She smiled real big at me. “You’re Lee, aren’t you? I knew that was you the moment I saw you. I used to know your mother, did you know that? She was a rowdy little thing, but sweet. And your dear uncle. Aren’t you just the spitting image of him.”

“Why, thank you,” I said, though it wasn’t true. I didn’t look a thing like Jeremiah.

“It’s the Spirit in you,” she said. “So much the way it was with him.”

I started to thank her again, to tell her how grateful I was for her kind words, when she swung her purse up hard and walloped me in the face with it. There had to be bricks in it, a concrete block or something, because I went down, and hard. My vision was splotchy, and I could taste blood, like she’d busted my nose.

The woman hunched over me, her eyes gone fierce.

“Yes, I can smell the evil reeking off of you,” she said. “Do you even know what you’re doing? What you’re capable of?”

The woman drew a big gleaming knife from her purse.

“I have gone down that road before, yes I have. I lived in that world for a time. And it was not right. I lost my daughter. I lost everything.”

She crouched on top of me, her knees on my chest, pinning me down. My head still swam, and I could barely focus my eyes. I could do nothing to stop her.

“I won’t let it happen again,” she said. “Not here. Not like that.”

The woman raised the knife above her head and brought it down in one swift plunge.

Something tackled her off me. It happened so fast and my head hurt so bad, I couldn’t tell who it was. I saw the woman roll someone off of her, and I saw her knife lodged deep in the person’s chest. She got up to run and fell back over, hollering, her shinbone bent at a weird angle.

That’s when I saw him clearly, the person who had saved me. He was tall and gangly with a big beard and wild hair, and his clothes stank, barely rags. He lay on his back, gasping these tiny little breaths like a fish does when you lay it on the riverbank to die.

It was the Hobo.

I crawled over to him, staring like it was a dream.

“But you aren’t real,” I said. “You’re just a vision in my head.”

The Hobo reached his hand out to me and touched my face softly, and I flinched backward. He died staring at me, his eyes full of pain, sadness.

He had saved my life.

Chapter 41