Instead of saying hello, she said, “Justin?” as if unsure it was really him on the other end.

“Hey.”

His voice was subdued, but it was him.

Before he could say anything else, she said, “I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that.”

He didn’t respond right away, and she thought he was still angry with her. She was going to apologize further, but he said, “I got the CT scan results this morning.”

She was confused. She’d known he’d had a doctor’s appointment, but he’d said nothing to her about needing a CT scan.

“Justin, what are you—”

“I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was sure. I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I just wanted to pretend that everything was normal for a little while longer, you know? Still, that’s no excuse for keeping you in the dark like I did. Sorry.”

Lori was stunned. After everything that had happened since last night at FoodSaver, she’d come to expect that her life was going to continue to get increasingly fucked up. But finding out that her boyfriend had some kind of ongoing medical issue – evidently a serious one – that he hadn’t told her about seemed equally as surreal as sadistic occultists in blood-red robes and black cars traveling an ebon road beneath a starless sky.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’ve been feeling rundown for a couple months, so much so that I’ve been guzzling coffee by the gallon trying to stay functional. It helped, but not as much as I’d hoped. I decided to go to the doctor for a checkup, and the doctor ordered a series of tests. X-rays indicated the presence of shadowy masses on my lungs, so the doctor ordered a CT scan.”

The word shadowy caught her attention as much if not more than masses. She imagined night-black multijointed fingers entering Justin’s mouth, reaching down into his lungs, infecting them with darkness.

“It looks like cancer,” Justin said. “How bad it is, we won’t know until we do a biopsy. I’ve got one scheduled for next week. But the doctor’s already talking about aggressive chemotherapy, so I know he thinks it’s pretty bad.”

Lori wanted to say something to comfort Justin, but nothing came to her. What can you say to someone who’s just told you that their body has betrayed them in one of the most horrible ways imaginable?

“Where are you? I want to see you.”

In an awful way, she was almost glad Justin had called her with this news. It gave her something to focus on besides herself and the shitshow her life had become in the last twenty-four hours. She would go to Justin, comfort him as best she could, and in so doing hopefully forget – if only for a little while – about the Cabal. She knew this was selfish, that it made her a terrible person, but there it was.

“I’m at work. I wanted to try to keep the rest of my day as normal as possible, take my mind off—” he paused, “—off it. It’s not really working, though.” He let out a mirthless laugh.

She wanted to tell him to leave work so they could be together, but she didn’t. Doing so would be focusing on her needs, not his. Maybe she wasn’t so selfish after all.

“Then how about after work? I could come over to your place.”

Justin almost never came to her apartment. Even if Larry wasn’t there, his presence was – at least that’s what Justin said – so when they spent time together, it was usually at his condo.

“Sure,” he said, voice devoid of emotion. “That would be great.” Another pause, then, “I should go. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do this afternoon.”

“Okay. I’ll come over around six. Sound good?”

He didn’t respond to her question, and she wondered if he’d even heard it.

“Bye,” he said, then disconnected.

Normally, he told her he loved her when he said goodbye to her over the phone. It always made her uncomfortable, but now that he hadn’t said the words, she was surprised by how much she missed hearing them.

She put her phone back in her purse and sat there for several moments, trying to absorb what Justin had told her. Her initial reaction was that he was too young to get cancer. She knew this wasn’t true, though. Cancer could strike at any time during a person’s life, and while she associated lung cancer with smoking, she also knew that a person who’d never touched a cigarette could also contract it. Still, she couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that Justin’s diagnosis was related to the Cabal somehow. Perhaps they’d caused his cancer in order to punish her further. She recognized this as another egocentric thought – that she was trying to make Justin’s cancer about her when she should be thinking about him. And even if the Cabal wanted to harm Justin to punish her, it wasn’t as if they’d made him sick overnight. He hadn’t told her he was getting a CT scan, but he would’ve had to have had it done at least a few days ago in order to get the results this morning. It took time for a pathologist to examine the scan’s results and then send a report to Justin’s doctor. Whatever abilities the Cabal possessed, they couldn’t reach backward in time to give Justin cancer. Then again, who knew what they could do and what sort of unnatural laws governed their actions?

If Justin’s cancer had been caused by the Cabal, however they’d managed it, that meant no one she knew was safe. They’d already done something to Katie and Melinda. Who else might be next? Reeny and her family? Their parents? Larry? Her clients at the clinic? She couldn’t let any harm come to them, but she had no idea how to prevent the Cabal from hurting them.

Or did she?

She remembered Reeny’s words about the Cabal.

If you can figure out what they think you’ve done, then you can make amends for it, whatever that entails.

Like in a twelve-step program, Lori thought. She’d never gone through such a program herself, but she’d worked with clients who had. She couldn’t remember which of the twelve steps making amends was, but she knew it was an important one. Maybe Reeny had been on to something. At least it gave her a place to start. But who had she wronged to such a degree that she needed to formally apologize to them? She was hardly a perfect human being, but she didn’t careen thoughtlessly through life, causing damage to others along the way. She wasn’t impulsive, always tried to think through her actions and anticipate their consequences before doing anything. She worked hard to avoid hurting anybody. So what could she possibly have done that the Cabal considered so bad that it warranted harassing her? No, more than that – torturing her. There wasn’t anything she could think of.

That’s not exactly true, and you know it.

Maybe she thought about the consequences of her actions these days, but she hadn’t always been that kind of person, had she?

Aashrita.

