Excerpt:

At the end of the field were trees, sparse enough to walk into, but thick enough that we could not see far past the first row of trees. It wasn’t quite a forest, I didn’t think, except in the roughest sense of the word; I’d always thought of forests as being larger, at least. The gray-eyed man brought us straight into the trees, and our footfalls were softer on the bed of pine needles and soil.
Eventually, we came to a clearing, where a group of ten or twelve people had been waiting for us. Their clothes were mismatched and threadbare, and they looked wild-eyed—not dead-eyed like the tall man who had led us here, but there was something off about them all, one way or another. I certainly didn’t trust them.
“These are them?” one woman asked, holding the hand of a tiny girl, who used the other hand to cling to the woman’s skirt.
The gray-eyed man stepped back to look at us. “These are them.”
I straightened up, but said nothing. I looked the tall man in his steel eyes and waited for him to go on.
“Miss Descoteaux, these are your new clients,” he pronounced.
“Look,” I said to him, “maybe you skipped a page somewhere, but we’re retired, sir, and even if we weren’t, I don’t so much as know your name. There’s a process for these things, you know.”
“Oh, we know the game you play, Miss Descoteaux. You’ll be compensated, and you’ll be left alone so long as you win the game for us.”
I shook my head. “Gonna have to give us a better reason than that to bring us out of retirement.”
The man turned to Marie and Jackson. “How far along is she, Everaard?”
Jackson put a hand on Marie’s shoulder.
“All kinds of facts we know,” the man said, turning back to me. “And this one’s not a fact, exactly, but I’d bet you all want that baby and its mama to turn out all right, wouldn’t you?”
The shorter man who had been trailing behind Moises stepped out. “Now, Cain, that’s not—”
Cain turned his gray eyes on the shorter man, who stopped.
“Cain,” I mused, maybe unwisely, “like in the Bible? What kinda mother goes through all the names in the Bible for their baby and picks Cain?”
His hand reflexively shot down to his hip, and I stepped back.
“Take it easy,” I murmured. “You’re a little jumpy about all this.”
“No more discussion. Let’s go.”
I shut up; I’d done enough damage for the time being. We followed Cain, going faster than before, but still walking in step amongst ourselves.