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young girls all sleepwalkin’ off the bridge and into the river, in one week?”
    Roberts shrugged. “Right now, it’s the best I’ve got, at least until we get the toxicology results back.”
    “Christ on a crutch.” Showalter kicked at the mud and stones. “Call me as soon as you identify the body, willya?”
    “Sure thing, Harry. Stay cool.” Roberts headed up the sloping bank, his spindly legs as surefooted and steady as they’d been twenty years ago when he and Showalter used to duck hunt not a hundred yards from where they stood right now.
    Stay cool. Easy for him to say. He doesn’t have three dead girls on his hands, waiting for someone to find their killer.
    Because if there was one thing Showalter was sure of, those girls had been killed, which, in a morbid way, was good.
    A murderer on the loose was bad enough.
    But not nearly as bad as trying to tell the mayor they had a sleepwalking epidemic.
     
    *   *   *
     
    “And the Lords sayeth unto them, scream, scream for your lives! And ask yourselves, ‘If the Gods are good, if they are wonderful, why do they inflict pain upon us? Why do they ask us to offer our bodies up to them?”
    Reverend Christian slammed his hands down on the pulpit’s wooden surface. His wireless microphone amplified the noise and sent it cascading throughout the church. The heavy thud sounded in time to the thunder booming outside, the eighth day in a row that storm clouds had blanketed the town, full of threatening pyrotechnics. But the only moisture came from the one hundred percent humidity that turned the air into a steaming soup.
    It was standing room only in Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, and the packed crowd seemed to pull in Christian’s energy and spit it back out, over and over, until the atmosphere reminded him of being inside an electrical plant.
    “The answer is simple, my friends. You belong to the Gods! Your bodies are Theirs, your souls are Theirs. Does your dog stand up and tell you what to do? No! And neither can we give orders to the Gods! They who see all, who know all, hold within Their hands the power to crush the life from us or reward us with our greatest dreams. He who is obedient and serves Them shall earn favor. Those who stray shall feel Their wrath. So sayeth the Ancient Ones, in the time before times!”
    Christian paused for breath. All eyes were on him; looking around, he saw no patrons whispering to each other, no faces slack with boredom.
    No, these people, his people, had come today to hear him speak.
    To hear the Word.
    “Too many people follow the path of the Other instead of the Word of the Gods! And now the burning time has come upon us! The sleeping giant wakes! Listen to the night. It speaks!”
    Thunder exploded outside. Heads turned to the windows and then back again. Christian lowered his voice, and it was the only sound in the room.
    “Hear me, people. Judgment Day cometh upon us. Will it find you ready or will it find you wanting?”
    Cyrus Christian held onto the silence for a count of three.
    “This is the Word of the Gods.”
    “Amen!” The word leaped out of three hundred throats.
    “Amen, indeed,” he responded. “Now, please turn to page eighty-three. The song today is ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
     

 
Chapter 7
    John Root pretended to sing along with the rest of the congregation, but his mind was elsewhere.
    Christian’s sermon had warning bells a’clanging in his head, as his mother used to say. He’d arrived too late the previous week to hear the Reverend’s talk, and so he had nothing to compare this one to. But certain words had caught his attention. Ancient Ones. The Other. Gods instead of God.
    Is he the one? Or is he under the influence of the one I seek? Perhaps a simple test will tell...
    After Mass, John waited outside among the churchgoers eager to speak with their new reverend. Christian stood by the tall, wooden doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, his long hair dangling in the sultry air. Finally,