It was walking away from us, and I didn’t think it looked like a dog at all. It didn’t have fur, and its skin was a brilliant electric blue. Its body swayed as it moved, as though it was part cougar and part python. Its four legs extended and retracted in a disturbing, boneless motion, like a set of tentacles or springs. It didn’t have wings, but it did have two rows of dark spots running down its back. A second glance showed that they weren’t spots at all but actually faceted blue crystals embedded in its flesh. Its long, slender, whiplike tail snapped and wavered the way a stream of water might move as it flowed over a pane of dirty glass.
Then it reached a patch of grass about a dozen feet away from us, turned, and sat on its haunches. Suddenly, it looked very much like a dog. Its broad, oversized head tapered at the front to a snout that had no opening. There were more blue crystals on its forehead and around its impossibly narrow neck. Its ears were long and floppy, almost long enough to be rabbit ears. And its eyes …
Its eyes were huge, as large as a cartoon animal’s. Its pupils were shaped like eight-pointed stars, and there were five of them in each eye, all shining gold and arranged in a circle.
It stared at us with an unfathomable expression while its pupils slowly rotated. The effect was hypnotic.
The sapphire dog was beautiful. That’s a simple word I’ve used to describe anything from a new car to a moment of karmic payback, but it could never capture the impact the sapphire dog had on me. Framed in bare trees and mud, the otherworldly beauty of it hit me like a punch in the gut. It didn’t look solid. It didn’t look real. I thought I might be having a vision.
“Lord, thank you for this day,” Steve said. He was a few paces to my right. It took an effort to look away from the animal, but Steve was just as stunned as I was. He stepped toward it, and so did I. I didn’t want him to be closer to it than I was. I didn’t want to share.
The sapphire dog looked at Steve, and I felt a twinge of jealousy—I wanted it to look at me. I wanted to punch the old man in the back of his head and knock him cold, so the sapphire dog would want me and only me.
There was a familiar pressure against a spot below my right collarbone. It meant something, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.
The tip of the sapphire dog’s snout began to recede, the way a person might suck at their cheeks to make them hollow. The snout changed color—first to a dark purple, then to shit brown. A nasty, puckered opening appeared—round, wrinkled, and toothless like a shit-hole.
We were in danger. I remembered that the twinge under my collarbone was a warning that I was under attack. There was a tiny feeling of unease deep inside me, but thoughts of the sapphire dog had crowded it out.
This wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right, and if I didn’t wake up, I was going to be dead.
It lifted its snout toward Steve. I bolted toward him and knocked him into the mud just as the sapphire dog’s long, bone-white tongue snaked out at him.
The tongue passed over us, swiping through the air near my shoulder. I felt Steve hit the ground hard, the air whuffing out of him.
A second wave of love-struck longing washed over me, but this time I recognized the twinge under my right collarbone. My iron gate, one of the protective sigils on my chest, was trying to block a magical attack.
These weren’t my feelings. I had to focus on that. The animal—no, the predator—across from me was trying to control how I felt.
It turned its attention on me. I rolled to my knees in the freezing mud and cocked my arm to throw the ghost knife. Its eyes widened.
I threw the spell.
The sapphire dog seemed to move in three directions at once. It slid to the left and right at the same moment, and shot straight up from the ground. It was almost as if it was a still image that had split apart.
The three afterimages vanished. The ghost knife passed through empty air.
I jumped to my feet, stepped between Steve and the ghost knife, and called it back. Hopefully, he wouldn’t see.
The sapphire dog was gone. Although it had split into separate still images before it vanished, there were footprints in the mud heading to the left and right for a few feet. Damn. At least it wasn’t cloning itself.
I scanned the area around the house. The predator was nowhere in sight. I ran around to the other side of the truck, but it wasn’t there, either.
I laid my face against the cold metal cab. I felt empty. I had a raw, hollow space inside where my adoration for the sapphire dog had been. I knew those feelings weren’t mine. I knew they’d been forced on me, but I still felt their absence as a terrible ache. And I knew that, because of them, I’d missed my chance to kill a predator.
