I tried to sleep on the plane. Tried being the operative word. Much of the flight was a blur, though. Not because the Darkness owned my ass again—I don’t think that happened. No, it was more that I was tired beyond words, jacked to the eyeballs with caffeine, heartsick, and scared.

Scared of Nicodemus.

Scared of what I had become, especially if that meant I was a puppet and Nicodemus had his hand up my ass.

Scared of what Kuga was about to do.

Just plain scared.

Now that Church was up to speed with everything, I probably should have felt comforted, but …

Ghost was on the seat next to me, and in his sleep, he moaned. It sounded like he was in pain. When I put my hand on the nape of his neck, he shuddered and settled into a deeper place in his dreams. The place where the mind is vulnerable and the fear can’t escape even through involuntary sounds or movements.

We flew on.

When we landed in Fort Lauderdale, the wheels hitting the tarmac jolted me out of a doze I wasn’t aware I was in. Ghost yipped, and I realized that in my surprise I’d squeezed my hand on his ruff.

“Sorry, boy,” I said.

He gave me a withering look.

We deplaned, and I did my trick of going into the bathroom and changing clothes from what was in my carry-on. And switched Ghost from emotional support to “just a dog.”

We went to Enterprise, and I used a fake ID to rent a bland white Ford Edge. Once in the car, I drove us out of the airport and to a grocery store. Loaded up on dog food, dog treats, a new rubber ball—also for the dog—and a handful of items for me. I also bought a tourist guide to the area and four burner phones. The clerk raised an eyebrow at those, and I gave him a ninja death stare until he looked away. He no doubt thought I was in the drug trade.

Packages in hand, we walked to the Edge, which I’d parked next to a whitewashed stone wall.

A man stepped out from between my car and a white panel truck parked next to me. He was roughly the size of Godzilla and had a face like an eroded wall and wore a DON’T TREAD ON ME ball cap and a windbreaker with a tattered American flag on the right chest. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw another man, thinner and with flaming red hair like the comedian Carrot Top, come up on my right. A third, wiry and fit, covered with tattoos of snakes coiling around swastikas, came around the front of the truck.

Godzilla had his hand inside a nylon windbreaker.

“Joe Ledger,” he said, smiling.

That’s the moment when you’re supposed to freeze, look shocked beyond words, maybe say something like a stuttering, “Wh-what?”