Ukiah went out the kitchen door to a flagstone patio. The stone house had been built on the highest point of the low-slung island, probably sometime in the eighteen-hundreds. Ukiah could see that from the north to the south points, the island was a mile long and a quarter of that distance from east to west. Grass and low shrubs made up most of the vegetation—less than a dozen pine trees dotted the island. The only creature moving seemed to be a solitary seagull riding a stiff wind overhead; its cry echoed his inward cry of dismay.

A thin veil of fog hazed the sky, obscuring the horizons. To the west he could make out tiny barren islands and then an immense nothingness of water and fog. To the east the land curved around a small bay with a dock and a garage-sized boathouse. Two boats sat tied to the docks; one was the one that the cult had used to kidnap him. Four cultists, heavily armed, guarded the boats.

Of the mainland, Ukiah could see nothing. Never in his life had he felt this alone.

Ice and Mouse had trailed out behind him, apparently not afraid he would try to escape. Escape to where?

"How far is it to the mainland?" Ukiah asked them.

Mouse glanced toward Ice. "Too far to swim, really it is."

Rennie had shown Ukiah a map of New England—yesterday? Tuesday? He'd been losing track of days since the cult entered his life. If they were north of Cape Cod, swimming west would get him to the mainland. If they were south of the Cape's peninsula, however, he could swim for days before reaching land.

What should he do?

Ukiah retained enough of Rennie's memories to know that, in his place, Rennie would have tried to kill as many of the cultists as he could before they took him down, snarling and biting. Animal's recent death, however, strengthened Ukiah's abhorrence of killing a human. And even if he wanted to kill the cultists, he wasn't sure he could—so far they were seriously outclassing him in fighting.

What would Max do in his situation? Try as he might, Ukiah couldn't imagine Max ever being mistaken for an angel by homicidal Christians.

Atticus? His brother would pretend to cooperate, gather information, and wait patiently for the chance to put it to use.

Mouse nervously gestured to the kitchen door. "Come. Get some food."

Ukiah's stomach clenched tight on the thought of food, so he let himself be led back into the house to eat. The seating at the table had obviously been carefully planned. Ice took the thronelike chair at the head of the table—angel or not, the new cult leader wasn't giving up his position to Ukiah. Surprisingly, it was quiet Mouse that sat to Ice's right, and Ether to his left. The remaining cultists sat in the ten chairs flanking the table.

The only chair left open for Ukiah was the one at the foot of the table. Ukiah sat, wondering whose place he was filling. Core's? No, he would have been at the head in the throne, with Ice to his right.

"Let us say grace." Ice held out his hands to Mouse and Ether.

The cultists joined in a chain of hands and burly Meta and diminutive Qwerty shyly held out their hands to Ukiah. He eyed them uneasily for traces of Invisible Red and could see no telltale glitter. He reached out and clasped them loosely.

"Our Father, who art in heaven," Ice prayed aloud. The other cultists had closed their eyes, but Ice kept his cold blue stare on Ukiah. "We—your chosen, your holy warriors—give thanks for our daily bread and the new weapon you've put in our hands. Guide us to use him wisely. Watch over us and protect us as we face evil. Amen."

Ukiah silently said his own prayer. Oh, God, help me find the Ae before these idiots do something stupid. Amen.

"Amen," the cultists echoed.

The cult had been taking advantage of the sea and land; the table was laden with lobster bisque, baked cod, late squash, roasted potatoes, and pumpkin bread. For several minutes the food sucked in all his attention. Luckily the soup came first, and after its jolt of creamy calorie richness, he managed to pull his focus back to the cultists.

They'd been watching him with a mix of shy reverence and intense curiosity. Silence reigned at the table, broken only by the chime of silverware on china and the soft slurping of soup.

"So, if you . . . know"—Ukiah almost said "think" but decided that "know" was a safer word—"that I'm an angel, why did you attack me? What is it you want from me?"

"We need your help," Ice said. "Or at least, we hope you can help us. Can you speak the language of the demons?"

"Of course he can." Mouse flinched from the hard look Ice gave him. "Well, he's an angel."

Was it safe to admit he did, or was this another test? "I don't understand. There aren't any demons here."

"We have recordings of their conversations," Ice said. "We knew from the start that it would be suicide to try to take out the demons where they nest. Studying their habits, finding their weaknesses, and exploiting them are the only intelligent methods."

Ukiah nodded at the soundness of this.

"By doing statistical modeling," Mouse said, "we've identified certain patterns in their behavior."

"The number of the beast is six-six-six," Ether said with bright eyes.

"Um, yeah." Mouse was momentarily derailed. "What that means is that the demons usually perform any function in a collective of six."

"Unless a demon is trying to pass as a human—then they go solo," Ether inserted.

Mouse bobbed his head to agree that this was true. "Six of these collectives gather into nests for a total of thirty-six individuals typical for any one nest. And each geographic area will have six nests, arranged in a hexagonal figure."

"So any one occupied area will have two hundred and sixteen demons," Ice said. "And we can't take on that number by ourselves."

This was news to Ukiah. While Hex acknowledged that he was most comfortable as six individuals, Ukiah suspected that the adherence to the multiples of six was totally unconscious. With their memories of the Ontongard, the Pack assumed they knew everything they needed to know about their enemy without realizing there were things that the Ontongard didn't know about themselves. "You mapped the nest locations and noticed a pattern?"

"There seems to be some variation to that which might be caused by geographic anomalies." Mouse rearranged the silverware, stealing some from those near him, to form a six-sided figure of forks and knives. "Normal hexagon." He placed a saltshaker at one point, and then dimpled the lines of that corner. "One with a body of water, highways, or whatnot in the way."

"Mouse, I'm sure he knows all this," Ice said.

Apparently there were some drawbacks to pretending to be a perfect being.

"Well, I just want to make sure all our assumptions are sound," Mouse said. "This has all been guesswork."

Ice sighed and waved his hand, inviting Mouse to continue.

"Well, we experimented on burning them out of a nest to see how they chose nest sites." Mouse removed the saltshaker and reformed the hexagon. "We discovered that we could predict where they move to. Their movement is very simple and organic, and we created a computer program to mimic it. If you burn one nest, they'll abandon all the surviving nests except one to maintain the hexagonal shape and yet avoid the area of the destroyed nest." Mouse shifted the hexagon around the point that once held the saltshaker. "They always keep the nest farthest from the burn, rotating it in this manner."