Steve was still on his back in the mud. He stared up at the overcast sky and muttered to himself.
A few seconds ago, I’d been about to put his lights out, and I’d been partly protected by the iron gate Annalise had given me. How much worse had it been for him?
I heard a crash from inside the house. The front door was still standing open, but I couldn’t see Penny. Damn. Of course she couldn’t just wait quietly to be taken to prison.
I kicked the bottom of Steve’s shoe. “Get up,” I said, my voice more harsh than I’d intended. “You have to call those ambulance assholes for the kid in the truck. You have to take your cousin to jail, too.”
I jogged toward the house. The predator might have hidden inside. I didn’t think it was likely, but I had to check. It’s what I was there to do, after all.
Penny was not in the living room, but the axe still lay where she’d dropped it. I stepped carefully inside. I couldn’t see anyone, but I did hear the far-off rasping of metal on metal.
I walked toward the sounds. The throw rug in the middle of the floor and the dingy brown sofa were coated with a fine layer of white cat hairs. Beside the sofa was one of those structures built of flimsy wood and cheap gray carpeting that are supposed to be fun for cats. This one was four and a half feet tall and three feet around.
A dead cat lay on the floor beside it. It had been stomped on, probably by someone with a heavy boot. Someone like Penny.
The kitchen was also coated with cat hairs. The smeary fridge had book reports and pop quizzes held on with magnets. The kid out front was a straight-A student—exactly the sort I used to beat up in my own school days.
Maybe, just maybe, the white stain on his face was temporary.
On the far side of the fridge was a set of stairs leading down to the basement. The sound of metal-on-metal sawing was coming from there.
The wooden stairs creaked under my weight. “Get out!” Penny screamed. “Get out of my house!”
The basement had a concrete floor and a low ceiling. There was a long workbench at one end and a stretching mat at the other. The mat had been repaired many times with duct tape.
Penny was beside the workbench. She’d managed to clamp a hacksaw into a vise and was rubbing the chain of the cuffs up and down the blade.
“Your son is outside,” I said. I had a pretty good idea how she would react, but I had to be sure. “He’s hit his head and is bleeding pretty badly.”
“Get out!” she screamed again.
“An ambulance is on the way to pick him up.”
“Get out of here before I kill you!”
Just as I’d thought. When she’d screamed not to take “him” away, she was talking about the sapphire dog, not her own son. It had touched her face and made her fall in love with it. It had fed on her.
She fumbled for a screwdriver on the bench. Her hands were still pinned behind her, and her charge was awkward and slow.
I yanked the screwdriver out of her hand and kicked her behind the knee. She fell onto the padded mat. I took a claw hammer off a hook on the wall. “That was a pretty little animal, wasn’t it?”
“Are you a fucking moron? It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. If you try to keep me from it, I’ll chop you into tiny pieces.”
“Yeah, sure. It needs a ride out of town, right? I’ll bet it wants to go to a city. Right?” She didn’t answer, but the hateful look in her eyes was all the confirmation I needed. “Now listen to this: I’m going to put you in the back of Steve’s car. If you fight me”—she began cursing at me, so I raised my voice—“if you fight me, I’ll break both your legs.”
I slammed the hammer on the concrete floor. She stopped shouting.
“Then,” I continued, “you won’t be able to take anyone anywhere, and the sapphire dog will find someone else to be with. Get me?”
She glared at me, her breath coming in harsh gasps. Just the idea of losing her precious pet made her eyes brim with tears. “Bide your time,” I told her, “or you’ll lose any chance you might have had.”
Penny let me lead her out of the house to Steve’s car. He told her an ambulance was on the way to check her son over, but she didn’t even look at him. She didn’t care. She sat in the back and I closed the door.
Steve rubbed his face. “We have a jail cell in the basement of the town hall. Sheriff uses it sometimes. The mayor’s on her way here with the key.”
