“Where is the woman Ann Hawkins?” Lazarus demanded, and Giles turned his clear gray eyes to him.

“You will not find her.”

“Stand aside. I will enter this house of the devil.”

“You will not find her,” Giles repeated. For a moment he looked beyond Lazarus to the men and the handful of women who stood in his glade.

He saw death in their eyes, and more, the hunger for it. This was the demon’s power, and his work.

Only in Hester’s did Giles see fear or sorrow. So he used what he had to give, pushed his mind toward hers. Run!

He saw her jolt, stumble back, then he turned to Lazarus.

“We know each other, you and I. Dispatch them, release them, and it will be between us alone.”

For an instant he saw the gleam of red in Lazarus’s eyes. “You are done. Burn the witch!” he shouted. “Burn the devil house and all within it!”

They came with torches, and with clubs. Giles felt the blows rain on him, and the fury of the hate that was the demon’s sharpest weapon.

They drove him to his knees, and the wood of the hut began to flame and smoke. Screams rang in his head, the madness of them.

With the last of his power he reached out toward the demon inside the man, with red rimming its dark eyes as it fed on the hate, the fear, the violence. He felt it gloat, he felt it rising, so sure of its victory, and the feast to follow.

And he ripped it to him, through the smoking air. He heard it scream in fury and pain as the flames bit into flesh. And he held it to him, close as a lover as the fire consumed them.

And with that union the fire burst, spread, destroyed every living thing in the glade.

It burned for a day and a night, like the belly of hell.

One

Hawkins Hollow

Maryland

July 6, 1987

INSIDE THE PRETTY KITCHEN OF THE PRETTY house on Pleasant Avenue, Caleb Hawkins struggled not to squirm as his mother packed her version of campout provisions.