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once. That they were okay. That you wouldn’t let anything happen to them. When really they were tied up in some basement cell in Crawford’s fucking mansion.”
    Mantu looked away. “Yeah. You have a point.”
    “Damn right I have a point.”
    “But listen—first things first. We’ll find them. We’ll get their signal. And then we’ll get them back to you. The Brothers don’t fuck around when it comes to our people. I promise you.”
    He’d heard that before, too. “Look, I promised Ellen and William I would never let them fall into the hands of that bitch again. They’ve been dragged into this nightmare because of
me.
Out of their normal lives into this. Running and hiding all the time, scared that a stranger is going to step out of the shadows and fill us with bullets. Do you know what that does to a woman from a little town in West Virginia? What it does to a
kid
?”
    Mantu shook his head. “I know. But Ray, we’ve been trying to get you to Eleusis since you left the States. Not just for your safety but for
theirs.
You kept refusing. You wanted to go it on your own.
You
kept swearing you’d be all right.”
    Ray felt the blood rising in his face. “Don’t you dare make this my fault, Mantu.”
    “I’m not—”
    “Because I know I said I’d never hit you again, but if you—”
    “Okay. Whoa. Take it easy.” He held up his hands. “How about we have a drink?” He pulled a bottle out of a rucksack. “Mezcal. I picked it up the last time I was in Chiapas.”
    Ray stared. “Okay. Yeah. Fine. After last night, I could use about ten drinks.”
    —
    Despite his exhaustion, Ray couldn’t even think about sleep. Now he was half in the bag, too—he and Mantu had killed the mezcal and were midway through a bottle of local rum.
    “So why do they want me at Eleusis? The one time I met him, Jeremy kept staring at me like I was some kind of rare butterfly. It gave me the creeps.”
    Mantu topped off Ray’s glass. “Well, first off, they know she’s been after you from the get-go. It’s in our best interest that she doesn’t catch you, too—not just yours. The bitch will make you suffer and she’ll try to get every last bit of information out of you in the process. And you might not take it seriously, Ray, but this Brotherhood thing is deep with us. And you’re one of us.”
    “Well, I’ll decide that. I never took any vows.”
    “Doesn’t matter. You’re one of us, so we took a vow to protect you.”
    He was serious. Ray had often wondered if Mantu would throw himself in front of a loaded gun to save him. “But it’s more than that. It’s about the weird stuff, too. The ‘Great Work’ they’re doing, right? Why do they want me for that?”
    Mantu swirled the shrinking ice cubes in his rum. “That’s complicated. You know me—I’m just a muscle man, for the most part. I’m not in the ‘need to know’ on the spooky shit.”
    “You have to have some idea. You trained in all that stuff.”
    Mantu took a drink. Set down his glass. Nodded. “Yeah. I have a general idea. We all learn the basics—psychic self-defense, projection, and some magical theory. We joke that it’s psychic boot camp.” He rubbed his head. “But what they call the Great Work covers a lot of territory. Basically, it’s to keep the world in balance. To help humanity evolve.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that a hundred times. And it still sounds like new age bullshit. But whatever. What I don’t understand is why I’m so important.”
    “You know how Crawford was trying to…communicate with those things—the entities. Behind the lights.
Through
the lights.”
    The hair on Ray’s neck rose. He hated thinking about what had happened in that stone circle under the stars. The mention of it made him want to cover his ears and start yammering to drown Mantu out.
    “Well, going all the way back to the old teachings—and I’m talking way, way back—there’s a whole mess of them. Different kinds of