“Good.” As long as she hadn’t picked up the predator’s knack for walking through solid objects, Penny would be out of the way for a while.
“Now. What in the Sam Hill was that thing?”
Before I could answer, the ambulance arrived. Steve waved Bushy Bill and Sue toward the crashed truck.
“That’s the first I saw of it,” I said.
“It … it was beautiful. And it vanished into thin air, didn’t it? I felt …”
“You loved it,” I said. “You loved it and you wanted it all to yourself.”
He squinted up at me. He’d come into contact with the world behind the world, and he didn’t even know what questions he should ask.
Information shared is information leaked. But he’d seen the predator, so he already had the most damning information. And I knew he would talk to Penny soon enough; I didn’t want her version of the sapphire dog to be the only one he heard. I had enough enemies as it was.
I said: “This is how it started last year with my friend. Understand? There was a creature that could make certain things happen. In my friend’s case, it healed his back and let him walk.” There was no need to mention Hammer Bay, so I didn’t. “This is something else, though.”
“I loved that animal.”
“It’s not an animal,” I told him. “It’s smart. It may be smarter than us.”
“By golly,” Steve said. He rubbed his neatly shaved chin. “Today I don’t think that would be too hard.”
“Not any day for me,” I said. “I’ve never been smart. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have to kill it.”
“Can’t we just capture it?” I could see the wanting in his expression.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. Steve winced at my language, and I was glad I hadn’t said what I’d originally meant to say. “Look at your cousin. Was she a bad mother before today? Did she hate her son?”
“No,” he said. “She loves that boy.”
“Yesterday she loved that boy. Today all she can think about is that damn sapphire dog.” That seemed to stagger him, but I wasn’t finished. “And you already know that Clara and Isabelle killed each other over it, don’t you?”
Steve stepped away from me, his shoulders slumping forward as if he suddenly bore a heavy weight. “Oh my heavens.”
“Maybe it’s temporary,” I said. He shot a look at me; he hadn’t even considered how long it would last. Of course, I’d seen predators at work before, and when they destroyed people, they didn’t do it on a temporary basis. “But our first job has to be to find that thing and kill it.”
“You made it vanish,” he said. “What did you throw at it?”
Now he was asking for too much information. “A credit card.” I pulled my MasterCard out of my pocket and showed it to him. “I scared it off. I don’t think it knows very much about this world.”
“Who brought this devil into our world?”
We were getting close to another subject I wanted to avoid. If Steve started talking about Jesus, I wouldn’t be able to turn him away from it, and judging by the way he talked to the paramedics, he had a lot of authority in this town.
Annalise had explained that predators and magic had nothing to do with God or hell, angels or demons. Magic was a way of controlling reality, and predators were just what the name suggested—hungry things from a place outside, sometimes called the Empty Spaces and sometimes called the Deeps.
If Steve started telling the people of Washaway that they were facing a devil, they might try to protect themselves with prayer and crosses, which was as effective as stopping a sniper’s bullet with a hopeful thought.
“It’s not a demon,” I told him. “It’s an alien.”
“Oh.”
“It didn’t come here in a ship. It’s just here. And it’s been here a long time.”
“It has? Where?”
“In Regina Wilbur’s house.”
“Regina? Why, she …”
His voice trailed off. I could see him reconsidering everything he knew about her in light of what he’d seen today. “But she doesn’t have a mark on her face.”
“No,” I said. “She’s kept it prisoner. It’s been hidden on her estate for all this time. But it can affect us at a distance. I think it did exactly that to her for decades. And I think it’s getting stronger.”
“What do we do?”
The paramedics were loading the boy into the ambulance. Sue had a bandage on her wrist; from the way the kid was lunging and snapping at them, I guessed he must have bitten her.
“How many roads lead out of town?”
“Just two,” he said. “This one, which leads to I-5, and Littlemont Road, which goes past the Breakleys’ to the pass.”
“We need to block them off. The predator is trying to get to a heavily populated area. Can you block the roads without causing too much suspicion?”
