Come home, Honor. It’s all right. There’s nothing in the house to hurt you. It’s the man you need to watch out for. He’s the one who’s threatening you.

She awoke slowly in the early evening, stale air-conditioned air stirring in the room around her. Ian’s guest room. The narrow iron cot.

She turned over and drifted, half in and half out of a dream. Her house was welcoming her, making her feel at home. The dark threat was gone, a figment of her imagination. She smiled and snuggled into her pillow, liking the sunny yellow of the kitchen.

She turned to smile at Ian, and her contentment shattered like exploding glass. He held a knife and was moving toward her, and there was murder in his strange green eyes.

Devil’s spawn.

She sat up, suddenly cold and very much awake, and clutched the sheets to her.

God! What an awful dream!

Moments later, wrapped in her short cotton robe, she padded barefoot down the hall to take a shower. She needed to shake off the last of the strange dream, and this seemed the best way to do it.

It was certainly getting to her, she thought as she stood under the hot spray and let it beat the tension out of her muscles. She had stopped having nightmares years ago, but now she seemed to be having them almost incessantly.

And maybe, she found herself thinking uneasily, maybe there was something to the dream. Maybe her subconscious was trying to get through to her. Maybe she was looking at things from the wrong perspective.

Back in the cell-like room, she dressed swiftly in white shorts and a red tank top, then sat on the edge of the bed to buckle her sandals. What, she found herself wondering, had actually happened?

There had been someone waiting for her when she came home the other night. That much she was sure of. After all, she’d heard something fall. But other than that, what did she have? A feeling that someone was watching? A feeling that someone was in the house?

And what had Ian done, except encourage her in the belief that there was something in her house? He had added to her fear, hadn’t he?

Sitting on the edge of the cot in the bare room, she rested her elbows on her knees and wondered what was going on. Was she really feeling something? Or was Ian taking advantage of her suggestibility? Why would he want to do that? What could he possibly hope to get out of this?

Or were they both caught up in some kind of folie à deux, feeding one another’s delusions?

But no, she reminded herself. Yesterday, all alone in her house in the late afternoon, when she’d been thinking of nothing but cooking dinner and going to work, she had found her bathroom door open. Had felt the cold touch of something…something other.

If that was imagination, she never wanted to imagine anything again. She couldn’t blame Ian for that, could she?

Or could she?

Witchcraft and satanism. Some people believed in those things. Believed it was possible to cast spells on other people. To make them see and hear things.

Abomination. Those eyes of his were…strange. Unnatural.

Suddenly shocked by the direction her thoughts were taking, Honor shook her head and stood up. No way. The man had done nothing but try to help her. He was a little strange, to be sure, but strangeness was not a hanging offense. Time to think of something else, she told herself. Time to think about something normal.

 

Twilight was just beginning to settle over the land when Honor remembered that she hadn’t collected her mail. Feeling a little homesick, hoping one of her friends back in Seattle had written, she told Ian she was going out to the mailbox. Even with the fading of the day, the air was still too warm and muggy for comfort. In a little while, though, the breeze would start up, causing the trees to rustle and sway, and the tree frogs would begin their nightly chorus.

Stepping into the road so that she could reach the front of her mailbox, she saw the flattened carapace of an insect that had to be at least ten inches long. Were there really bugs that big around here? The largest she had seen so far were the tree roaches, and they were only a couple of inches at their biggest. Horrified, she stared at the bug and tried to tell herself it was something else.

“Miss Honor?”

Startled, she swung around toward the voice, then smiled as she recognized Orville Sidell, a ten-year-old boy who lived farther up the road, deeper in the woods. He had been one of her first patients, brought in by his older brother and sister after being bitten by a coral snake. She had seen him several times since, and as usual he was wearing only a dusty pair of shorts and a grimy T-shirt. “Hello, Orville. How’s your leg?”

“Jes’ fine.” He held it out briefly for her inspection.

The tissue damage had been minimal, she saw with relief. Only a small pit marked the death of muscle. “That really looks good.”

