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prison.
    But Daddy hadn’t been able to keep her out of the prison of her own making, and she descended into drugs, partying, and bad relationships, all trying to fill a void which could never be filled.
    Now, her pain was finally over.
    Memory crashed into the present and left Abigail shaking in brutal sobs on the floor. She was fed, and her body again whole. But everything else felt wrong.
    Larry moved toward her, his hands landing softly on her shoulders as he scooped her up from the floor. “Come on, Abi, I’ll take you home.”
    He carried her from the house like a rag doll.
    “We were wrong, Larry,” Abigail wept, “We were wrong.”

    **

    Abigail said nothing on the long ride back to Washington, sitting in the front seat, trying not to see the occasional flash of memories she’d stolen along with Karen’s life. Larry tried talking to her, tried to apologize, tried to comfort her, but every time he opened his mouth, it felt like an icy blade beneath her overheated skin.
    “Please,” she said, retreating into a fetal ball in the front seat.
    Abigail wished she could sit in the back, but that’s where “the body” was, and Larry had yet to dump it. Karen’s life had been mostly pain, with a rare spark of joy. Now she was a battery of memory in a thief’s head, with nothing left of who she was, except for the charred remains that would soon be buried in the woods never to be found, much less identified.
    Abigail let tears wash her cheeks, believing at first she was crying for Karen. And though she was, there was something else there, too. The little girl who could never grow older was also crying for yet one more piece of herself — forever lost to the creeping darkness.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Larry

    Larry woke an hour before the sun was due to go down.
    Being on Abigail’s schedule meant he only had a few hours in the morning and another few in the early evening to himself. He’d always been a night person, so the adjustment to sleeping through daylight wasn’t too difficult. While their house was large enough — three bedrooms, one for each of them plus space for his office — living with a perpetual preteen girl, and the frequent moodiness that came with it, made his alone time all the more precious.
    He grabbed an ice-cold Mountain Dew from the fridge and sat in the middle of his three monitors, scrolling through his many alerts to see if anything worthwhile had surfaced while he’d slept.
    Abigail was good for at least two weeks, without feeding, but Larry liked to search ahead of time for someone who met their criteria so they had enough time for all the requisite research, thereby ensuring they had someone truly deserving of death. He’d blown it last night with Karen McKenna, and Abigail gave him the silent treatment the entire trip home, then added to the onslaught even once they were back. She went to bed without saying a word, which meant she’d probably be extra annoying today.
    Seeing nobody even close to local that they should or could go after, Larry started sifting through his email looking for word from John.
    Nothing.
    It had been a few months since he’d last heard from his old friend, and more than a year since he’d seen him.
    Their communication was limited to the rare email from one of John’s many aliases. The e-mails were always the same — photos with encrypted data buried inside. John’s last message was asking Larry if he had found Hope yet.
    “No, nothing yet,” Larry sent back in the form of an encrypted message.
    As far as anyone in Larry’s network could confirm, Hope was a ghost. He had considered hiring a Tracker to find her, but John insisted that he involve only the most trusted people he knew. There were scant few people Larry or John fully trusted, particularly since John was working on behalf of the Guardians and Omega, kidnapping or killing, depending which rumors you believed, a steady stream of Otherworlders. It would have been one thing if