By the Light of the Moon

passed in that blink. The needle had been withdrawn from her arm. The twins no longer hovered over her.

In fact, only one of the men was present, and she realized that the other had not actually existed, had been a trick of vision. He stood at the foot of the bed, returning the hypodermic syringe to the leather satchel, which she'd mistaken for a kit of salesman's samples. She realized that it must be a medical bag.

He droned on about his life's work, but nothing he said made any sense to Jilly, perhaps because he was an incoherent psychopath or perhaps because the fumes of nepenthe, still burning in her nose and sinuses, rendered her incapable of understanding him.

When she tried to rise from the bed, she experienced a wave of vertigo that washed her back down onto the pillows. She clutched the mattress with both hands, as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a raft of flotsam in a turbulent sea.

This sensation of tilting and spinning at last stirred up the fear that she knew she ought to feel but that until now had been an inactive sediment at the bottom of her mind. As her breathing grew shallow, quick, and frantic, her racing heart churned currents of anxiety through her blood, and fear threatened to darken into terror, panic.

She had never been interested in controlling others, but she'd always insisted on being the master of her own fate. She might make mistakes, did make mistakes – lots, lots – but if her life was destined to be screwed up, then she'd damn well do the job herself. Control had been taken from her, seized by force, maintained with chemicals, with drugs, for reasons that she could not understand even though she strained to remain focused on her tormentor's line of self-justifying patter.

With the surge of fear came anger. In spite of her karaoke-karate threat and her Southwest Amazon image, Jilly wasn't by nature a butt-kicking warrioress. Humor and charm were her weapons of choice. But here she saw an ample backside in which she emphatically wanted to bury a boot. As the salesman-maniac-doctor-whatever walked to the desk, to pick up his cola and three bags of peanuts, Jilly tried once more to rise in righteous rage.

Again, her box-spring raft tossed in the flamboyant sea of bad motel decor. A second attack of vertigo, worse than the first, spun a whirlpool of nausea through her, and instead of executing the butt-booting assault that she'd envisioned, she groaned. 'I'm gonna puke.'

Retrieving his Coke and peanuts, picking up his medical bag, the stranger said, 'You'd better resist the urge. The effects of the anesthesia linger. You could lose consciousness again, and if you pass out while regurgitating, you'll wind up like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, choking to death on your own vomit.'

Oh, lovely. She'd simply gone out to buy some root beer. Such an innocent undertaking. Not ordinarily a high-risk task. She had fully understood the need to compensate for the root-beer indulgence with a dry-toast breakfast, but she hadn't gone to the vending machines with any expectation whatsoever that by doing so she would put herself at risk of choking to death on her own upchuck. Had she known, she would have stayed in her room and drunk tap water; after all, what was good enough for Fred was good enough for her.

'Lie still,' the crackpot urged, not with any element of command in his voice but with what sounded like concern for her. 'Lie still, and the nausea and the vertigo will fade in two or three minutes. I don't want you to choke to death, that would be stupid, but I can't risk hanging around here, playing nursemaid. And remember, if they get their hands on me and discover what I've done, they'll come looking for anyone I've injected, and they'll kill you.'

Remember? Kill? They?

She had no memory whatsoever of any such previous warning, so she assumed that it must have been part of what he'd been talking about when her brain haze, now gradually clearing, had been as thick as London fog.

From the door, he looked back at her. 'The police won't be able to keep you safe from these people who're coming. There's no one to turn to.'

On the rolling bed, in this tilting room, she could not help but think about the chicken sandwich, slathered with chipotle mayonnaise, and the greasy French fries she'd eaten. She tried to concentrate on her assailant, desperate to devastate him with words in place of the boot that she hadn't been able to bury in his bottom, but her gorge kept trying to rise.

'Your only hope,' he said, 'is to get out of the search area before you're detained and forced to have a blood test.'

The chicken sandwich struggled within her as though it retained some of its chicken consciousness, as though the fowl were attempting to take a first messy step toward reconstitution.

Nevertheless, Jilly managed to speak, and she was at once embarrassed by the insult that escaped her, which would have been lame even if she had pronounced it without confusion: 'Siss my kass.'

In comedy clubs, she frequently dealt with hecklers, cracked their thick skulls, wrung their geek necks, stomped their malicious hearts till they cried for mama – metaphorically speaking, of course – using a dazzle of words as effective as the fists of Muhammad Ali in his prime. In postanesthesia disorientation, however, she was about as witheringly funny as chipotle mayonnaise, which right now was the least amusing substance in the known universe.

'As attractive as you are,' he said, 'I'm sure someone'll look after you.'

'Pupid srick,' she said, further mortified by the utter collapse of her once formidable verbal war machine.

'In the days ahead, you'd be best advised to keep your mouth shut about what happened here-'

'Cupid strick,' she corrected herself, only to realize that she had found a new way to mangle the same insult.

'-keep your head down-'

'Stupid prick,' she said with clarity this time, although the epithet had actually sounded more withering when mispronounced.

'-and never speak to anyone about what's happened to you, because as soon as it's known, you'll be a target.'

She almost spat the word at him, 'Hickdead,' though such crude language, whether or not properly pronounced and clearly enunciated, was not her usual style.

'Good luck,' he said, and then he left with his Coke and his peanuts and his evil dreamy smile.

7

Having cut himself loose from the chair, having taken a quick piddle – deedle-doodle- diddle – Dylan returned from the bathroom and discovered that Shep had risen from the desk and had turned his back on the unfinished Shinto temple. Once he began to obsess on a puzzle, Shep could be lured from it neither with promises nor with rewards, nor by force, until he plugged in the final piece. Yet now, standing near the foot of the bed, staring intently at the empty air as though he perceived something of substance in it, he whispered not to Dylan, apparently not to himself, either, but as if to a phantom visible only to him: 'By the light of the moon.'

During most of his waking hours, Shepherd radiated strangeness as reliably as a candle gave forth light. Dylan had grown accustomed to living in that aura of brotherly weirdness. He had been Shep's legal guardian for more than a decade, since their mother's untimely death when Shep was ten, two days before Dylan turned nineteen. After all this time, he could not easily be surprised by Shep's words or actions, as once he had been. Likewise, in his youth he had sometimes found Shep's behavior creepy rather than merely peculiar, but for many years, his afflicted brother had done nothing to chill the nape of Dylan's neck – until now.

'By the light of the moon.'

Shepherd's posture remained as stiff and awkward as always, but his current edginess wasn't characteristic. Though usually as smooth as the serene brow of Buddha, his forehead furrowed. His face gave itself to a ferocity he'd never exhibited before. He squinted at the apparition that only he could see, chewing on his lower lip, looking angry and worried. His hands cramped into fists at his sides, and he seemed to want to punch