twisting people into committing spiritual suicide wasn’t any better than murder in my book. Then I reconsidered: perhaps she had stopped soul harvesting for a time, but returned to it with a vengeance a year ago. But why? How much of what she’d told Henry was actually true? It was impossible to tell.
After a few hours of sleep, Pal and I met Charlie at the cafeteria at 6 A.M. for a quick breakfast, and then we gathered our gear and weapons and the black kittens and flew out toward the Civic League Park near the center of town.
“The water lily garden is back behind those trees,” Charlie said from her seat behind me, a little too loudly in my ear. She pointed toward a thicket of oaks beyond the sun-browned remains of a municipal golf course. “We should land before they see us.”
“Okay,” I replied. “How far can the shadow see and hear?”
“It can see people who are in the water with it, but if it’s hunting on land it needs David’s eyes and ears,” she said. “It felt like it needed mine, anyway.”
I scanned the ground beneath us; at the intersection beside the entrance to the golf course, there was an abandoned Sonic drive-in. Pal, land us over there.
Pal settled gently in the shade of the Sonic’s covered parking area. Someone had long ago smashed most of the plastic menus at the individual order stations. I slid down to the weed-ridden pavement, and Charlie followed.
“So if we blind David, we’ve partly blinded the shadow?” I asked her as I pulled my black kitten off its climb up my brown dragonskin jacket. I tucked the little creature back into the sling I’d borrowed from the dorm’s front desk. Even unbuttoned, the jacket was stiflingly hot, but the sun was strong and I didn’t want to burn. The kitten seemed to sense that massive carnage was on the agenda, and it kept trying to crawl up around my neck.
Charlie looked startled, then distressed. “I guess so.”
“Look, I know he’s your friend, or used to be,” I said gently. “I know you don’t really want to hurt him. Pal or I can temporarily blind him with a spell. But we have to take him out somehow, or we’ll have a hard time here.”
“I know,” she said. She pulled the clip on her AK-47, checked her ammunition, then shoved it back into the receiver. “The shadow picked me because it knew I had evil in me. Maybe I didn’t do much of a job fighting it, but I tried. I really did. But David … I don’t think he’s tried to get rid of it, ever. He’s not at all bothered by what it tells him to do.”
Charlie paused, looking furious, as if she might start crying. “He totally hid that side of himself from me. How … how can you be friends with somebody for years, hang out with them all the time, and not realize they have that kind of evil in them? The … the things he’s doing now, they’re nasty.”
“You weren’t a bad kid. David didn’t sound like he was a bad kid, either,” I told her, hoping my words would help. I sympathized with her and wanted her to feel better, but more important, I needed her focused for what was ahead. “Everyone has a nasty side. Devils find the kernels of evil in a person, turn on the heat, and pop them until the good’s buried. But it can be found again.”
I hoped what I was telling her was true, for the Warlock’s and my own sake as much as hers and David’s. “If we can destroy the shadow, I bet he’ll come around.”
“I brought this on him. On everyone,” she said quietly. “I need to see this finished.”
She wiped her eyes, adjusted her gun strap, and shook the tension out of her shoulders. “Okay. We got to do this. Listen: the shadow can move from puddle to pond to river if the waters are near each other. There’s a half-dozen lily ponds down there in the garden—the shadow’s in one of them, I think—but there’s another natural pond nearby and past that, the river. The shadow will stick around if it thinks it’s gonna get something to eat, but it can bug out of there in a hurry if it thinks it’s threatened. It can probably use the meat puppets to transport itself—they’re mostly water, and they can’t say no. If the shadow goes to the