She glanced at Amy, still in her tank top and leather jacket, caught her attention and nodded toward the front door, mouthed, There are two, held up two fingers, One back there, and extended her arm toward the bedroom. We have to get out. The truck.

Amy nodded.

There should have been pounding from the locked bedroom door. If the first Suuke was in there.

The second Suuke looked up, its bulging eyes casting a fire-bright target on Calliope. This one had no snake around its neck but black crow feathers darting from its neck like a choker of arrows. It carried a bow, pressed now against the ground in reprieve. A ceasefire. For how long? A basket strung over its shoulder like the old woman in Calliope’s dream who had carried Eunjoo away. Calliope shuddered. Chance had called the Suuke a pair of bogeypeople, disciplinarians. What reason had anyone in this room given the creatures to discipline? What rules had been broken?

Eyes still glued on Calliope, the second Suuke sprang up, bounded through the broken window, and Chance yelled, “Now!”

Calliope didn’t think. As he fired shot after shot, she held the girl wrapped around her as tightly as she could and threw her whole body shoulder-first toward the bedroom door, changing the plan. If the first Suuke had been there, it would have shown itself by now. She had a gut feeling the front door wasn’t the way out.

Her muscles strained as she flung open Tía’s bedroom and ran toward the opposite side of the room where Tía’s side door was dead bolted.

She turned the lock, her hands steady with adrenaline, and the door opened to an icy blast of night air. She hoped Amy was following, along with Chance and the others. But she couldn’t care about anything except the girl and the babies inside her. To Eunjoo she whispered, groaning with effort, “No te preocupes, chica. I have you.”

The gunfire rang on. Did bullets inflict any harm on a Suuke? Or were they just noise to the demons?

She squinted into the blackness, willing her eyes to adjust to starlight, the bright strip of Milky Way that Chance had called the Great Snowdrift of the Skies, now clearly visible. Her boots crunched the ice-mud as she plowed through the scrub; she’d run this way countless times as a girl in hide-and-seek and knew the knotted landscape by heart. She darted over the rutted ground past the curandera’s garden Tía had planted, now shocked with freeze, yerba mansa, arnica, pigweed, and datura, all used for healing by peoples of the past, now tangling in her path, crackling beneath her boots as she ran, Eunjoo’s head pressed close to her chest. Yucca and black walnut branches scratched her face and neck.

Footsteps behind her.

She couldn’t look to see if it was Amy or Chance or …

Her heart thrummed.