"Here you go," he said. "Bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt cuisine from Chez Syd." He pa.s.sed her the plate.

"You first. You're the starving one."

"Nah," he replied. "This'll only take a second."

He grabbed another egg. She spotted the defective one, picked it up.

"That one's bad," he warned.

"You sure?" Nora turned it in her fingers, sniffed it. "Smells okay to me."

Before he could reply, Nora cracked it on the counter's edge, brought it to her lips, and tipped it back down her throat. She gulped it down, then wiped her mouth.

"Yum," she said. She picked up an orange slice, peeling the pulp away with her teeth. Syd made a persimmon face. "Jesus," he grimaced. "And I actually kissed those lips?"

"What?" Nora said, nonchalant. "They're good this way."

"Uh-huh," Syd said skeptically. "This is all a cheap ploy to avoid my cooking." He cracked the egg he was holding, poured it into the bowl, and picked up the fork.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," he groaned, stepping back.

"What?" she asked. He gestured queasily. Then she looked in the bowl, and all the color drained from her face. Nora gasped.

Floating in the bowl was a gelatinous, malformed ma.s.s: tiny body soft as a Dali-clock, little stringers of blood curling around it, threading through the clear amniotic fluid. It was a chicken fetus, right down to the beak and bulging eye sockets. A grinning little rictus was frozen on its dead, gooey face.

Syd dropped the fork and stepped back, his head suddenly reeling. He looked around wildly, then turned toward the back door: wrenching it open, pushing through the screen, and falling out onto the porch.

He was leaning against the rail-coughing and sputtering, a thin rope of spittle trailing from his lips-when Nora appeared in the doorway. "Syd, are you okay?" she asked, her voice tense and choked. She reached out to touch him.

He pulled away, leaned his head against his arms. Then the sickness took precedence, and he visibly slumped. A high-pitched buzzing trilled in his ears. "I think-" The buzzing got louder. He shook his head, trying to clear it. "I think maybe I . . ."

He took a step away from the railing, and his legs folded under him.

"Syd!" Nora cried. She lurched forward, caught him by the waist. "Syd, what is it?"

"I . . . feel sick," he mumbled.

"You're okay," she urged, an undercurrent of panic swelling in her voice. "You're just having a bad reaction. . . ."

Reaction to what? he thought to ask, but the words wouldn't come out of his mouth. "Nee'ta laydow . . ." he slurred.

Steadying him, Nora helped Syd off the porch and into the kitchen. The food smells a.s.saulted him again and he doubled over, body spasming.

"Hang on, baby," she said. "Hang on."

Nora steered him back out of the kitchen, heading for the bedroom. By the time they were halfway there he had broken into a full-body sweat, his skin going hot then cold then both at once. His consciousness dislodged and descended, spiraling in his skull.

When Nora next spoke her voice seemed distorted, a million miles away. His brain couldn't quite make out the words she said.

But he could've sworn they were oh G.o.d, here it comes. . . .

18.

Nora and Syd huddled on the bed like a macabre Madonna and child, as the first tremors wracked his flesh.

Nora cradled his head to her breast: fighting down her panic, rocking him like a baby. In the last half hour his body temperature had plummeted to near hypothermia, then rocketed clear into fever-dream territory. She had scoured the apartment, gathering every sheet and blanket and towel, which were now arranged into a heaping semi-circular coc.o.o.n on the bed, forming a makeshift sweat lodge. A bucket was positioned within easy reach. A washrag soaked in ice water sat ready and waiting on the bedside table; the bottle of Comfort was uncapped an arm's length away.

Nora took a slug off the bottle and braced herself, beating back her own fear in the process. The mixing bowl still sat on the kitchen counter, taunting her. She didn't know what to make of the omen, was afraid to even look at it as she broke open the ice trays, raced through the rooms . . .

. . . but when she closed her eyes she could see herself: huge with child but not ready yet, screaming at Vic as they pulled away from the parking lot of the s.h.i.thole Texas dive where she'd caught him again, his nose already halfway up some beehive-headed bimbo's crack. She could see herself, screaming at Vic as they roared down the highway, his face contorted with anger and resentment and rage.

She could hear herself, the horrible dull-knife agony twisting in her guts as the contractions. .h.i.t, sent her reeling and clutching at the dashboard. She could hear Vic's screams, mingling with her own, as he rocketed off the highway and onto a pitch-black back road.

