By the Light of the Moon (14 page)

The kid’s moray eyes revealed not the feral ferocity of Becky, but the calculation of a sneak and the incomplete commitment of a coward who was bravest with a weak adversary. He was a monster, but not the savage equal of his blue-eyed squeeze, and he made the mistake of slipping in for the kill instead of lunging full-out. By the time Dylan turned toward him, the bat arcing high, Kenny should have been rushing forward with enough momentum to duck under the bat and drive the blade home. Instead, he flinched, juked back, and fell victim to his lack of nerve.

With a Babe Ruth
crack,
the bat broke Kenny’s right forearm. In spite of the looped handle and formed grip, the knife flew out of his hand. Kenny seemed almost to lift off his feet, as though he were a two-base hit if not an out-of-the-park home run.

As the screaming kid failed to take flight and instead dropped like a bunt, Dylan could sense Becky coming at his back and knew that a dancing bear could never outmaneuver a psychotic ballerina.

As she reached the next-to-the-last step, Jilly heard someone shout “Kenny!” She halted short of the upstairs hall, unsettled that the cry had come neither from Dylan nor from a thirteen-year-old boy. Urgent and shrill, the voice had been female.

She heard other noises, then a man’s voice, likewise not Dylan’s and not that of a boy, though she couldn’t discern what he said.

Having come to warn Dylan that young Travis was up here with Kenny, but also having followed to help him if he needed help, she couldn’t freeze on these steps and yet retain her self-respect. For Jillian Jackson, self-respect had been won with considerable effort through a childhood that, except for the example set by her mother, had provided fertile ground for seeds of self-doubt and excessive self-effacement. She would not here relinquish what she had struggled so long and hard to capture.

Hurrying out of the stairwell, Jilly saw a spill of soft light coming from an open door on the left, brighter light issuing from a door farther along on the right—and doves erupting through a closed window at the end of the hallway, a vision of doves that left the panes intact in their wake.

The birds made no sounds—no coos or cries, nor the faintest thrum of wings. When they exploded around and over her, cataracts of white feathers, a thousand piercing gazes, a thousand yawning beaks, she didn’t expect to feel them, but she did. The breeze stirred by their passage was spicy with incense. Their wing tips brushed her body, arms, and face.

Staying close to the left wall, she moved quickly forward into a storm of white wings as dense as the feathery blizzard that earlier had swept across the Expedition. She feared for her sanity, but she didn’t fear the birds, which meant her no harm. Even if they had been real, they would not have pecked or blinded her. She sensed that they were in fact proof of
augmented
vision, although even as this thought occurred to her, she had no idea what augmented vision might be; for the moment it was a thing she understood instinctively, emotionally, rather than intellectually.

Although she could not be harmed by these phenomena, the timing of the birds’ appearance couldn’t have been worse. She needed to find Dylan, and real or not, the birds were a hindrance to the search.

“Ha!”
exclaimed someone close at hand, and an instant later, Jilly felt on her left the open doorway that the seething flock had hidden from her view.

She stepped across the threshold, and the birds vanished. Before her lay a bedroom revealed by a single lamp. And here was Dylan, too, armed with a baseball bat, bracketed by a young man—Kenny?—and a teenage girl, both brandishing knives.

The bat cut the air with a
whoosh,
the young man screamed, and the wickedly sharp knife, tumbling free, clattered against a walnut highboy.

When Dylan swung the bat, the teenage girl behind him tensed, for an instant tightening down in her crouch. As Kenny shrieked in pain, the girl drew her knife back in striking position, certain to spring forward and bury it in Dylan before he could turn to deal with her.

On the move even as the girl uncoiled out of her crouch, Jilly shouted,
“Police!”

Monkey-agile, the girl whipped around but also sidestepped to avoid turning her back on Dylan, to keep him in sight.

Her eyes were as blue as any sky adorned with cherubim on any chapel ceiling, but also radiant with dementia surely spawned by psychosis-inducing drugs.

A Southwest Amazon at last, but too squeamish to risk destroying the girl’s eyes, Jilly aimed lower with the instant ant death. The nozzle on the can that she’d found in the pantry had two settings:
SPRAY
and
STREAM
. She had set it on
STREAM
, which would reach ten feet, according to the label.

Perhaps because of her excitement, her homicidal exhilaration, the girl was breathing through her mouth. The stream of insecticide went straight in, like an arc of water from a drinking fountain, moistening lips, bathing tongue.

Although instant ant death had a notably less severe effect on a teenage girl than it would have on an ant, it wasn’t received with lip-smacking delight. Less refreshing than cool water, this drink at once took all the fight out of the girl. She flung the knife aside. Gagging, wheezing, spitting, she staggered to a door, yanked it open, slapped at the wall switch until the lights came on, revealing a bathroom. At the sink, the girl cranked on the cold water, cupped her hands, and repeatedly flushed out her mouth, sputtering and choking.

On the floor, groaning, crying with a particularly annoying note of self-pity, Kenny had curled up like a shrimp.

Jilly looked at Dylan and shook the can of insecticide. “From now on, I’m going to use this on hecklers.”

“What did you do with Shep?”

“The grandmother told me about Kenny, the knives. Aren’t you going to say
‘Thanks for saving my butt, Jilly’
?”

“I told you not to leave Shep alone.”

“He’s all right.”

“He’s
not
all right, out there by himself,” he said, raising his voice as though he had some legitimate authority over her.

