They passed the Oasis gas station in the middle of the road and entered the Old Village proper, the interior of the car getting darker as the streetlights became spaced farther apart.

“If Leland gave Slick something,” he said, “Carter could do the same to you. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you need to know. I want you to be safe. I care about you. I care about Blue and Korey. Y’all are a big part of my life.”

He looked earnest as a suitor asking someone to be his bride as he turned from Pitt Street onto McCants.

“What are you saying?” she asked, lips numb.

“You deserve better,” he said. “You and the children deserve someone who knows your true value.”

Her stomach slowly turned inside out. He passed Alhambra Hall and she wanted to shove open the door and jump out of the car. She wanted to feel the asphalt slap and cut and scrape her. It would feel real, not like this nightmare. She made herself look at James Harris again, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. She kept quiet until he pulled up in front of her driveway.

“I need time to think,” she said.

“What are you going to tell Carter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Patricia said, and made her face a mask. “Not yet. This is between us.”

She fumbled with the door handle, and as she did, she dropped Francine’s license onto the floor of his car and slipped it beneath the passenger seat with her foot.

It wasn’t his wallet, but it was the next best thing.

* * *

—

She woke up in the dark. She must have turned off the bedside light at some point and didn’t remember. Now she lay there, scared to move, stiff as a board, listening. What had woken her? Her ears strained, scanning the darkness. She wished Carter were here, but he was on another drug company trip to Hilton Head.

Her ears wandered through the dark house. She heard the higher-pitched heat coming through the air registers, the ticking sound it made deep in the tin ducts. Behind the ticking came the high-pitched rush of warm air, and the drip from the bathroom faucet.

She thought about Blue. She needed to reach him, somehow, before James Harris got him further under control. He’d lied about a rape, but she didn’t think it was too late. She needed to give him something he’d want more than he wanted James Harris’s approval.

Then she heard it, behind all the house sounds, the deliberate sound of a window sliding open. It came from down the dark hall, from behind Korey’s closed bedroom door, and in a flash Patricia realized Korey was sneaking out of the house.

She kicked herself. No wonder Korey acted so exhausted in the morning. No wonder she seemed so fuzzy headed. She was sneaking out of the house every night to see some boy. Patricia had been so caught up with Slick and James Harris and all these other things that she’d ignored the fact that she had two teenagers in the house, not just Blue. And there were plenty of normal, everyday risks to worry about.

She threw back her comforter, slid her feet into her slippers, and padded down the hall. There was a furtive, rhythmic sound coming from behind Korey’s door and she realized that maybe Korey wasn’t sneaking out, but this boy was sneaking in. She snapped on the hall light and threw open Korey’s bedroom door.

At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at in the spill of light from the hall.

Two pale, naked bodies lay on the bed, and she realized the one closest to her was James Harris, his muscled back and buttocks moving slightly, rhythmically, pulsing like a heartbeat. He knelt between the smooth long legs of a girl with a flat stomach and firm, upturned, underdeveloped teenaged breasts. His mouth was affixed to a place on her inner thigh, right next to her pubis. Her hair was spread out across the pillow, her eyes were half-closed in ecstasy, and she smiled with abandon, a smile Patricia had never seen before on Korey’s face.

CHAPTER 35

Patricia fell on her daughter, shaking her shoulders, slapping her cheeks.

“Korey!” she screamed. “Korey! Wake up!”

Obscenely, they kept going, latched together, pulsing like an engorged sack of blood. Korey gave a small mew of pleasure and one hand drifted down, ghosting lightly across her stomach, toward her pubic hair, and Patricia grabbed her wrist and yanked it away and Korey began to squirm, and Patricia had to get James’s head out from between her daughter’s legs, and she looked down at him, and her stomach gave a warning flop. She was going to throw up.

She clamped her lips together, let go of Korey’s feverish wrist, and tried to haul James away by the shoulders, but he struggled to stay latched to her daughter. Feeling like an idiot, Patricia grabbed a soccer cleat from the floor and hit him in the head with its heel. Her first blow was a silly, ineffectual tap, but the second was harder, and the third made a knocking sound when the cleats hit bone.

As she struck him in the head with Korey’s shoe over and over again she heard herself repeating, “Get off! Get off! Get off my little girl!”

A sucking slobbering noise ripped through the quiet of the room, the sound of raw steak being torn in two, and James Harris looked up at her like a country cousin, mouth hanging open, something black and inhuman hanging from the hole in the bottom of his face, dripping viscous blood, eyes glazed. He tried to focus on Patricia, the shoe held back by her ear, ready to bring it down again.

“Uh,” he said, dully.

He belched and a line of bloody drool dribbled from the corner of the proboscis hanging beneath his chin. Then it began to curl back up on itself, retracting slowly into his gore-slimed mouth.

My God, Patricia thought, I’ve gone insane, and she brought the cleat down again. James Harris rose, seizing her wrist in one hand, her throat in the other, and he threw her against the far wall. She took the impact between her shoulder blades. It punched all the air out of her lungs. It loosened the root of her tongue. Then he was on her, breath hot and raw, forearm across her throat, stronger than her, faster than her, and she went limp in his grip like prey.

“This is all your fault,” he said, voice thick and slurred with liquid.

Blood coated his lips, and hot specks of it sprinkled her face. And she knew he was right. This. Was. All. Her. Fault. She had exposed her children to this danger, she had invited it into her house. She had been so obsessed with the children in Six Mile and Blue that she hadn’t seen the danger to Korey. She had driven both her children right into James Harris’s arms.

She saw a lump move down, down, down his throat as he swallowed whatever apparatus it was he used to suck their blood. Then he said, “You said this was between us.”

She remembered saying that in the car earlier, and she had only meant to stall him, to buy more time, to keep his guard down, but she had said it, and to him it had been another invitation. She had led him on. She deserved this. But her daughter didn’t.

“Korey,” was the best she could manage through her constricted windpipe.

“Look what you’re doing to her,” he hissed, and wrenched her head to the side so she could see the bed.

Korey had pulled her arms and legs in on themselves, retracting into a fetal position, muscles twitching, going into shock. Blood spread on the mattress beneath her. Patricia closed her eyes to let the nausea pass.

“Mom?” Blue called from the hall.

She and James Harris locked eyes, him totally nude, his front a bib of blood, her in her nightgown, not even wearing a brassiere, the door standing a quarter of the way open. Neither of them moved.

“Mom?” Blue called again. “What’s going on?”

Do. Something, James Harris mouthed at her.

She reached up and touched her fingertips to the back of the hand that held her throat. He let go.

“Blue,” she said, stepping through the door and into the hall. She prayed that the flecks of Korey’s blood she felt on her face wouldn’t show. “Get back into bed.”

“What’s wrong with Korey?” he asked, standing in the hall.

“Your sister’s sick,” Patricia said. “Please. She’ll be better later. But she needs to be alone right now.”

Having determined that this was nothing that required his attention, Blue turned without speaking, went back into his bedroom, and closed the door. Patricia stepped back into Korey’s room and turned on the overhead light just in time to see James Harris, naked, squatting on the windowsill. He held his clothes balled up against his belly like a lover fleeing an angry husband in some old farce.

“You asked for this,” he said, and then he was gone and the window was just a big black rectangle of night.