Was there a point to suffering? Or was it some kind of f.u.c.king entertainment?

These thoughts slowed her feet, and the fat statesman gave her arm a sharp jerk.

"Come along, you cow," he growled.

People were already gathered ahead to the right, half a dozen in a rectangular s.p.a.ce where an open gate led onto a path between an eight-foot-tall standing stone that seemed to mark the site and a smaller clump of boulders. On the gradual downhill slope beyond it lay a bowl-like depression in the ground next to the piled rubble of what might once have been a cairn like those back up the road at Balnuaran. A little farther on, but separated by fences, lay more stones and boulders and artificial depressions in the ground. At the low end of the fenced s.p.a.ce stood a line of high shrubs and beyond that a stretch of woodland. She glimpsed the glisten of a stream on its far side.

Because the previous event had occurred late at night, Stacey antic.i.p.ated that nothing would happen here until after dark. Instead, the six people already there spread out into a circle around the central depression-a runnel surrounding a small mound, like a miniature of a Bronze Age hill fort. No one said a word. The clarity and stillness of the afternoon, the matter-of-fact way they all took their places, made it surreal to her. Entranced, she had escaped from this fate last night. Now, fully aware, she might as well have been entranced again. She couldn't stop it.

"Over here," said the statesman, taking her arm again. He waddled down into the runnel and then up onto the mound. A cold wind blew across the field.

As he spoke, some of the gathered people snickered.

That seemed strange to Stacey. Even now, even with all this.

No . . . because of all this.

If she was a necessary sacrifice, then why laugh at her? If her death meant that worlds would be safe, shouldn't these people-these skinwalkers-be weeping for her? Honoring her?

It's what she would have done.

But their laughs were like Carrie's secret smile. Wrong and out of place.

The fat statesman pushed her to a spot and then stopped her. "You will take off your clothes and pa.s.s naked through the doorway."

"Why?" she demanded.

"Only a pure sacrifice will do. Clothes are impure. Plastics, metal . . . no. You will be reborn into the fire as naked as you were born into the blood of this world."

The smiles around her grew brighter. Several of them licked their grinning lips and wrung their hands.

Stacey frowned. "N-no . . ."

"Do it," said the fat man, "or we will do it for you, and we won't be gentle."

She made no move to obey. Instead she looked into his eyes. "Why are you doing this?"

"We told you . . ."

"No. Why this? Why do I need to be naked? I stopped fighting you, so why are you treating me like this? Why are you being so mean?"

His only answer was a lascivious chuckle. Then he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat and drew out a black stone about the size and shape of a large box cutter. It had been polished to a high gloss and sharpened along one side to a wicked razor edge. Like the stone Rhymer had, it was covered with all sorts of markings and symbols. But Rhymer's wasn't knifelike, and Stacey thought of primitive knives or adzes from prehistoric sites. She was sure she'd seen such a tool in a museum display somewhere, but now it was here, not on display, and they were going to kill her with it.

"No," she begged.

"Oh yes," he said. "You are a cow, but you are a comely cow. Let us see the flesh that will burn. Let us delight in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that will suckle monsters and the loins that will sp.a.w.n the horrors of h.e.l.l."

He darted out a hand and caught her blouse. Stacey cried out in disgust and pulled away, but the man's grip was strong and b.u.t.tons flew and cloth tore.

She staggered back, her blouse torn open, her bra and bare midriff exposed to their sight. The eyes of every person in the circle burned with delight at what they saw.

"Tear the rest off," yelled one of the women.

"Let us see the wh.o.r.e," cried a hulking man.

"Cut her!" yelled the others. "Let us see the wine of her heart. Cut her . . . cut her!"

They all began to chant for the fat man to strip her. To use his knife to cut her clothes. To slash her face and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and limbs. They hopped up and down, punching the air with their fists, eyes ablaze, pa.s.sion causing red poppies to bloom in their cheeks.

