WAS FAR AWAY IN A PLACE WHERE TINY SPARKS OF LIGHT flittered through a great sea of darkness and Dexter swam through it with legs made of lead and arms that did not move at all with a very unpleasant buoyancy that seemed to float up from a queasiness in my center and there was no other thought or feeling of any kind except for mere being for a very long time until finally, from far away, an urgent sound came in to me and carried on its back a very strong idea that tumbled into focus in one crystal-clear syllable: Ow! And I became aware that “ow” was not a mystic word for use in meditation, nor a lost land of the Bible, but, in fact, the only way I could succinctly sum up the State of Dexter, from shoulders upward. Ow …

“Come on, wake up, Dexter,” a soft female voice said, and I felt a cool hand on my forehead. I had no idea whose hand, nor whose voice, and in truth it really did not seem nearly as important as the fact that my head was an endless ocean of pain and I could not move my neck.

“Dexter, please,” the voice insisted, and the cool hand patted my cheek a great deal harder than seemed to be polite, strictly speaking, and each little pat-pat sent an echoing wave of ow rolling through my head, and at last I found the controls for my arms and moved one up to brush away the hammering hand.

“Ow,” I said out loud, and it sounded like the distant cry of a large and weary bird.

“You’re alive,” the voice said, and then that damned hand came back and patted my cheek again. “I was really worried.” I thought I might have heard that voice before, but I couldn’t say where, and it wasn’t a high priority at the moment, considering that my head was filled with flaming oatmeal.

“Owww,” I said again, with a little more force. It was really all I could think of to say, but that didn’t matter, since it summed things up so nicely.

“Come on now,” the voice said. “Open up your eyes, Dexter. Come on.”

I thought about that word: “eyes.” I was pretty sure I knew that one. Something to do with, um—seeing? Located somewhere in or near the face? That sounded right, and I felt a dull and dim glow of pleasure; I got one right. Good boy.

“Dexter, please,” the female voice said again. “Open up, come on.” I felt her hand move again, as if to pat my cheek, and the sheer annoyance of that idea sparked a memory—I could open my eyes like this. I tried it. The right one popped open while the left fluttered a few times before finally coming open to a blurry world. I blinked them both several times and the picture settled into focus, but it did not make any sense.

I was looking straight up at a face only a little more than a foot away from my own. It was not a bad face, and I was pretty sure I had seen it before. It was young, female, and creased with concern at the moment, but as I blinked at it and tried to remember where I had seen it, it broke into a smile. “Hey, there you are,” she said. “You had me so totally worried.” I blinked again; it was an awful lot of work, and it was just about all I could manage. Trying to think at the same time was just too hard, so I stopped blinking.

“Samantha,” I croaked, and I was very pleased with myself. That was the name that went with that face. And her face was so close to mine because my head was resting in her lap.

“The one and only,” she said. “Nice to have you back with us.”

Things were slowly filtering into my throbbing brain: Samantha, cannibals, refrigerator, giant fist.… It took some work, but I began to connect the separate thoughts and the picture came slowly together into a memory of what had happened—and it was far more painful than my head and I closed my eyes again. “Owww …” I said.

“Yeah, you said that already,” Samantha said. “I don’t have any aspirin or anything, but this might help—here.” I felt her turn a bit under me and I opened my eyes. She held a large plastic water bottle up and twisted the top off. “Take a sip,” she said. “Slow. Not too much, you might hurl.”

I sipped. The water was cool, with a very faint taste I couldn’t identify, and as I swallowed I realized how parched and sore my throat was. “More,” I said.

“A little bit at a time,” Samantha said, and she let me take another small sip.

“Good,” I said. “I was thirsty.”

“Wow,” she said. “Three whole words together. You’re really coming around.” She took a sip, too, and then put the water bottle down.

“Could I have a little more?” I said, and added, “That’s six words.”

“It sure is,” she said, and she sounded happy with my wonderful new talent for using multiple words. She held the bottle to my lips and I took another sip. It seemed to ease the muscles in my throat and brought a slight relief to my headache, as well as a growing awareness that things were not entirely as they should be.

