He stared at her, startled. “I wasn’t—”
“Listen to me,” she interrupted quickly. “You’ve been running for weeks, looking over your shoulder, sleeping with one eye open. When you sleep at all, that is. You’re so tightly strung you’re about to snap. Maybe you don’t see it, but I do. You have to let go of everything for at least a few hours. You can’t keep this up.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted.
“No, you’re not.” She leaned close. “There isn’t anything you can do out there tonight. Whatever it is you think you can do, you can’t. I know you. I know how you are. But you have to step back. You have to rest. If you don’t, you’ll do something foolish.”
He studied her without speaking. Slowly, he nodded. “I must be made of glass. You can see right through me, can’t you?”
She smiled. “Come on inside, John. You might have a good time, if you’d just let yourself.”
He thought about his plan to try tracking the demons, and he saw how futile it was. He had no place to start. He had no plan for finding them. And she was right, he was tired. He was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. If he found the demons, what chance would he have of overcoming them?
But when he glanced over at the Hepplers’ brightly lit home, he didn’t feel he belonged there, either. Too many people he didn’t know. Too much noise and conversation.
“Could I still borrow the car?” he asked quietly.
She climbed out without a word. Leaning back in before closing the door, she said, “She still lives at the same address, John. Watch yourself on the roads going back into town.”
Then she closed the door and disappeared inside the house.
-=O=-***-=O=-
It took him a long time to get to where he was going. It was like driving through an exploded feather pillow, white particles flying everywhere, the car’s headlights reflecting back into his eyes, the night a black wall around him. The car skidded on patches of ice and through deep ruts in the snow, threatening to spin off the pavement altogether. He could barely make out the roadway ahead, following the tracks of other cars, steering down the corridor of streetlamps that blazed to either side. Now and again, there would be banks of lights from gas stations and grocery stores, from a Walgreens or a Pizza Hut, but even so, it was difficult to navigate.
He thought again of going after the demons, of making a run at them while they were all gathered together somewhere, waiting out the storm. It remained a tempting image. But Nest was right. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and it required energy he did not have to spare.
More debilitating than his exhaustion was his loneliness and despair. He had denied it for a long time, shrugging off the emptiness inside, pretending that for him such things didn’t matter. But they did. He was a Knight of the Word, but he was human, too.
It was seeing Josie again that triggered the feelings, of course. But it was returning to Hopewell and Nest Freemark as well, to a town that seemed so much like the one he had grown up in and to the last member of a family that seemed so much like his own. Just being here, he found himself trying to recapture a small part of his past. He might tell himself that he wasn’t here for that, but the truth was simple and direct. He wanted to reaffirm his humanity. He wanted to step outside his armor and let himself feel what it was to be human again.
He drove down Lincoln Highway until it became Fourth Avenue, then turned left toward the river. He found his way without effort, the directions still imprinted on his memory, fresh after all these years. He steered the Taurus down the dead-end street to the old wooden two-story and parked by the curb. He switched off the headlights and engine and sat staring at the house, thinking over what he was about to do.
It isn’t as if you have to decide now, he told himself. How can you know what will happen after so long?