to listen. What a fucking ungrateful bitch. She’d be a lot more respectful after Mollie opened her—

Oh, God.

She was doing it again. Giving over to rage. Mollie looked around to convince herself that Horrorshow’s malign influence hadn’t seeped through the portals. But the portals were closed and folks weren’t trying to nibble on each other’s eyeballs. No, it wasn’t so simple.

She was tainted. Repeated exposure to the madness had changed her. It was as though her brain had been rewired, lowering her threshold for anger—no, not just anger, but incandescent rage—until anything could set her off. It no longer took a nudge from supernatural evil to push her thoughts in wickedly violent directions. Her emotional barometer had been destroyed. Her emotional state had only two readings: teetering on the verge of becoming a useless blubbering heap, or fantasizing about tearing people apart in retaliation for the most minuscule of imagined slights.

Mollie shuddered again. She counted off the days on her fingers. Six. Had it really been less than a week ago when her biggest problem was dealing with a couple of trigger-happy Paris gendarmes? That couldn’t be true. That had been a million years ago. A different planet. A different Mollie.

“Did you hear what I said? I said—”

Babel’s phone rang. As the Committee leader lifted it to her ear, Mollie glimpsed the caller’s name on the glassy screen: Ink.

“Sorry. I have to take this,” Babel said.

“Sure. Whatever.”

Mollie checked her own phone. Nothing. Nobody from Idaho had called her back.

She thought about going to the hospital to see for herself how Dad and the boys were doing. She even started to call up a doorway to Idaho, but then she imagined the naked disdain on their faces when they saw her. The nascent portal disintegrated.

“Fuck this,” she said. And decided to distract herself with some shoplifting. She stepped around the corner and opened a doorway to Half Moon Bay.