Blackwood said, “If past wrongs are not addressed, and dealt with honestly, dark spirits will erupt through the unhealed seam. It is the same for cities and towns as it is for people.”

Odessa remembered the image of her father then. And something else came back to her. “While I was out,” she said, trying to remember, “I had a dream. I saw a woman.”

Blackwood turned to her, captivated. “Tell me.”

Odessa reached deep into her memory. “Black hair. Black eyes. She wore a white dressing gown…”

“Yes?” said Blackwood, with quiet urgency.

“She wanted to help me. To wake up. I think she…she sent me back. Does that sound crazy?”

Blackwood didn’t answer. He was lost in thought.

“You mentioned your wife,” said Odessa.

Blackwood came back from his reverie. “The invading spirit revealed itself to me as her. She is trapped in a netherworld, waiting for me to rescue her. If I can complete my tasks, and save the world from these dark forces enough times, I believe I can free her from limbo.”

Odessa understood then. Hugo Blackwood had been slaying projections of his beloved for four and a half centuries in a quest to save her. That was what made him the prickly creature he was.

Odessa was still unaccountably sore. Aside from her cuts and bruises, and the pain in her jaw, it felt like something more. She reached around to rub the back of her sore neck, and felt something strange there, beneath her hairline.

A raised vein. Fading now, but she probed it with her fingertips, and remembered…

A sigil. The mark of the Hollow Ones.

She looked at Blackwood, and saw that he knew then that she knew.

Odessa jumped back and clawed at her arms, sick at having been inhabited by one of those disgusting imps.

“My God!” she said. “That thing was in me?”

Blackwood did not say yes, and he did not say no.

“What did I…what did it make me do?” she said. She saw dirt on Blackwood’s suit, a missing button. “Did I go after you?”

“You did,” he admitted.

“But wait. I thought you said the only way to rid a body of one of those things…was to kill. You saved me.” She was deeply confused now. “Why?”

Blackwood looked at her strangely, as though unsure of the answer himself. “Yes,” he said. “Why indeed.”

Chapter

In the end, the FBI incident inquest never went forward.

The Office of Professional Responsibility, the Bureau’s internal affairs division, declined to adjudicate the matter, based almost exclusively upon the surviving Peters daughter’s sworn eyewitness account of what transpired on that tragic night.

Walter Leppo was determined to have perished in the line of duty, and his family received his full pension with incentive awards.