By the light of the moon

had some legitimate authority over
her.
    'Don't you shout at me. Good lord, you drove here like a maniac,
wouldn't tell me why, bailed out of the truck, wouldn't tell me
why. And I'm supposed to – what? – to sit out there,
just shift my brain into neutral like your good little woman, and
wait like a stupid turkey standing in the rain with its mouth open,
gawking at the sky, until it drowns?'
    He glowered at her. 'What are you talking about turkeys?'
    'You know exactly what I'm talking about.'
    'And it's not raining.'
    'Don't be obtuse.'
    'You have no sense of responsibility,' he declared.
    'I have a huge sense of responsibility.'
    'You left Shep alone.'
    'He won't go anywhere. I gave him a task to keep him busy. I
said, "Shepherd, because of your rude and overbearing brother,
I'm going to need at least one hundred polite synonyms for
asshole." '
    'I don't have time for this bickering.'
    'Who started it?' she accused, and turned away from him, and
might have left the room if she'd not been halted by the sight of
the doves.
    The flock still streamed through the hallway, past the open
bedroom door, toward the stairs. By this time, if these apparitions
had been real, the house would have been so fully packed that
extreme bird pressure would have blown out all the windows as
surely as a gas leak and a spark.
    She willed them to vanish, but they flew, they flew, and she
turned her back on them, fearing for her sanity once more. 'We've
got to get out of here. Marj will call the cops sooner or
later.'
    'Marj?'
    'The woman who gave you the toad pin and somehow started all
this. She's Kenny's grandma, Travis's. What do you want me to
do?'
    * * *
    In the bathroom, on her knees at the toilet, Becky had begun to
reconsider her dinner, if not the entire direction of her life.
    Dylan pointed to a straight-backed chair. He saw that Jilly got
the message.
    The bathroom door opened outward. With the chair tipped back and
wedged under the knob, Becky would be imprisoned until the police
arrived to let her out.
    Dylan didn't think that the girl would recover sufficiently to
cut him to ribbons, but he didn't want to be vomited on,
either.
    On the floor, six-way-wired Kenny had come unstrung. He was all
tears and snot and spit bubbles, but still dangerous, speaking more
curses and obscenities than sense, demanding immediate medical
attention, promising revenge, and given half a chance he might
prove whether or not his teeth were snake-sharp.
    A threat to cave in Kenny's skull sounded phony to Dylan when he
made it, but the kid took it seriously, perhaps because he would
not have hesitated to crush Dylan's skull if their roles had been
reversed. On demand, he produced handcuff and padlock keys from one
of his embroidered shirt pockets with mother-of-pearl button
snaps.
    Jilly seemed reluctant to follow Dylan out of the bedroom, as if
she feared other miscreants against whom insecticide might prove to
be an inadequate defense. He assured her that Becky and Kenny were
the sum of all evil under this roof. Nevertheless, wincing,
hesitant, she crossed the hallway to the shackled boy's room as
though fear half blinded her, and repeatedly she glanced toward the
window at the end of the hall, as if she saw a ghostly face pressed
to the glass.
    As he freed Travis, Dylan explained that Becky was not morally
fit to compete in the Miss All-American Teen Pageant, and then they
went downstairs to the kitchen.
    When Marj rushed in from the back porch to embrace her grandson
and to wail about his blackened eye, Travis all but disappeared in
cuddling candy-stripe.
    Dylan waited for the boy to half extract himself and then said,
'Both Becky and Kenny need medical attention—'
    'And a prison cell until their social security kicks in,' Jilly
added.
    '—but give us two or three minutes before you call
nine-one-one,' Dylan finished.
    This instruction baffled Marj. 'But you are nine-one-one.'
    Jilly fielded that peculiar question: 'We're one of the ones,
Marj, but we're not the other one or the nine.'
    Although this further baffled Marj, it amused Travis. The boy
said, 'We'll give you time to split. But this is fully weird, it's
practically mojo. Who the heck are you two?'
    Dylan couldn't summon a reply, but Jilly said, 'Damned if we
know. This afternoon we could have told you who we are, but right
now we don't have a clue.'
    In one sense her answer was true and grimly serious, but it only
puckered Marj's face in deeper bafflement and widened the