He nodded, then put his bare foot back down in the dust. “I brought you some squirrel.”

“Squirrel?”

“Yeah.” He brought his hand out from behind his back and held out two dead squirrels. “Shot ’em m’self.”

“You did?” Honor had a feeling this wasn’t the time for her to react as she would have in Seattle. “You must be a good shot.”

Orville nodded. “Ma’s got more’n she needs. Said you might like ’em.”

Honor looked from him to the pathetic-looking squirrels he dangled by their tails. “For what?”

He grinned suddenly, amused by her stupidity. “Eat ’em, Miss Honor. They’re good.”

“Oh.” She regarded the squirrels uncertainly. “What do they taste like?”

He shrugged. “Like squirrel.”

“How do I cook them?”

“Any way you like.”

She guessed she was going to have to do this. She certainly didn’t want to offend Orville. “Tell you what, Orville. If you would be so kind as to clean them for me, I’ll give it a try.” She gave him an apologetic smile. “I’ve never had to skin a squirrel. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Okay.” He started to turn away, apparently satisfied, but then he paused and faced her again. “Miss Honor, my ma says you oughta be careful of that man.”

“Which man?”

The boy’s brown eyes slid past her. “Him,” he said. “The army man.”

Once again Honor felt a chill trickle of unease run down her back. “He seems like a perfectly nice man, Orville.”

“Ma says he’s got the evil eye.”

At any other time, under any other circumstances, Honor would have been hard-pressed not to laugh. Right now, all she felt was a crawling sense of unease. “Well, he hasn’t done anything to hurt me,” she told Orville. “He’s been very helpful. You can tell your mother I said that.”

Orville simply stared at her, clearly nonplussed.

“Hey, Orville!”

Honor looked down the road and saw Orville’s older brother, Jeb, wave the boy over. Jeb had been with Orville the night he came to the emergency room. He was an extremely big, slow-witted man who made a living at manual labor, and there wasn’t a doubt in Honor’s mind but that he loved his younger brother dearly.

“Comin’!” Orville shouted back. He started to leave, then glanced over his shoulder at Honor. “Ma says the old preacher used to shun him.”

“Shun him? Who?”

“The army guy.” Then he was off and running, the squirrels dangling from his hand.

Honor stared after them until they disappeared around a bend in the road and were hidden behind the dense foliage. Shunned. What on earth had he done to deserve that?

Damn it, now she was going to demand some explanations. He was still avoiding the question of his injuries, with his nose buried in all those books he’d gotten today. Surely she deserved some answers. Surely she deserved to know a little about the man whose roof she was sharing?

Clutching her mail, she turned toward the house and again noticed the huge squashed insect. Why hadn’t she stayed in Seattle?

 

Ian was still seated at his kitchen table, with books spread all around him. Photos purporting to be pictures of apparitions stared up at Honor from several of the opened volumes.

“Find anything?” she asked.

“Plenty, but nothing that looks really useful yet.” An hour’s nap seemed to have nearly restored him. When he looked up at her, his eyes didn’t appear nearly so sunken. “You must be getting hungry. I should make dinner.”

“It can wait. How’s your side?”

“Sore.”

The sudden intensity of his gaze left her wondering if he had somehow sensed her determination to tolerate no further evasions. Feeling nervous, she pulled out a chair facing him and sat. “I’ve been waiting all day for an explanation,” she said, refusing to chicken out, even though he had never looked more forbidding or more terrifying than he did at this moment. “How did you get hurt?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. He stared at her with those odd eyes of his, looking as if he could see past her surface to deeper things. Deeper feelings. “What,” he asked, “makes you so sure you’re entitled to any explanation at all?”

Honor gasped, as stunned as if she’d been struck. The man was incredible, she found herself thinking. She’d never met anyone like him for sheer, uncompromising, unapologetic rudeness—when he felt like it. Then she got mad. “What makes me think I deserve an explanation? How about you yanking up your shirt earlier to show me twenty or thirty stitches and then telling me that…that thing could hurt me? How’s that for a reason?”

