Peter’s Hierarchy of Shit He Can Live Without

It was the last day before the Snow Moon, and when the eighth-period bell rang it dismissed not only the student body for the day but also the last hot minute of denial on Peter’s part of what he had been putting off for the last two weeks: now he would have to tell her. Women and talking, the way it just went together like drawn and quartered. He walked from study hall to his bus, wincing at the prospect, when Alex Finster and Tom Dublyk appeared at his flanks, with an additional one or two behind. This was not the reprieve Peter had in mind.

“Full moon tomorrow,” said Alex. Peter said nothing.

“You got spunk in your ears, Rumancek? I’m talking to you, you dirty Gypsy piece of shit.” Peter did not take his eyes from the exit sign down the hall over the wave of heads.

“Aw, he’s probably just down his girlfriend’s in a coma,” said Tom.

The question, Peter knew, was simple: make it to the bus. They wanted him to give them a reason. If people were going to jump you, they just jumped you; these shitheads needed him to give them a reason. So it was the simple question of just keeping his mouth shut and getting on his bus.

Alex called him a deaf Gypsy faggot and as they passed through the door the crush pressed their bodies together and Alex turned his head and breathed hot in Peter’s ear.

“Probably needs to run home and suck Sleeping Beauty’s dick,” said Tom.

Just keep his mouth shut long enough to board bus 89. They wanted him to give them a reason but Peter had been on the wrong end of enough beatings to know that nothing was worth it. This was what made Peter not like Roman; Peter had control. When they can take that from you there is no floor under what else you can lose.

Tom drew two fingers under his own nostrils, inhaling deeply. “Is that pussy I smell?”

They were outside now and the buses were in an idling line no more than fifteen yards away. Fifteen yards, an achievable goal.

Alex put an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “So where’s the wolf half come from, anyway?” he said. He thought this intrusive familiarity would goad Peter into reacting. Just enough smart to get on the bus. “Your mom toss a steak between her legs and say, ‘Come and get it, boys’?” said Alex.

Peter hit Alex in the balls.

Alex doubled over and tripped over his own feet and fell and Peter broke for it. The other boys were just behind him, but the moment’s lapse in their reaction was all he needed to get to the bus, whatever was nearest, something at least he could hang on to and kick. He made passing eye contact through the bus window with those girls, the Sworn twins, staring at him with those spooky little eyes, but if staring was the worst of it there were things worse than eyes.

He leaped up the steps but then one of the twins’ eyes widened (which?—lost to history) and she yelled, “Watch out!” but Peter knew: he had lost, and a hand seized him by the ponytail and wrenched him down off the bus and he was shoved to the pavement, finding himself in a ring of boys and looking up

directly at Duncan Fritz, 210 pounds of Duncan Fritz who had not been seeking this fight but now that a fight was in the air could not pass it up. This is what a fight cost you: the right to abstractions, like “fair.” This is one of the things a fight cost you. Peter attempted to bring his hands up in protection, but before he could Duncan punched his face. It was like looking into a very bright spotlight, and a quick succession of half a dozen flashes of this spotlight followed before Peter was successful in getting his hands into place and curling his knees into his chest and wheezing blood into his palms and waiting for the kicking to begin.

But then sharp elbows broke through the ring surrounding him and another combatant entered the fray and he felt the weight of this new body come down on top of him and a pair of arms encircle his neck. It was not a lot of weight and the arms were shaking and skinny like a girl’s. It was a girl. It was Letha. Letha had thrown herself on top of him.

Things were quiet again. Letha clung to him, shaking. There flowed from the center of her body a power so great even now Peter could feel it in his Swadisthana, and it caused her whole body to shake with her intention of not letting go of him.

“Aw fuck,” someone said eventually. The party was over before it had begun: this stalemate alongside the immediate threat of some authority’s arrival caused the mob to drift, deflated. As suddenly as the tribe lust for sacramental violence had arisen, the pregnant girl was a real wet blanket.

Letha helped Peter up. His hair was loose and in disarray and his face was red and bleeding from cuts over his eye and his mouth. And although he was standing now and okay what she saw in her mind’s eye was that other boy standing over him and hammering his fist into him again and again. She had never herself seen such violence before but knew instinctively and unequivocally that the only real way to fight it was with its equal and opposite, and she kissed his face. She covered the face the other boy had beaten with fists with kisses that were the fluttering of moth wings. An eye for an eye.

