By the light of the moon

too, the rack of candles in the dunes. And the
mantilla-mantled woman, cast back to an unknown church with the pew
on which she had arrived.
    A short sharp bark of pent-up air popped from Jilly's uncorked
throat. With the first shuddery inhalation that followed, she
detected what might have been the dead-last smell that she would
have wanted if she'd been asked to make a list of a thousand odors.
Blood. Subtle but distinctive, unmistakable, here was the scent of
slaughter and of sacrifice, of tragedy and glory: faintly metallic,
a whiff of copper, a trace of iron. More than a white wave of wings
had splashed her face. With trembling and tentative hands, she
touched her throat, chin, cheeks, and as she gazed with revulsion
at the evidence on her fingers, she recognized a matching wetness
on her lips and tasted the same substance that her fingertips
revealed. She screamed, this time not silently.

12
    Blacker than the barren land in this moonlit gloom,
the highway sometimes seemed to unravel ahead of the Expedition,
leading Jilly and the brothers O'Conner into chaos and oblivion. At
other times, however, it appeared instead to be raveling itself up
from chaos and into an orderly ball, steadily winding them toward a
rigorously plotted and inescapable destiny.
    She didn't know which possibility scared her more: running into
an ever thornier and more tangled thicket of troubles, into a briar
patch where every prickling turn brought her to another
sanity-shaking encounter with the unknown – or discovering
the identity of the smiling man with the needle and laying open the
mystery of the golden liquid in the syringe.
    In twenty-five years of life, she had learned that understanding
didn't always – or even often – bring peace. Currently,
since returning to her motel room with root beer, she existed in a
purgatory of ignorance and confusion, where life resembled a waking
nightmare or at least a bad and edgy dream. But if she found
answers and a final resolution, she might discover that she was
trapped in a living hell that would make her yearn for the
comparative serenity and comfort of even this nerve-fraying
purgatory.
    As before, Dylan drove without his full attention on the road,
repeatedly checking the rearview mirror and periodically glancing
over his right shoulder to assure himself that Shep was not in any
way harming himself, but now two worries distracted him from
his driving. Following Jilly's dramatic roadside performance
– her babble of birds and blood – the attention that
Dylan paid to her had the same brother's-keeper quality that
colored his attitude toward Shepherd.
    'You actually tasted it – the blood, I mean?' he asked.
'Actually smelled it.'
    'Yeah. I know it wasn't real. You didn't see it. But it seemed
real enough.'
    'Heard the birds, felt their wings.'
    'Yeah.'
    'Do hallucinations usually involve all five senses – or
involve them so completely?'
    'It wasn't any hallucination,' she said stubbornly.
    'Well, it for sure wasn't real.'
    She glared at him and saw that he wisely recognized the mortal
danger of continuing to insist that she – Southwest Amazon,
fearless cactuskicker – was susceptible to hallucinations. In
her estimation, hallucinations were only one step removed from such
quaint female complaints as the vapors, fainting spells, and
persistent melancholy.
    'I'm not an hysteric,' she said, 'or an alcoholic in withdrawal,
or a consumer of psychedelic mushrooms, thank you very much, so the
word hallucination doesn't apply.'
    'Call it a vision, then.'
    'I'm not Joan of Arc, either. God isn't sending me messages.
Enough already. I don't want to talk about this anymore, not right
now, not for a while.'
    'We've got to—'
    'I said not now.'
    'But—'
    'I'm scared, all right? I'm scared, and talking it to death
isn't going to make me less scared, so time-out. Time-out.'
    She understood why he would regard her with new concern and even
with a measure of wariness, but she didn't like being the object of
his solicitude. Even the compassion of friends was difficult for
her to bear; and the sympathy of strangers could easily curdle into
pity. She would not tolerate pity from anyone. She bristled at the
thought of being perceived as weak or unfortunate, and she had no
capacity whatsoever for being patronized.
    Indeed, Dylan's glances, each of which glistened with dewy
commiseration, so deeply annoyed Jilly that she soon grew desperate
to distract herself from them. She unhooked her safety