He became aware of her long bare legs. The flimsiness of her panties. The way her red T-shirt had pulled up to expose her flat belly. The swell of her full breasts, which seemed even fuller than they were because of the leanness of the rest of her. The sharp outlines of her ni**les against the material of the shirt. The smoothness of her skin. Her smell.

Revulsion burst through him like pus from a secret inner abscess, and he let go of her. Turning, he saw that the cats were looking at him. Worse, they were still lying where they had been when he had pulled Violet from her chair, as if they had not been frightened by his outrage even briefly. He knew their equanimity meant that Violet had not been frightened, either, and that her erotic response to his fury—and her mocking smile—was not in the least feigned.

Verbina was slumped in her chair, her head bowed, for she was no more able to look at him directly now than she had ever been. But she was grinning, and her left hand was between her legs, her long fingers tracing lazy circles on the thin material of her panties, under which lay the dark cleft of her sex. He needed no more proof that some of Violet’s sick desire had communicated itself to Verbina, and he turned away from her too.

He tried to leave the room quickly, but without looking as if he was fleeing from them.

In his scented bedroom, safely among his mother’s belongings, Candy locked the door. He was not sure why he felt safer with the lock engaged, though he was certain it was not because he feared his sisters. There was nothing about them to fear. They were to be pitied.

For a while he sat in Roselle’s rocker, remembering the times, as a child, when he’d curled in her lap and contentedly sucked blood from a self-inflicted wound in her thumb or in the meaty part of her palm. Once, but unfortunately only once, she had made a half-inch incision in one of her br**sts and held him to her bosom while he drank her blood from the same flesh where other mothers gave, and other children received, the milk of maternity.

He had been five years old that night when, in this very room and in this chair, he tasted the blood of her breast. Frank, seven years old then, had been asleep in the room at the end of the hall, and the twins, who’d only recently reached their first birthday, were asleep in a crib in the room across from their mother’s. Being alone with her when all the others slept—oh, how unique and treasured that made him feel, especially since she was sharing with him the rich liquid of her arteries and veins, which she never offered to his siblings; it was a sacred communion, dispensed and received, that remained their secret.

He recalled being in something of a swoon that night, not merely because of the heavy taste of her rich blood and the unbounded love that was represented by the gift of it, but because of the metronomic rocking of the chair and the lulling rhythms of her voice. As he sucked, she smoothed his hair away from his brow and spoke to him of God’s intricate plan for the world. She explained, as she had done many times before, that God condoned the use of violence when it was committed in the defense of those who were good and righteous. She told him how God had created men who thrived on blood, so they might be used as the earthly instruments of God’s vengeance on behalf of the righteous. Theirs was a righteous family, she said, and God had sent Candy to them to be their protector. None of this was new. But though his mother had spoken of these things many times during their secret communions , Candy never grew tired of hearing them again. Children often relish the retelling of a favorite story. And as with certain particularly magical tales, this story somehow did not become more familiar with retelling but curiously more mysterious and appealing.

That night in his sixth year, however, the story took a new turn. The time had come, his mother said, for him to apply the truly amazing talents he had been given, and embark upon the mission for which God had created him. He had begun to exhibit his phenomenal talents when he was three, the same age at which Frank’s far more meager gifts had become evident. His telekinetic abilities—primarily his talent for telekinetic transportation of his own body—particularly enchanted Roselle, and she quickly saw the potential. They would never want for money as long as he could teleport at night into places where cash and valuables were locked away: bank vaults; the jewelry-rich, walk-in safes in Beverly Hills mansions. And if he could materialize within the homes of the Pollard family’s enemies, while they slept, vengeance could be taken without fear of discovery or reprisal.

“There’s a man named Salfont,” his mother cooed to him as he took his nourishment from her wounded breast. “He’s a lawyer, one of those jackals who prey on upstanding folks, nothing good about him at all, not that one. He handled my father’s estate—that’s your dear grandpa, little Candy—probated the will, charged too much, way too much, he was greedy. They’re all greedy, those lawyers.”

The quiet, gentle tone in which she spoke was at odds with the anger she was expressing, but that contradiction added to the sweet, hypnotic quality of her message.

