“I’ll keep you posted if anything happens.” I’m trying too hard to sound normal. I just sound stupid instead. “I’d better get to my lesson.”

I climb into the car and head out.

When I glance into the rearview mirror, the guys are still standing there, watching me. Then the road twists, and the dark blur of the trees comes between us, and they’re gone.

Thea

My father used to bring me stones.

Nearly every day he’d come home from repairing a boat somewhere and in his pocket there would be a stone, smooth and water polished, from whatever river or lake he’d been near.

“Baptized in the waters of the River Jordan,” he’d say. Because all rivers are one river, really. Every river, every raindrop, all flowing to the sea.

It took time for me to see the power in them. In the flowing water and in the stones. But then I started to build the circles. Circles of river-washed stones, around my bed, around our house, around the scrubby edges of whatever yard was temporarily ours.

As long as the circle was whole, we were safe. The darkness couldn’t reach inside.

My father didn’t approve. He thought it was pagan. Witchy. More magical than holy. But I know the truth: there’s not much difference.

My father’s always been this way. He argues with Aunt Mae about her cards and her whiskey and her Bible scrying, when she asks the book a question and opens it to a random passage. He argues with me. At me.

I understand. He isn’t one of us.

He’s always on the lookout for the things he calls evil. He sees them on TV. In music. In other peoples’ churches. But he can’t see what we see. The places where the evil slides in. The spots where the world is a little too thin and too dark and too full of hiding places.

My father and I used to move around a lot, river to lake to river. In each new spot he would find a church and then slowly begin to disagree with the pastor’s way of doing things until he’d launched a whole holy war in his mind. Then he’d go off on his long nights, drinking, preaching, standing thigh deep in the river. Every now and then he’d get a warning or a fine from the police. Public intoxication. Disturbing the peace. A few times something larger happened, something that might have tied him to some old barn or building that had suddenly burned down, and we’d leave town with the smell of smoke still billowing behind us.

Sometimes I had to leave before my own work was done.

I lost some. The ones I couldn’t keep inside the circles. The ones who were already half gone.

It just made me work harder.

My father had been gone on a weeklong bender/baptizing spree when I learned about Anders, up near Aunt Mae’s place in Greenwood. Mae had been seeing things, hearing things. But she couldn’t go out and do the work herself—a fragile old woman lurking around a high school, hanging out at a noisy coffeehouse.