She had done what any loving mother would do.
“Mama?”
Mary Alice was sitting in a rocking chair, staring through the bars of the window. When she heard that voice—the sound like the sweet tinkle of a bell—she thought at first she must have imagined it. But when she looked up, she saw a woman in the doorway of her room.
A woman with golden hair and beguiling blue eyes.
A woman with the face of an angel.
Her angel.
Her beautiful girl.
She put out a hand and the angel floated toward her, graceful and elegant. So loving and sweet.
It was only then that Mary Alice realized her visitor wasn’t alone. A man had come into the room behind her. He was tall and dark and thin to the point of gauntness. His hair was swept back from his forehead and his dark eyes held a strange reddish hue. He had a terrible scar on the right side of his neck that looked as if he might have been burned years ago.
When his gaze met Mary Alice’s, a shiver of dread crept up her spine.
She’d seen those eyes somewhere before, or what was behind them.
“Mama, this is Ellis Cooper. He’s a very good friend of mine.”
The man leaned down and tried to take Mary Alice’s hand, but she pulled it away. For some reason, she didn’t want him to touch her.
He picked up a paper crane from the floor and held it out in his palm.
“This yours?” he asked with a smile that chilled Mary Alice to her very core. “I always loved origami. Some guy once told me about a Japanese legend. Seems if you fold a thousand of these things, your wish will come true.”
Mary Alice said nothing.
Ellis Cooper glanced around. “Looks like you’ve got a ways to go.”
Mary Alice refused to look up. She would not meet the man’s gaze. She would not stare into that dark abyss.
But she could feel his eyes on her.
“Your daughter’s told me a lot about you,” he said with a liquid smoothness. “I’ve sure been looking forward to coming to see you. If you don’t mind my saying so, this is a pretty special day for me.”
“Ellis,” said the angel. “Would you leave us alone for a moment?”
“Oh, you bet. Take all the time you need. I’ll just wait outside.”
He bent suddenly and put his face very close to Mary Alice’s so that she could no longer avoid his gaze.
And this time, he grabbed her hand before she could pull it away. He held it very tight between both of his. His skin was cold and dry, and there was something reptilian about those terrible, gleaming eyes.
“I expect we’ll meet again very soon, Mary Alice. And I do so look forward to that encounter.”
He released her hand then and straightened, and though Mary Alice still kept her gaze averted, she sensed something pass between the man and her daughter. A smile maybe. Or a brief, intimate touch.
A smaller, softer hand took hers once they were alone. “Everything’s going to be all right now. You’ll see.”
Mary Alice placed the angel’s hand between both of hers and clung for dear life.
“It’s okay, Mama. I know what I have to do. I’ve always known.”
That soft hand came up to stroke Mary Alice’s cheek.
“You taught me well. And now that I have Ellis helping me, it’s going to be so much easier.” The angel’s blue eyes shimmered with excitement as she leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Mama…he’s one of us!”
No, Mary Alice thought in despair. That man is not one of us.
Ellis Cooper was one of them.
Ellis leaned a shoulder against the wall as he peered through the reinforced glass panel in the door, watching in fascination as the little drama unfolded inside.
Every so often, he would glance up the hallway in front of him and then over his shoulder behind him to make sure one of the patients or someone on the staff didn’t sneak up and catch him unawares.
He was probably being a little paranoid, Ellis realized, but he knew only too well of the trickery and deception that went on in a place like this. You couldn’t trust anyone.
Ellis had spent a couple of hitches in state mental wards, the first when he was only fifteen years old. Given his experience, he couldn’t say he was exactly happy to be back in one. But at least today, he had the freedom to walk out whenever he chose. That was something.
Normally, he steered clear of any type of institution, be it a government office or even a regular hospital. He had a fundamental distrust of anything that smacked of authority, of any place in which he was not in complete control, but he’d found the prospect of a meeting with the infamous Mary Alice Lemay too irresistible to pass up.
So he’d temporarily disabled his aversion, if not his paranoia. Ellis knew from past experience that he could stand anything for a little while, even the worst kind of torture.
Now that he was here, though, all those old feelings were creeping up on him again. And dear God, the memories!
The slack jaws and vacant stares.
The unholy smells that drifted from the open doorways.
He glanced up at the surveillance camera at the end of the hallway. There was another one at the opposite end and probably a few hidden in places that were not readily discernable.
Oh, yes, Ellis knew all about those cameras.
The incessant winking of the red eyes had reminded him night and day that he was never alone. Not in his room, not in the cafeteria, not in the showers or on the toilet. As long as those red eyes were blinking, someone was watching. Always.
Even when he prayed.
Maybe especially when he prayed, seeing as how it had been his religion that had netted him his first trip to the psych ward in the first place.
Well, not his religion exactly. Not back then. That was before his awakening.
It was his father’s interpretation of the gospel that had caught the attention of Child Protective Services in the backwoods Georgia town where he grew up.
His father, Nevil, had been a preacher and an avid follower of the teachings of George Went Hensley, one of the founders of the charismatic movement. Ellis’s father, like Hensley, had believed in a strict interpretation of the Bible, including the “signs” passage from Mark:
And these signs will accompany those who believe; in my name they will cast out demons;
they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.
As a boy, Ellis had been enthralled by the serpent-handling spectacle that accompanied some of his father’s sermons. Ellis hadn’t been a true believer back then, but he’d loved watching the snakes. To him, they were among God’s most glorious creatures. Even the thick, leathery water moccasins, with their white mouths and razorlike fangs, held a certain fascination.
Along with the rattlers and copperheads, the moccasins had been kept in cages behind the chicken coop at Ellis’s home. Once his after-school chores were done, he would head out there and sit in the grass for hours, mesmerized by the sinewy movement of the reptiles as they climbed up the mesh wire of the cages and wrapped themselves around one another.
By this time, Ellis was quite adept at catching the creatures in their natural habitats—underneath