“No,” he said, “but the state police can. I’ll tell the mayor to call. Heck, considering everything that’s happened, it would be suspicious if we didn’t block them. But we’re going to do more than that, aren’t we?” He looked stricken and miserable. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
“We’ll try,” I said. “And help is coming.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Just tell me one thing, son. You didn’t cause this, did you? You didn’t let this thing loose on my town?”
The question startled me, although it shouldn’t have. “No.”
He sighed in relief. He believed me, although I had no idea why. “I’ll take Penny …” He trailed off as a battered yellow pickup screeched to a halt at the edge of the road. “Looks like you’re going to meet the mayor,” Steve said.
The driver’s door opened and a burly, gray-haired woman bowled out. She wore a Santa cap and a red-and-green coat covered with snowmen. She bustled up the hill toward us.
Steve turned to me. “What should I tell her?”
“You know her. I don’t. Would she believe the truth?”
He sighed. “Not a chance on God’s green earth.”
“Like I said: you know her. Tell her what you have to.”
“Good Lord, Steve, what’s going on?” she said when she was a few paces away.
“People are going crazy, Pippa, and the crazy is spreading.”
I kept my mouth shut, letting Steve take the lead. She stopped next to us, breathing hard. “Explain. No, wait. First, who are you?”
She stepped close to me. She may have been past sixty and barely five feet tall, but she looked at me with the same bullish challenge I’d gotten from cops and prison-yard toughs.
I didn’t answer. “Ray Lilly,” Steve said, “this is Pippa Wolfowitz, mayor of Washaway.”
“Nice shiner you got there. You’re the fellow who got himself carjacked last night.”
“I am.”
“Funny how all this happened just as you came to town.”
I was about to tell her it wasn’t funny at all, but I didn’t. For all I knew, one of the bodies I’d found today was a member of her family. She was entitled to be a little testy.
“Pippa, Ray here saved my life. Penny tried to chop me down like a tree, but he stopped her.”
“Big Penny?” Pippa looked at the back of Steve’s car. “What’s she got against you?”
“Not a thing as far as I know. It’s like I said: everyone is going crazy. It started at the Breakley place, then somehow got to Isabelle’s house. Isabelle brought it here, and it got to Penny and Little Mark.”
“It? What it got to all those people?”
Steve looked at me, his mouth working. “We don’t exactly know yet.”
“Don’t play games with me, Steve Cardinal. I’m too old for that stuff.”
“Sheriff get here?”
“No, and don’t change the subject.”
“It’s all the same subject. You need to call the state police and have them block the roads. We can’t let this spread.”
“Block the …? The festival is tomorrow! People here need this festival. They have bills to pay!”
“Pippa—”
“Is this about November, Steve?”
“For goodness sakes, would you listen to me?” His voice got high and whiny when he was angry. “This has nothing to do with the election.”
He was losing her, and the more I thought about it, the less it seemed to matter. What could she do, anyway? Organize a posse? Warn people to stay indoors? I wasn’t even sure how useful a roadblock would be.
What I did know was this: I was wasting time listening to these people. I backed away from them and looked up at Penny’s house. It was dark and quiet.
I went inside and took out my ghost knife.
I searched the house from basement to attic but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The sapphire dog certainly wasn’t hidden there, and Penny didn’t have any spell books I could find. The only things I found were a pair of tabby cats cowering under the bed and an old police-band scanner in the kitchen.
When I went back outside, Pippa and Steve were standing at the back of Steve’s car, talking to Penny.
I walked toward the Neon. Pippa heard me coming and held up her index finger, signaling me to wait. I ignored her and kept walking to my car.
Pippa frowned and followed me. “So, this is your dog?”
“Nope.”
“But you know about it,” she said. “What’s wrong with it? Rabies? Why is it blue?”
“Steve and Penny both saw it. Why not ask them?”
She stepped too close to me again. I’d have suspected she was clueless about personal space if it hadn’t been for the look on her face. “I have. Now I’m asking you.”
