Iris stirred lazily, enjoying the wash of the warm sheets against her skin, a smile coming to her lips - she couldn't quite recall, in the misted realm between dreams and lucidity, precisely why she felt so contented, but she gave her heart leave to be cradled by the feeling nonetheless, knowing the rarity of the moment and wishing to savor it for as long as she was allowed to.

That ended up, as it usually did, being not as long as she would have liked. The cradle tipped over when she opened her eyes, spilling the morning back into her head in a jumble of memories. Justin, dead and alive and wanted both ways; Sofie, called home to darkness and joy. And though the bed Iris slept in was hot, the sources of that heat were absent: neither her brother nor her niece were where they had been when had last closed her eyes.

She remembered awkward mornings, when she or Justin would slip silently from whomever's bed they had occupied the night before, when acknowledgement of their nocturnal deeds seemed too onerous an undertaking. Guilty mornings, whose frequency had waxed and waned throughout the years. Had he left her again in the remnants of his shame? But that shame, he had professed, had been for this, only this - that he had not woken with her always. And what of Sofie? Sofie who had held the hiltless blade, Sofie who was young and beautiful and his daughter?

Iris left the bed and found her brother's robe still hanging by its hook on the door - she must have slept through his dressing for the day. Pulling it on, she was unable to keep a sigh from escaping her anxious lips as his scent and a stark need to see him again, to feel him by her side and reaffirm his existence, enveloped her.

If the slant of the sun through the curtains was anything to go by, it was late in the afternoon. Justin was usually in his study about this time, but today had been far from usual. Knotting the sash of his robe around her waist, she exited his bedroom, then padded silently down the stairs, skipping the step second from the top that never failed to betray a trespasser with a complaintive creak. She hadn't quite reached the bottom when voices drifted from the dining room, her brother's and another's, alien to her ears.

Iris's heart knotted together with her stomach. Another meeting she was not privy to, another shadow she could not see into beyond the light of her own much-dimmed nimbus. His promises had been meaningless, teething rings to distract from her discomfort but not assuage it. Nothing had changed.

And yet, Iris found as she stepped into the hallway, the sliding doors that led to the room were open; but she reined in her hope, knowing that this oversight did not necessarily imply an invitation. Not wanting to be cut out of the conversation before she had even entered into it, she tarried near the doors, unseen, and listened.

"Reverend, you must understand. The reports say that you had some sort of. . .episode. . .while riding the Ferris wheel. Witnesses claim that you seemed to be in a great deal of pain, that your eyes turned black, and then you tore off your cassock, revealing a large tattoo of a tree on your torso. The ride malfunctioned - some say it stopped at your command - and then you tore off into the crowd, into the tent of a healer by the name of. . ." There was a pause as the speaker presumably consulted his notes. ". . .Benjamin Saint John. They say you cut a swathe through half-a-dozen folk with a reaping hook before going after the healer himself. Now I'll admit, some of these accusations seem to be the product of mass hysteria, the eyes and the like, but they all of 'em say that it was you, Reverend, that you done these things."

"You've seen the atrocities Hollywood can produce. Lon Chaney makes himself believably grotesque for every role. Amos and Andy blackface for a living. Paint and glue is all it takes, gentlemen, and with the blessed success of my ministry, my face is hardly an obscure one with little to go on for copying."

Iris bit down on her bottom lip. So he was not going to excuse his actions - he was not going to take responsibility for them at all.

A chair creaked as the other man shifted uncomfortably. "Be that as it may—"

"Brother Varlyn," Justin interrupted him (Iris wondered when Stroud had returned, and where he had been, if not seeing to herself or Sofie), "if you would be good enough to fetch Levi Tracey? He's posted at the gate."

Heavy footsteps led out of the dining room as Stroud obeyed. Iris flattened herself against the wall so that she wouldn't be seen as he passed through the hallway near the front of the house, but the hulking man didn't so much as glance in her direction, set determinedly upon his task.

Iris had her own to undertake (I can protect you).

Pulling Justin's robe more tightly around her shoulders, she affected a dazed, sleepy look, one that begged to be caught off guard, and entered the dining room.

Eight stony eyes eyes shifted in her direction. Justin waited a beat before allowing his gaze to follow. Upon sight of her, a smile that quickened her heart spread across his features.

