Passing silently back through the main room, he spotted, hanging on a hook behind the wood stove, a set of keys.

Ángel stared at the keys, then the pickup, then the man in the sleeping bag, who still slept peacefully.

He grabbed his boots and the keys, and slipped outside.

He had to use his injured right hand to start the truck, which made pain radiate up his arm. The truck was a diesel and he worried that it would be hard to start in the cold, but it roared to life loud enough to wake the dead. Clenching his teeth, as if he could keep weasel-face Ron from waking up by will alone, he executed a clumsy three-point turn in the driveway—thank God it was an automatic—and pointed the truck’s nose down the mountain.

For the rest of his life Ángel would revisit the terrifying white-knuckle drive from the cabin in his nightmares.

He had never driven in the snow before. This road was nothing more than a pair of tire ruts in snow, winding steeply down through the trees. Constantly clenched for disaster—for pursuit, for the truck to slide into a tree, or to jam itself in a snowbank—he found himself praying again. Don’t get stuck, don’t get stuck, don’t get stuck.

He didn’t get stuck. He eventually came out onto a lonely paved two-lane road, plowed and sanded, which surely meant it lead somewhere. At random, he turned left.

He was still shivering a little. The truck had a powerful heater which, cranked up to the max, warmed him but could not thaw the ice around his heart. He was dizzy from fatigue and hunger and pain, too, and was worried that he would fall asleep and drive right off the road. So he turned on the radio. It was tuned to the local NPR station playing All Things Considered.

The man on the radio said, “Audie, security was extremely tight here in Missoula this morning when the new envoy from the Otherworld arrived in a maple tree not far from the University of Montana campus.”

Ángel braked hard, steered the pickup onto the shoulder of the road, and stopped with a lurch. He turned up the volume.

“The tree began to glow early this morning,” said the radio man, “giving the DOR time to arrive and secure a perimeter for his safety.”

“Tell us about the new envoy, Larry,” said Audie.

“Well, the press was kept in a sort of corral pretty far away,” said Larry. “But from what I could see he looks just like Oberon. He was greeted and given a robe by the mayor of Missoula, because like Oberon he arrived without any clothes. And Oberon was there. Due to the last-minute announcement of the new envoy’s arrival, the governor of Montana was unable to attend.”