“Uh-huh, thanks,” he said, not very convincingly. “Anyway, it’s not you I have to convince. It’s a couple of old desk jockies inside the Beltway. They’ve offered me a desk job, but…” He shrugged.

“Come on now,” I said. “You can’t really want to go back to the cloak-and-dagger work, can you?”

“It’s what I’m good at,” he said. “For a while there, I was the very best.”

“Maybe you just miss the adrenaline,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “How about a beer?”

“Thank you,” I said, “but I have orders from on high to get bottled water and ice before it’s all gone.”

“Right,” he said. “Everybody’s terrified they might have to drink a mojito without ice.”

“It’s one of the great dangers of a hurricane,” I said.

“Thanks for the help,” he said.

If anything, traffic was even worse as I headed for home. Some of the people were hurrying away with their precious sheets of plywood tied to their car roofs as if they had just robbed a bank. They were angry from the tension of standing in line for an hour wondering if someone would cut in front of them and whether there would be anything left when it was their turn.

The rest of the people on the road were on their way to take their places in these same lines and hated everyone who had gotten there first and maybe bought the last C battery in Florida.

Altogether, it was a delightful mixture of hostility, rage, and paranoia, and it should have cheered me up immensely. But any hope of good cheer vanished when I found myself humming something, a familiar tune that I couldn’t quite place, and couldn’t stop humming. And when I finally did place it, all the joy of the festive evening was shattered.

It was the music from my sleep.

The music that had played in my head with the feeling of heat and the smell of something burning. It was plain and repetitive and not a terribly catchy bit of music, but here I was humming it to myself on South Dixie Highway, humming and feeling comfort from the repeating notes as if it was a lullaby my mother used to sing.

And I still didn’t know what it meant.

I am sure that whatever was happening in my subconscious was caused by something simple, logical, and easy to understand. On the other hand, I just couldn’t think of a simple, logical, and easy-to-understand reason for hearing music and feeling heat on my face in my sleep.

My cell phone started to buzz, and since traffic was crawling along anyway, I answered it.

“Dexter,” Rita said, but I barely recognized her voice. She sounded small, lost, and completely defeated. “It’s Cody and Astor,” she said. “They’re gone.”

Things were really working out quite well. The new hosts were wonderfully cooperative. They began to gather, and with a little bit of persuasion, they easily came to follow IT’s suggestions about behavior. And they built great stone buildings to hold IT’s offspring, dreamed up elaborate ceremonies with music to put them in a trance state, and they became so enthusiastically helpful that for a while there were just too many of them to keep up with. If things went well for the hosts, they killed a few of their number out of gratitude. If things went badly, they killed in the hope that IT would make things better. And all IT had to do was let it happen.

And with this new leisure, IT began to consider the result of IT’s reproductions. For the first time, when the swelling and bursting came, IT reached out to the newborn, calming it down, easing its fear, and sharing consciousness. And the newborn responded with gratifying eagerness, quickly and happily learning all that IT had to teach and gladly joining in. And then there were four of them, then eight, sixty-four-and suddenly it was too much. With that many, there was simply not enough to go around. Even the new hosts began to balk at the number of victims they needed.

IT was practical, if nothing else. IT quickly realized the problem, and solved it-by killing almost all of the others IT had spawned. A few escaped, out into the world, in search of new hosts. IT kept just a few with IT, and things were under control at last.

Sometime later, the ones who fled began to strike back. They set up their rival temples and rituals and sent their armies at IT, and there were so many. The upheaval was enormous and lasted a very long time. But because IT was the oldest and most experienced, IT eventually vanquished all the others, except for a few who went into hiding.

The others hid in scattered hosts, keeping a low profile, and many survived. But IT had learned over the millennia that it was important to wait. IT had all the time there was, and IT could afford to be patient, slowly hunt out and kill the ones who fled, and then slowly, carefully, build back up the grand and wonderful worship of ITself.

IT kept IT’s worship alive; hidden, but alive.

And IT waited for the others.

CHAPTER 37

A S I KNOW VERY WELL, THE WORLD IS NOT A NICE PLACE. There are numberless awful things that can happen, especially to children: they can be taken by a stranger or a family friend or a divorced dad; they can wander away and vanish, fall in a sinkhole, drown in a neighbor’s pool-and with a hurricane coming there were even more possibilities. The list is limited only by their imaginations, and Cody and Astor were quite well supplied with imagination.

But when Rita told me they were gone, I did not even consider sinkholes or traffic accidents or motorcycle gangs. I knew what had happened to Cody and Astor, knew it with a cold, hard certainty that was more clear and positive than anything the Passenger had ever whispered to me. One thought burst in my head, and I never questioned it.

In the half a second it took to register Rita’s words my brain flooded with small pictures: the cars following me, the night visitors knocking on the doors and windows, the scary guy leaving his calling card with the kids, and, most convincingly, the searing statement uttered by Professor Keller: “Moloch liked human sacrifice. Especially children.”

I did not know why Moloch wanted my children in particular, but I knew without the slightest doubt that he, she, or it had them. And I knew that this was not a good thing for Cody and Astor.

I lost no time getting home, swerving through the traffic like the Miami native I am, and in just a few minutes I was out of the car. Rita stood in the rain at the end of the driveway, looking like a small, desolate mouse.

“Dexter,” Rita said, with a world of emptiness in her voice. “Please, oh God, Dexter, find them.”

“Lock the house,” I said, “and come with me.”

She looked at me for a moment as if I had said to leave the kids and go bowling. “Now,” I said. “I know where they are, but we need help.”

Rita turned and ran to the house and I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.

“What,” Deborah answered.

“I need your help,” I said.

There was a short silence and then a hard bark of not-amused laughter. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “There’s a hurricane coming in, the bad guys are lined up five deep all over town waiting for the power to go out, and you need my help.”

“Cody and Astor are gone,” I said. “Moloch has them.”

“Dexter,” she said.

“I have to find them fast, and I need your help.”

“Get over here,” she said.

As I put my phone away Rita came splattering down the sidewalk through the puddles that were already forming. “I locked up,” she said. “But Dexter, what if they come back and we’re gone?”