Alexsei.

"Iris," he said, "awake at last."

Slowly, she came to stand near his chair, and frowned, brow furrowed in confusion, at the policemen gathered in their home. There were four in total, though only one - whom she recognized as Roy Fiske, the San Benito county sheriff - was seated at the table opposite Justin. Sofie was nowhere to be seen. "What's going on?"

"My sister hasn't been feeling well," Justin explained to the officers. "Last night was very trying on her nerves."

"Ah," Fiske cleared his throat. "We're very sorry to hear that, Miss Crowe. But if you wouldn't mind - there's a few questions we'd like to ask you about your brother's activities last night."

Iris blinked at him, feigning puzzlement, and shook her head. "I don't understand - his activities?"

Fiske exchanged a glance with the deputy to his right, then looked again to Justin. "Reverend, if you could excuse us for a moment—"

"Nonsense," said Justin, extending an arm to grasp Iris's hand. "My sister and I have no secrets between us, Mister Fiske. Iris, these upstanding men of the law believe I slaughtered five members of my congregation last night, including Norman Balthus."

Eyes waking, widening with horror, mouth parting in shock. ". . .What?" she breathed.

If Fiske had fur, it would have stood on end. "Now that's not entirely—"

"That's preposterous," Iris broke in, ignoring him. "That's insane, Justin wasn't even at the carnival last night!"

"Miss Crowe, the reports all say that you were there with him, that you two spoke, were seen on the Ferris wheel together."

"That monster was not my brother!" She felt Justin's hand tighten around her own. "I knew it the minute he claimed I would ride the Ferris wheel with him. I'm deathly afraid of heights - do you honestly think my own brother would force something like that on me?" Now it was her turn to squeeze, her nails digging into his palms.

"But you went along with it?"

Iris laughed as if the question were the most absurd thing she had ever heard. "What other choice did I have? To expose him as an imposter, to be seen trying to claw my brother's face off? in front of the migrants, the children? and with the guards none the wiser, after what happened with Norman—" Her voice broke on her former guardian's name. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, and found that the tears came easily. "I didn't know what to do, other than wait until the ride was over, and then try to explain things to Brother Stroud and hope to high Heaven he didn't think I was crazy."

"If that was the case, didn't you wonder where your real brother was?"

"Of course I did!" Iris snapped. "After that. . .that man took off running, I couldn't find Brother Stroud, so I went back to the house. I found Justin in bed, asleep. I couldn't wake him up at first, I thought that he'd been. . ." She trailed off, took a shuddery breath. "But he was just drugged, thank God."

"Why didn't you call the police?"

"A person doesn't always think clearly in stressful situations, Mister Fiske. I was simply too concerned for my brother's welfare to think of it."

"Are you aware of what happened at the carnival after you left?"

"Yes." She swallowed, allowing her distraughtness at the memory of those hours to show in her face. "Our maid, Sofie, informed me. She had gone down to the camps earlier in the evening, and returned to the house not long after I did. She didn't see what happened, but she heard. . .the poor dear will never forgive herself for taking the evening off. It was one of her duties, you see, to look after Norman. . ." Again Iris shook her head. "How dare you. How dare you accuse my brother of murdering our own father! Justin is a man of God!"

Justin rose from his chair and placed a consolatory arm around her shoulders. "There, there, dear. Calm yourself."

Fiske looked skeptically between the two siblings, and seemed about to say something when the sound of the front door opening stifled his words. A moment later, Varlyn Stroud appeared in the dining room, one hand clasped around the arm of a nervous-looking migrant.

"Ah," Justin smiled. "Brother Levi. You were stationed at the gate four nights ago, is that correct?"

The man shifted, twisting his hat nervously in his hands. "Uh, yessir, I was. Me an' a few other folks - Caleb an' Rufus an'—"

"And you saw something out of the ordinary?"

Tracey reared back a step like a spooked horse, raising his hands in surrender. "No sir! I mean yessir - I mean, that is. . .I don't know what I saw, sir."

"Try to describe it," Justin said patiently. Tracey hesitated. "Please," he urged.

". . .A man in a car, I ain't never seen him before - he told me to open the gate."

