then his mouth and left arm sagged and he fell onto the grass.
I lunged at him and turned him over. His hat fell off and a thick strand of drool hung from his lip. He was dying right in front of me—dying of a stroke just like Penny and Little Mark in their cells—and there was nothing I could do about it except watch.
I rubbed at the stubble of hair on the top of his head. It only took a moment to find a patch of white skin beneath his hair. The sapphire dog had learned to hide its mark.
The pets moved closer to me, and I held up my hands again. Seven or eight of them fell on me, pressing me down onto the wet grass. They bent my arms behind my back. I cursed at them and tried to struggle free, so they leaned on my arms until I thought my shoulder would pop. I stopped struggling and let them cuff me and pull me upright. Damn. The only way I could get to my ghost knife now would be to
Across the field, I saw a gray Volvo creep out of the parking lot. No one else seemed to notice. Go, Catherine, go.
They shoved me along. As we came near the field house, I saw Preston among the folks still standing guard. He was still holding his double-barreled shotgun, but he didn’t seem interested in scaring me anymore.
Behind Preston I saw Pippa Wolfowitz and Graciela. I looked for Graciela’s toddler with her tiny earrings, but I didn’t see her nearby. Pippa was still wearing the same Santa cap and bulldog expression she’d worn outside Big Penny’s house, but underneath her jacket she wore pajamas. She looked up at the sky as though she wanted to study the clouds, then fell over backward and was still. No one moved to help her.
Damn. They were dying all around me.
Pastor Dolan pushed through the crowd. “Where are the two women who were with you?”
The stone-cold way he looked at me gave me a chill, so I smirked at him. “They escaped while you dipshits were chasing me.”
He wasn’t insulted. Maybe he didn’t know how to be insulted anymore. “You’ll tell us more soon enough.”
“Yeah, sure I will,” I said. “Take me to your pet.”
Everyone stopped and turned toward me. They looked to be a half second from stomping the life out of me. I felt a sudden nervous tingle on the back of my neck.
“He isn’t a
“Sure, sure. But next time you threaten someone, stand on a box first.”
He didn’t react, just turned away. Hondo grabbed my right arm, and a man I didn’t recognize grabbed my left. This was it. I wished my hands were free so I could grab my ghost knife. The entrance to the field house was just ten yards away.
A green light lit the sky on the right. Everyone turned toward it, and I stepped back to get a clear view through the tops of the festival tents.
Green fire had blasted a hole in the roof of the pastor’s house. There was a loud boom, then a series of sharp cracks. It sounded almost like fireworks.
A nest of blue lights came through the wall. The whole house appeared to buckle, a piece of roof blasted upward, and we heard the explosion a second or two later.
There was another sudden flare of green flame. “Go, boss,” I said under my breath. “Kick his ass.”
A section of the downstairs wall suddenly blinked out of existence. The building sagged in on itself. There was a high-pitched sound almost like a scream. The walls shuddered and a column of white flame tore through the entire roof.
Burning wood rained down on the nearby lawn. I had a sick feeling in my gut. I’d never seen Annalise use white fire; maybe it was a spell she kept in reserve.
The walls twisted and collapsed into rubble. I stood in the crowd, watching the pieces of broken shingle and siding burn in the mud. I looked for a figure moving amid the wreckage, a glimpse of a dark coat, but I couldn’t see anything.
The pastor turned toward Waterproof. “Get together a dozen men and check that out.” He glanced back at his house, his expression showing as much concern as he’d show for a toppled Porta Potti. “Actually, bring twenty. With guns. Kill anyone you find over there. We don’t want to take any chances with his safety.”
Waterproof took about a third of the crowd with him, maybe two dozen people, but these guys weren’t operating under military discipline. They marched across the open field in a mob with their mismatched weapons.
I was hustled toward the open door. People stepped over Pippa’s body as if she was a rotted log. “I’m cooperating,” I snapped. “You don’t have to hold my hand. I’m cooperating!”
They didn’t let go. My stomach knotted up as I thought about being dragged in front of a predator with my arms pinned. Damn, did I feel stupid.
We went inside, passing a halogen floodlight set on a stand in the back corner. This was the same white room where I’d eaten the church lunch. The tables, chairs, and steam trays had been removed, and the room was flooded with light. I counted four halogens, each set into a corner and each shining onto a pedestal near the far wall. I nearly tripped over the fat black power cables that ran along the base of three of the walls.
And there on the pedestal was the sapphire dog, sitting on a big satin pillow like pampered royalty. Its tail wavered, sometimes weaving slowly and sometimes snapping from one position to the next too quickly for the eye to see.
Its back looked different than I remembered. The last time I’d seen it, it had been smooth like a snake, but now I saw a row of polyps.