“I’ve tried for years to get part of the fee returned to me, like I deserve. I’ve gone to other lawyers, but they all say his fee was reasonable, they all stick up for each other, they’re alike, peas in a pod, rotten little peas in rotten little pods. Took him to court, but judges are nothing except lawyers in black robes, they make me sick, the greedy lot of them. I’ve worried at this for years, little Candy, can’t get it out of my mind. That Donald Salfont, living in his big house in Montecito, overcharging people, overcharging me, he ought to have to pay for that. Don’t you think so, little Candy? Don’t you think he ought to pay?”

He was five years old and not yet big for his age, as he would be from the time he was nine or ten. Even if he could teleport into Salfont’s bedroom, the advantage of surprise might not be sufficient to ensure success. If either Salfont or his wife happened to be awake when Candy arrived, or if the first slash of the knife failed to kill the lawyer and brought him awake in a defensive panic, Candy would not be able to overpower him. He wouldn’t be in danger of getting caught or harmed, for he could teleport home in a wink; but he would risk being recognized. Police would believe a man like Salfont, even as regarded such a fantastic accusation as murder lodged against a five-year-old boy. They would visit the Pollard place, asking questions, poking around, and God knew what they might find or come to suspect.

“So you can’t kill him, though he deserves it,” Roselle whispered as she rocked her favorite child. She stared down intently into his eyes as he looked up from her exposed breast. “Instead, what you have to do is take something from him as vengeance for the money he took from me, something precious to him. There’s a new baby in the Salfont house. I read about it in the paper a few months ago, a little girl baby they called Rebekah Elizabeth. What kind of name is that for a girl, I ask you? Sounds high-falutin’ to me, the kind of name a fancy lawyer and his wife give a baby ’cause they think them and theirs is better than other people. Elizabeth is a queen’s name, you see, and you just look up what Rebekah is in the Bible, see if they don’t think way too much of themselves and their little brat. Rebekah ... she’s almost six months now, they’ve had her long enough to miss her when she’s gone, miss her bad. I’ll drive you past their house tomorrow, my precious little Candy boy, let you see where it is, and tomorrow night you’ll go there and visit the Lord’s vengeance on them, my vengeance. They’ll say a rat got into the room, or something of the sort, and they’ll blame themselves until the day they’re dead too.”

The throat of Rebekah Salfont had been tender, her blood salty. Candy enjoyed the adventure of it, the thrill of entering the house of strangers without their permission or knowledge. Killing the girl while grownups slept in the adjoining room, unaware, filled him with a sense of power. He was just a boy, yet he slipped past their defenses and struck a blow for his mother, which in a way made him the man of the Pollard house. That heady feeling added an element of glory to the excitement of the kill.

His mother’s requests for vengeance were thereafter irresistible.

For the first few years of his mission, infants and very young children were his only prey. Sometimes, in order not to present a pattern to the police, he did not bite them but disposed of them in other ways, and occasionally he took hold of them and teleported out of the house with them, so no body was ever found.

Even so, if Roselle’s enemies had all been from in and around Santa Barbara, the pattern could not have been hidden. But often she required vengeance against people in far places, about whom she read in newspapers and magazines.

He remembered, in particular, a family in New York State, who won millions of dollars in the lottery. His mother had felt that their good fortune had been at the expense of the Pollard family, and that they were too greedy to be permitted to live. Candy had been fourteen at the time, and he had not understood his mother’s reasoning-but he had not questioned it, either. She was the only source of truth to him, and the thought of disobedience never crossed his mind. He had killed all five members of that family in New York, then burned their house to the ground with their bodies in it.

His mother’s thirst for vengeance followed a predictable cycle. Immediately after Candy killed someone for her, she was happy, filled with plans for the future; she would bake special treats for him and sing melodically while she worked in the kitchen, and she would begin a new quilt or an elaborate needlepoint project. But over the next four weeks her happiness would dim like a light bulb on a rheostat, and almost one month to the day after the killing, having lost interest in baking and crafts, she would begin to talk about other people who had wronged her and, by extension, the Pollard family. Within two to four more weeks, she would have settled on a target, and Candy would be dispatched to fulfill his mission. Consequently, he killed on only six or seven occasions each year.

