By the light of the moon

self-respect. For
Jillian Jackson, self-respect had been won with considerable effort
through a childhood that, except for the example set by her mother,
had provided fertile ground for seeds of self-doubt and excessive
self-effacement. She would not here relinquish what she had
struggled so long and hard to capture.
    Hurrying out of the stairwell, Jilly saw a spill of soft light
coming from an open door on the left, brighter light issuing from a
door farther along on the right – and doves erupting through
a closed window at the end of the hallway, a vision of doves that
left the panes intact in their wake.
    The birds made no sounds – no coos or cries, nor the
faintest thrum of wings. When they exploded around and over her,
cataracts of white feathers, a thousand piercing gazes, a thousand
yawning beaks, she didn't expect to feel them, but she did. The
breeze stirred by their passage was spicy with incense. Their wing
tips brushed her body, arms, and face.
    Staying close to the left wall, she moved quickly forward into a
storm of white wings as dense as the feathery blizzard that earlier
had swept across the Expedition. She feared for her sanity, but she
didn't fear the birds, which meant her no harm. Even if they had
been real, they would not have pecked or blinded her. She sensed
that they were in fact proof of augmented vision, although
even as this thought occurred to her, she had no idea what
augmented vision might be; for the moment it was a thing she
understood instinctively, emotionally, rather than
intellectually.
    Although she could not be harmed by these phenomena, the timing
of the birds' appearance couldn't have been worse. She needed to
find Dylan, and real or not, the birds were a hindrance to the
search.
    'Ha!' exclaimed someone close at hand, and an instant
later, Jilly felt on her left the open doorway that the seething
flock had hidden from her view.
    She stepped across the threshold, and the birds vanished. Before
her lay a bedroom revealed by a single lamp. And here was Dylan,
too, armed with a baseball bat, bracketed by a young man –
Kenny? – and a teenage girl, both brandishing knives.
    The bat cut the air with a whoosh , the young man
screamed, and the wickedly sharp knife, tumbling free, clattered
against a walnut highboy.
    When Dylan swung the bat, the teenage girl behind him tensed,
for an instant tightening down in her crouch. As Kenny shrieked in
pain, the girl drew her knife back in striking position, certain to
spring forward and bury it in Dylan before he could turn to deal
with her.
    On the move even as the girl uncoiled out of her crouch, Jilly
shouted, 'Police!'
    Monkey-agile, the girl whipped around but also sidestepped to
avoid turning her back on Dylan, to keep him in sight.
    Her eyes were as blue as any sky adorned with cherubim on any
chapel ceiling, but also radiant with dementia surely spawned by
psychosis-inducing drugs.
    A Southwest Amazon at last, but too squeamish to risk destroying
the girl's eyes, Jilly aimed lower with the instant ant death. The
nozzle on the can that she'd found in the pantry had two settings:
SPRAY and STREAM. She had set it on STREAM, which would reach ten
feet, according to the label.
    Perhaps because of her excitement, her homicidal exhilaration
the girl was breathing through her mouth. The stream of insecticide
went straight in, like an arc of water from a drinking fountain,
moistening lips, bathing tongue.
    Although instant ant death had a notably less severe effect on a
teenage girl than it would have on an ant, it wasn't received with
lip-smacking delight. Less refreshing than cool water, this drink
at once took all the fight out of the girl. She flung the knife
aside. Gagging, wheezing, spitting, she staggered to a door, yanked
it open, slapped at the wall switch until the lights came on,
revealing a bathroom. At the sink, the girl cranked on the cold
water, cupped her hands, and repeatedly flushed out her mouth,
sputtering and choking.
    On the floor, groaning, crying with a particularly annoying note
of self-pity, Kenny had curled up like a shrimp.
    Jilly looked at Dylan and shook the can of insecticide. 'From
now on, I'm going to use this on hecklers.'
    'What did you do with Shep?'
    'The grandmother told me about Kenny, the knives. Aren't you
going to say "Thanks for saving my butt, Jilly" ?'
    'I told you not to leave Shep alone.'
    'He's all right.'
    'He's not all right, out there by himself,' he said,
raising his voice as though he