By the light of the moon

twice after, Shep returned to the
bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his
slippers.
    'You're still wearing socks,' Dylan noted.
    Shepherd always slept barefoot. But when Dylan knelt to remove
the socks, the kid swung his legs into bed and pulled the covers up
to his chin.
    Deviations from routine were forced on Shep, always to his deep
dismay; he never chose to make them.
    Dylan worried, 'Are you all right, kiddo?'
    Shepherd closed his eyes. There would be no communication on the
issue of socks.
    Maybe his feet were cold. The in-window air conditioner didn't
cool the room evenly, but sent icy drafts chasing along the
floor.
    Maybe he was worried about germs. Germs on the carpet, germs on
the bedclothes, but only germs that infected feet.
    Maybe if you excavated around one of those Easter Island stone
heads, you'd find the rest of a giant statue buried in the earth,
and maybe when you revealed its feet, the statue would be wearing
stone socks, for which an explanation would be as hard to come by
as an explanation for Shep's new preference for bedtime
footwear.
    Dylan was too headachy and too wrung-out weary to care about
what the psychotropic stuff might be doing in his brain, let
alone to worry about Shepherd's socks. He took his turn in the
bathroom, wincing at the haggard face that confronted him in the
mirror.
    * * *
    Jilly lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling.
    Shep lay in his bed, staring at the backside of his eyelids.
    The hum and rumble of the air conditioner, at first annoying,
settled into a lulling white noise that would mask the bang of car
doors and the voices of other guests who might rise with the
dawn.
    The air conditioner would also ensure that they could not hear
the specific engine-noise pattern of a souped-up Suburban or the
stealthy sounds of assassins preparing to storm their room.
    For a while, Jilly tried to work up a little fear about their
vulnerability, but in fact she felt safe in this place, for a
while. Physically safe, anyway.
    Without an urgent concern for her immediate safety, without
active fear to distract her, she couldn't stave off a
discouragement that came close to despair. Dylan believed they had
a chance to track down Frankenstein's identity and learn the nature
of the injections, but she didn't share his confidence.
    For the first time in years, she wasn't in control of her life.
She needed control. Otherwise, she felt as she had felt for
too much of her childhood: weak, helpless, at the mercy of pitiless
forces. She loathed being vulnerable. Accepting victimhood, taking
refuge in it, was to her a mortal sin, yet it seemed now that she
had no choice but acceptance.
    Some psychotropic hoodoo elixir was at work in her brain, at
work on her brain, which filled her with horror when she
dared to think about it. She'd never done drugs, had never been
drunk, because she valued her mind and didn't want to lose any
significant number of brain cells. During all the years when she'd
had nothing else, she'd had her intelligence, her wit, her rich
imagination. Jilly's mind had been a formidable weapon against the
world and a refuge from cruelty, from adversity. If eventually she
developed the gluteus muchomega that plagued the women in her
family, if her ass grew so fat that she had to be driven everywhere
on a flatbed truck, she had always figured that she'd still have
her mind and all the satisfactions of that inner life. But now a
worm crawled through her brain, not a worm in the literal sense,
perhaps, but a worm of change, and she could not know what would be
left of her or even who she might be when the worm of change
had finished remaking her.
    Although earlier she had been exhilarated when she and Dylan had
dealt with the murderous Kenny and Becky, she could not get in
touch again with the fine sense of empowerment that for a while had
lifted her. Concerned about the oncoming violence foreseen in
visions, she could not convince herself that the gift of
clairvoyance might again help her to save others – or that it
might, in time, leave her more in control of her destiny than she
had ever been before.
    Negative Jackson. She'd never had much faith in other people,
but she'd long had an abiding faith in herself. Dylan had been
right about that. But her faith in herself began to desert her.
    From his bed, Shepherd whispered, 'Here, there.'
    'What is it, sweetie?'
    'Here, there.'
    Jilly raised herself on one elbow.
    Shep lay on his back, eyes closed. Anxiety pleated