I turned my head to look around, and was rewarded with an electrifying stab of pain running from my neck right up through the top of my head. But I could also see a little bit more of the world than Samantha’s face and shirt, and the picture was not encouraging. There was a fluorescent strip light overhead, and it lit up a light green wall. In the place where reason said a window might have been, there was a plain, unpainted piece of plywood. And I could see nothing else without moving my head some more, which I very definitely did not want to do, considering the searing pain I had just experienced moving it this far.

I slowly rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to think. I did not recognize my surroundings, but I was no longer in the refrigerator, at least. I could hear a mechanical rattle nearby, and I knew it, as any Floridian would, as the sound of a window air conditioner. But neither that nor the plywood told me anything important.

“Where are we?” I asked Samantha.

She swallowed a sip of water. “In a trailer,” she said. “Way out in the Everglades somewhere, I don’t know. One of the guys in the coven has like fifty acres out here with this thing on it, trailer, for hunting. And they brought us here, like, totally isolated. Nobody will ever find us out here.” She sounded happy about that, but at least she remembered to look a little guilty about it and tried to cover it with a sip of water.

“How?” I said, and it sounded croakish again, and I reached for the water bottle. I took another swig, a bigger one this time. “How did they get us out of the club?” I said. “With nobody seeing us?”

She waved a hand, and the movement jolted my head—a slight jolt, but a much larger pain. “They rolled us up in rugs,” she said. “These two guys in overalls come in and carry out the rugs, with us inside, and dump ’em into a van, and just drive us out here. ‘Gonzalez Carpet Cleaners,’ it said. Easy.” She gave a half smile, half shrug, and took a sip of water.

I thought about it. If Deborah had still been watching, seeing two large bundles carried out would certainly have made her suspicious—and, being Debs, if she got suspicious she would have jumped out with her gun drawn and stopped them right then and there. So she had not been watching—but why not? Would she really abandon me, her own dear brother? Leave me to a fate worse than death, although certainly including it? I didn’t think she would, not willingly. I took a sip of water and tried to think it through.

She would not willingly leave me. On the other hand, she couldn’t really call in backup—her partner was dead, and she was technically doing something just a little bit outside department regulations and, for that matter, the Florida Penal Code. So what would she do?

I took another sip of water. The bottle was more than half-empty now, but it did seem to ease the pain in my head a bit—not that the pain went away, but hey—it wasn’t really so bad. I mean, pain meant I was alive, and who was it who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope”? Maybe Samantha knew—but as I opened my mouth to ask her she took the water bottle back and took a big sip and I remembered I was trying to think about what my sister would have done, and why that led to my being here.

I took the bottle back from Samantha and sipped the water. Deborah wouldn’t leave me like that. Of course not. Deborah loved me. And the realization flooded into me—I loved her, too. I took another swig of water. It’s a funny thing, love. I mean, to realize this at my age was weird, but I was actually surrounded by so much love—my whole life, from my adoptive parents, Harry and Doris; they didn’t have to love me—I wasn’t really their kid—but they did. They did love me, like so many others, all the way up to now, with Debs—and Rita, Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne. Beautiful, wonderful, miraculous Lily Anne, the ultimate bringer of love. But all those others, too, they all loved me in their own way—

Samantha took the water bottle and sipped, and it hit me with a tremendous rush of insight: Even Samantha had shown me so much love. She had proved it by risking everything that meant anything to her, everything she had always wanted, just to give me a chance to escape! Wasn’t that an act of pure love?

I took another sip of water and felt myself completely surrounded by all these wonderful people, people who loved me even though I had done some very bad things—but what the hell, I had stopped, hadn’t I? Wasn’t I now trying to live a life of love and responsibility, in a world that had suddenly blossomed into a place of wonder and joy?

Samantha grabbed the bottle and took a big swig. She handed it back and I finished it eagerly—delicious, the best water I’d ever tasted. Or maybe I was just appreciating things more. Yes. The world was really an amazing place after all, and I fit in perfectly. And so did Samantha. What a wonderful person she was. She had taken care of me, too, and she didn’t have to. And she was taking care of me now! Nurturing me and stroking my face with what could only be called love—what a wonderful girl she was! And if she wanted to be eaten—wow: I had an epiphany. Food is love—so wanting to be eaten was just another way to share love! And that was the way Samantha had chosen because she was so filled with love she couldn’t possibly hope to express it except in some ultimate form like this! Amazing!

