By the light of the moon

out in pain, in shock.
    Even in this dusty dimness, she saw the first drops of blood
flung from her fingertips when she convulsively shook them.
Droplets spattered darkly against the cardboard boxes in a pattern
that no doubt foretold her future.
    From her stung brow, curling down her right temple, a fat bead
of blood found the corner of that eye.
    One, three, five, and more rounds smashed up through the floor,
closer than the first cluster.
    Shepherd grabbed Jilly's uninjured hand.
    She didn't see him pinch or tweak, but the attic folded away
from them, and brightness folded in.
    Low rafters flared into high bright sky. Knee-caressing golden
grass slid firmly underfoot as attic flooring slipped away.
    Sounding as brittle and juiceless as things long dead, clicking
flitters of startled grasshoppers shot every which way through the
grass.
    Jilly stood with Shep and Dylan on a hilltop in the sun. Far to
the west, the sea seemed to wear a skin of dragon scales, green
spangled with gold.
    She could still hear steady gunfire, but muffled by distance and
by the walls of the O'Conner house, which she saw now for the first
time from the outside. At this distance, the structure appeared
less damaged than she knew it must be.
    'Shep, this isn't good enough, not far enough,' Dylan
worried.
    Shepherd let go of Jilly and stood transfixed by the sight of
blood dripping from the thumb and first two fingers of her right
hand.
    Two inches long, roughly a quarter of an inch wide, a splinter
had pierced the meaty part of her palm.
    Ordinarily the sight of blood wouldn't have weakened her knees,
so perhaps her legs trembled less because of the blood than because
she realized this wound could have been – should have
been – far worse.
    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