"And you obeyed him? why?"

Tracey swallowed, his gaze shifting around the room as he inwardly debated with himself over the validity of the phrase "speak of the devil." "Somethin' about him weren't right. His eyes. . .his eyes were black as tarred marbles, an' he. . ."

"Go on."

"I ain't never felt nothin' like him before, not in my whole life. That man weren't like any kind o' man I ever met, an' I never wanna meet another like 'im."

"Aside from his eyes, what did he look like?"

Tracey shrugged. "White. Grayish hair, long - a bit like that German feller's, that smart one. Fifty, maybe, fifty-five. Couldn't tell how tall he were, on account o' him bein' in the car."

Justin nodded. "Thank you, Brother Levi. Your testimony is invaluable to me. Brother Varlyn?"

Stroud produced a weathered postcard from his pocket and dropped it on the table in front of Sheriff Fiske. Upside-down to her though it was, Iris could see that it depicted a man dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, holding two limp white bundles in his hands - chickens?

"A acquaintance of mine," Justin explained, "a Mister Wilfred Talbot Smith, gave this to me a few weeks ago. The man in the picture is called Henry Scudder. He's a carnival geek, and the father of this 'Benjamin Saint John'. An old friend of Scudder's, Smith cautioned me about the man's mental instability and dislike of me - I believe he and the boy are rather overzealous Baptists. I paid heed to Smith's warning, of course, and tightened my own security, understandably believing that Scudder and his son, if they wished to cause me harm, would do so only to me I never once imagined that they would conspire so deeply against my ministry, that they would hurt - kill - so many, in the name of destroying all the good we have worked for here. . ." He sighed, shook his head sadly.

Fiske held the picture up for Tracey to see. "This him?"

Tracey blanched, and his eyes grew wide as saucers as he nodded. "He's the one. He's the one I saw."

Scudder, Iris thought, her head filling with images of scorched flesh, of blunt teeth ripping apart gristle, spooning marrow into a carrion-stained mouth.

"If you knew this man and his son were carny folk," asked Fiske, returning his attention to Justin as he pocketed the postcard, "why did you allow the carnival into New Canaan?"

"That was my doing," Iris confessed. "God forgive me, I didn't know - oh, Justin, I'm so sorry!" A part of her meant it. The apologies of the morning had been his to her, but she was not without her own to make. She wondered how aware he was of that, how long he would wait for her to return the gesture. As he ran his hand along her upper arm, dragging his fingertips over the bunched fabric of a too-large sleeve, she knew that the answers were Very, and Not long.

Yet he was her brother - Alexsei Belyakov, Justin Crowe, the Usher of Destruction - and despite his greed found gratification in the struggle. She had known that about him since she'd been twenty-one years old, when she'd learned to tell the incredibly harsh distinction between impatience and lust for anticipation.

"Shhh," he half-soothed, half-hissed. "None of that. You acted in ignorance. The blame lies with me for not mentioning it sooner - I wanted to spare you worrying, and instead I have brought grief to all of my disciples."

Fiske pursed his lips and squinted slightly, as if attempting to hold on to a fleeing thought. "And the tattoo?"

Justin took his arm from around his sister and, without haste, began to unbutton his cassock. Iris held her breath, sucked her bottom lip into her mouth as the groping branches of the tree, now clean and pure sable, came into view. She looked to the policemen, to Tracey, for their reactions—

—but there was barely a change in their demeanors. They couldn't see it.

"Well, I'd say that pretty much settles it," said Fiske, rising from his seat. "We'll be putting out a search for Saint John and this Scudder feller."

"See that you do," Justin agreed, nodding once. "Keep me informed of your progress. It is my most fervent prayer that we will see the perpetrators of these acts brought to justice. I trust you gentlemen can show yourselves out?"

"Of course." Fiske replaced his hat upon his head, tipped it. "Good day to you, Reverend, Miss Crowe." He nodded at Stroud and Tracey ("Brother Levi, you're free to go"), then followed the other officers out of the room.

Once she heard the front door close, Iris took a step away from her brother as he buttoned up his cassock and folded her arms across her chest. "Where's Sofie?"

Justin smiled pleasantly. "She's having a rest up in her room. The poor dear did tucker herself out this morning, and she didn't want to be dozing off during tonight's sermon."

