Her face twisted. “Only by sheer luck! They chanced upon the only thing that will kill rakoshi—fire! Iron weakens them, fire destroys them.”

“Fire and iron…” Jack suddenly understood the two jets of flame Kusum had stood between, and the reason for housing the monsters in a steel-hulled ship. Fire and iron: the two age-old protections against night and the dangers it held. “But where did they come from?”

“They have always been.”

Jack stood up and pulled her to her feet. Gently. She seemed so fragile right now.

“I can’t believe that. They’re built like humans but I can’t see that we ever had a common ancestor. They’re too—” He remembered the instinctive animosity that had surged to life within him as he had watched them “… different.”

“Tradition has it that before the Vedic gods, and even before the pre-Vedic gods, there were other gods, the Old Ones, who hated mankind and wanted to usurp our place on earth. To do this they created blasphemous parodies of humans embodying the opposite of everything good in humans, and called them rakoshi. They are us, stripped of love and decency and everything good we are capable of. They are hate, lust, greed, and violence incarnate. The Old Ones made them far stronger than humans, and planted in them an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The plan was to have rakoshi take humankind’s place on earth.”

“Do you believe that?” It amazed him to hear Kolabati talking like a child who believed in fairy tales.

She shrugged. “I think so. At least it will do for me until a better explanation comes along. But as the story goes, it turned out that humans were smarter than the rakoshi and learned how to control them. Eventually, all rakoshi were banished to the Realm of Death.”

“Not all.”

“No, not all. My ancestors penned the last nest in a series of caves in northern Bengal and built their temple above. They learned ways to bend the rakoshi to their will and they passed those ways on, generation after generation. When our parents died, our grandmother passed the egg and the necklaces on to Kusum and me.”

“I knew the necklaces came in somewhere.”

Kolabati’s voice was sharp as her hand flew to her throat. “What do you know of the necklace?”

“I know those two stones up front there look an awful lot like rakoshi eyes. I figured it was some sort of membership badge.”

“It’s more than that,” she said in a calmer voice. “For want of a better term, I’ll say it’s magic.”

As Jack walked back to the living room, he laughed softly.

“You find this amusing?” Kolabati said from behind him.

“No.” He dropped into a chair and laughed again, briefly. The laughter disturbed him—he seemed to have no control over it. “It’s just that I’ve been listening to what you’ve been telling me and accepting every word without question. That’s what’s funny—I believe you! It’s the most ridiculous, fantastic, far-fetched, implausible, impossible story I’ve ever heard, and I believe every word of it!”