Owen hung up. He sat in shock and his thoughts returned to Melody. He told himself he should try to go back to sleep and go to her aid in the night world. He lay back down and closed his eyes. It wasn’t long before the phone rang again. He answered.

“He’s finished,” said Kiara. “The flames and the phosphorous bullets melted him. Once I was down in his lair, I didn’t give him a chance.”

Epilogue

OWEN DISCOVERED OVER THE next week that whatever automatic passage he’d had to the night world was gone. His struggles against sleep paralysis vanished, and instead, he had long, involved dreams of meeting Melody at different places in town. Every incident was rushed and full of insoluble complexities. Every morning, he woke with a sense of dread. And then five days later, he saw her obituary in the Westwend Tattler. “Died peacefully in her sleep. Survived by a son, a daughter, a husband.” For the most part, he knew her only as a phantom, but he had seen her and her family in the grocery, and he mourned for their loss and his. On the same day, Kiara came to the library in the afternoon with William. She brought coffee for them and they sat on the bench out front while the boy played with a toy truck on the front path.

“Are you leaving?” he asked.

She nodded. “Going north to take a rest; the organization has given me a year off. My husband and I had been trying to bring Crenshaw down for a while and had lost a number of people, including Duane. They know they owe it to me.”

“I’m glad I could help . . . if I did.” Then he told her about Melody and they sat in silence for a brief time. As Kiara got up to leave, he told her about when he’d seen Melody in the market and what she and her family looked like in life. They both fell silent for a time, and then she gathered up William. At the car, Kiara put the child in his car seat. She beeped as she pulled away, and Owen waved.