Peter leaned his forehead against hers. He put his thumb to her mouth and wiped his blood from her lips. She was crying and mucus was leaking from her nose. He drew his index finger along her upper lip.

“Snot,” he said.

He fished a spare hairband from his pocket and pulled his hair back in its ponytail. He took her hand. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Hey!” barked a voice like clapper boards and Vice Principal Spears seized Peter’s elbow. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“He’s coming with me.”

The vice principal released Peter. His face paled twice in the twin reflections of Olivia Godfrey’s sunglasses.

* * *

Peter and Letha went with Olivia. Shelley, for whom Olivia had come, sat in the bed of the pickup, and the three of them in the cab, Letha in the middle, tucking her legs to the side of the gearshift. Olivia had furnished Peter with her head scarf and he held it to his bloody mouth. The inside of his cheek wall was torn and he worried it with his tongue. Olivia, in response to a question that had not yet been voiced, said, “He’s the same.” She lightly rapped Letha’s thigh, which at first seemed like a gesture of solace—but she needed room to shift.

She drove them to the Rumanceks’ trailer. She told Letha, “I really should take you home, darling.” Letha said nothing. Olivia made a display of mulling her adult responsibilities and relented.

“Call your mother, at least. She is wound rather tightly these days.”

At the sight of Peter’s split lip and swollen eye, it took Lynda the better part of fifteen minutes to grieve and rage. She spat on her own breast, calling some of the more voluptuous curses on the poison wombs that conceived such monsters that could do that to a face so handsome. Then she calmed to practical

maternal authority and cleaned him up and gave him a tea with two crushed aspirin and a joint and sent him to the bed with a Saran-wrapped frozen pork chop against the swelling. Olivia stayed to have a discussion with Lynda.

In the bedroom, Letha lay with him and draped an arm and a leg over his body. Still superstitiously keeping herself between this body and the world.

He prodded at the fissure in his mouth again. Letha winced. “Stop that. I can see you doing that.”

Peter looked at her. This funny little person who had put all the love inside her between him and a kicking that might have had who knew what end. One of Nicolae’s main criteria in determining a woman’s quality was whether or not she would help with moving the furniture. Not some womanly business like picking up the odd lamp or box of dishware, but really get in there with the men and put some teeth in it. What do you say to that, Nic?

But the fact remained that Peter still had to tell her what he’d been avoiding in the first place. He had to tell her what was going to happen tomorrow night and she was not going to like it. Especially now. She was not going to like hearing it any more than he was going to like saying it. But it did not change the fact that he had to tell her, and waiting would only make it worse. He shut his eyes and smelled her hair. In a minute.

There was a knock on the door. Lynda entered with Olivia. They had agreed it might not be safe for Peter to stay here. The full moon does bring it out in people, observed Olivia. Peter nodded, in no mood to challenge this unlikely turn of events. He rose and packed an overnight bag for Godfrey House.

* * *

Olivia set Peter up in a spare bedroom. In the corner there was an old mirror mounted on wooden trunnions and angled slightly up, and from where Peter stood it caught the reflection of the wall portrait of an old man with a hawk face and previously commented-on green eyes and the ghost of a smile like he’d just stuck the knife in without your even noticing.

Olivia put her hand on Letha’s shoulder. “I took the liberty of calling your father.”

She turned to Peter, looking at his mangled face. He could not read her expression behind the sunglasses. She put her fingers to his face but he didn’t flinch. The soft knowing of her touch did not hurt him.

She left to give them a few minutes. “Boys…” she said under her breath. “Boys…”

Peter looked into the mirror. His Swadisthana may have given him a heightened sensitivity to the frequency, but he had always been just as happy that this had never migrated up into the Third Eye. The Third Eye had struck him as depressingly literal. But tomorrow night would come the turn, the turn where he would have to do what had become inescapable since Roman got himself arrested. What the fact was, was inescapable since the night they found Brooke Bluebell. He would have to scent the vargulf and hunt him down and tear his throat out. It made him weak and he wanted just to lie down, but he was supported by the ongoing pain of the beating. Pain providing nothing if not a sense of priority. He did wish now for just enough of the Third Eye to provide him a view in the glass of how the world would look the morning after next, but all it contained was his own ugly beaten face. In the mirror, hands came around his midsection and clasped.