He gave an infinitesimal nod, but she was too wound up to register his agreement. “How about the fact that you’re insisting I live under your roof? How about the fact that you keep telling me I need to be protected, but you won’t tell me what from? How about—”

He laughed. Amazingly, incredibly, astonishingly, he laughed. The sound instantly halted Honor’s diatribe, and she stared at him in utter amazement. He looked so…different when he laughed. So attractive. So nice. So warm. So…sexy. So damn irritating.

“What is so funny?” she demanded. “Why are you laughing at me?”

Still grinning, a wonderfully attractive expression on his face, he answered on a chuckle. “I’m not laughing at you. You just surprised me. I can’t remember the last time anybody yelled at me.”

“Well, of course not,” she said sharply. “I imagine everyone is too terrified of you.”

His smile broadened a shade. “Probably. But you aren’t.”

The casual statement struck her forcefully, reminding her afresh of how big he was, how powerfully built. A much smaller, weaker man with his Ranger training would be dangerous. A man like Ian McLaren would be lethal with very little effort.

His smile faded, almost as if he had sensed her renewed uneasiness. In the blink of an eye, he once again became the dark monolith she had first met, the extraordinarily powerful, solitary man who needed nothing and no one. The man who wore loneliness like a concealing cloak.

“I’d never hurt you,” he said roughly, looking away. “But I can see you’re not going to believe that.”

“Ian…” She felt the need to say something, but what? From moment to moment, she was constantly unsure what she felt about this man, what she thought of him. Sometimes she longed to reach out and wrap her arms around him in hopes of easing the loneliness she sensed in him. Other times she was unsure she should trust him at all. What did she really know about him, after all?

“I was shot,” he said abruptly.

“Shot?” All her other concerns scattered. “How? When? My God, how bad was it?”

“It was just a graze.”

She had helped patch together a lot of gunshot wounds in her career; it was an inevitable experience in a city emergency room. She didn’t lose her cool over such things.

Except that this time, the man who had been shot was someone she knew. Someone she…cared about. Her stomach twisted, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, seeking self-control. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, knowing too well what could have happened if that bullet had hit him dead-center. “Oh, my God.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” he said, his deep, dark voice pitched soothingly. “Honey, it was just a graze. Not much worse than a cut. I put a pressure bandage on it and drove to the base hospital.”

This time she didn’t jump all over him for calling her honey. Instead she thought of him bandaging his own wound and then driving to the hospital. About what you would expect from a Ranger, she thought with amazing bitterness. An ordinary person would consider it a major achievement to have phoned for help. Not a Ranger. They weren’t ordinary mortals. They were superhuman, or they were nothing.

If he’d had to, he probably would have sewed the wound himself. Look at him sitting there, treating it as if it were all in a day’s work…which it was, for him, she reminded himself. So he wouldn’t want any fussing or concern. He wouldn’t want her to reach out….

But somehow she did anyway. Somehow she was bending over him, with her arms wrapped tightly around his broad shoulders and her face pressed to the warm, fragrant curve between his neck and his shoulder.

For an instant, he seemed frozen; then his arm lifted to curl around her waist to make her welcome. He tugged gently and pulled her down so that she was perched on his thigh.

“It’s okay,” he murmured.

“You could have been killed.” She barely whispered the words, hardly daring to voice the possibility. Everything inside her felt as if it were twisted out of shape, as if she were trying to find some kind of equilibrium in a world gone mad.

“But I wasn’t.” She was wearing her hair down, and of its own accord his hand burrowed into the silky strands. He didn’t want to think about how long it had been since he had risked letting a woman come this close. Right now he felt a very normal, very human, need to give in to some very normal human urges. He couldn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t. But, damn it, he could be forgiven for stealing just a few minutes of warmth.

After a few moments she gave a tremulous sigh and straightened. Looking at that slash of white in his dark hair that must have resulted from an injury, thinking about the scars on his back that spoke of great suffering, she ached for this man. Subjected to an exorcism as a child of six, slapped and shouted at for days. Shunned by his own church. He lived inside a concrete emotional bunker, she thought now. Letting no one come close. How sad. How lonely.