I looked up at her face with a new appreciation. This was a wonderful, giving person. And even though it hurt my neck, I had to show her that I understood what she was doing and truly appreciated what a wonderful, beautiful person she was—so I raised my arm up and put my hand on her face. The skin felt soft, warm, vibrantly alive, and I rubbed the palm of my hand softly across her cheek for a moment. She looked back at me, smiling, and put her hand back on my face.

“You are so beautiful,” I said. “I mean, just saying the word, ‘beautiful’—that doesn’t really sum it up, except in a kind of superficial way that only talks about the outside and doesn’t really get at the true, absolute depths of what I mean by beautiful—especially in your case, because I think I just understood what it is you’re doing with this whole ‘eat me’ business—I mean, you’re beautiful on the outside, too; that’s not what I mean, not to take any of that away from you, because I know it’s important to a girl. A woman. You’re eighteen; you’re a woman, I know, because you’ve made a very adult choice with what to do with your life, and there’s no turning back from it, which makes it a really adult choice, and I’m sure you understand the consequences of your decision, and there can’t be a better definition of adulthood than that, to make a decision with ultimate consequences and know you can’t turn back from it, and I really admire you for that. And also because like I said you are really, really beautiful.”

Her hand rubbed my face and then slid down across my neck and through the collar of my shirt and she rubbed my chest. It felt good. “I know what you’re saying exactly and you are the first person who I think really understood what it means for me to go through all this—” She took her hand away from my chest to wave it in the air, indicating everything all around us, and I reached up and pulled it back down onto my chest because it felt really good and I wanted to keep touching her. She smiled and rubbed softly across my chest again. “Because it isn’t something that’s easy to understand, I know that, and that’s one reason why I never thought I could ever talk about it to anybody and why, you know, I’ve been so completely alone for most of my life, all of it really, because who could ever understand something like this? I mean, if I just say it to somebody, ‘I want to be eaten,’ then it’s gotta be like this whole, ‘Oh, my God, we’re getting you to a shrink’ thing and nobody ever looking at you like you’re normal ever again and I feel like this is totally normal, a totally normal expression of—”

“Love,” I said.

“You do understand!” she said, and she slid her hand lower, across my stomach, and then back up onto my chest again. “Oh, God, I knew you would get it, because even when we were in that refrigerator there was just something about you that was different from everybody else I have ever met in my whole life and I thought maybe just once before it happens I can talk to somebody who really gets it and they won’t look at me like I’m some kind of perverted sick twisted freak monster!”

“No, no, you’re just so beautiful,” I said. “Nobody could ever think that about you, just even your face is so amazing—”

“No, but that’s not it—”

“No, I know that, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “But it’s part of what makes you who you are, and to see that part really leads to understanding about the rest—I mean, if you’re not a total idiot, you can’t look at your face and not think, Wow, what an incredible person, and then to see that the insides are even more beautiful is just amazing.” And because mere words could not really express it completely and I really wanted her to understand what I meant, I pulled her face down to mine and kissed her. “You are beautiful inside and out,” I said.

She smiled with an incredible warmth and appreciation that just made me feel like everything would always be all right. “You are, too,” she said, and she lowered her face and kissed me again and this time the kiss was longer and it led into another kind of feeling that was new for me and I could tell that it was new for her, too, but neither one of us wanted to stop until she stretched out beside me on the floor as we kissed and after a long time of that she did stop, just for a second, and said, “I think they put something in the water.”

“I don’t think that matters,” I said. “Because what we have started to understand doesn’t really come from anything you can put in water because it comes from inside us, the real inside, and it is really true, which I know you can feel as well as I can.” I kissed her and she kissed back for a minute before she stopped and put both hands on my cheeks.

“In any case,” she said, “even if it is just something in the water it doesn’t matter because I always kind of thought that this is just so important—I mean love, and you know, I mean, not just the kind that you feel but the kind you do and I thought, I’m eighteen; I should do it at least once before I check out, don’t you think?”

“At least once,” I said, and she smiled and closed her eyes and brought her face back to mine and we did.

More than once.