Dylan slipped a supporting hand under her arm, examined her forehead. ‘It’s just a shallow laceration. Probably from another splinter, but it didn’t stick. More blood than damage.’
Below the hill, beyond the meadow, in the yards surrounding the house, three armed men stood sentinel to prevent their quarry from somehow escaping through battlefield barrages and through the cordon of killers that searched the bullet-riddled rooms. None of the three appeared to be looking toward the hilltop, but this bit of luck would not hold.
While Jilly was distracted, Dylan pinched the splinter in her hand and plucked it free with one sharp pull that made her hiss with pain.
‘We’ll clean it out later,’ he said.
‘Later where?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t tell Shepherd where to fold us, he’s liable to take us on a trip somewhere we don’t dare go, like back to the motel in Holbrook, where you can bet they’re waiting for us – or maybe even back into the house.’
‘But where is safe?’ Dylan wondered, momentarily blank.
Maybe the blood on her hand and on her face reminded her of the desert vision in which she’d been splashed by a wave of white wings and worse. Into the hard reality of this desperate day, the dreamy portents of imminent evil suddenly intruded.
Rising out of the wheatlike smell of dry grass came the sweet spicy fragrance of incense.
At the house, the muffled popping of gunfire rapidly declined, ceased altogether, while here on the hilltop arose the silvery laughter of children.
By one tell or another, Dylan recognized her condition, knew that she was surfing a swell of paranormal perception, and said, ‘What’s happening, what do you see?’
Turning toward the mirthful music of the children’s voices, she found not those who made the laughter, but saw instead a marble font of the kind that held holy water in any Catholic church, abandoned here on the grassy hilltop, canted like a tombstone in an ancient graveyard.
Movement beyond Shep caught her attention, and when she shifted her focus from the font, Jilly discovered a little girl, blond and blue-eyed, perhaps five or six years old, wearing a lacy white dress, white ribbons in her hair, holding a nosegay of flowers, solemn with purpose. As the unseen children laughed, the girl turned as though in search of them, and as she rotated away from Jilly, she faded out of existence—
‘Jilly?’
—but turning into existence and toward her, precisely where the little girl had been standing, appeared a fifty-something woman in a pale-yellow dress, wearing yellow gloves and a hat with flowers, her eyes rolled so far back in her head that only the whites showed, her torso pocked by three hideous bullet wounds, one between the breasts. Although dead, the woman walked toward Jilly, an apparition as real in blazing summer sunlight as any that had ever haunted beneath a moon, reaching out with her right hand as she approached, as though seeking aid.
No more able to move than if she had been rooted to the ground, Jilly shrank from the ghostly touch, thrust out her bleeding hand to ward off contact, but when the dead woman’s fingers touched her hand – with a sense of pressure, coldness – the apparition vanished.
‘It’s going to happen today,’ she said miserably. ‘Soon.’
‘Happen? What?’ Dylan asked.
Far away a man shouted, and another man answered in a shout.
‘They’ve seen us,’ Dylan said.
The vast aviary of the sky contained just one bird, a circling hawk gliding silently on currents high above, and no birds erupted into flight from the grass around them, yet she heard wings, at first a whispery flutter, then a more insistent rustle.
‘They’re coming,’ Dylan warned, speaking not of birds but of assassins.
‘Wings,’ Jilly said, as the whisking thrum of invisible doves rapidly grew more turbulent. ‘Wings.’
‘Wings,’ said Shepherd, touching the bloody hand with which she had tried to fend off the dead woman, and which she still held out before her.
The chop-chop-chop of automatic gunfire, real to this place and time, was answered by the more deliberate crack of high-powered rifles that only she could hear, by shots fired in another place and in a time yet to come – but coming fast.