Harper Albright puffed another gout from the meerschaum skull and watched night fall. The others were behind her, no one speaking. Bernard was playing solitaire on his computer, the repeated click of the mouse sounding curt, violent, agitated. Storm was brooding on the high stool, drumming his finger atop the draftsman’s table or sometimes, absently, massaging his left arm. Sophia, by the fire, hugged herself, rubbed her shoulders, nervously eyed the grotesqueries staring from the covers on the wall, from the jars and aquaria around the office.

And Harper stood, smoking without surcease. She could see the others, all of them, in wavery reflections on the rain-washed glass. For the most part, however, she let them fade from her consciousness, melt from her focus.

She was thinking about the trail of stories. About what it had revealed to her. About how it had led her to this dangerous night.

It had been ten days now since her meeting with Iago. It had been enough time to work out her understanding of the thing. The chronology, anyway, was more or less clear to her.

Some thirty or forty years ago, before Harper had met him, Jacob Hope had chanced to purchase a supply of a blue crystalline stone at a bazaar in Morocco. That much he had revealed to her himself. The merchant who had sold him the stone must have told him some version of the Belham monk’s confession—some legend, anyway, of the stone’s power to grant eternal life. Obviously, either Iago had believed the tale at once, or he had tried out the powers of the stone for himself and found the story to be true. In any case, Harper had no doubt that the pleasure of killing an infant would have been motive enough for him to proceed.

After that, he had returned to Europe. There, he had begun to collect his followers. At a time when cults were springing up everywhere, he had invented a cult of his own. But the cult, of course—as the warlock Dr. Mormo had suggested—the cult was merely an excuse. What Iago was really after were the women. The women, and the children he could sire off them. The children—and their blood. The cult was a perfect system for creating a steady supply of that “precious ingredient more without which the stone is useless.”

And so, in the compound in Argentina, he had carried out his experiments in the jungle. Dissolving bits of the blue stone in water, completing the elixir by murdering his children for their blood. In this mixture, he had bathed himself every six months. Indeed, judging by the looks of him, he had somehow continued to feed the hungry stone, even after Harper had discovered him and he had burned the compound—and his children—to the ground. Using charisma and cunning, Iago had somehow kept the children’s blood flowing for the last twenty-five years.