“Don’t you shout at me. Good lord, you drove here like a maniac, wouldn’t tell me why, bailed out of the truck, wouldn’t tell me why. And I’m supposed to—what?—to sit out there, just shift my brain into neutral like your good little woman, and wait like a stupid turkey standing in the rain with its mouth open, gawking at the sky, until it drowns?”

He glowered at her. “What are you talking about turkeys?”

“You know
exactly
what I’m talking about.”

“And it’s not raining.”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“You have no sense of responsibility,” he declared.

“I have a
huge
sense of responsibility.”

“You left Shep alone.”

“He won’t go anywhere. I gave him a task to keep him busy. I said, ‘Shepherd, because of your rude and overbearing brother, I’m going to need at least one hundred polite synonyms for
asshole.
’”

“I don’t have time for this bickering.”

“Who started it?” she accused, and turned away from him, and might have left the room if she’d not been halted by the sight of the doves.

The flock still streamed through the hallway, past the open bedroom door, toward the stairs. By this time, if these apparitions had been real, the house would have been so fully packed that extreme bird pressure would have blown out all the windows as surely as a gas leak and a spark.

She willed them to vanish, but they flew, they flew, and she turned her back on them, fearing for her sanity once more. “We’ve got to get out of here. Marj will call the cops sooner or later.”

“Marj?”

“The woman who gave you the toad pin and somehow started all this. She’s Kenny’s grandma, Travis’s. What do you want me to do?”

In the bathroom, on her knees at the toilet, Becky had begun to reconsider her dinner, if not the entire direction of her life.

Dylan pointed to a straight-backed chair. He saw that Jilly got the message.

The bathroom door opened outward. With the chair tipped back and wedged under the knob, Becky would be imprisoned until the police arrived to let her out.

Dylan didn’t think that the girl would recover sufficiently to cut him to ribbons, but he didn’t want to be vomited on, either.

On the floor, six-way-wired Kenny had come unstrung. He was all tears and snot and spit bubbles, but still dangerous, speaking more curses and obscenities than sense, demanding immediate medical attention, promising revenge, and given half a chance he might prove whether or not his teeth were snake-sharp.

A threat to cave in Kenny’s skull sounded phony to Dylan when he made it, but the kid took it seriously, perhaps because he would not have hesitated to crush Dylan’s skull if their roles had been reversed. On demand, he produced handcuff and padlock keys from one of his embroidered shirt pockets with mother-of-pearl button snaps.

Jilly seemed reluctant to follow Dylan out of the bedroom, as if she feared other miscreants against whom insecticide might prove to be an inadequate defense. He assured her that Becky and Kenny were the sum of all evil under this roof. Nevertheless, wincing, hesitant, she crossed the hallway to the shackled boy’s room as though fear half blinded her, and repeatedly she glanced toward the window at the end of the hall, as if she saw a ghostly face pressed to the glass.

As he freed Travis, Dylan explained that Becky was not morally fit to compete in the Miss All-American Teen Pageant, and then they went downstairs to the kitchen.

When Marj rushed in from the back porch to embrace her grandson and to wail about his blackened eye, Travis all but disappeared in cuddling candy-stripe.

Dylan waited for the boy to half extract himself and then said, “Both Becky and Kenny need medical attention—”

“And a prison cell until their social security kicks in,” Jilly added.

“—but give us two or three minutes before you call nine-one-one,” Dylan finished.

This instruction baffled Marj. “But you
are
nine-one-one.”

Jilly fielded that peculiar question: “We’re one of the ones, Marj, but we’re not the other one or the nine.”

Although this further baffled Marj, it amused Travis. The boy said, “We’ll give you time to split. But this is fully weird, it’s practically mojo. Who the heck are you two?”

Dylan couldn’t summon a reply, but Jilly said, “Damned if we know. This afternoon we could have told you who we are, but right now we don’t have a clue.”

In one sense her answer was true and grimly serious, but it only puckered Marj’s face in deeper bafflement and widened the boy’s grin.

Upstairs, Kenny pleaded loudly for help.

“Better get movin’,” Travis advised.

“You don’t know what we were driving, never saw our wheels.”

“That’s true,” Travis agreed.

“And you’ll do us the favor of not watching us leave.”

“As far as we know,” said Travis, “you took a running leap and flew away.”

Dylan had asked for three minutes because Marj and Travis would have difficulty explaining a greater delay to the cops; but if Shep had wandered off, they were ruined. Three minutes wouldn’t be long enough to find him.

Except for the breeze in the olive trees, the street was quiet. In the house, Kenny’s muffled shouts wouldn’t carry to a neighbor.

At the curb, driver’s door open, the Expedition waited. Jilly had doused the headlights and switched off the engine.

Even as they crossed the front lawn, Dylan saw Shepherd in the backseat, face illuminated by the reflected glow of a battery-powered book light bouncing up at him from the page he was reading.

“Told you,” Jilly said.

Relieved, Dylan didn’t snap at her.

Through the dusty window at Shepherd’s side, the title of the book could be seen:
Great Expectations,
by Charles Dickens. Shep was a fiend for Dickens.

Dylan settled behind the wheel, slammed the door, figuring more than half a minute had passed since they’d left Travis to watch the wall clock in the kitchen.

Legs folded on the passenger’s seat to spare her jade plant on the floor, Jilly held out the keys, then snatched them back. “What if you go nuts again?”