When he threw open the driver’s door, she snared a handful of his Hawaiian shirt and held fast. She had the grip of a griffin; her fingers hooked like talons in the fabric.
Dark anxiety clouded her beauty, and her sable-brown eyes, once as limpid and sharp with purpose as those of a sentinel eagle, were muddy with worry. ‘Where did you go?’ she demanded.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the clapboard house.
‘I mean on the road. You were a world away. You forgot I was even with you.’
‘Didn’t forget,’ he disagreed. ‘No time. Stay with Shep.’
Griffin-tough, she tried to hold him back. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Hell if I know.’
Maybe he didn’t pry Jilly’s fingers out of his shirt with a cruel force uncharacteristic of him, and maybe he didn’t shove her violently away from him. He wasn’t sure how he tore loose of the woman, but he got out of the Expedition. Leaving the driver’s door hanging open behind him, he rounded the front of the SUV, heading toward the house.
Darkness ruled the first floor, but light shone behind the curtains of half the upstairs windows. Someone was home. He wondered if they were aware of his approach, if they were waiting for him – or if his appearance at their doorstep would come as a surprise to them. Perhaps they instinctively sensed something rushing toward them as Dylan himself had been aware of being drawn to an unknown place, by a power inexplicable.
He heard a noise that seemed to come from the right, at the side of the house.
Halfway along the front walk toward the porch, he veered off the herringbone bricks. He crossed the lawn to the driveway.
Attached to the house: a carport. Under the carport, an aging Buick stood beyond the reach of the waning moonlight as during the day it would shelter from the fierce desert sun.
Hot metal pinged and ticked as it cooled. The vehicle had arrived here only recently.
Past the open end of the carport, toward the back of the house, a noise arose: a jangling, as of keys on a ring.
Though a sense of urgency continued to plague him undiminished, Dylan stood motionless beside the car. Listening. Waiting. Uncertain what to do next.
He didn’t belong here. He felt as if he were a lurking thief, although as far as he knew, he hadn’t come to this place to steal anything.
On the other hand, the operative phrase was as far as he knew. Under the influence of the injected stuff, he might discover himself driven to commit heinous acts of which he would previously have been incapable. Theft might be the least of the crimes from which he would be powerless to turn away.
He thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inner beast released and sent roaming.
From the moment he had succumbed to the urgent need to drive west, his fear had been sharp, but also it had been sheathed in a blunting thickness of compulsion and confusion. Now he wondered if the substance circulating in him might be the chemical equivalent of a demon saddling his soul and digging spurs into his heart. He shuddered, and an icy blade of fear flayed his nerves and caused the skin to prickle with dread on his arms and on the nape of his neck.
Again, not far away, he heard the soft brass ring of keys on keys. Hinges creaked, perhaps those of a door.
At the back of the house, light bloomed behind daisy-patterned curtains at the ground-floor windows.
He didn’t know what to do, and then he did: He touched the handle on the driver’s door of the Buick. Cascades of sparks whirled across his vision, phantom fireflies in flight behind his eyes.
Inside his head, he heard a fizzing-crackling electrical sound, the same as he had heard earlier in the Expedition, when he’d touched the button that bore the cartoon toad’s grinning face. Some kind of seizure afflicted him, frightening but fortunately less severe than full convulsions, and as his tongue vibrated against the roof of his mouth, he heard himself make that queer, half-mechanical sound again. ‘Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!’