“Let’s go see him,” said Letha.

They went up to the attic. Shelley was downstairs; when not sleeping she held her brother’s privacy as inviolate. He lay under the window. Pairs of owl eyes glimmering in the trees creating a flickering vigil. There was more natural black on Roman’s scalp, and his cheeks were patchy with stubble. Letha knelt.

“I didn’t even know he could grow facial hair,” she said. She looked at his face. In the moonlight she

could see the delicate veins in his eyes.

“If you were going to run away, would you tell me?” she said. “I’m not going to run away,” said Peter.

“I’ll go with you if you run,” she said. He looked out at the round moon.

“I’m not fast enough to outrun this,” he said.

She looked at the curl of Roman’s ear, like a?, and knew there was more to come and she would hate it just as much as she hated that her best friend was in a coma and seeing the beating of the first boy she had loved with all her body. She knew that whatever he was about to say was going to be like that, so she focused on the faintly luminous down of hair in Roman’s ear and she waited for it.

“I need you to promise me something,” said Peter. “Tomorrow night I need you to promise me you’ll be home at sundown and no matter what that someone else is with you until the sun comes up. The whole night.”

“What are you going to do?” she said pointlessly. She knew exactly what he was going to say and it wasn’t going to improve anything hearing him say it, which made it no less necessary to hear.

“I’m going to kill it,” he said.

She could just barely hear Roman’s breath issuing from his nose.

“You know you’re just a person, right?” she said. “That’s what we all are. We’re all just people.” “An hour before sundown,” said Peter. “Under no circumstances leave the house. Under no

circumstances let anyone in.”

“And then what? The next time I see you you’re in jail? At your funeral? Do I even see you again after that?”

Peter didn’t have an answer and had taken too many hits to the head to make one up fast enough.

“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “I think you’re both fucking full of shit. You think I’m the one who needs protecting? Well, look at you. Look at both of you. What do you need to happen to understand that this isn’t some kind of game? This is life.”

Peter still did not answer; it was not because he didn’t have one but because he was too tired to hear it himself. That what had happened the last two turns was going to happen again tomorrow night, and the whole town knew it. Unless he killed it. That this thing knew who he was and there was nothing he could do now to make himself not part of this. Unless he killed it. That he had a fear now even deeper than the cage and it was for what had happened to those other girls to happen to her, for her to be alive and watching while teeth and claws ripped open sacks of meat and jelly and shit and the life inside her. Unless he killed it. That life is a game, with the clearest stakes possible, and that losing it blows beyond all comprehension. He was not a killer, he did not want to kill anything, fuck all this killing.

He looked for something breakable but not valuable, punctuation, not passion. He selected a desk lamp and hurled it to the floor. Letha startled at the violence, which had been its intended effect, and he hated its efficacy.

“Either do exactly what I say or you will never see me again, you stupid little bitch,” he said.

There was a wash of headlights outside; her father was here. Letha lifted Roman’s hand and brushed the tears from her cheeks. She rose and smoothed out her shirt and looked at Peter. Her crying Godfrey eyes were red and green, like the worst Christmas in the world.

After she was gone, Peter sat on Roman’s bed. He put a hand on Roman’s shin and gave it a shake. “Nobody here but us chickens,” he said.

There was a creak and he looked up to find Shelley hovering in the doorway, reluctant to intrude. She looked at the broken lamp but would not have needed the evidence to know the air of people hurting. Peter said nothing. He bent forward and removed one of his sneakers, and then its mate. He tossed one sneaker and then the other into the air and she watched as he, with an elegiac grace, began to juggle in the

dark room.

* * *

The following morning, Peter was prodded awake by his mother. His cheek was a welt of purple and there was a black crust on his lip that had leaked in the night and fixed to the pillow. He wanted to feel better now that he had gotten a night’s sleep and his mother was here, but what he felt hadn’t changed. Yesterday had still happened and so would tonight, and nothing in between changed that giant black hole of suck.

“How are you feeling?” she said. “How do I look?” he said.

She spit on her shirtsleeve and dabbed at the side of his lip. “Breakfast,” she said.