And wasn’t she doing the same thing?

Lifting an unsteady hand, she pressed her palm to his cheek, felt the warmth of his skin, the prickle of his stubble. Masculine textures that made her ache deep inside for things lost, for a naïveté that had been stolen from her by deceit. Jerry had crippled her, but this man had come dangerously close to making her forget that.

Something cold seemed to touch the base of her skull, and she shivered. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, then rose from his knee. “Why don’t I make supper while you tell me what happened, and why you think the ghost had something to do with you being shot? I mean, ghosts don’t carry guns. Do they?”

“No, ghosts don’t carry guns.” He was perfectly capable of cooking their meal, but he sensed that she needed the activity, so he simply told her where everything was.

A short while later, as she shaped a hamburger patty, she faced him. “What happened last night, Ian?”

Something in his face shut down, and that was when she began to grow distinctly uneasy. Whatever he told her now, she realized, wasn’t going to be everything. Not by a long shot. How could she trust him if he was

withholding information? But how could she be positive that he was? The chilly touch at the base of her skull returned.

“I was checking out your house last night,” Ian said finally. “I…get these feelings sometimes. I’ve mentioned them before.”

He had, so she nodded. She knew about those intuitive feelings; she’d had them all her life, and she knew it didn’t pay to ignore them. She just hoped the uneasiness she was feeling right now wasn’t intuitive.

Turning, she set the patty down on a plate and started making another one. “What happened?” she repeated. His reluctance to talk wasn’t making her feel any better. This man, after all, was the guy who could say no with all the finesse of a sledgehammer. The thought of him tiptoeing around something, anything, wasn’t reassuring.

“I kept a key to the new lock I put on your front door,” he said flatly.

Honor spun around and stared at him, aghast. “Why?”

“Because, damn it, when you lock everything out, you lock yourself in. If you needed help, how was anyone going to get in? The fire department. EMS. The cops. Think about it.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded, remembering a couple in Seattle who had arrived too late in the emergency room, killed by carbon monoxide in their home. The husband had called for help, realizing something was wrong with his wife, but the windows had been covered by iron bars, and the doors had been securely bolted. By the time rescue personnel had managed to break in, it was too late. “You should have told me.”

“You’re right. I should have told you.” But his expression never changed, and she remembered him telling her that he always did whatever he considered necessary, regardless of what others thought.

“I realize you don’t give a damn what I think about anything,” she said tautly, “but I would appreciate being informed when you take any action that affects me.”

He gave a brief nod that told her nothing, his strange green eyes never wavering from her face.

“So you went into my house last night?” she asked. “Why?”

“To see if I could learn anything about what you’ve been feeling. What I’ve felt in there.”

“And did you?”

“Yes,” he said.

Honor looked down at the hamburger patty she had been making and realized she had squeezed it between her fingers. Did she really want to hear what he had learned last night? The icy touch at the base of her neck grew stronger, and she had the worst urge to flee, to just say to hell with it all, ditch the house and file for bankruptcy.

As soon as she thought it, she felt ashamed. Her dad had raised her to be tougher than that. You didn’t run from these things; you faced them. The alternative was being locked in the dark closet of fear. Her father had been right about that, even if his methods had left something to be desired.

“What happened?” she asked finally.

“Just an hour or so before dawn, it came.”

It came. The words were like ice water running down her back. “It? You felt it?” It. Oh, God, the word gave form to the thing. Made it more than a feeling. Turned it into an entity. A being. It.

“It’s…pretty hard to describe,” he said slowly. “But you felt it, so I guess I don’t have to. It…seemed almost to gather itself. Like a storm. As if it’s not there all the time and has to be triggered by something.”

Honor sank slowly into a chair, the hamburger forgotten in her hand. “It has to be,” she said quietly. “Otherwise I’d feel it all the time, and I don’t.”

He nodded briefly. “That’s what happened this morning, anyway. It…gathered, for lack of a better word. The house grew really cold, as if it were sucking all the heat out of the air. All the energy.”