That frequeney satisfied Roselle, but the older Candy got, the less it satisfied him. He had not merely acquired a thirst for blood but a craving that occasionally overwhelmed him. The thrill of the hunt also intoxicated him, and he longed for it as an alcoholic longed for the bottle. Not least of all, the mindless hostility of the world toward his blessed mother motivated him to kill more often. Sometimes it seemed that virtually everyone was against her, scheming to harm her physically or to take money that was rightfully hers. She had no dearth of enemies. He remembered days when fear oppressed her; then at her direction all the blinds and drapes were drawn, the doors locked and sometimes even barricaded with chairs and other furniture, against the onslaught of adversaries who never came but who might have. On those bad days she became despondent and told him that so many people were out to get her that even he could not protect her forever. When he begged her to turn him loose, she refused and only said, “It’s hopeless.”

Then, as now, he tried to supplement the approved murders with his forays into the canyons in search of small animals. But those blood feasts, rich as they sometimes were, never quenched his thirst as thoroughly as when the vessel was human.

Saddened by too many memories, Candy rose from the rocking chair and nervously paced the room. The blind was up, and he glanced with increasing interest at the night beyond the window.

After failing to catch Frank and the stranger who had teleported into the backyard with him, after the confrontation with Violet had taken that unexpected turn and left him with undissipated rage, he was smoldering, hot to kill, but in need of a target. With no enemy of the family in sight, he would have to slaughter either innocent people or the small creatures that lived in the canyons. The problem was—he dreaded evoking his sainted mother’s disappointment, up there in Heaven, yet he had no appetite for the thin blood of timid beasts.

His frustration and need built by the minute. He knew he was going to do something he would later regret, something that would make Roselle turn her face from him for a time.

Then, just when he felt he might explode, he was saved by the intrusion of a genuine enemy.

A hand touched the back of his head.

He whirled around, feeling the hand withdraw as he turned.

It had been a phantom hand. No one was there.

But he knew it was the same presence that he had sensed in the canyon last night. Someone out there, not of the Pollard family, had psychic ability of his own, and the very fact that Roselle was not his mother made him an enemy to be found and eliminated. The same person had visited Candy several times earlier in the afternoon, reaching out tentatively, probing at him but not making full contact.

Candy returned to the rocking chair. If a real enemy was going to put in an appearance, it would be worth waiting for him.

A few minutes later, he felt the touch again. Light, hesitant, quickly withdrawn.

He smiled. He started rocking. He even hummed softly—one of his mother’s favorite songs.

Banking the coals of rage eventually made them burn brighter. By the time the shy visitor grew bolder, the fire would be white hot, and the flames would consume him.

49

AT TEN minutes to seven, the doorbell rang. Felina Karaghiosis did not hear it, of course. But each room of the house had a small red signal lamp in one comer or another, and she could not miss the flashing light that was activated by the bell.

She went into the foyer and looked through the sidelight next to the front door. When she saw Alice Kasper, a neighbor from three doors down the street, she switched off the dead bolt, removed the security chain from its slot, and let her in.

“Hi, kid. How ya doin’?”

I like your hair, Felina signed.

“Do ya really? Just got it cut, and the girl said did I want the same old same old, or did I want to catch up with the times, and I thought what the hell. I’m not too old to be sexy, do ya think?”

Alice was only thirty-three, five years older than Felina. She had exchanged her trademark blond curls for a more modern cut that would require a new source of income just to pay for all the mousse she was going to use, but she looked great.

Come in. Want a drink?

“I’d love a drink, kid, and right now I could use six of ‘em, but I gotta say no. My in-laws came over, and we’re about to either play cards with ’em or shoot ’em—it depends on their attitude.”

Of all the people Felina knew in her day-to-day life, Alice was the only one, other than Clint, who understood sign language. Given the fact that most people harbored a prejudice against the deaf, to which they could not admit but on which they acted, Alice was her only girlfriend. But Felina happily would have given up their friendship if Mark Kasper—Alice’s son, for whom she had learned sign language—had not been born deaf.

“Why I came over, we got a call from Clint, asking me to tell ya he’s not on his way home yet, but he expects to get here maybe by eight. Since when does he work so late?”