“Exactly. If we wish to make contact, we must do so through a messenger. An ancient fae with a deep connection to the natural world—one so close to the end of life that he or she is already merging with nature and attuned to the will of those forces. I performed the ritual of contact. The next day, a fae answered my summons. I explained what I needed. She told me four sacrifices were required. She gave me their names, and when we visited them, we knew they would be righteous deaths.”

“That’s how you do it, then? How you determine guilt? It’s a sense?”

“Not a sense, but a certainty. What’s the saying? To see guilt written on a face? Sometimes we can access their memories, which is a power you seem to have inherited. Even when those memories are closed to us, guilt is as obvious as the color of their skin. In the case of the Tysons, we saw memories of their crime. With Hilton and Pasolini, we only knew they were guilty.”

“Whatever they did, it’s linked to the Tysons.” I told him about the vision in the fun house. “Gabriel and I haven’t had time to even begin investigating that. But it seems as if the Tysons, Hilton, and Pasolini were part of some group, some…”

“Cult?” Ricky said.

I made a face. “All the research I did into my parents’ crimes taught me that ritual murderers and cultists are just idiots who’ve seen too many movies.”

“Liv’s right,” Ioan said. “If these four thought they could summon dark forces with their sacrifices, it’s just an excuse to exercise very dark and very twisted desires. They wanted to kill. Doing it in a ritual seemed more acceptable to them. A form of mob mentality, if you like.”

“So Pamela was asked to execute four killers pursuing a single goal,” I said. “The issue here, though, is who brought you that deal. The ancient fae. You presumed she was the messenger you’d summoned.”

“Yes. I should have made certain.”

His mistake was understandable. He put out a summons. Someone answered and gave him what he expected. Having never done such a deal, he’d have no way to test the messenger, no cause for doubt.

“So we’re now thinking it was a sluagh in manifested form,” I said. “Probably the same one who contacted my father, telling him how to summon you.”

Ricky nodded. “A setup from the start. The sluagh prod Todd to ask for the deal. Then they intercept the message and negotiate the terms.”

“Which gives them power over me,” I said. “That’s what the sluagh meant, isn’t it? That it was the one who cured my spina bifida. That puts me in its debt. In its power.”