Kate had always been a moose. Now she'd turned into Godzilla. Aunt Alice had told her how Kate used to piss the refs off when she was playing basketball, a woman doing slam dunks in high school. Now she looked like she could dunk the ball flat-footed. And she glowed. Gold skin, gold clothing, with a greenish tinge.
Too many variables, not enough equations. How the hell did I get into this mess?
She was repeating herself. Get a grip, Haskell. Find a target, blast it, cook up an alibi. What's complicated about that?
That target scares the shit out of Aunt Alice. That's what's complicated. A little over an hour to moonrise . . .
It'll be over, one way or another. Either we win or it's someone else's problem, 'cause we'll be dead.
Caroline started to shiver, adrenaline rushing though her blood but no action to soak it up, sweat cold on her back and down her sides under her armpits.
"He should not have come into my land." Kate had moved up to loom beside Caroline, still scanning the darkness around the clearing. Her voice sounded like echoes in a cave.
Possession? Maybe they'd survive this, after all.
"I underestimated you once. I swore I would not make that mistake twice."
Caroline spun toward the voice and looked up, to the crown of the ridge just above them and the soft pulsing light of the stone circle. The brujo stood there, tall over the altar stone, Jackie Lewis in Frankenstein makeup. Caroline snapped the shotgun to her shoulder and sighted, but couldn't fire.
The brujo held a naked body slung over his shoulder, her shoulder, head down and legs behind, a human shield. Jeff Burns. To shoot the brujo, you'd have to go through Jeff's body first. And the brujo held something glittery to Jeff's throat with his free hand, her free hand.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Oh God, I can't do this. That's my baby. I don't care what's happened to her, what she's threatening. That's Jackie standing there.
"You will please to drop your weapons."
Kate struggled to focus on the shape behind the altar. It glowed like everything else in this night of fire, red edges, red eyes, vibrating against the green night-sights of her Colt searching for a gap, for a target. Her hands shook and tears blurred her eyes.
Livid scars shone through the glow, a small spot on Jackie's forehead, a little higher than her eyebrows and to the left of her nose, and then a broad hairless patch above and behind her left ear. Kate stood close enough to see them clearly. Entry and exit wounds, her cop training murmured, trajectory says assailant was level with the target, in front and to her right. The slug tumbled after bone impact, or it was an expanding high-velocity bullet.
Then pictures followed, dotted lines tracing the expanding damage through frontal lobe and parietal lobe, convolutions and fissures, straight out of Alice's nursing texts. Kate gagged and swallowed sour vomit at the images blanking her sight, images formed by the House's magic but so real in her head, memories of skull fragments and clotting blood and spattered brains and the stink of shit and piss.
She saw Jackie there behind the altar. How could she move and see and speak after that wound? Fading in and out, an FX movie overlay, she saw the brujo as she'd known him last June with his flattering lying Spanish-phrased English and courtly ways, she saw scales and long jaw and teeth like some kind of upright crocodile. She saw a skull, gray and stained and weathered as if it had lain dead in the sun and rain for a century or more.
She felt weird. Time expanded, until such a chain of disjointed thoughts could fill an hour between two beats of her heart. She heard mice rustle in the dry autumn blueberry leaves, a flying squirrel whisper through the air between trees in the oak wood below the field. Even in the darkness, moon yet to rise, her eyes picked out the finest detail, like the scalloped chipped keen edge of the obsidian knife Jackie held against Jeff's neck. She smelled Jackie, the shared chemistry of Rowley blood between them.
Not Jackie. That's Antonio Estevan Francisco Juan Carlos da Silva y Gomes. AKA "Tupash," AKA "El Indio," AKA a whole bunch of other names he puts on and takes off like a shirt in the morning. "You can call me Tony" when he's in seducer mode. Peruvian drug lord and ancient Inca sorcerer, psychic cannibal, ghost. How many times do we have to kill the bastard?
I can put all six slugs from this beast into a two-inch circle at twenty-five yards. I'm maybe twenty-five feet from the fucker, and I can see his entire forehead. Why can't I hold this damned pistol steady?
Besides, if I shoot, his hand will jerk and he'll cut Jeff's throat. And she's my baby.
"No. Put the boy down."
He shook his head, Jackie's head. "But Señora, if you do not put down your weapons, both of you, I will kill this child."
The voice sounded like Jackie, but the phrasing wasn't her. And Kate's heart felt like stone in her chest, cold stone but glowing and pulsing like the gems in the Rowan brooch on her shirt. She saw Caroline move, circle to the left, stop at a flanking angle where the blast from that shotgun still would miss Kate, all seen clear and sharp even though it was peripheral vision without taking her focus from the brujo's forehead and the sights.
She saw things she couldn't have seen. She had no eyes in the back of her head, yet she saw another woman standing at the arc of stone between her and Caroline. A stout dark woman shrouded
