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to see Dr. Ross again, and the sonofabitch would talk to her and ask her the same dumbass questions, and she would tell him the truth and he would shake his head and look sad and ask her again, and then she would get pissed off and tell him to go to hell and then start to scratch her arms again.
    She was up to her arms now, because she had scratched the backs of her hands and her wrists raw already, and they were bandaged up. But she had to scratch something, because she couldn't keep her hands still. Dr. Ross had told her that if she continued to hurt herself, they'd have to put her in restraints. Then she would stop, and wait until she got back to her cell, because for Chrissake, she was already restrained enough , wasn't she?
    She knew what he wanted to hear her say, but she wasn't about to say it. She was going to tell the truth, and she had told it, time and again, and it was so simple an idiot child could understand it, but they didn't believe her, so they kept her in this nut house.
    She went over it in her mind again, her closely clipped nails digging at her arms, burrowing in the soft spot inside the bend of her elbow, reddening the flesh. They had been in that Indian roadhouse on the reservation, and those moronic cowboys had started on Damon, who was trying to lead them to the Divine now that Ezekiel had disappeared into the desert. Then Rodney, the big ex-biker who was with them, went for one of the cowboys, and all hell broke loose.
    Before she knew what had happened, Jezebel had rammed a shard of glass from a broken sugar container into the throat of a cowboy, killing him deader than dirt. She and Damon had gotten out and driven away, but their van got stuck, and the next thing she knew, Ezekiel, her brother and lover, was there, a mummylike walking corpse, enveloping Damon and somehow sucking all the juice out of him. In a minute, Damon's body was as dried as Ezekiel's had been, and Ezekiel, now full of Damon's fluids, was standing there, looking happy and satisfied, come back to life.
    Then the cops had come, or at least some people she thought were cops, some black bitch and a white guy. They took Ezekiel and put him in their trunk, along with Damon's body, and told her to say that Damon had run away. That was the story she had told the other cops when they came, and they had taken her and charged her with the murder of Arthur Griffith, which was the name of the shit-for-brains cowboy she had stabbed.
    For a while, she had given them the story the first cops had told her to tell, but then, after days of being in her cell, she told her court-appointed attorney to go screw himself and gave the authorities the dope on what had actually happened. When none of them believed her, she got a little violent, and then started scratching herself. That was when they'd put her in the nuthouse.
    She didn't give a damn, though. Those cops who'd taken Ezekiel away hadn't come back or done shit for her, so why should she tell their bullshit story? And when it came right down to it, the nuthouse was better than the jail. The cells were cleaner, for one thing, and she'd rather be locked up with crazies than with the trash she'd been with in jail.
    But Jesus, she hated that Dr. Ross. If they let her nails grow out, which they wouldn't, she'd try and scratch his eyes out. She was already in for murder, so what else could they do to her?
    She had just closed her eyes to try and get some sleep when she heard a weird sound, like somebody had ripped a really big piece of cloth. She sat up quickly and opened her eyes, and saw him.
    She had never set eyes on the Divine before, nor had she spoken to anyone who had ever seen him, but from the electricity that filled her entire body, she knew this being in front of her could be no one else. He was wearing a loose white shirt and light-colored trousers, and he smiled at her as though he were an angel come down from heaven. A light brown beard wreathed his strong jaw, and his soft hair fell