“I won’t promise not to hurt them,” she said in a small voice.

Del shook his head. “I don’t like my girls squabbling. And you know what I do when things I don’t like start happening.”

Mattie kept her gaze on her shoes and nodded.

“How about you, little girl?” Del asked Lizzie. “Can you guess what happens?”

Lizzie shook her head. “But go ahead. Do your worst.”

Del laughed.

“Little girl,” he said. “You can’t even imagine my worst. Say, what’s your name, anyway?”

Lizzie let the moment draw out. She was figuring out the distance between them, the best way to take him down.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yeah, and I don’t feel like answering. So bite me.”

He swung his hand at her, but he’d telegraphed the attack with his eyes and Lizzie easily dodged the blow. While he was off-balance, she spun around, putting the force of the movement behind the foot aimed at his knee. After all, it had worked on the priest. But Del recovered faster than she’d expected and grabbed her leg. He gave it a jerk and she went tumbling to the ground.

Before she could get up, he had a boot on her chest, exerting pressure until she stopped struggling.

“Feisty little thing, aren’t you?”

“Fuck you!”

“Potty-mouthed, too.” He glanced at Mattie. “And we all know what happens to potty-mouthed little girls, don’t we?”

“Oh, Christ,” Lizzie started, “would you give it a—”

But then her mouth stopped moving. She . . .

Del laughed. He lifted his boot and stepped away from her, allowing her to get up.

Lizzie lifted shaking hands to her mouth, but there was nothing there. Only smooth skin from the bottom of her nose down to her chin. She tried to move her jaw, but there was nothing there to move. Under her fingertips she could feel that it was all solid bone beneath her skin. No jaw. No jaw muscles. No mouth.

“See,” Del said. “I don’t need to know your name to work my mojo on you. That’s how it works here. Asking your name—that was just me being sociable.”

Lizzie couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t stop moving her hands over the bottom of her face. A huge, gibbering dark panic was starting up in the pit of her stomach. When she finally turned in his direction, she couldn’t stop the pleading in her eyes.

Don’t do this. Fix this. Please . . .

But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. There was only Mattie, staring at her with big eyes and a smile twitching in the corner of her mouth. Del had walked over to the priest who still lay where Lizzie had dropped him.

“Well, aren’t you a piece of work,” he said to the unconscious man. “Letting an itty-bitty girl like that knock you flat on your arse and out cold.”