The Praying Mantis Bride (Nameless: Season One, #3)

by Dean Koontz

“A butterfly flyin’ after dark is an omen, means your death is maybe comin’ soon.

“A woman steps on eggshells means she’ll soon go mad.”

“Don’t step on no ants. We’ve had too damn much rain the past week. We don’t need no more.”

The darkly overcast day is hot and humid. Fat palmetto beetles drone through the sticky Florida air—hideous flying cockroaches. The decaying trailer park is set on a low rise overlooking the iron-gray Gulf of Mexico. Water views aren’t exclusively for the rich, and certainly not just for the virtuous.

“She doesn’t know art from applesauce. She’s about as creative as a turd.”

She dropped these scissors one day and insisted my old man had to pick them up. If the person who drops scissors picks them up, he’ll cut his own good luck.

Stepping on a spider is bad luck. Stepping on ants brings rain. She believed it all.”

They want not merely to destroy the woman psychologically and prevent her from murdering again, but also to terrify and torment her so that she feels keenly the sword of justice.

Justice has been twisted by culture and politics until its meaning is everywhere contested. Each of their missions is instead meant to bring truth and its consequences into the life of someone who has woven a persona of lies, thereby putting an end to his or her crimes.

However, he is a tool of the program, a status for which he is sure that he volunteered before amnesia was imposed on him. A hammer should not argue with the carpenter who wields it.

The raftered ceiling is home to spiders that have spun their elaborate versions of dream catchers, their dreams being juicy moths and silverfish. The blond widow for whom Nameless has spun a web is more lethal than the spiders.

he’s as silent as the eight-legged hunters overhead.