The first fully conscious thought I remember having after being knocked out cold by Alma James was that I was hot. It was the stifling, hard-to-breathe kind of hot that kept me awake on mid-summer nights as a kid. The kind of hot that draws droning mosquitoes in through unseen cracks around the edges of the window screens. I tried to reach up and wipe the sweat from my face, but my hands refused to obey my commands.

My second thought was that I'd never had such a bad headache in my life. I couldn't pinpoint where it hurt. My entire skull felt like a throbbing lead weight.

Forcing my eyelids opened required focused effort. I blinked and tried to make sense of my surroundings. I was laying on a hard, flat surface. A single bare bulb hung on a wire from a cracked concrete ceiling. Looking at it caused the throbbing in my head to increase, so I turned to the left and saw some kind of enormous tank, maybe six feet tall and ten feet in circumference with gauges on top. Long lines of rust marred the once-white surface. It made a whooshing sound and shuddered and the temperature rose another degree or two.

The boiler.

I'd hidden in this room once during a late-night youth group game of hide and seek and gotten scolded for making myself too hard to find, as if that weren't the object of the game.

The church.

I was still in the church where I'd come to find my father, but he wasn't here and Reverend Hobbs... Oh, God. My heart hammered in my chest, threatening to make my brain swell and burst. I jerked my head to the right and saw him standing there in his neatly pressed black pants and black clerical shirt. The light reflected from his black eyes and he held a glittering black blade in his right hand.

Alma James, the frail little gray hair who'd been in charge of cleaning the church since before I could remember stood just inside the door at the reverend's side. "It's good that you've come home, dear. Your family needs you here, not out in California." She wagged a finger at me. "I saw one of those movies you made. Local girl makes it big, you support her you know, but it wasn't ten minutes in and you had every bit of God's good business exposed to the world. You're better than that, Jessica Kellerman."

Straining against my bonds caused them to cut into my wrists. Pain in addition to pain. Had I ever hurt in so many places at once? Tears rolled down my throat and it hurt to force words through the tiny, constricted tube of my throat. "Why are you doing this?"

The reverend moved past his wrinkled old assistant and stood next to me. The odor of sulfur rolled off him in nauseating waves.

I thrashed against the surface they'd tied me to. It thunked and rattled against the concrete floor. A folding table, the kind we'd sat at during a thousand church potlucks.

"Do you believe, Jessica?"

I couldn't bare to look in his horrible eyes. I couldn't look away. My sanity became a physical thing, like a rubber band in my mind, stretched far beyond its intended capacity. "What do you want from me? Why are you doing this?"

"Everything I do, I do to bring enlightenment to humankind. We're a broken race. You, a daughter of Eve, chasing fame and the pleasures of the flesh. Me, a prideful son of Adam, believing it's up to me and not God to save my brothers and sisters."

"What are you?"

"I'm a sinner, Jessica, just like you, and sin can only be atoned for in blood."

Lights flashed around the edges of my vision and I wondered if I'd throw up. Maybe I'd choke on it and die. Who would ever find me? Who would care? "I just wanted to find my father and Jake."

The preacher set his knife down near my thigh and began unbuttoning his shirt. "Jake's already been here, Jessica. Come and gone. He won't save you, and your father... well... we both know he can't be saved."

Alma bustled forward with a bucket and an armful of towels. "Don't make a mess, please. I know you've got to do what you've got to do, but think of those of us who need to clean up afterward."

With his broad, pale chest exposed, Reverend Hobbs picked up his knife again. He pressed one hand against my heart, just at the top of my left breast. "All of this is for you, Jessica."

He raised his knife. The band in my mind snapped. My screams echoed in the tiny room. A thousand Jessica's screamed with me while Alma clucked her tongue and shook her head. "Such a shame."

The obsidian blade arced downward and I braced, but there was no pain, only a wet, tearing sound.

Warm liquid ran over my torso.

I opened my eyes.

Reverend Hobbs hovered over me with the handle of the knife protruding from his bare chest. His blood poured over me.

In the palms of my sweaty hands I could feel the warmth of my mother's blood, pouring from her body.

"All of this is for you, Jessica," the reverend wheezed. The blackness faded from his eyes and black, sulfurous smoke rose from the gaping wound in his chest and then he fell to the floor.

Alma bent over him and came up with the bloody knife in her hands. She slipped the blade between my arm and the table and worked it back and forth until my bonds were cut.

"Now where will you run?" she asked.

I rolled away from her and landed on my feet on the far side of the table. My legs threatened to buckle under me. Heat rolled off the boiler, burning hot against my back.

"Well, the sacrifice has been made for you. What are you going to do?"

I edged away from her and staggered backward to the door. "Please tell me what's happening."

She rolled her eyes, tossed the knife in the bucket, and began wiping blood from the table. "That's against the rules. I always took you for a smart one, one to question everything. Now look at you, stumbling about like a drunk in the dark."

"I don't understand." I could not have understated my case more greatly if I'd tried.

"Go on, then. Keep running and maybe you'll figure it out. I'll tell you this, though. Often the key to our present problems lies in our past." She dropped a sodden towel in the bucket and picked up a clean replacement.

A pathetic whimper burbled out of me where I meant words to come.

Alma ignored me, so I gave into my terror and ran up the stairs, out of the church, and climbed into Crazy Dan Tucker's beat up old Dodge Dart. I locked the doors, started the engine, and threw the car into drive.

Maybe I'd lost my damn mind. Maybe all this was some sick dream. Maybe the whole world had gone made. I didn't know, but what I did know was that every horrible crazy thing that ever happened to me, happened in the town where my father lived. I was leaving.

"He's a killer, Jess. Don't leave him alone. Keep an eye on him, always."

"I can't do it, Mom. I can't. I have to get out of here." I sobbed through the words as the car careened westward on the icy roads. The setting sun burned my tortured eyes. The metallic scent of blood and the stench of sulfur choked me and I rolled the window down two inches for fresh air. I turned hard right on the main street, once more putting the river at my side, but the bald tires failed to find anything to hold on to and I slid, smooth as a skater, between those thin trees. The ice buckled with a deafening crack and water so cold it burned when it touched me poured through the open window.