She remembered the moon, looming over her through the rear window. As full and cold as she felt, as she pushed and pushed and pushed through a blinding veil of pain. She remembered Vic's halting liquor breath as he cradled her head, remembered the smell of her own sour outpouring, a gushing torrent threaded with red, as she ushered forth the wrongness.

The wrongness that slid from between her legs.

Most of all, she remembered the silence. Like a shroud that descended to engulf them, as Vic lifted the tiny misshapen body to the sky. To the night. To distant mother moon.

A silence broken only by her own wretched sobbing. And the feeding sounds that followed. . . .

Nora stopped: blocking the memories, forbidding any further thought on the subject. That was a long time ago, she told herself. Ancient history, to be forgotten at all costs.

This was now. And she had work to do.

Nora took another swig. She was as ready as she'd ever be. And it wasn't like she hadn't done this before. Initiation was one thing: just about anyone with the spark in them could be jump-started, tapping into the root of the beast through the combination of intoxication and manic s.e.x-magic. And she knew how to pick 'em-weeding out the dweebs and lost causes almost at a glance-so it was rare that she didn't get her pick through the first set of hurdles.

But mastering it . . .

That was the hard part. There were so many ways to fumble, so many things that could go wrong. The kinds of walls they had built-in to shield them from their nature. The strength and resiliency of their human mind relative to the ferocity of their animal instincts. The sheer force of their imagination . . .

In the end, there were an infinite number of worst-case variations on blowing it. But only one real way of getting it right. First you had to free the beast. Then you had to learn to ride the f.u.c.ker. Primal essence was soul nitro, explosively unstable, and tapping into it always meant working without a safety net.

The price of failure, plain and simple, was death.

Sometimes they got unruly and she did it in self-defense; sometimes they just couldn't get it up, in which case they were meat. Worse yet were the doomed ones who couldn't weather the inner storm that awakening invariably aroused. And while it was a certainty that life without tapping their true nature meant consignment to the hollow strictures of man-meat, freeing the beast without the necessary mental power to harness it was tantamount to turning a starving tiger loose on a sleeping keeper. Unchained after years, sometimes decades of repression, rabid with appet.i.te, the animal side would literally eat its host alive. It was not pretty.

"Uh-nuh . . ." Syd twitched and shivered, a clammy chill seeping across his skin. He could barely speak. "N-Nora . . ."

"I'm here," she whispered, feeling his forehead. He was burning up. His breathing was alternately shallow and gasping; his heart jackhammered inside his rib cage.

Nora wrung out the cold rag, sponging his brow. She cursed herself for not having seen this coming. He'd breezed past the first hurdles as if he'd been greased, and tricked her into thinking he could take awakening in stride.

But he was so bound up, and she had so much riding on this, and there wasn't enough time, and . . .

Stop it, she thought. She reminded herself that she'd expected him to crash hard: men inevitably took it harder. Every man she'd ever met was ultimately a child, and any kind of sickness reduced them to infants.

But this . . .

She couldn't kid herself. Syd had not only unlocked the cage, he'd blown it clear off the hinges. There was no way of knowing what he'd do.

"What's happening to me?" he asked, his hands clutching at her, weak as twigs. His eyes were closed, his whole being seized in the grip of raw mortal terror. Nora gripped his hand, felt him vibrate like a bowstring.

"You're fine, baby, you're doing fine," she whispered. "Just tell me what you see."

"N-nothing," he stammered, his teeth chattering like porcelain castanets. ". . . c-c-can't s-see . . ."

"Yes you can," she told him, trying to guide him. "You've just got to concentrate. Focus your will, look around you, and tell me where you are."

"L-lost," he murmured, ". . . it's dark . . . I'm s-scared."

"Don't be, baby, I'm here . . ."

"S-so scared . . ."

Another seizure hit; Syd started to thrash. Nora grabbed the bottle. Liquor lowered the inhibitions, loosened the mortar holding the inner walls together. She took another hit for herself, then fed him some.

"Here," she whispered.

"I . . . I . . ." he stuttered. "I c-cannh . . ."

His eyes were rolling back and forth in their sockets, unable to fix or focus. She chased his mouth with the bottle, made contact, tipped it back until amber rivulets trickled down his chin.

"Achh," he sputtered, coughing out at least as much as he managed to swallow. He held it down, then suddenly doubled over.

"Ahuuagh!"