Laughing with them, the fat man advanced on her, one hand clutching as he reached for her, the other slicing the air with awful promise.

Suddenly, it was as if a cold, clean hand reached out of the darkness of her mind and slapped Stacey across the face.

A coven after all.

Just that.

All around her, hearts beating for the love of darkness.

And everything was lies.

She actually staggered back from him as if struck.

But as her foot came down it landed firmly and she crouched, fists clenched, teeth bared, deep understanding catching fire in her mind.

This was the truth. This carnal madness of the moment tore away the cobwebs in her mind.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," she said. "You lied to me."

They heard her words and for a moment they stared blankly at her, and then they erupted into huge, coa.r.s.e laughter that scared the birds from the trees.

"This is all a game to you, you sick f.u.c.kers."

The woman who had yelled gave a few seconds of ironic applause. "And the trained monkey squeezes out a real thought."

Everyone laughed at that.

Stacey spat in her face, but the woman wiped it from her skin and licked her fingers.

"So . . . all of that about Rhymer, that was-what? A joke?"

"Oh, no," insisted the fat man, "it's not a joke."

Stacey hesitated. "But-"

"It's more delicious this way," he explained. "The last turn of the knife, so to speak. The ugly truth, the final betrayal, the realization that you came willingly when you really should have tried to run away and find your fabled savior. So nice. Like whipped cream." He leaned close. "Oh . . . how they scream when they hear that."

The gathered skinwalkers cackled like crows.

Stacey wheeled around, looking for a line of escape, but the people closed ranks around her.

"And how it must turn the knife even harder in Rhymer," said the fat man. "To know that those he fails to save die either hating and d.a.m.ning him or calling for his help, and he is always too late."

"Too late!" chanted the crowd.

"Year after year, century after century, too late." The fat man squeezed his crotch as a wave of erotic joy flushed through him. "His pain is so delicious. So . . . very delicious."

"You are monsters," said Stacey softly. "Everything Rhymer said-all of it-was true. You are a coven of monsters."

"Monsters, monsters, monsters," they chanted, laughing and fondling themselves.

The fat man guffawed and held his trembling belly as he laughed. "I wish you had seen it, girl," he said. "When he realized that we were already in that town. When he saw that we were already in the restaurant. He turned as white as a sheet and ran-actually ran-from there. Your hero. Failed once again. The last we saw of him was his back as he ran for his life, leaving you, my dear, to . . . us."

And with that he lunged at her with the stone. For all his bulk, the man was terrifyingly fast. Stacey flung herself backward but the edge of the sacred stone drew a red line across the tops of both b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Beads of red blood bulged from the cuts and then spilled down, following the curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, staining her torn blouse, falling onto the ground.

The crowd cheered wildly.

"Cut her again!" screeched a reed-thin man dressed in a postman's uniform.

The fat man laughed and raised his stone. Stacey tried to back away, but the crowd was a solid ring and they forced her toward him.

"Cut her! Cut her!"

Stacey realized that this was it, that she was going to die. Even with all that had happened since last night she'd never quite accepted the absolute reality of her death. Or its absolute imminence.

The stone knife slashed through the air, inches away, and she saw strands of her hair flutter in the breeze. The fat man was circling her, closing the distance with each pa.s.s. Cut after cut whistled through the air and she felt lines of molten heat erupt along her back and arms. Blood ran like rivers.

"Cut her! Cut her!"

The chant filled the air.

The fat man grinned like a ghoul as he closed in. Behind him the air began to shimmer with green fairy lights.

"Cut her! Cut her!"

Stacey braced herself, shifting her weight to the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, ready to run, ready to spring. Ready to fight. Ready to do anything but let him butcher her without at least crippling the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. She was determined to take his eyes with her. If she had to die, then f.u.c.k it. Let them pay for it.

"Cut her! Cut her!"

Stacey timed herself to his next swing, and then she ducked low and s.n.a.t.c.hed up a rock, rose, pivoted, and hurled it with all her strength.