Steve had felt the effects of the sapphire dog. I’d talked to him because he already knew enough to get killed. With Pippa, things were different.
And I didn’t like or trust her.
The ambulance siren chirped as it pulled out.
“Come on, Pippa,” Steve said. “He saved my life and he’s trying to help.”
She ignored him. “I don’t trust you. When the sheriff gets here, I’m going to have you locked up until the real truth comes out.”
“Well, you should call him, then.”
“I think I will.”
She walked away, putting her cellphone to her ear. Steve came close. His expression betrayed his embarrassment, but he didn’t apologize.
“Once Penny’s locked up,” he said, “we’ll talk again. Go back to the Sunset, okay? You look like you could use some sleep anyway.”
“You’ll block those roads, right?”
“Right,” he said. “Pippa will order it. I’ll make sure.”
He started toward his car, but I wasn’t finished. “Steve, what happened to the Breakleys?”
He glanced around to make sure Pippa was still on her cell. “They were home when the fire broke out,” he said. “The fire chief said he saw them in the basement window while the crews were dousing the barn. They wouldn’t come out, though. A couple of hours later, I went back to check on them.
“There was a hole in the stone foundation of the house, like someone had tunneled through. They were all dead. They’d killed each other, starting with the little ones.”
“Any white marks?”
“The parents each had one, and the grandmother.”
“But not the kids?”
Steve shook his head, got into his car, and did a U-turn to head back to town.
Parents killing their own children. I tried not to think about that. The sapphire dog hadn’t touched the two little girls. Maybe it hadn’t gotten the chance, or maybe they were too young. Steve had said the girls were seven and nine, and while Little Mark had a white stain, he was at least fourteen or fifteen. The baby Steve had given to the paramedics hadn’t been marked, either. Maybe the predator needed its food to be ripe.
After a quick circuit of the rental car to make sure the predator hadn’t materialized in the backseat, I drove farther out on the road. There were no more houses or buildings out this way. I passed several signs telling me the highway turnoff was coming up, and I saw a couple of scattered businesses, a campground, and a turnoff for the church and fairgrounds. Another banner told me the Christmas festival was taking place at the fairgrounds, and a little sign below told me the church was having a benefit lunch … well, it was happening right then, as it turned out.
I drove by, passed the school grounds, and entered the town from the other side. I hadn’t seen the turnoff for the highway. I did a U-turn and drove back. I missed it a second time. Maybe some joker had moved the signs.
This time I pulled into the fairgrounds. The church was off to the right on a low hill; it looked like exactly the sort of church I’d expect in a little town: small with a peaked roof and a steeple. I parked below the church in the fairgrounds parking lot, a wide asphalt patch that overlooked the fairgrounds below. The grounds were slightly larger than a football field, which I thought surprisingly small until I realized that level ground must be a pretty scarce commodity around here.
I shut the engine off and sat in the car. The sapphire dog had not come this way by accident. It was possible that Clara had chosen the route, but I didn’t believe it. Little Mark had tried to chauffeur the predator, too, and I remembered the way it felt to be near that thing. Whatever it would have wanted, I would have wanted, too. The sapphire dog was the one in control.
But why this way? Maybe it wanted to go camping. Maybe it wanted to go to church. Maybe it wanted to get on the feeder road—which I couldn’t find—to the highway and then hit the big city, where there were hundreds of thousands of people to make crazy. But it had failed.
Now I was looking across the fairgrounds at a cinder-block building. The door kept swinging open as people went in and out. Why go all the way to Seattle to feed when it could stop off right here?
I climbed from the car and walked along the parking lot. I passed an old fire engine; the firefighters had probably stopped off for lunch after the Breakley fire.
To catch this predator, I’d have to figure out what it wanted. Eat and reproduce was the simple answer, but Catherine and her songbird story had made me realize that this wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
Maybe it just wanted its freedom. Maybe the most important thing to it right now was not to be captured and starved in a cage again. Then, once it was far away, it would do its thing. Maybe it would call more of its kind here. Or start a cult. Maybe it would create an army and install itself as Pet Emperor.
