Another pair of headlights pierced the distance. I waited, leaning against a wine-red 1968 Pontiac Bonneville. She wasn’t as sweet as my Impala, or as forgiving on tight corners, but she was a good car.

Cirque de Charnu was painted on everything except the glossy limo, in baroque lettering highlighted with gold. Under the fierce desert sun it would look washed-out and tawdry. At night it glittered, taunted. Seduced.

They’re good at that. I sometimes wonder if they hold classes for it in Hell. It wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing much would surprise me about that place, or about hellbreed.

Saul lit a Charvil, a brief flare of orange light. He studied each and every car, and the taut silence around him was almost as tense as the way he tilted his chin up, slightly, sniffing the air. Testing the wind.

“I don’t like this,” he murmured, and turned his sleek, new-shorn head slightly to watch the headlights arrowing toward us. A few silver charms were knotted into his hair with red thread. He had a small copper bowl of them in the bathroom, all the ones he’d worn before his mother died, tied back in as his hair got longer.

I contented myself with a shrug. The scar on my right wrist pulsed, the bloom of corruption on the caravan plucking at it. I’d stuffed the leather wristcuff in my pocket, wanting my full measure of helltainted strength tonight.

Just in case.

Baked, sage-touched wind off the cooling desert ruffled my hair, made the silver charms tied into long dark curls tinkle sweetly. I had no reason to draw silence over me like a cloak right now. We’d arrived at the meeting spot first, slightly after dusk.