It struck the fat man on the shoulder as he was raising his weapon and then ricocheted off and struck the postman in the mouth. He staggered back, spitting teeth.

The crowd laughed at that, too.

With a sinking heart she realized that they were used to their victims struggling. Worse, they enjoyed it.

The wall of green light intensified, blocking out part of the circle of skinwalkers. Its presence cut down on the amount of maneuvering room she had. She was barely able to stay away from the killer as it was, but as the wall strengthened and grew, Stacey knew that sooner or later she would fall beneath the knife or be forced through that doorway.

The fat statesman slashed at her again, and she dodged, but as she did so she realized that he could have cut her. She stumbled away, confused. Surely he wasn't showing her mercy . . .

As he stalked her, the fat man began speaking some words and phrases in a language she didn't know, which sounded like a made-up form of Latin. With each word the shimmering light flared and grew.

He must have seen the look of realization in her eyes. He said, "That's right, we won't kill you here. But we will lap your blood." His tongue waggled obscenely.

She was a t.i.the to h.e.l.l. Not a blood sacrifice. She was going into the green light alive, not into the ground dead.

The light bathed the whole clearing, painting the faces of everyone there in shades of sickness and unreality. It was like looking at a pack of madmen through night-vision goggles. All green and black and shades of gray.

The fat man raised the blade high over his head.

He opened his mouth to say something else. Perhaps another phrase in that weird language. Maybe another taunt.

Whatever it was, though, would never be spoken.

Not in this world.

Something whipped past Stacey's ear and for a split second she thought it was a wasp. It hummed, high and sharp.

Then she stared with slack-jawed shock at the thing sticking out from between the fat man's teeth. Long and slender, with brown feathers quivering at the end.

An arrow.

The fat man took a slow, wandering sideways step and turned away from Stacey, revealing the barbed spear point standing out from the back of his skull, slick with blood and strands of gore.

The fat man clutched at Stacey, but his body began to shudder violently. His chest bulged outward-she could hear the wet, m.u.f.fled sound of his ribs and sternum snapping, then the skin stretched and stretched until it burst open in a spray of blood. Something leaped through the bone-broken doorway, a humped and gnarled figure no larger than a child. It landed on two misshapen legs and stared around with eyes that glowed with real inner heat. Its skin looked like a map of veins and musculature, like some grotesque subject of dissection in a medical school. But it was alive and filled with hate. Intelligence burned in those hot eyes.

Stacey lunged for the fallen stone knife.

So did the creature.

But as they both reached for it-as Stacey curled her fingers around it-a second arrow snapped through the air and struck the creature. This time it hit the chest and transfixed it. If this monster, this Yvag, had a pumping heart like a human, then the broad-bladed arrow must surely have torn it in half.

The creature looked at Stacey, its burning eyes seeming to lock on her, and its inhuman mouth opened, screeching to the sky in furious terror. Then it abruptly ruptured into a gray-green mist that spattered Stacey and every shocked and now silent person in the circle. Bones and raw meat flopped to the ground.

The statesman's body-the fat empty sh.e.l.l-still stood impossibly upright; but it was rotting before her eyes in swift, freakish decomposition. Skin bruised, sagged, the wide eyeb.a.l.l.s liquefied and fell back into the skull, and the whole corpse deliquesced inside the suit, collapsing with a wet squelch to the ground. He had been in the press for years, decades she thought. Dead far longer than the driver of the limousine.

The wall of light suddenly changed from green to red. Furnace heat roared out across the clearing.

"Push her in!" screamed the woman who had applauded with such vicious irony. Her words broke the others out of their shock. The postman was closest; he made a grab at Stacey.

A third arrow came out of nowhere and punched through his chest. It stood there, the shaft thrumming from the force of impact.

The postman juddered to a stop, and he managed to croak a single last word, raised his arm and pointed.

"No . . ."

Everyone turned.