Why her room? Iris wanted to ask, but her eyes shifted to Stroud, who was staring at her with a smugness that made her skin crawl. Apparently whatever benignity that had infected his mind the previous night had been cured.

"Not to worry," Justin assured her, sensing her misgivings in the way that only he could. "We had a little chat while you were sleeping. I would have woken you, but you looked so peaceful, almost like you weren't sleeping at all. . ." He cupped her cheek tenderly in one hand. Iris tightened her jaw to stave off a shiver at his words (He said we must have been blind not to see it). Things had changed between them. . .hadn't they?

"Come," he said, his eyes lighting with a sudden enthusiasm as he took hold of her hand and began to lead her away from the dining room. "I have something to show you."

Iris wetted suddenly dry lips, and made no move to follow him until he tugged her insistantly along. When they were almost to the hallway, Justin paused and turned to look at her, ran his eyes slowly and consideringly over the length of her body.

"It suits you," he murmured approvingly of his robe.

Iris glanced over her shoulder just in time to catch the curious frown creasing Varlyn Stroud's features before Justin guided her out of the room.

Roy Fiske slammed his truck door shut and allowed his body to sag wearily against the sun-warmed seat. He pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes, rubbing the pain of sudden brightness from them as he rebeheld the sky, feeling as a dreamer does having narrowly escaped some terrible nightmare.

The passenger's side door opened. "That's it?" demanded his nephew, climbing in, and not for the first time Fiske regretted having promised his dying brother to look after the boy, turn him into something to be proud of. He was too smart for this job, too inquisitive - which made him not smart enough for it at all.

"Of course that ain't it," Fiske snapped, pulling out his handkerchief and wiping the back of his neck with a defeated sigh. "But that's all we can do."

The young man gawped predictably at him. "All we can do, are you shittin' me? Did you see the look on that Okie's face in there, yes-sirin' an' no-sirin' like a goddamn Stepin Fetchit? What about that maid? - we didn't talk to her. And ain't we gonna look for that Smith character?"

Too damned inquisitive and not smart enough.

Fiske made an exaggerated show of surveying their surroundings. "I don't see him nowhere."

"But Sheriff—"

"Goddamn it, Eran, we can't touch this guy!"

"Who, Crowe? Why the hell not?"

Fiske only shook his head, wiped at his face with his handkerchief, pulled it back to glance briefly at its fresh scarlet stain.

"Uncle Roy, we—" Eran's words were harnessed by his eyes as he caught sight of the bloodied handkerchief, his face a darkening cloud of confusion. "What in the hell. . .?"

Fiske crumpled up the square of fabric and shoved it tremulously into his shirt pocket. One red corner peeked above the edge of its cloth cage like a macabre carnation. "We can't touch him," he said again, sounding more palliated than made uneasy by the thought, as he started up the truck and shifted it into gear.

"Fill 'er up. And get those couple o' cannisters in the back, too." Samson handed over a wad of bills to the young roustie seated beside him, who in turn passed them to a surly-looking gas station attendant, identified by the name 'Buz' stitched clumsily onto his shirt. The man looked distrustingly between the money and the carnival convoy, eventually decided the cash was genuine enough, then nodded at the younger coverall-clad fellow standing ready at the pump.

"Dumb clucks," Samson muttered under his breath, staring out the window at the desert stretching from the false light of the gas station to the violet horizon that looked to be a thousand miles away. They'd reached Utah by sundown, just as he'd hoped, but few victories as of late had felt as triumphant as they ought to have. The presence of Osgood in a place he never should have inherited - the driver's seat of the lead truck - only made that fact even more miserably clear. Samson didn't protest when the boy left the truck, mumbling something about grabbing a drink from inside and making sure they didn't get stiffed for gas.

He'd known Clayton Jones for fifteen years solid, had seen the man up through the bottom of a bottle and down in the dirt the morning after. He was glad, at least, that he would never have to see the man under that same dirt. And Sofie, whom he'd known even longer, whose name had been the last word Samson heard Jonesy utter before the head roustabout had shot off to play the ever-lovin' knight in spit-polished armor. He used to think those two were meant to be together - he and everyone else who had eyes, even that blind bastard Lodz - and now, he supposed, they finally were.

