Barrington Whelk was not pleased with Neeve. For starters, since getting in the car, she had done nothing but eat hummus and crackers, and the combination of the garlic odor and cracker chewing was incredibly aggravating. The thought that she was filling his driver’s seat with crumbs was one of the more troubling ones he’d had in a week of extremely troubling thoughts. Also, the very first thing she had done after they exchanged hellos was to use her Taser on him. This was followed by the ignominy of being tied up in the back of his own car.

It is not enough that I should have to put up with a shitty car, Whelk thought. Now I’m going to die in it.

She hadn’t told him she intended to kill him, but Whelk had spent the last forty minutes unable to easily see much but the floor behind the passenger seat. Lying there was a wide, flat clay bowl containing a collection of candles, scissors, and knives. The knives were sizable and sinister, but not a guarantee of imminent murder. The rubber gloves that Neeve wore now, and the extra set inside the bowl, were.

Likewise, Whelk couldn’t be certain they were headed toward the ley line, but from the amount of time Neeve had spent perusing the journal before setting off down the road, he suspected it was a good guess. Whelk was not much for postulation — but he thought his fate was probably meant to be the same as Czerny’s, seven years earlier.

A ritual death, then. A sacrifice, with his blood seeping down through the earth until it reached the sleeping ley line below. Rubbing his tied wrists against each other, he turned his head toward Neeve, who held the wheel with one hand as she ate crackers and hummus with the other. To add insult to injury, she was listening to some kind of trance nature sounds CD on his car’s radio. Perhaps preparing herself for the ritual.

His death on the ley line would, Whelk thought, have a sort of circularity to it.

But Whelk didn’t care for circularity. He cared for his lost car, his lost respect. He cared for the ability to sleep at night. He cared for languages dead long enough that they wouldn’t change on him. He cared for the guacamole his parents’ long-gone chef used to make.

Also, Neeve hadn’t tied him tightly enough.