April watched the people in the crowd confer with each other. She was winning them over at last.
“The demon did all this,” the old woman said, pointing a shaking, twisted hand at Hakim. “The one you brought here with you.”
“No, that’s not true,” April said. “And you know it isn’t true. You were all showing symptoms before we even arrived. All of those things I just described to you—you’ve been dealing with them for years now, haven’t you?”
“How do we know you’re really fixing things?”
April found the source of the question: Emma’s mother, standing near the children. Charley, still gagged, got a hand free and held it up in the air. April thought he was asking permission to speak, but then she realized what he was really doing. She climbed back out of the fountain and slapped wetly acros
