There were always people camped around Drain sites, but Sloane never got used to them. They were all fanatics, but there were distinct groups among them—wannabe magic-users, usually, but also those who were desperate with grief and seeking spiritual healing and, the worst of the bunch, Dark One acolytes who wanted to bring him back.
Matt was on the phone, calling Agent Henderson for help, Sloane assumed, because there was no way they could drive through the wall of tents ahead of them. He stopped the car and waited at a safe distance from the crowd.
“Agent—yes, hello, it’s Matt Weekes,” he said. “Fine, thanks, and you? Great. We’re here, but there’s a bit of a problem—ah. Okay, thank you.” He hung up. “They’re sending a golf cart.”
“I am not diving into that bowl of mixed nuts in a golf cart,” Sloane said. “Can’t they clear a path or something?”
“Apparently they’ve tried that and were unsuccessful,” Matt said. Those were the first words he’d spoken to her since an “Excuse me” that morning in the kitchen. “So we either go on foot or in the golf cart.”
“You forgot about secret option three,” Sloane said, “which is to turn around and go home because HenderCho never wants anything we want to give them anyway.”
“Slo, it’s not gonna be that bad,” Ines said. “Promise. We’ll even let you sit up front.”
“Oh, joy,” she said.
“Bring your potato-chip bag,” Ines suggested.
The golf cart arrived a few minutes later, one of the long ones with multiple rows of seats. The driver was in his early twenties, an eager man with sandy-blond hair and a firm handshake. He introduced himself as Scott, then directed Matt to a parking area and invited them all to climb into the cart. Sloane took the front seat she had been promised, sliding across the squeaky beige vinyl so Scott could get in beside her. The others piled in, and the cart lurched toward the tents.
“Sure is lively out here, huh?” Scott said, grinning. “Reminds me of a music festival, only—”
“Even worse outfits?” Sloane said, grabbing the handle on her right to steady herself as Scott whipped around a corner.
Up ahead was a circle of people in loose-fitting clothing sitting cross-legged. In the middle was a young woman lying with her hands over her heart. As Scott drove past, Sloane spotted a purple crystal in the woman’s hands, held against her sternum. Sloane rolled her eyes. A séance, probably. A lot of people thought that the barrier between life and the afterlife was thinner at places like these, places where so many had died, so they came here to speak to their lost loved ones.
Just beyond the séance was a tent with an altar in front of it, a stick of incense dwindling in a dish atop it. At another tent, a besom—a kind of broom used in Wiccan rituals—was leaned up against a massive pentagram painted on the side of it. All around were different-colored stones wrapped in twine or laid on low tables. The smell of patchouli was thick.
“The air always feels weird here,” Matt said. “Like a storm is coming, only it never does.”
“Possibly you’re just getting a contact high,” Albie said. “Pretty sure that’s not all just incense.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Matt said.
“I feel it too,” Ines said from the very back of the golf cart. “Makes me dizzy.”
They drove past a shirtless old man playing a pan flute. He spotted them and, startled, dropped the instrument into his lap. Sloane saw Matt touch his finger to his lips to ask for silence. He always did that to stop people from going wild at the sight of them. It worked about half the time.
For all that Sloane was annoyed by people like this, people who thought being close to such horror and destruction would give them superpowers or make their wishes come true, she didn’t have a real problem with them. And that was because the third set of people who gathered around Drain sites were so much worse by comparison: Dark One acolytes.
These were no well-meaning Wiccans, no modern druids in robes, no tarot-reading psychics or astrologists trying to figure out the position of Mercury (in retrograde at the moment). They were the kind of people you could walk past on the street and never look twice at, mostly men, almost all of them white, wearing blue jeans, and running secret websites about how the Dark One was