"Do you think this wil ever go away?"
"This?" Bil frowned.
Jack shrugged self-consciously. "This. The aftershock from what happened with . . . with the Prowlers." His gaze was locked on Bil 's. "It's like an echo that won't fade."
"It'l fade," Bil replied instantly. His eyes ticked toward Mol y. "Our girl here wil head off to Yale in the fal , and life wil go back to normal. The nighttime wil go back to just being what happens when it gets dark."
Mol y cleared her throat. They both turned to her. She stirred the ice in her glass with a straw.
"Maybe it shouldn't," she said. Jack frowned. "What do you mean?" "Maybe it shouldn't go back to normal. Okay, we could forget about it. I mean, at least partial y. Forget in a sense that whole days might go by where we wouldn't think about it."
Her gaze, hard and sad, went to Bil . "Except you. I guess you couldn't forget, could you?"
"Not likely."
Mol y reached a hand out to grasp Jack's wrist. "But if we do forget, what about next time?"
"I don't get you," Jack told her. Though he was afraid that he did.
"What about the next time it happens somewhere? And we could have done something because we knew?"
Bil placed both hands on the bar and leaned forward, a grave expression on his face. "No one wil believe you. Even the people who know about Prowlers pretend it isn't true. Look at the Boston Police Department. Had to be twenty officers and detectives, maybe more, involved in the case in April. Al of them saw, with their own eyes. None of them talked about it.
Who'd believe them?"
"So we don't talk," Mol y relented. "But I know how I'm going to feel if it happens again."
It was just after seven the fol owing morning when Mol y stumbled into the kitchen, wiping sleep from her eyes. The sun streamed in through the high windows and gleamed off the slanted floor. Jack sat behind the round table in a T-shirt and jean shorts, looking bright-eyed and ready to face the day.
Mol y wanted to kil him.
His chin was covered with stubble, but that was the only sign that he had not woken up much earlier than she had. With her hair more unruly than ever, slippers on her feet, and her ratty terry robe badly tied around her, she felt like roadkil .
"Good morning," he said pleasantly, a bowl of Wheaties on the table in front of him.
"Who says?" Mol y griped as she trudged to the fridge to pul out the orange juice.
"You're real y not a morning person, are you?" Jack teased.
It had been almost three months since she had moved in. He knew ful wel she was not a morning person, no matter how perfect and sunny it was outside.
"You're a sadist," she told him as she retrieved a glass from the cabinet. She sat down at the table and began to pour as Courtney walked into the kitchen.
"Jack?" his sister said.
Her voice was fil ed with a cold dread that sent shivers through Mol y. Courtney walked with a cane and had done so for a decade, and though her features were stil young and attractive, her handicap often made her look older than her twenty-nine years. But never as old as she looked in that moment. Her face was ashen and drawn.
"What is it?" Jack asked, voice tinged with concern for his sister as he went to her.
Mol y had known them half her life, and she knew there was no one more important to Jack than Courtney. Courtney held pages from her computer printer in her hand, and she offered them to him.
Her eyes went to Mol y's. "I've been sort of . . . keeping an eye out. On the Net. Like we talked about? I ran across this today."
Courtney let Jack take the pages and sat down at the kitchen table, resting the cane against her leg. Mol y's gaze ticked from her to Jack and back again, wondering what she had found, but knowing exactly what it was al about. When Jack final y handed her the pages, Mol y hesitated only a moment. It was a news piece about the mutilation murder of a mailman in central Vermont.
"It could be anything," she said, her voice sounding hol ow even to herself.
Mol y glanced up at Courtney, but Jack was the one who replied.
"It could be," he agreed.
With a sigh, Mol y closed her eyes and dropped the pages on the table. When she opened them again, Jack was staring at her expectantly.
"But it's probably them," she al owed, resigned to the truth of it.
Jack reached out for her hand, gently lacing his fingers with hers. "There's only one way to know for sure."
CHAPTER 3
It took almost an entire day for Jack and Molly to arrange everything for their trip north. The schedule at the pub had to be considerably altered to cover for their indefinite absence. It was a sort of reconnaissance trip - at least they tried to think of it as such. Bill and Courtney were eager to reassure them that it was unlikely they would actually find anything, that the acquisition of a cell phone for each of them was merely a precaution.
Jack and Molly had spoken about the murders privately only once. The details sounded too familiar. While there were other explanations, now that they knew that Prowlers existed, it was natural to lay the blame for this new round of savagery on the ancient, monstrous race.
Bill had explained to them that contemporary Prowlers had no real unity, no cohesive society, and yet there did exist a kind of loose network, a matrix of connections and information. There were