Honor felt her scalp prickle as she thought of that cold spot at the foot of the attic stairs. “Oh, boy.”

“Anyway, then I felt something from outside.”

“Outside?” She stiffened. “You mean there’s more than one?”

“No. It was…well, whoever was out there was human. It was no phantom that took a shot at me. But I think he might have been influenced by the thing in your house.”

Honor closed her eyes. “Oh, no…” she breathed. “Didn’t I tell you I felt like something was trying to get into my head? Didn’t I tell you?” Her eyes opened in time to see Ian nod. “So you think this thing influenced somebody to shoot at you. Do you know how crazy that sounds? Why the hell do I believe it? But I do! I do!”

She jumped up and put the squashed hamburger down on the plate in front of her. “It was bad enough when I thought some spook was trying to scare me out of the house, but this is worse. This is incredible. Unbelievable. Guns!”

And if it could influence somebody to shoot at Ian, it could influence Ian.

The thought chilled her to the very bone. She would have given a great deal not to have even thought of the possibility, but now that she had, she couldn’t ignore it. And it made the threat so much worse. So very much worse.

Outside, night had descended. Through the window she saw flickers that might be lightning or might be the bombing on the reservation. A hundred yards away was her house, in the possession of some…thing. Some evil thing that had tried to hurt Ian. That might well have been trying to kill him.

“What do I do?” The words escaped her as little more than a whisper.

“I’m going to keep reading,” Ian answered. “Maybe I can find something. In the meantime, you’re safe here with me. Absolutely no one and nothing is going to get to you without going through me first. That much I can guarantee.”

She looked down at the raw hamburger meat and felt her stomach twist. But how, she wondered, would it get through him? By killing him?

Or by turning him to its purposes?

 

It wasn’t until much later in the evening, with another thunderstorm breaking over their heads, that Honor recalled what Orville Sidell had told her.

Looking up from the book she was reading, she studied Ian’s bowed head in the lamplight. They had moved into his living room, into worn but comfortable overstuffed chairs, and were reading the books he had gotten that day.

So far, all the books had done was give her a much more frightening idea of just what ghosts could do. Poltergeists, it seemed, had occasionally been known to set fires. She did have fire insurance, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be sleeping in a house when a ghost started a bonfire. And if it could do that, then it could do other things.

Ian looked up, the lamplight gleaming on his gray streak and glimmering oddly in his eyes. “Problem?” he asked.

“I was just having some unhappy thoughts about the fact that poltergeists have been known to start fires. And I haven’t found one useful thing about dealing with them. Everything I’ve read so far just seems to indicate that these things eventually go away by themselves. The question is whether I can wait that long.”

He pointed to the book he held. “This one suggests trying to tell the ghost it’s dead.”

Honor thought about what she had felt, about what Ian had earlier told her had happened to him. “Great. And hopefully it won’t tell somebody to shoot us while we’re arguing with it.”

A smile cracked the frozen landscape of his face. “There is that problem. But a human agent can be locked out.”

Instinctively she turned toward the window when a particularly loud crack of thunder startled her. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “And you think it’s really going to listen?” Suddenly she wished she had to work tonight. She was off for the next three days, and while ordinarily she thoroughly enjoyed her breaks, this one loomed in front of her seemingly endless. Between ghosts and Ian McLaren, she would rather work the ER during a natural disaster.

“No.”

Again that single uncompromising syllable. Honor looked at him. “It won’t listen?”

“It didn’t feel like a confused soul to me. It felt…” He hesitated, clearly reluctant to go on.

“Evil,” Honor said. “I know. I felt it.” She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling chilled. The wind rattled the rain against the windowpane. “I didn’t always believe in evil,” she remarked. “It’s easy not to believe until you run into it, impossible not to believe once you’ve seen it.”

She glanced at him and found him nodding in agreement. His eyes looked even eerier than usual in the lamplight. “Why were you shunned?” The words were out of her mouth before she was even aware that she was going to speak them. Shock at her own temerity trickled through her. She expected some kind of reaction from him—shock, surprise, anger. Anything. But like the Sphinx, he betrayed nothing.