Unless I destroyed it first.
The cinder-block building was painted white, and I walked inside feeling like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest. I had come eagerly to this little town to kill and possibly be killed, and none of the old ladies smiling at me as I dropped fifteen dollars of Fat Guy’s money into the food-bank kitty had any idea how dangerous I felt. There was a second door right in front of me, and behind the welcome table on the right was a long hall filled with lawn equipment.
I accepted a tray in exchange for my donation and went into a much larger room. As I moved down the line at the kitchen windows, a heap of mac and cheese, a pair of chicken drumsticks, succotash, home-baked rolls, and broccoli-cheddar bake were put on my plate. I said thank you. No one had white marks on their faces, and no one seemed likely to go on a murder spree.
The sapphire dog hadn’t come here. Not yet.
As I stepped away from the serving line, I scanned the room. There were a dozen round tables set up and ten chairs at each table. Most of the seats were full. At the center table, a half dozen firemen were holding court. They were tall, well-muscled men ranging from their mid-twenties to mid-fifties. Several women—two dozen or so in all—sat at their table or chatted with them from an adjacent table. I wondered if I could sit close enough to hear what they knew about the Breakleys.
“Oh, please join us,” a gray-haired woman said from the table nearest me, at the edge of the room. She was sitting with three people: an Asian woman who looked just a few years younger; a brown-eyed toddler wearing tiny earrings; and a woman I assumed was the toddler’s mom, plump, with dark hair and a lot of eyeliner.
The gray-haired woman, who had the whitest skin I’d ever seen, introduced herself as Francine, then went around the table and introduced Mai, Estrella, and Graciela. I told them my name was Ray, and Mai immediately asked me if I was the one who had his car stolen. I retold that story, because it would have seemed odd to refuse. The women clucked their tongues and made a fuss over my black eye. Then conversation turned to the Christmas festival.
Just as I was about to steer the topic toward the Breakley fire, another woman stopped by the table. The others called her Catty, which startled me. For a moment, I thought they had copied my habit of giving descriptive names to people, but no, it was just an unfortunate nickname. They traded forced pleasantries until Catty left, then Graciela admitted that she felt obligated to buy some of Catty’s jewelry at the festival because Catty had helped her out so often.
Mai kindly told me that Graciela’s husband was serving overseas, and while the whole town was happy to help her out, only Catty hinted that she deserved some sort of repayment. Graciela listened to this without looking up from her plate.
They chatted about the display Catty would have and how much Graciela should spend. I wasn’t a part of the conversation, but it was too late to move to another table. I was not getting any closer to finding the predator.
I had looked into the sapphire dog’s eyes only an hour before. After I’d seen something so alien and beautiful, the everyday chatter around me made me feel utterly out of place.
Then Hondo stopped by. He greeted everyone enthusiastically, especially little Estrella. Turning to me, he said: “I take it your lady friend decided not to leave after all.”
Someone on the other side of the room laughed uproariously. People were having fun. “What do you mean?” I said.
He was a little surprised by my tone. “Your friend. She paid me a pickup fee for the train station, but it only takes a half hour to drive out there. I’m still waiting for her call.”
Francine noticed the look on my face. “Maybe she has a problem with her phone,” she said in a soothing tone.
Now Hondo was looking concerned, too. “I don’t think so. Arliss at the station knows my cars. He says it’s not there.”
Catherine didn’t arrive at her destination. I dropped my napkin onto my plate. “Excuse me.”
“Hey, man,” Hondo said, “do you need help?” Everyone at the table looked ready to jump up and join the search.
“Thanks, but no. I’m sure she’s fine. I just need to make certain for my peace of mind.”
I pushed my way toward the door. As I passed the firefighters, I heard one of them say he had to get back to his family for Christmas, then they stood, too.
I made my way back to my car. It was nearly three-thirty, and Catherine had left around noon. I had to find out what had happened to her.