Olivia had given Lynda the run of the kitchen and this was reflected in the volume of the offering. But it was times like these that require our greatest strength and it had just killed Lynda the night before that she couldn’t feed her baby. Shelley attempted to eat with an exaggerated delicacy to compensate for the increased toll on her nerves, but every so often her salad tong clattered into the punch bowl of Cream of Wheat before her. When their eyes met Peter pulled one earlobe down and cocked the opposite eyebrow and this elicited a faint smile, but when he attempted to return it he only grimaced at the affront to his bruise. Olivia, meanwhile, hid behind smiling eyes and blithe gossip about the recent celebrity scandal as though just as pleased for this amusing disruption of routine. Peter did not know what to make of the upir woman’s sudden hospitality, and didn’t care. His mind was busy with the way Letha had flinched when he threw the lamp, and the lost look in Roman’s eyes when Peter turned his back on him, and the moon that was now on the other side of the earth but couldn’t have exerted greater pull over his thoughts.

After breakfast Olivia rose to take Shelley to school. Lynda took the other woman by the hand. “Your kitchen is really a dream,” she said.

Olivia was demure. “One does one’s best.”

When Peter and Lynda were alone, Lynda rummaged for the liquor cabinet. She removed a bottle of whiskey and doctored their coffee.

“It’s less than a day’s drive to Toma and Crystal’s farm,” she said. “We can be there before you turn.” There was a hairline crack in his mug and he traced it with his fingernail.

“What if she’s next?” he said.

They looked at each other and there was nothing more to say.

Peter sipped from the mug. When he swallowed, his throat was the eye of a needle. Lynda got up and came over to him and he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into the folds of her belly and he wept and wept.

“Fuck all this killing,” he said.

Someone came into the dining room and Lynda looked over. It was Roman. He did not display surprise at walking in on the Rumanceks in his dining room as much as the faint befuddlement of the overslept.

“What time is it?” he said.

PART III

THE FOREVER HOWL

The Fence

Peter and Roman sat on the hood of Roman’s car and the sun was pink through the trees and the shadow of the electrical substation came at them like a slow attack of elbows.

“Will I be able to keep up?” said Roman. “No,” said Peter.

Roman threw his cigarette butt to their growing pile and lit another. “I’m sorry I was a pain in your balls,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Peter.

Roman looked at the crisscrossing tracks at the rail yard and straightened his arm, considering the intersection of veins at his elbow. Means of transporting iron.

“Do you love her?” said Roman.

Peter hunched forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Yeah,” he said. “Or whatever.” “Shee-it,” said Roman.

“Shee-it,” said Peter.

They were quiet. Peter reached into his pocket and pulled out the fragment of Goblin Market and handed it to Roman.

“What is this?” said Roman.

“I found it here last time,” said Peter. “What do you think it means?” said Roman.

Peter didn’t answer. He was through trying to solve a wolf problem with people skills. “Why are you giving me this?” said Roman.

Peter didn’t say it. But if tonight went all to shit it would be on Roman to stay on the trail. God help us. He changed the subject.

“Do you remember anything from when you were out?” said Peter.

“No,” said Roman. “Well, a feeling. I have a feeling. It’s sort of like déjà vu but not. Like … something that’s gonna happen but I forget what it is. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.”

He looked at the Dragon and knew now what if only he had known sooner. That it stood for something that was more powerful and more important than anything with the name Godfrey on it, and making fun of it had been a boner move.

They were quiet. “Shee-it,” said Peter. “Shee-it,” said Roman.

And then Peter felt it. Heard, that is. It starts when you hear it, in the rocks and trees and sky. Calling out your secret name. He slid off the roof of the car and undressed. He pulled his ponytail free and got on all fours. When the wise wolf stopped shaking and the red mist settled, it looked at Roman. It had the appearance of being stouter than at the previous moon; its winter coat was coming in.

“Peter?” said Roman.

The wolf looked at him but not in recognition, and then it looked away. It walked to the entrance of the mill with its head lowered and scratched at the door for entry. Roman went and pushed it open and stood back as the wolf trotted inside, nose to the ground. Roman waited outside; he accepted finally that the better part of valor was knowing when you were getting in the way. After a minute or two the wolf returned and nosed its way out and turned toward the rail yard.

“Is there a scent?” said Roman. The wolf lifted its nose into the air. “Do you have him?” said Roman.

