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“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”
“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.
Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.
“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.
“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are wi
I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty. “Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are wi
She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture. “Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.
From the very begi
But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.
IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.
The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state. The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.
Then there was fire-fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.
And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.
Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.
IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.
CHAPTER 31
W HEN I WAS VERY YOUNG I ONCE SAW A VARIETY ACT on TV. A man put a bunch of plates on the end of a series of supple rods, and kept them up in the air by whipping the rods around to spin the plates. And if he slowed down or turned his back, even for a moment, one of the plates would wobble and then crash to the ground, followed by all the others in series.
That’s a terrific metaphor for life, isn’t it? We’re all trying to keep our plates spi
Here I had stupidly assumed that the tragic death of Ma
The metaphorical plate in question shattered when I came into Rita’s house after work. It was so quiet that I assumed no one was home, but a quick glance inside showed something far more disturbing. Cody and Astor sat motionless on the couch, and Rita was standing behind them with a look on her face that could easily turn fresh milk into yogurt.
“Dexter,” she said, and the tromp of doom was in her voice, “we need to talk.”
“Of course,” I said, and as I reeled from her expression, even the mere thought of a lighthearted response shriveled into dust and blew away in the icy air.
“These children,” Rita said. Apparently that was the entire thought, because she just glared and said no more.
But of course, I knew which children she meant, so I nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” I said.
“Ooh,” she said.
Well, if it was taking Rita this long to form a complete sentence, it was easy to see why the house had been so quiet when I walked in. Clearly the lost art of conversation was going to need a little boost from Diplomatic Dexter if we were ever going to get more than seven words out in time for di
“Ooh,” she said again, which was not encouraging.
Well really, there’s only so much you can do with monosyllables, even if you are a gifted conversationalist like me. Since there was clearly no help coming from Rita, I looked at Cody and Astor, who had not moved since I came in. “All right,” I said. “Can you two tell me what’s wrong with your mother?”
They exchanged one of their famous looks, and then turned back to me. “We didn’t mean to,” Astor said. “It was an accident.”
It wasn’t much, but at least it was a complete sentence. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. “What was an accident?”
“We got caught,” Cody said, and Astor poked him with an elbow.
“We didn’t mean to,” she repeated with emphasis, and Cody turned to look at her before he remembered what they had agreed on; she glared at him and he blinked once before slowly nodding his head at me.
“Accident,” he said.
It was nice to see that the party line was firmly in place behind a united front, but I was still no closer to knowing what we were talking about, and we had been talking about it, more or less, for several minutes-time being a large factor, since the di
“That’s all they’ll say about it,” Rita said. “And it is nowhere near enough. I don’t see how you could possibly tie up the Villegas’ cat by accident.”
“It didn’t die,” Astor said in the tiniest voice I had ever heard her use.
“And what were the hedge clippers for?” Rita demanded.
“We didn’t use them,” Astor said.
“But you were going to, weren’t you?” Rita said.
Two small heads swiveled to face me, and a moment later, Rita’s did, too.
I am sure it was completely unintentional, but a picture was begi