T WAS WELL PAST FIVE O’CLOCK BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK to headquarters and so, in spite of some very sour looks from Deborah, I loaded Cody and Astor into my own humble vehicle and headed for home. They remained subdued for most of the ride, apparently still a little bit shaken by their encounter with the scary guy. But they were resilient children, which was amply demonstrated by the fact that they could still talk at all, considering what their biological father had done to them. So when we were only about ten minutes from the house Astor began to return to normal.

“I wish you would drive like Sergeant Debbie,” she said.

“I would rather live a little longer,” I told her.

“Why don’t you have a siren?” she demanded. “Didn’t you want one?”

“You don’t get a siren in forensics,” I said. “And no, I never wanted one. I would rather keep a low profile.”

In the rearview mirror I could see her frown. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means I don’t want to draw attention to myself,” I said. “I don’t want people to notice me. That’s something you two have to learn about,” I added.

“Everybody else wants to be noticed,” she said. “It’s like all they ever do, is do stuff so everybody will look at them.”

“You two are different,” I said. “You will always be different, and you will never be like everybody else.” She didn’t say anything for a long time and I glanced at her in the mirror. She was looking at her feet. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I said. “What’s another word for normal?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully.

“Ordinary,” I said. “Do you really want to be ordinary?”

“No,” she said, and she didn’t sound quite so unhappy. “But then if we’re not ordinary, people will notice us.”

“That’s why you have to learn to keep a low profile,” I said, secretly pleased at the way the conversation had worked around to prove my point. “You have to pretend to be really normal.”

“So we shouldn’t ever let anybody know we’re different,” she said. “Not anybody.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She looked at her brother, and they had another of those long silent conversations. I enjoyed the quiet, just driving through the evening congestion and feeling sorry for myself.

After a few minutes Astor spoke up again. “That means we shouldn’t tell Mom what we did today,” she said.

“You can tell her about the microscope,” I said.

“But not the other stuff?” Astor said. “The scary guy and riding with Sergeant Debbie?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But we’re never supposed to tell a lie,” she said. “Especially to our own mother.”

“That’s why you don’t tell her anything,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know things that will make her worry too much.”

“But she loves us,” Astor said. “She wants us to be happy.”

“Yes,” I said. “But she has to think you are happy in a way she can understand. Otherwise she can’t be happy.”

There was another long silence before Astor finally said, just before we turned onto their street, “Does the scary guy have a mother?”

“Almost certainly,” I said.

Rita must have been waiting right inside the front door, because as we pulled up and parked the door swung open and she came out to meet us. “Well, hello,” she said cheerfully. “And what did you two learn today?”

“We saw dirt,” Cody said. “From my shoe.”

Rita blinked. “Really,” she said.

“And there was a piece of popcorn, too,” Astor said. “And we looked in the microphone and we could tell where we had been.”

“Microscope,” Cody said.

“Whatever,” Astor shrugged. “But you could tell whose hair it was, too. And if it was a goat or a rug.”

“Wow,” Rita said, looking somewhat overwhelmed and uncertain, “I guess you had quite a time then.”

“Yes,” Cody said.

“Well then,” Rita said. “Why don’t you two get started on homework, and I’ll get you a snack.”

“Okay,” Astor said, and she and Cody scurried up the walk and into the house. Rita watched them until they went inside, and then she turned to me and held onto my elbow as we strolled after them.

“So it went well?” she asked me. “I mean, with the—they seemed very, um…”

“They are,” I said. “I think they’re beginning to understand that there are consequences for fooling around like that.”

“You didn’t show them anything too grim, did you?” she said.

“Not at all. Not even any blood.”

“Good,” she said, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, which I suppose is part of the price you have to pay when you are going to marry someone. Perhaps it was simply a public way to mark her territory, in which case I guess I should be very happy that she chose not to do so with the traditional animal method. Anyway, displaying affection through physical contact is not something I really understand, and I felt a bit awkward, but I put an arm around her, since I knew that was the correct human response, and we followed the kids into the house.

I’m quite sure it isn’t right to call it a dream. But in the night the sound came into my poor battered head once again, the music and chanting and the clash of metal I had heard before, and there was the feeling of heat on my face and a swell of savage joy rising from the special place inside that had been empty for so long now. I woke up standing by the front door with my hand on the doorknob, covered with sweat, content, fulfilled, and not at all uneasy as I should have been.

I knew the term “sleepwalking,” of course. But I also knew from my freshman psychology class that the reasons someone sleepwalks are usually not related to hearing music. And I also knew in the deepest level of my being that I should be anxious, worried, crawling with distress at the things that had been happening in my unconscious brain. They did not belong there, it was not possible that they could be there—and yet, there they were. And I was glad to have them. That was the most frightening thing of all.