“What else did Orville tell you?” he asked.

“How did you know it was Orville?”

“I saw you talking with him,” he said dryly. “What else did he tell you?”

Honor hesitated only a moment before plunging ahead. They might as well clear the air, she thought. “He said his mother said I ought to avoid you. That’s all.”

“Annie Sidell.” He nodded. “I went to school with her. She was a thorn in my side all along, but that was hardly surprising, considering old Mrs. Gilhooley was her mother. The woman had it in for me.”

She studied him in silence, wondering why she had to feel so drawn to someone she wasn’t sure she could trust. Wondering why she felt compelled to question him about things that she suspected had scarred him. She couldn’t imagine anyone becoming as remote and removed as this man without a damn good reason. People were social animals, and instinct generally led them to reach out. This man must have powerful reasons for being so isolated. So unnatural.

Abomination.

Honor shrugged the cold whisper away as if it were nothing but an annoying insect. Whatever was working on her to drag such words out of her unconscious, she wasn’t going to pay any attention to it. Not right now.

“There must,” she said finally, “have been more to it than a goat as old as Methuselah.”

The silence grew long. Heavy. Rain and wind rattled at the windows, a cold sound.

“There was.”

She swung her head around to stare intently at him, having heard the tension in his brief statement. And the way he had spoken those words warned her it was not some minor, long-forgotten transgression. She waited.

With a suddenness that was jarring, he slammed closed the book he held. “I’m getting some coffee,” he said roughly. “Want some?”

“Ian…” Surely he wasn’t going to leave her dangling without an explanation?

“Look, lady.” Suddenly he leaned over her. Loomed over her. She shrank back a little in her chair, unable to look away from his oddly glowing eyes. “You’re asking questions about things that happened thirty-five years ago. Things I never talk about.” His voice was a thunderous growl. “You’re just going to have to let me do this in my own way. In my own time. It’s the least you can do when you ask somebody to bare his soul.”

“I didn’t—”

“Oh, yes, you did,” he said, almost savagely, spacing his words emphatically. “I’ve never told anyone what you’re asking me to tell you. Never.” Abruptly, he stepped back. “Now, do you want that coffee?”

Stiffly she nodded an affirmative. What, she wondered, had she unleashed? What had she asked? She had known it had to be more than a goat, but she hadn’t envisioned anything so awful that he hadn’t spoken about it in thirty-five years.

A strong gust of wind splattered rain against the window, and she looked toward it, thinking what a miserable night it had turned into. If she were working, she could have been sure of seeing a number of auto accidents. Right now she wondered if that wouldn’t have been easier to face.

What a morbid thought! Dismayed because she ordinarily wasn’t in the least morbid, she told herself that the lonely sound of the rain and wind was getting to her. She hadn’t really been herself for a couple of days now. Not since the night she had come home to find someone—or something—waiting in her house.

“Here.” Ian had come soundlessly into the room, and he was putting her coffee on the table at her elbow before she even heard him. Fresh coffee. Its aroma was homey, welcoming, a marked contrast to the man who had brought it. He returned to his seat in the chair across from her, then put his heels up on the scarred coffee table.

Looking around her now, it suddenly occurred to her that this was probably the same furniture he had grown up with. This room probably hadn’t changed at all.

“So you want to know why Mrs. Gilhooley hated me,” he said. His voice was low, rough. Reluctant.

“Well, she might have been crazy,” Honor said, “but you have to admit, it’s rather extreme for an adult to hate a child as much as she must have hated you to accuse you of being possessed.”

Ian lifted his mug to his lips, then put it on the table beside him. “First I was possessed. Later I was a witch. Finally I was—” He broke off. His jaw worked visibly. It was the first genuine sign of distress Honor had ever seen him show. The ache she felt for him deepened, and she wished there were a way to erase bad memories for people. To just take them away and make them vanish.