Looking through the side mirror at Libby Dreifuss a few vehicles back, who had climbed out of her daddy's car to stare up and down the road, searching for a highway ghost, Samson wondered if she thought the same. He hoped not. That girl was too sweet by half to go through life only half-loved. Maybe that wasn't a fair thought - he didn't know the whole story between her and Jonesy, and they had seemed close as any true loves - but facts were facts, and one fact was that Jonesy had been hung up on Sofie for the better part of three years. It took more than a few weeks of fussing from a baby vamp to patch so wide an unrequited hole.

The same went for Hawkins, for that and many other reasons. Ten times trouble didn't even begin to sum up the impact of that kid on every life he touched, and Samson for one had been more than happy - and not a little relieved - when Sofie had taken a powder and nipped whatever had been growing between them in the bud. Not that it had done her much good, her or her lovesick, griefsick, stricken-down swain lying cloven-bellied in the trailer bed of his predecessor. Ah, who knew? if she hadn't left. . .

Samson sighed and shook his head. If he'd learned nothing else from Babylon, it was that dwelling on hindsight got a man about as far as a wooden nickel in the cootch tent. Instead his thoughts turned to Hawkins, and the boy's possible demeanor upon waking. Samson had ordered the carnival quickly onward for more than solely their own safety.

If she's dead. . .then God help 'em. Each an' every last one of 'em in this valley.

Not God, but a Nazirite, and not yet a blinded judge. That was a war Samson was not willing to aid, or allow the rest of the carnival to be roped into. You could only know a man so much - and you could only ask so much of him. The preacher had picked a number for what he'd done. Anything beyond that wasn't justice: it was murder, naked and raw.

He fished a box of matches and a hope chest from his inside jacket pocket and shook out a cigarette. Striking a match on the scuffed interior of the truck, he dropped it in his lap mid-flare as Osgood heaved himself, frantic and panting, back into the cab.

"Cast a kitten, kid!" Samson exclaimed, beating out the match before it could do more than singe the inseam of his trousers. "Who lit the fire under your pants and why're you tryin' to light one under mine?"

"You gotta listen to this," Osgood puffed, twisting the key in the ignition with one hand and scanning the radio dial with the other. Static whistled and crunched through the speakers as stabs of brassy jazz and serial dramas were cut short by the roustie's frenzied search, until he finally passed one resonant station, paused, and slowly turned the nob back to find it again.

"—and I say unto you we will not be reduced by these cowardly acts, we will not see our numbers further lessened because of them! For that is their will, and their ungodly arrogance, the False Prophet who leads them to believe that it is their place to smite! That by their hands they may cast upon us all the wrath that only the will of God can mete out!"

The cold cigarette hung by the moistness of Samson's lower lip for a second before it dropped from his mouth to land, forgotten, in the side well of the truck. He couldn't be hearing right, it wasn't possible - he'd seen the man dead as Dillinger with his own two eyes! He'd had a knife embedded in his heart, for crying out loud! There was no way. . .

"And I can only pray, brothers and sisters, that you will find it in your hearts and in your souls not to pay heed to that same beckoning devil of hollow and delusive retribution, to forgive these wretched men, to pity those who have fallen from our Savior's encircling arms; to forgive their envy of you, you who have found the strength to cling for dear eternal life to the bosom of your Lord God, where you and your progeny have grown strong upon the virtuous milk of divine obedience."

. . .but there was no mistaking that voice, that metallic rumble, a voice of freshly forged - or reforged - steel.

Samson's gaze went to Osgood, whose eyes mirrored his own in their dread and disbelief.

"What do we do?" the boy asked, perched so near to the edge of his seat it was a wonder he didn't topple over into the pedals.

Samson looked helplessly again at the radio dial. He swallowed, his throat parched as the plainslands.

"Our work here is far from finished, brothers and sisters. Saint John who dreamt the Revelation has scarcely begun to close his leaden eyes for slumber. He will not rest in peace."

". . .Wake Hawkins."

To be continued. . .

The Fine Print - Many thanks to Drea dearest for giving this a twice-over and glutting too-often-insecure little George with feedback throughout. ♥