She looked up the hillside, toward Tyler’s house. She saw Shade standing on the deck, watching. She caught herself just before she waved to him and smiled. That didn’t seem such an odd thing to do, now that she had come to know the dog better. Not long ago the sight of Shade would have frightened her. Now, he made her feel safer.
She remembered the story of the long-ago ancestor of the deVilles, the woman who had stood up to Adrian and befriended Shade. Shade would keep them safe.
She heard the rustling of leaves beneath the balcony.
She looked down and saw Shade.
Startled, she looked toward Tyler’s house. Shade was still there.
She looked between the two dogs, and although Shade was at some distance from her, she knew him well enough now to be able to see differences in the two dogs. Although also a very large dog, this one seemed to be a little less muscular than Shade, to have a slighter build. She stared, and her stare was returned unflinchingly. The dog seemed as fascinated with her as she was with him.
Him? Her? She couldn’t tell from here. She had the oddest feeling about it, as if she should hurry downstairs to be with it.
Not every big black dog was Shade, she reminded herself sternly, and her hand came up to touch her scar.
Suddenly the dog’s head turned, as if it had heard a distant sound, and it moved out of sight.
“Amanda? Did you find the spare key?”
Rebecca’s voice snapped her out of the spell the dog seemed to have cast on her.
She turned to see Rebecca standing in the bedroom doorway.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
On the way back to Tyler’s house, she thought of the night she and Alex had driven past the woods. Amanda had been distracted by seeing the ghosts, but Alex had said that she thought she had seen Shade.
It seemed likely that this other dog was the one that had been coming around her house. But was it another cemetery dog? Could there be more than one at a time? Was there someone else like Tyler, nearby? She recalled something in the pages Tyler had given her to read-a claim by Adrian that he didn’t need Shade, that he would find another cemetery dog.
What if Adrian found this dog? What if he had already found it, and the dog was his?
She shivered. She would ask Tyler what to do.
But when she got back to the house, she learned that Tyler had just left.
Ron said, “He asked me to ask you to please-I was supposed to emphasize the ‘please’ part-stay here until he gets back.”
She agreed to do so and decided to spend some time in the library.
The ghosts were waiting for her there.
39
The pill bugs-Evan called them sow bugs-arrived during the morning, and in the afternoon an insect Daniel thought to be one of the most butt-ugly living creatures he had ever seen. When he dared to ask what it was, Adrian told him it was an ant lion, the larva of a dragonfly-like insect.
“They’re quite beautiful in the adult stage,” Adrian had said.
Daniel found that difficult to believe.
To his growing list of reasons for hating Adrian, he added ant lions.
Adrian was probably completely screwing up the environment, Daniel thought. Daniel wasn’t a scientist, but you didn’t need to be one to figure out that if a thousand of something got eaten up in the cellar, whatever usually ate that something was going hungry.
He was wondering if a thousand ant lions could be missed by anything or anyone when Adrian called Daniel and Evan to the basement.
He braced himself and followed Evan down the stairs. They were allowed to turn on the basement light now, but Daniel really wished they were back to the candle days. The only advantage was that they could now see what to avoid on the floor.
Adrian himself was worse than an ant lion. Far worse. Daniel knew that if they avoided looking at him, they would be punished, but the sight always turned his stomach.
Adrian had no skin. In some places-such as along the place where a man’s rib cage would be-he had something like an insect’s shell. His arms and legs were thin sticks, little more than muscle-covered bones. His feet were thin and long, and seemed almost too narrow to support him. His toes were fused together. His hands were pincers. Over his visible muscles, ligaments, and tendons, a thick mucus glistened.
Only his head seemed to be mostly human. He had no visible ears or nose, but he had dark eyes and hard, insect-shell eyelids now. Otherwise his mouth and other facial features seemed to be those of a man. A fleshless man.
The basement held a new odor, something like mustard, and although there was still an underlying scent of decay, the new stench masked it.
To Daniel’s relief, Adrian was focusing on Evan tonight.
“Do you know, Evan,” he said, “I had not realized previously what a handsome fellow you are…”
Evan blushed, but Daniel thought it was true that Evan was good looking, and what’s more, that Evan knew it. He had used those looks to get over on more than one woman. Evan wasn’t tops in the brains department, but women didn’t seem to mind.
Still, he didn’t blame Evan if it made him uneasy to hear Adrian talking like that.
“How old are you?” Adrian asked.
“Thirty-six, my lor-I mean, Mr. deVille.”
“Hmmm.”
Adrian’s eyelids make a clicking sound as he blinked, like the shutter of an old camera.
Adrian turned to Daniel.
“I have work for you to do.”
Daniel waited.
“It will be so much better when I have finished my transformation. I will be able to attend to these matters myself.” He sighed. “Evan tells me that Hawthorne’s lover may be back at her home. I want the two of you to make another trip there tonight, to confirm this. If it’s true, I want you to bring her to me.”
There was only one possible response, and Daniel made it. “Yes, sir.”
40
Tyler stood at the bedside of Mrs. Mary Cleeves, who was about to die in Olive View Hospital, in Sylmar. He had helped her communicate with her daughter, who stood on the other side of the bed, weeping. But Mrs. Cleeves’s next words were for Tyler.
You’re troubled, aren’t you?
Is Adrian back? he asked.
You already know the answer to that question.
What does he want?
You know the answer to that, too. She paused, then said, It’s so difficult to make decisions when one’s loved ones are in danger, isn’t it?
Amanda’s in danger?
Everyone who lives is in danger, Tyler Hawthorne. Even you.
Wait! What danger is she in?
I think you already know. Here’s something that will help you: Take good care of that dog. Now, I’ve got to be going. Thank you for helping me and all the others.
She died. Her daughter began to cry harder.
Would it be too much to ask, Tyler raged silently, to allow one of these people to give me a complete message?
Silence answered him.
He left the hospital, greeted Shade warmly, and bestowed praise and attention on him. He let him out of the van on a leash-an unnecessary device in Shade’s case, one Tyler used only to prevent legal problems, and to provide some comfort to people who feared large, black, rather ferocious-looking dogs. Near the hospital, Shade briefly took an interest in an area that Tyler knew had once been the site of a tuberculosis sanitarium.
They got into the van, and Tyler called the house. Alex answered and said that Amanda had been in the library most of the day. “Want me to transfer the call to her there?”