The car crouched quietly at the curb, lights off, engine off.
Two shapes sat in the front seat. There was a chill in the air and they had collars turned up and hats pulled low. The street was silent and a light rain fell, pattering on the hood of the car, plinking in puddles, hissing in the grass. The wet asphalt looked like a river of oil as it wound up and curved around the darkened houses.
The two shapes watched the Scully house, first in darkness and then lit by a last flash of distant lightning.
“She’ll do,” said the passenger, breaking the long silence.
“You’re sure?” asked the driver.
“Time will tell.”
There was a sound from the backseat, and both men turned to see another shape there. Bulky and soaked from the rain. The third figure, a big man in a dark blue uniform, sat hunched forward, face in his trembling hands, sobbing quietly. “Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t…”
The two men in the front exchanged a look and turned away.
Lightning flashed once more, tracing the edges and lines of the house with a blue-white glow.
The man behind the wheel smiled, his teeth as bright as the lightning.
“She’ll do.”
CHAPTER 3
Scully Residence
10:09 P.M.
Dana prayed she would not dream again that night.
She prayed hard, on her knees, hands clasped and fingers twisted together, trying to concentrate on her prayer despite the music from the next room.
Melissa’s bedroom was on the other side of a thin wall. She was in one of those moods where she played the same album over and over again. Tonight it was the self-titled Fleetwood Mac record that came out four years ago, when Melissa was thirteen. Sometimes her sister played whole albums without pause except to flip the disk over; and then there were long stretches where she’d play and replay the same song. Lately it was “Rhiannon.” Melissa was rereading Triad: A New Novel of the Supernatural by Mary Leader, the book that inspired the song. Melissa believed that she, like the character in the song, was the reincarnation of a Welsh witch.
That was Melissa.
Dana took a breath, pressed her eyes shut, touched her hand to the small cross she wore on a gold chain—an exact match of the one Melissa wore—and tried again to recite the prayer to the Virgin.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Dana was not as diligent as she wanted to be. Faith, like belief in anything that was part of the spiritual world, took effort for her, but at the same time it interested her. She liked the orderliness and structure of the rituals and prayers; they were like formulae to her. She went to church, but not as often as her mother wanted her to. There were answers there, she knew, but maybe not to her own questions. Or maybe it was that her instincts told her that church wasn’t going to answer all her questions. She wasn’t sure.
She finished the prayer, rose from her knees, sat down on the edge of the bed, and opened her Bible to where she’d placed a feather as a bookmark. It was a crow feather she’d found on the bottom step of the porch. Dana used the soft, gleaming tip to brush the words as she read the passage. Second Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse fourteen. “‘And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.’”
Those words troubled her.
Since moving to the town of Craiger, Maryland, a few months ago, Dana had begun having more vivid and frequent dreams. Back in San Diego, her odd dreams had been strange but kind of fun. She’d dream the ending of a movie before the family went to see it. She’d know someone’s name before being introduced. The dreams were like a freaky kind of déjà vu, because she usually only remembered them when the substance of her dreams became the reality of the moment. Not that she ever had many of those dreams. A few, scattered through the months. They’d only turned strange and dark here in Craiger. And she was having them much more often. Maybe it was the town. Maybe it was that Dana felt more like an outsider here.