The wolf shot through the rail yard for the trees. It was immediately apparent nothing on two legs could keep pace. Roman watched the wolf race over the muddy outskirts of the yard and leap over the fence. The hairs on Roman’s arms prickled as he watched the wolf leap: clearing the razor wire with a brute and unsurpassable grace, its coat rippled like a breeze over a wheat field and if its paws never touched ground again Roman would have been just as happy, he would have been just as happy to watch his friend fly forever.

Then, faster than Roman could keep track, things went all to shit. A pained yelp issued from the wolf and it went all cockeyed in the air, body tumbling over legs and skidding into the brush. With whimpering pants it rose, stumbling, and attempted to push forward into the woods, but its shaking legs sent it into a drunken carom, walking into the trunk of a birch.

“Peter!” Roman cried, and he ran to the fence.

The wolf shook its head and attempted a few more steps before its legs gave out and it splayed to the ground.

“What is it!” said Roman, the panic in his chest so overpowering that it didn’t occur to him he was talking to a dog.

A convulsion passed through the wolf and it was still. Roman cried out Peter’s name again but the wolf just lay there. Its tongue lolled. The rise and fall of its ribs. A long, thin tube, Roman now saw, sticking from the ribs. That was the thing, whatever it was, the thing that was hurting his friend. Roman seized the fence and started to climb. There was razor wire along the top but he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He just saw his friend lying there helpless with a thing sticking out, and that was as far as he’d gotten.

“Get down.”

There was a rustling in the brush and a person emerged from a few yards down, on the other side of the fence. It was Chasseur. She was camouflaged in dark khaki that was rank with deer piss to mask her own scent and she carried a rifle with a scope and there was a pack around her shoulders, and Roman realized what was sticking from the wolf: a dart.

“You don’t understand,” he said, still hanging on to the fence. She stopped and shouldered the rifle and sited him.

“Get down,” she said.

Roman dropped to his feet. “Listen to me,” he said.

“Do not attempt eye contact,” she said. “Stay ten paces back. Keep your hands visible. Do not attempt eye contact.”

Roman averted his look. “It’s not him.”

Chasseur set her rifle and her pack on the ground by Peter. She did not show that she heard what he had said.

“I said it’s not him!”

“How do you know that?” she said. Less to entertain the discussion than keep him amused while she did what she had to. She was willing to tranquilize him if pushed, but didn’t want it to come to that. To the eye a shot is only geometry and yardage and wind, but to a still-beating heart pulling a trigger on another living body and watching it fall is to be avoided, it does not give you a good feeling. If you aren’t a

psychopath or a male.

“Because—” said Roman. How did he know that? “I was with him last time. The whole night.” “You’re lying,” she said. She undid the clasps of the pack.

“If you hurt him, you are dead,” said Roman. “Do you hear me? Dead,” he stressed pathetically.

“He’s fine,” said Chasseur. “And if you threaten me again I’ll come over there and break your fucking teeth in.”

She pulled a thin plastic loop from the bag and fitted it around Peter’s hind legs and tightened it. Roman mashed his knuckles into his face, chastened and desperate.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But … I’m telling you, you don’t know what you’re doing right now.”

She fastened another ZipCuff around his forelegs and pulled a conical steel and leather apparatus from the pack.

“It’s not Peter,” said Roman. “We were tracking him. That’s why we came here. To get the scent.”

She tucked Peter’s tongue in his mouth and closed his jaws and fitted the apparatus around his snout. A muzzle.

“Just how much of what you think you know is what he told you?”

Roman looked up helpless at the spreading inkblot night. His foot sank into the ground with a mud belch. Abruptly he snapped his fingers and jabbed emphatically at the fresh paw prints.

“The vargulf doesn’t leave tracks!” he said.

She did not deviate from fitting the straps of the muzzle.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Peter leaves tracks, the killer doesn’t.” “No tracks were found,” she said.

Roman came forward to the fence and she put a warning hand on the rifle butt.

“It’s going to be your fault,” he said. “If there’s another one tonight, it will be your fault.”

She tightened the straps. “Roman,” she said, “what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. This is not your friend. This is not a person. I know it’s hard for you to accept and I believe it’s hard for him too. I believe that you wanted to find the monster, and so did he. Because he couldn’t know that about himself. You can’t know that about yourself and continue being a person.”