“What set her off,” he said. It was not a question. “Her husband died. I remember it was August. Hot. Nobody had air-conditioning then, and we just endured the heat, the humidity, the bugs. I was just a kid, though, and it didn’t bother me too much. When all the adults were indoors, staying as cool as they could, I was usually out playing.

“This one afternoon, I came around the rear of the Gilhooley house and saw old man Gilhooley flat on his back. He’d evidently been on a ladder, and the ladder fell over. I looked up and saw Mrs. Gilhooley standing in the open attic window, looking down. He was dead. I knew that right off. And I knew she had pushed the ladder over.”

Honor shivered, seeing the scene so clearly in her mind’s eye. “How did you know that? How could you know that?”

He ignored the question. “Being only six, I didn’t have the sense to keep my mouth shut. I told my parents. I told the policemen who came to investigate. Nobody listened.”

He reached for his coffee mug. “Except Mrs. Gilhooley. She listened. It wasn’t long after that when she claimed I was possessed.”

“But why would anyone listen to her? Why would anyone believe such a thing?”

Thunder rumbled, a deep, low sound. A gust of wind rattled the house.

“Given the beliefs of the church to which both my parents and the Gilhooleys belonged, it wasn’t unheard-of. Or even difficult to accept.”

“Did your parents believe it?” The ache she felt for him was growing stronger, as she considered how bewildering and frightening all this must have been for a six-year-old boy.

“Of course.”

“So they performed an exorcism.”

He nodded once, slowly, never taking his eyes from her.

“Didn’t that put an end to it?”

“No. I told you, that kind of thing sticks like the odor of skunk. Nobody ever really trusted me after that. I shut up about the old woman killing her husband, but that didn’t make her feel any more secure, I guess. She kept muttering about me being unnatural. Demon spawn, she called me.” Now he did look away, as if he didn’t want her to glimpse the pain in his eyes.

Demon spawn. She had heard that before, Honor thought, as a chill crept down her neck.

“Finally,” he said, “her muttering got me shunned by the church members. My parents kept dragging me anyway, probably hoping some kind of sanctity would rub off on me. I don’t know. They’d drag me, and then I’d have to sit in a special chair. No one would talk to me or look at me or even come near me. Made it kind of hard to forget what they thought of me.”

“How awful,” she murmured. She wanted to reach out to him, but she stopped herself. Nothing she could do now would ease the pain of what had happened to him so long ago. “How could your parents do that to you? How could they let you be treated that way? Why didn’t they look for another church?”

Slowly he turned his head to look straight at her. “Because they believed it, too.”

“My God.” She breathed the words, hardly able to conceive of such a thing. “They believed you were—were demon spawn? A devil? Evil?”

He gave a slight nod.

Indignation swept through her, so hot and furious in its strength that she could no longer sit still. Leaping to her feet, she paced the lamplit living room. “That’s awful. That’s terrible! I can’t imagine any parent feeling that way about a child. Oh, I know some parents are terrible, but—I can’t believe it!”

“You were locked in a closet,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but—” She broke off, realizing that his parents had probably justified themselves in exactly the same way her father had. “They did it for my own good.”

“Exactly.” Ian shook his head. “It didn’t do me any good.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a faint, wry smile. “About the time I was ten, I quit going to church at all. Nobody could make me. My dad whipped me half to death for it, but I refused to go anymore. I used to slip out of the house before everybody woke up and hide. And I was getting too big for him to force me. Finally he gave up and left me alone. And Mrs. Gilhooley married again and left me alone. For a while.”

There was more. She knew there was more, because they still hadn’t covered the events the electrician had referred to. So far he had said nothing to explain why he had been accused of witchcraft.

She stopped pacing near the window and looked out at the stormy night. It was so dark outside that she couldn’t make out her house, or the trees and moss around it. They might have been alone in the universe, floating endlessly through empty space.

Then she caught sight of a glimmer, high up in the direction of her house, as if a distant light had been reflected on glass. Probably a headlight from the highway, she thought, that had somehow pierced the gloom and rain. As she watched, it flickered and was gone.

Then it appeared again, in the same place. And this time it looked…orange. More like…

Fire.