By the Light of the Moon

Fake fear had washed out of Becky's blue eyes, and a mad glee had flooded into them.

She launched herself off the bed in a frenzy, slashing wildly with the knife. Dylan twisted out of her way, and Becky proved to have more enthusiasm for murder than practice at it. She stumbled, nearly fell, barely escaped skewering herself, and shouted, 'Kenny!'

Here came Kenny through the door that Becky had not indicated. He had certain qualities of an eel: lithe and quick to the point of sinuousness, lean but muscular, with the mad pressure-pinched eyes of a creature condemned to live in cold, deep, rancid waters. Dylan half expected Kenny's teeth to be pointed and backward- hooked like the teeth of any serpent, whether on land or in water.

He was a young man with flair, dressed in black cowboy boots, black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black denim jacket brightened by embroidered green Indian designs. The embroidery matched the shade of the feather in the cowboy hat that had been perched atop the suitcases in the bedroom across the hall.

'Who're you?' Kenny asked Dylan, and without waiting for an answer, he demanded of Becky, 'Where the hell's the old bitch?'

The white-haired woman in the candy-striped uniform, home from a hard day's work, was no doubt the old bitch for whom these two had lain in wait.

'Who cares who he is,' Becky said. 'Just kill him, then we'll find the old pus bag and gut her.'

The shackled boy had misunderstood the relationship between his brother and the girl. Cold-blooded conspirators, they intended to slaughter Grandma and little brother, perhaps steal whatever pathetic trove of cash the woman had hidden in her mattress, toss Kenny's two suitcases in the car, and hit the road.

They might make a stop farther along the street at Becky's house to pick up her luggage. Maybe they intended to kill her family, too.

Whether or not their plan subsequent to this snafu would prove successful, right now they had Dylan in a pincer play. They were well positioned to dispatch him quickly.

Kenny held a knife with a twelve-inch blade and two wickedly sharp cutting edges. The rubber-coated, looped handle featured a finger-formed grip that appeared to be user-friendly and difficult to dislodge from a determined hand.

Less designed for war than for the kitchen, Becky's weapon would nevertheless chop a man as effectively as it might have been used to dismember a chicken for a stew pot.

Considerably longer than either blade, the baseball bat provided Dylan with the advantage of reach. And he knew from experience that his size warned off punks and drunks who might otherwise have taken a whack at him; most aggressive types assumed that only a brute could reside within the physique of a brute, when in fact he had the heart of a lamb.

Perhaps Kenny hesitated also because he didn't understand the situation any longer, and worried about murdering a stranger without knowing how many others might also be in the house. The homicidal meanness in those eely eyes was tempered by a cunning akin to that of the serpent in Eden.

Dylan considered trying to pass himself off as a police officer and claiming that backup was on the way, but even if the lack of a uniform could be explained, the use of a baseball bat instead of a handgun made the cop story a hard sell.

Whether or not a drop of prudence seasoned the drug-polluted pool of Kenny's mind, Becky was all intense animal need and demon glee, certain not to be dissuaded for long by the reach of the bat or by her adversary's size.

With one foot, Dylan feinted toward Kenny, but then spun more directly toward the girl and swung the bat at the hand in which she held the knife.

Becky was perhaps a high-school gymnast or one of the legions of ballerina wannabes on whom multitudes of loving American parents had squandered countless millions with the certainty that they were nurturing the next Margot Fonteyn. Although not talented enough for Olympic competition or for the professional dance theater, she proved to be quick, limber, and more coordinated than she had appeared to be when she'd flung herself off the bed. She fell back, avoiding the bat with a cry of premature triumph – 'Ha!' – and at once sprang to her right to get out of the way of the backswing, half crouching to contract her leg muscles, the better to move with power when she decided how to move.

Under no illusions that Kenny's better judgment would ensure his continued hesitancy if an ideal opening appeared, Dylan borrowed some moves from Becky, though he probably looked less like a failed ballerina than like a dancing bear. He rounded on the embroidered cowboy just as Kenny came in for the kill.

The kid's moray eyes revealed not the feral ferocity of Becky, but the calculation of a sneak and the incomplete commitment of a coward who was bravest with a weak adversary. He was a monster, but not the savage equal of his blue-eyed squeeze, and he made the mistake of slipping in for the kill instead of lunging full- out. By the time Dylan turned toward him, the bat arcing high, Kenny should have been rushing forward with enough momentum to duck under the bat and drive the blade home. Instead, he flinched, juked back, and fell victim to his lack of nerve.

With a Babe Ruth crack, the bat broke Kenny's right forearm. In spite of the looped handle and formed grip, the knife flew out of his hand. Kenny seemed almost to lift off his feet, as though he were a two-base hit if not an out-of-the-park home run.

As the screaming kid failed to take flight and instead dropped like a bunt, Dylan could sense Becky coming at his back and knew that a dancing bear could never outmaneuver a psychotic ballerina.

***

As she reached the next-to-the-last step, Jilly heard someone shout 'Kenny!' She halted short of the upstairs hall, unsettled that the cry had come neither from Dylan nor from a thirteen-year-old boy. Urgent and shrill, the voice had been female.

She heard other noises, then a man's voice, likewise not Dylan's and not that of a boy, though she couldn't discern what he said.

Having come to warn Dylan that young Travis was up here with Kenny, but also having followed to help him if he needed help, she couldn't freeze on these steps and yet retain her self-respect. For Jillian Jackson, self- respect had been won with considerable effort through a childhood that, except for the example set by her mother, had provided fertile ground for seeds of self-doubt and excessive self-effacement. She would not here relinquish what she had struggled so long and hard to capture.

Hurrying out of the stairwell, Jilly saw a spill of soft light coming from an open door on the left, brighter light issuing from a door farther along on the right – and doves erupting through a closed window at the end of the hallway, a vision of doves that left the panes intact in their wake.

The birds made no sounds – no coos or cries, nor the faintest thrum of wings. When they exploded around and over her, cataracts of white feathers, a thousand piercing gazes, a thousand yawning beaks, she didn't expect to feel them, but she did. The breeze stirred by their passage was spicy with incense. Their wing tips brushed her body, arms, and face.

Staying close to the left wall, she moved quickly forward into a storm of white wings as dense as the feathery blizzard that earlier had swept across the Expedition. She feared for her sanity, but she didn't fear the birds, which meant her no harm. Even if they had been real, they would not have pecked or blinded her. She sensed that they were in fact proof of augmented vision, although even as this thought occurred to her, she had no idea what augmented vision might be; for the moment it was a thing she understood instinctively, emotionally, rather than intellectually.

Although she could not be harmed by these phenomena, the timing of the birds' appearance couldn't have been worse. She needed to find Dylan, and real or not, the birds were a hindrance to the search.

'Ha!' exclaimed someone close at hand, and an instant later, Jilly felt on her left the open doorway that the seething flock had hidden from her view.

She stepped across the threshold, and the birds vanished. Before her lay a bedroom revealed by a single lamp. And here was Dylan, too, armed with a baseball bat, bracketed by a young man – Kenny? – and a teenage girl, both brandishing knives.

The bat cut the air with a whoosh, the young man screamed, and the wickedly