The killer blinked his red-rimmed eyes but still appeared to be under her spell.

"The stones told you this, did they?"

"We know everything," Sheila said. "They called you the Chadrach, but that's not what you call yourselves. You were the first people, long before the Pilgrims, even before the Manisses tribe settled here. You've been harvesting these people for almost two-hundred years. Eating their children. The ritual nourishes you. It makes you younger and stronger. It makes you immortal. And if it really was the children you needed, it might be understandable, from an ecological standpoint. But it's not. You feed on sadness and despair, but what you really crave is revenge. Because they killed one of your daughters. And now they've done it again."

"You're wrong." The smile returned to Ruby's face. "Ethel and Mavis live. Take a look out the window, if you don't believe me."

Cautiously, they peered through the shattered window.

The other Midwives stood in the street in the warm glow of sunrise. Bruised and bloody, Helen held Clarabelle's unconscious body, the woman's arms slack at her sides. Geraldine held the rifle in her gloved hands. On either side of them, Mavis and Ethel stood as if their wounds weren't still gaping, still oozing fluids, caught in the gray limbo between life and death.

"You see?" Ruby's smile widened. "We are stronger than you. We are the first."

She reached up and gestured with her finger, dragging it across her throat. Standing opposite her, Barclay mimicked the action, raising the knife. His flesh opened easily from ear to ear. Twin jets of gore spewed from the severed arteries.

Ruby stepped quickly into the spray. Pools of blood poured down her face and into her open mouth. They watched in horror as she tasted it, savored it, licking her lips, her eyes opened in ecstasy.

He remembered the dream that woke him a few hours earlier and wondered if Barclay's blood had a flavor particular to him. If she could taste his memories. His fears.

The killer's eyes sprang open in shock as if the fact of his death just struck him. Then he fell to the floor, the blood spurting from his wounds weaker with each diminished beat of his heart.

Ruby wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She swiped her hands on the front of her dress, already soaked with the killer's blood, turned primly and sat. Picked up her teacup and saucer and took a generous sip of what was likely more blood than tea.

"There, that little problem's all taken care of," she said. "Spared you doing the bloody deed yourself. Don't you want to thank me, Martin?"

He didn't. He felt cheated, looking down at the lifeless body of the man who'd terrorized him for the past six years. The Witch Hunter's death should have been at his hands. Blood relations or not, the need for revenge ran deep in the Savage family's marrow.

"Now, whatever shall we do with the two of you? You obviously know far too much for us to let you on your merry way. But then, who would believe you?"