The music was not welcome in the Dexter Auditorium. I did not want it. I wanted it to go away. But it came, and it played, and it made me supernaturally happy against my will and then dumped me by the front door, apparently trying to get me outside and—

And what? It was a jolt of monster-under-the-bed thought straight from the lizard brain, but…

Was it a random impulse, uncharted movement by my unconscious mind, that got me out of bed and down the hall to the door? Or was something trying to get me to open the door and go outside? He had told the kids I would find him when the time was right—was this the right time?

Did someone want Dexter alone and unconscious in the night?

It was a wonderful thought, and I was terribly proud to have it, because it meant that I had clearly suffered brain damage and could no longer be held responsible. Once again I was blazing new trails in the territory of stupid. It was impossible, idiotic, stress-induced hysteria. No one on earth could possibly have so much time to throw away; Dexter was not important enough to anyone but Dexter. And to prove it, I turned on the floodlight over the front porch and opened the door.

Across the street and about fifty feet to the west a car started up and drove away.

I closed the door and double-locked it.

And now it was my turn once more to sit up at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and pondering life’s great mystery.

The clock said 3:32 when I sat down, and 6:00 when Rita finally came into the room.

“Dexter,” she said with an expression of soporific surprise on her face.

“In the flesh,” I said, and it was exceedingly difficult for me to maintain my artificially cheerful facade.

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

Rita bent her face down toward the floor and shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Then she sat across the table from me and took a sip. “Dexter,” she said, “it’s perfectly normal to have reservations.”

“Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what she meant, “otherwise you don’t get a table.”

She shook her head slightly with a tired smile. “You know what I mean,” she said, which was not true. “About the wedding.”

A small bleary light went on in the back of my head, and I very nearly said Aha. Of course the wedding. Human females were obsessive on the subject of weddings, even it if wasn’t their own. When it was, in fact, their own, the idea of it took over every moment of waking and sleeping thought. Rita was seeing everything that happened through a pair of wedding-colored glasses. If I could not sleep, that was because of bad dreams brought on by our upcoming wedding.

I, on the other hand, was not similarly afflicted. I had a great deal of important stuff to worry about, and the wedding was something that was on automatic pilot. At some point I would show up, it would happen, and that would be that. Clearly this was not a viewpoint I could invite Rita to share, no matter how sensible it seemed to me. No, I had to come up with a plausible reason for my sleeplessness, and in addition I needed to reassure her of my enthusiasm for the wonderful looming event.

I looked around the room for a clue, and finally saw something in the two lunch boxes stacked beside the sink. A great place to start: I reached deep into the dregs of my soggy brain and pulled out the only thing I could find there that was less than half wet. “What if I’m not good enough for Cody and Astor?” I said. “How can I be their father when I’m really not? What if I just can’t do it?”

“Oh, Dexter,” she said. “You’re a wonderful father. They absolutely love you.”

“But,” I said, struggling for both authenticity and the next line, “but they’re little now. When they get older. When they want to know about their real father—”

“They know all they’ll ever need to know about that sonofabitch,” Rita snapped. It surprised me: I had never heard her use rough language before. Possibly she never had, either, because she began to blush. “You are their real father,” she said. “You are the man they look up to, listen to, and love. You are exactly the father they need.”

I suppose that was at least partly true, since I was the only one who could teach them the Harry Way and other things they needed to know, though I suspected this was not exactly what Rita had in mind. But it didn’t seem politic to bring that up, so I simply said, “I really want to be good at this. I can’t fail, even for a minute.”

“Oh, Dex,” she said, “people fail all the time.” That was very true. I had noticed many times before that failure seemed to be one of the identifying characteristics of the species. “But we keep trying, and it comes out all right in the end. Really. You’re going to be great at this, you’ll see.”

“Do you really think so?” I said, only mildly ashamed of the disgraceful way I was hamming it up.

“I know so,” she said, with her patented Rita smile. She reached across the table and clutched at my hand. “I won’t let you fail,” she said. “You’re mine now.”

It was a bold claim, flinging the Emancipation Proclamation aside like that and saying she owned me. Still, it seemed to close off an awkward moment comfortably, so I let it slide. “All right,” I said. “Let’s have breakfast.”

She cocked her head to one side and looked at me for a moment, and I was aware that I must have hit a false note, but she just blinked a few times before she said, “All right,” and got up and began to cook breakfast.

The other had come to the door in the night, and then slammed it in fear—there was no mistaking that part. He had felt fear. He heard the call and came, and he was afraid. And so the Watcher had no doubt about it.

It was time.

Now.