How the hell he had ever gotten himself to a hospital, he could not for the life of him imagine, but he damn well had. His self-evaluation told him that he had been shot in the left lung, which had resulted in aspiration pneumonia, caused by blood and debris. There wasn’t any fever, so whatever antibiotics were in that drip were clearly doing their job. Also, the pain was diffuse, not concentrating on a certain spot the way it did when you had a bullet in you. Okay, so he’d been operated on. How much of the lung was left in there he had no idea. Maybe none, the way it felt.

Altogether, he had been in worse shape than this and come out of it okay. So, great, he was going to have himself a killing spree as soon as he recuperated . . . unless, of course, his presence in this intensive care ward meant that he was back in the hands of the Company.

After a long five minutes, Miriam came up off Sarah’s lap. The red eyes glared up at her. Instinct made Sarah cringe back away from her. Miriam sucked in breath. Sarah realized what was happening: she was hearing something.

“Is it Paul Ward?” But a glance at one of the monitors that had been set up in every room said that he wasn’t the issue. He was stirring from the woozy state induced by his Valium drip, but he came in and out of consciousness three or four times a day. His lung capacity was too low to allow him to be fully awake.

Miriam came to her feet, catlike. In an instant, she was at the front door, listening against the thick mahogany. Then she rushed across the foyer into the music room, sat down at the piano, and—of all things—began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The vision of the cloud of butterflies floating around that narrow, incredibly graceful being was heart-stopping. She played with a touch as soft as a dusting of snow.

Sarah watched the great front door. The lock clicked. The handle moved. Leo’s face appeared. From its flush, Sarah knew at once that she had fed. Hearing the music, seeing Sarah sitting with her head back against her chair, Leo’s nervous face smoothed. All seemed well to her, all at peace.

Sarah could not imagine the reason for the false tableau. It was as if Miri didn’t believe that Leo would come in unless she was lured by an artificial appearance of serenity. Perhaps Miriam overestimated Leo’s intelligence, because she was entirely deceived.

She came strolling in, smiling a conspiratorial smile at Sarah. There was blood on her blue T-shirt, more on her jeans.

“Where’s the remnant?” Sarah hissed. Leo tried to go around her. Sarah grabbed her collar. “Where is it?”

“Leave me alone!”

“Leo, where the hell is it?”

Miriam played on, seemingly oblivious.