“Oh, I’m surprised,” Eddie said. “Maybe not stunned, but…well…” He picked berries and dropped them into Roland’s hat. “I saw some things, okay? Sometimes she’s too pale. Sometimes she winces and grabs at herself, but if you ask her, she says it’s just gas. And her boobs are bigger. I’m sure of it. But Roland, she’s still having her period! A month or so ago I saw her burying the rags, and they were bloody. Soaked . How can that be? If she caught pregnant when we pulled Jake through—while she was keeping the demon of the circle occupied—that’s got to be four months at least, and probably five. Even allowing for the way time slips around now, it’s gotta be.”

Roland nodded. “I know she’s been having her monthlies. And that’s proof conclusive it isn’t your baby. The thing she’s carrying scorns her woman’s blood.” Roland thought of her squeezing the frog in her fist, popping it. Drinking its black bile. Licking it from her fingers like syrup.

“Would it…” Eddie made as if to eat one of the pokeberries, decided against it, and tossed it into Roland’s hat instead. Roland thought it would be a while before Eddie felt the stirrings of true appetite again. “Roland, would it even look like a human baby?”

“Almost surely not.”

“What, then?”

And before he could stay them, the words were out. “Better not to name the devil.”

Eddie winced. What little color remained in his face now left it.

“Eddie? Are you all right?”

“No,” Eddie said. “I am most certainly not all right. But I’m not gonna faint like a girl at an Andy Gibb concert, either. What are we going to do?”

“For the time being, nothing. We have too many other things to do.”

“Don’t we just,” Eddie said. “Over here, the Wolves come in twenty-four days, if I’ve got it figured right. Over there in New York, who knows what day it is? The sixth of June? The tenth? Closer to July fifteenth than it was yesterday, that’s for sure. But Roland—if what she’s got inside her isn’t human, we can’t be sure her pregnancy will go nine months. She might pop it in six. Hell, she might pop it tomorrow.”

Roland nodded and waited. Eddie had gotten this far; surely he would make it the rest of the way.

And he did. “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”