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“What’s going on?” he asked, as if he was arriving late to a practical joke of some kind.

“You are to

come with me,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, not frightened, just puzzled.

“I’m talking about filling a syringe with heroin and shooting it into a girl’s arm,” I said.

The smile that had lingered now dropped from his face. “I don’t know—”

The last part of that sentence, “—what the hell you’re talking about,” was spoken to the frozen audience of the Grand Ole Opry.

I am certain Oliver was surprised.

Five people stood at the back of that stage—Oliver and Nicolet, Haarm, Messenger, and me. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people around us, but they might as well have been statues. They stood or sat, laughed, spoke, or muttered into microphones, all utterly still, as still as the people in a painting. The stage lights were purple, giving the scene an extra layer of surrealism.

Oliver was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Nicolet wore spangled boots, a cutaway skirt, and midriff-baring top.

Many unusual people and things had appeared on the fabled stage, but this was no doubt the strangest.

“Who are you people?” Nicolet demanded.

“I’m not with them,” Oliver said. “I’m . . .” He failed to come up with a way to introduce himself and fell back on, “This is one weird dream.”

“You have done wrong,” Messenger said. “You must first acknowledge the wrong, and then you must atone.”

“I don’t acknowledge anything without a lawyer,” Oliver said.

This brought a grin from Haarm. “Just like on American television shows.”

Really? He was making wisecracks?

“You have each helped to cause the degradation, victimization, addiction, and infection of Graciella Jayne.”

That got Nicolet’s full and undivided attention. “I don’t know what that little bitch has been telling you, but—”

“Nicolet and Oliver, I offer each of you a game,” Messenger began.

“—she’s not . . . Wait a minute, what the hell is this about?” Nicolet demanded, her anger growing. “You can’t do this to me. Do you know who I am?”

It was not my turn to speak, but I couldn’t help it. “Do you know who Graciella Jayne is?”

“I . . .”

“And you would know her as ‘Candy,’” I said to Oliver.

“The little whore?” he blurted. “I don’t even know where she is! She’s not working for me anymore.”

Messenger shot me a look that was not approving of my interruption and just stopped me as I was about to say, She’s in the hospital, thanks to you.

“Nicolet DeMarche and Oliver Benbury, this wrong demands punishment. I offer you a game. If you win, you will go free, unbothered by me or my apprentice.”

Nicolet and Oliver exchanged a look, realizing that whatever this dream was, they were both in it together. But what could they do? They were each in their own way powerful and used to getting their way. But their power was nothing to Messenger.

“What game?” Oliver asked.

Give him credit: he recovered quickly.