"s.h.i.t!" Nora pressed him toward the bucket as Syd pitched forward and heaved up a quant.i.ty of fragrant bile. "It's okay, get it out. Get it all out." She rubbed his back, let him void until she was sure he was empty, then pulled him back into the coc.o.o.n and pressed his face to her breast.

"Here. Suck." Nora offered her nipple to him. Syd's mouth found it and locked on hungrily: drawing it in, filling the vacuum. The contact completed a circuit between them; she took another hit off the bottle, felt her nipple b.u.m as it stiffened in his mouth. As he suckled she began to secrete: transfusing energy. Feeding him.

Syd sucked hungrily. His cries subsided, as an eerie quiet fell upon the room. Nora kissed his hair, felt the storm inside him stirring in her core as well, connecting them like a thunderhead moving across some vast inner plane.

Nora closed her eyes, reached out with her mind. She could see the tiny latticework of veins in her eyelids grow distant as a blood-red sunset, ephemeral as heat lightning, as she descended into blackness. Searching for the plane where all consciousness meets.

Searching for him.

"I'm here, baby," she whispered. "Can you feel me?" Syd mumbled, nearly comatose.

"Can you?" she urged.

He fought for control. A moment later, thought came back to him, echoing through her mind.

Yes. . .

Black static suffused her inner vision, wrapped her in its inky embrace. She delved into the darkness, trying to pierce the veil between them.

"What are we doing?"

Rruhn . . . running . . .

"Where are we running?"

She hovered over him: listening to his breathing, waiting for his reply. A rumbling started deep in his chest, resonated through his torso, as the blackness gave way.

And he was in the woods again.

He was running, a fierce wind raging around him: trees groaning under its sway, vaulted limbs knitting patterns like shattered gla.s.s over his head . . .

Syd fought to hold on to the question, felt his mind fragment into a billion glittering bits of thought. Nora held him, his muscles rippling and writhing, his entire body a disjointed confederation of flesh, cells quivering in sympathetic vibration . . .

. . . as he tore through night and storm, running from the beast at his back, his feet punctured by jagged stones. Ragged underbrush snagged his flesh, ripping hunks from him that flapped like streamers, as the beast bore down upon him. . . .

Syd's heart was an out-of-control pile driver in his chest, slamming him mercilessly. His body rocked with spasms, every vein and artery suddenly straining to the bursting point, racing down his arms and across his chest, slithering like angry serpents up his temples. The sound coming out of him mounted in intensity . . .

. . . as the animal's howl wound around and through him: merging with the storm as it blotted out all thought, all sensation save his awareness that he was there, hurtling inexorably forward, unable to stop as more and more pieces of him stripped off, reducing him to meat to bone to b.l.o.o.d.y writhing essence. His feet became entangled in clinging vines, his legs unable to keep up with the pace.

Syd tripped, lost his balance, fell screaming in blackness . . .

. . . and the scream became a raw keening cadence that went on and on and on, long after his vocal cords had shredded and his lung capacity exhausted itself. It was the sound of revolution: his mind divided, his cells at war, his DNA splintering at the seams.

Syd's spine went rigid. Nora braced herself.

And emergence was upon them. "AHHHHHHNAHNAHHHURTS IT HURTS IT HURTSSS . . .!!!"

He broke contact, howling in agony, every muscle and sinew and ligament wrenched to the breaking point. A blood vessel popped in his temple, sent a thin spritz arcing out to spatter the sheets. His limbs stiffened under the covers; his lungs took in one final heaving gasp of air.

And then-just when it seemed it could go no further, that he would simply explode in a bright red spray of flesh-and-bone confetti-he stopped.

For Nora it was like watching a burning fuse disappear into a keg of dynamite and not blow up. Moving quickly, she stripped the blankets back to reveal his naked torso, gleaming with sweat and flush with struggle.

"C'mon, baby," she pleaded, and began ma.s.saging his chest. "C'mon . . ."

His engorged veins receded, like ripples on the surface of a pond. His breathing resumed, shallow and halting . . .

He was at the heart of the forest, the eye of the storm twirling madly above. His body was gone: his essence distilled to a Syd/not-Syd awareness that hovered in the air, permeated the s.p.a.ce. A preternatural calm enveloped him.

And the sound of feeding came.

The great wolf stood in the clearing, its maw buried in the chest of its freshly fallen prey. He watched in horror as its head dipped down, disappeared completely into the glistening breach . . .

. . . while in the room Syd shuddered, as the plane of flesh just under his rib cage suddenly distorted and ballooned outward . . .