The moment she thought the name, her mind fought to snatch it back, to drag it down into the depths of her consciousness and bury it once more, as it did whenever she thought of Aashrita. But she didn’t let it happen this time. There was too much at stake.

Aashrita, she thought. Aashrita, Aashrita, Aashrita.

She backed out of her parking space, then headed for the road—

—and Woodlawn Cemetery.

Chapter Six

Debra Foster parked her blue Ford Mustang – with a bumper sticker that said I’d rather be in the saddle – in front of Get Moving! at roughly the same time as Lori and Reeny left A Taste of Thai. She was pissed off, but that wasn’t anything special. She was always pissed off about something. At the moment, she was angry that she couldn’t find her goddamned reading glasses. She’d looked everywhere for the fucking things, but she’d had no success locating them. When she’d been younger, she thought that old people who wore their reading glasses tethered to a loop of string around their necks were pathetic. Obviously, they were so damned senile they’d lose their things if they didn’t keep them on their person at all times. Now she was one of those old people – although she no longer considered being in her fifties as old – and she misplaced her reading glasses often.

She wasn’t certain that she’d had them with her when she’d arrived for her physical therapy appointment with Lori, but she’d decided to retrace her steps and see if she’d accidentally left them somewhere. She was going in reverse, so she’d start at Get Moving! and if she didn’t find her glasses here, she’d return to the diner where she’d eaten breakfast this morning and see if she’d left them on the table when she’d departed. She knew she could simply buy a new pair. Non-prescription ones didn’t cost much, and you could find them at any grocery or pharmacy. But it was the principle of the goddamned thing. They were her glasses and she was determined to find them, even if she had to spend the rest of her day driving all over the fucking town.

Lori had once commented on her stubbornness, saying that if she directed it toward her physical therapy, kept up with her exercises at home, she’d be sure to see results. Debra knew the woman had only been doing her job, but she’d almost told her to go fuck herself just the same.

She turned off the car, and when she moved to open the driver’s-side door a bolt of white-hot pain lanced through her left shoulder. She’d been taking over-the-counter painkillers and anti-inflammatories like they were candy for the last several weeks, but they only did so much to blunt the pain. She drew in a hissing breath, muttered, “Fuck,” and pushed the door open. She got out of the car slowly, hoping to avoid setting off any more pain, and then gently closed the door behind her. Even though she used her right hand to do this, her shoulder gave a twinge, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as before, and she counted this as a minor victory.

She knew her injury was her goddamned fault. She’d kept horses ever since she’d been a little girl, and she’d been cleaning stalls all this time. The sawdust you put down in a horse’s stall absorbed their urine when they pissed, and when they pissed, they pissed a flood. They were big animals, after all. The sawdust grew sodden and heavy, and when you shoveled it into a bucket to remove it, you had to be careful not to put in too much at a time, or else the bucket would be too heavy to carry. Last month, there’d been a stretch of several days when it had rained like a sonofabitch – strong winds, lightning, thunder, the whole fucking deal – and she’d kept the horses, a quarter horse named Lucky and a Friesian named Gustav, in the barn until the storms finally blew over. When she let them out into the field, she had days’ worth of manure and urine-soaked sawdust to clean up. She’d been impatient, and instead of filling buckets up halfway, dumping them outside, and returning for more, she filled them up full to overflowing and struggled to lift and carry them out of the barn. She knew better, that was the hell of it, but she’d done it anyway, and in the process fucked up her shoulder big time.

She lived alone – sharing living space with another person would irritate the hell out of her, and she knew she’d be no picnic to cohabitate with either – so she had no one to help her with the chores around the farm. Thanks to her goddamned shoulder, everything took twice as long for her to do now. She was convinced her shoulder would eventually heal on its own, but in the meantime, she needed better meds to help her function. Her fucking doctor insisted she try physical therapy for a month before the bastard would prescribe heavy-duty painkillers and muscle relaxers for her, and while she resented the hell out of him for it, she was determined to get through the stupid therapy and get her drugs. The staff at Get Moving! were nice enough, if a little too fanatical in their devotion to the great god of Physical Rehabilitation, but she still hated going there, and she resented the fact that she had to return. One visit a day was way more than enough for her.

But she needed her fucking glasses, couldn’t read a goddamned thing without them.

When she walked into Get Moving!, the first thing she noticed was an odd smell. She’d lived in the country all her life, and she knew the smell of meat starting to rot, knew the smell of spilled blood. The mingled odors triggered an alarm in her subconscious, but she was so damned pissed about her glasses that she ignored it. The woman who was always at the front – Debra could never remember her name – wasn’t there. Maybe she’d gone to lunch, but if so, someone should’ve been covering for her until she got back. At the very least, she could’ve left a note that said when she’d return. But there was nothing. The woman’s absence irritated her. She’d hoped to ask her if anyone had found her reading glasses and turned them in. She had no intention of taking a seat in the waiting area and flipping through old magazines with wrinkled covers and torn pages until the woman returned. Debra had things to do. She had a life.

Fuck it.

She walked around the semicircular counter, intending to look for her glasses herself, go through every drawer if she had to. But when she got to the other side, she saw that the space wasn’t empty. The office chair was pushed up to the desk, and the woman – Katherine? Kathy? – was crouched on the floor, hunched over something. Her head was pointed away from Debra, so she couldn’t see what the woman had, but she was making wet chewing noises. Debra’s subconscious sent up another warning, this one louder than the last.

Get the fuck out!