Roman shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just bullshit.”

She gave Peter’s restraints a once-over and stood. “This is an animal,” she said. “That’s what it is.” Roman looked pleadingly at her. She repeated her admonition about eye contact.

“If you’re wrong, someone is going to die tonight,” said Roman. “Can’t you see I’m just trying to help? Why won’t you let me help?”

“Because you don’t believe in God,” she said.

She pulled the dart from Peter. “Please go to your car and leave of your own volition. I’m going to be really pissed off if you make me shoot you.”

For a moment Roman was still except for the play of shadow on the hollows of his clenching jaw. Then he turned his back to the fence and walked away.

“God doesn’t want you to be happy, He wants you to be strong,” she said.

She looked down at the truly marvelous specimen at her feet breathing the last of its free air. Questions of right and justness aside, the wolf would surely die in a cage. Its kind didn’t know how to live in one. She knelt and placed her palms flat on its chest and belly and felt its breathing and permitted herself this one moment of pity before what had to be done was done. The death of freedom was always something to be mourned.

* * *

The van was parked along the train tracks a half mile away. Chasseur sat for a few moments on the back bumper and caught her breath, folding forward and pulling her lower back into a long stretch. It hurt more

than it used to, humping a load that far. She didn’t know whether it was her or this case, but it used to be that being in the field made her feel younger. She got up to close the rear doors but stopped, glancing a moment at the mud-caked paws. Doubt gnawed, but the method prevailed: replicable observation and measurement of material phenomena. The sanity of science of apostolic necessity in trafficking with mystery, God the most necessary hypothesis. She shut the wise wolf in.

“Take this sword: its brightness stands for faith, its point for hope, its guard for charity,” she said.

She looked out at the river. On the other bank several streetlamps dotted their reflections on the water, making a series of stuttering exclamation points !!! She took out her phone. Holding her fingertips to the crucifix around her neck but not quite touching. She dialed.

“He’s in bracelets,” she said. “Make a bed.”

She hung up and watched the light of her LCD screen slowly fade, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van and came face-to-face with Olivia Godfrey.

“Hello again,” said Olivia. She wore a satin evening gown as white as a grin and Chasseur could not account for how so glaringly absurd a thing could have gotten the drop on her, but it wasn’t a priority.

Chasseur unholstered her .38 and aimed it at Olivia. Pulling a trigger on another body has its exceptions.

Olivia regarded her with a cocked head. “The cross you wear,” she said, “it’s not of your order.” “Mrs. Godfrey,” said Chasseur, “I am going to give you one opportunity to slowly place your hands on

the vehicle, and if you take one step toward me I will kill you.”

Olivia’s head cocked the other way. “Saint Jude. Oh, Little Mouse: What makes you feel so lost?” She stepped forward. Her gown shimmered like the risen moon in the river.

* * *

And Peter woke.

He didn’t know what had happened or where he was. He didn’t know shit about shit. This is no way to go through life, he thought. He focused. He was nude and in a strange room—but he had been here before, the night before—he was in the guest bed at Godfrey House. And someone was standing over him. Roman. Roman was waiting for him to wake up. It was in his posture and his eyes. Roman had bad news.

Peter tried to sit up, but this was ambitious. There was a heavy groan and he realized it was coming from him. He tried to pinpoint the last thing he could remember but it was like looking at shapes underwater: nothing resolved into actual thingness and anything might eat you.

My heart really breaks for Peter here. He didn’t deserve any of this, and it is with great melancholy that I picture him peeing on a tree, a lattice of diamonds imprinted on his bare back from the hammock, or pulling his hair fully around his face to become Cousin Itt, or chasing a squirrel—too slow!—up a gully. All in all, Peter’s love of being Peter was so great that like an overfilled bucket of paint it slopped over even in the smallest moments of his day. No, Peter didn’t deserve any of this. Though it could be said it was his fault.

“What happened?” Peter said. It was like sandbags were tied to his words. “Alexa and Alyssa Sworn,” said Roman. “The vargulf got the sheriff’s daughters.”

Peter looked at the ceiling. He had no idea what to do with this information; this was not a respectable way to go through life. Then he snapped upright and seized Roman’s arm.

“Lynda,” he said.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 619