Lightning fast, she leapt at Sarah, who stood, dumbfounded as her mother transformed into this thing.

Ingram's fist slammed her to the floor of the cabin. His foot lashed out viciously, catching the black thing that had once been Sarah's mother in the chest.

Ingram moved before she could begin another attack, grabbing the thing by the neck and hoisting her into the air. She clawed frantically at his arms, drawing furrows in his already bloody skin.

He slammed the pommel of the sword into her face, and she went limp in his hand. He tossed her across the room, back into the corner they had found her.

"No!" Sarah screamed. She scrambled to where her mother had fallen.

"Momma!" she screamed, cradling her mother's limp form. Blood streamed from Elizabeth Rheinhart's nose, her eyes, her ears. Her form mutated, changed. Her skin became pink and white once more. Her body vibrated, shaking and spasming. After a while she stilled, the tremors leaving her limbs.

Sarah closed her eyes and wept.

Ingram went to Andrez and helped him up. A quarter-sized hunk of flesh was missing from his cheek, pumping blood. The priest's eyes and cheeks had already swelled horribly, turning purple. Andrez spat blood to the floor, and two teeth pinged off the metal.

Woozy, unsteady on his feet, Andrez gripped Ingram's arm. Sarah looked at the priest, his gory mouth, then back down to her mother.

No more tears for this... this... thing. She sold my baby to become some Old God's whore. She deserved to die.

She shoved her mother's corpse away and stood.

She looked at Ingram. Gore covered his torso. Blood streamed from wounds on his right arm. The bandage covering his missing fingers was no longer spotted with red, it was soaked. Sarah reached out and touched his shoulder, concern in her face.

Ingram's eyes searched hers. He leaned forward.

In her ear, he whispered, "Don't cry for me. I chose to be here. And so did the priest. And so did you, and so did your mother, for that matter."

He swallowed, glancing at the priest who was touching his face gingerly, lost in his own pain.

"Just so you know... being with you, with Franny has been... it's changed me. I feel like I could become a good man with you. We could be good together."

Andrez cleared his throat. His voice sounded different, the plosives coming strangely. "It's been hours now. We have to move."

Ingram straightened. "You're right."

He moved to the door, and peered through the porthole.

"Looks like we're right under the pilot house. There's the stairs leading up." He turned back to them. "It's time to finish this. Whoever's steering this damned boat will be in the pilot house. We're gonna go in there and get Franny back."

At that moment, the boat lurched, sending them bouncing off the metal hull.

"Feel that, Bull?" Andrez asked, eyes wide.

"Yeah. We hit something, submerged tree probably."

"No, do you feel it?"

Sarah nodded. "Yes. Something's changed. Something's happened."

Andrez shook his head. "We have to hurry. They're trying to bring something through. This feels like Godshatter. But worse."

"Let's go." Ingram lifted his sword.

"I can't find my gun, Bull. I must've dropped it."

He faced Sarah and shook his head. "Well, it's too late to go back in there." He looked down, as though checking himself one last time. "Stay behind us, Sarah. If you see anything you can use as a weapon, pick it up. When we go out this door, you'll both need to be right on my ass. I'm going out and up the stair and through the door, even if I have to knock the bastard down."

"Let's go get Franny," Ingram said.

Ingram turned, opened the door, and moved quickly into the gray light of day. Andrez scrambled behind him, and Sarah followed as best she could, keeping close behind the little man.

The shore was nearer now-brown and green foliage whipping past, thirty yards off the starboard bow-as the barge took a large crook in the river. The wind ripped through Sarah's clothes and she smelled the river, like dead fish and dead men and river mud.

The three raced around a short dividing wall and mounted the stairs to the pilot house. Ingram took the stairs two at time, sword out, the muscles in his back rippling.

At the top of the stairs, he stopped and looked at his companions.

The instant he turned, she saw everything about him, his pain and loneliness, his determination and viciousness, his wounds and fiercely beating heart. She felt her heart swell and rise to meet his.

Ingram nodded to her, then wrenched the handle down and shoved open the door. Andrez pushed his body into motion after him, and Sarah followed.

Her senses slowed, and she felt as though she moved through water, everything happening with a dreamlike intensity. Her perceptions became almost mechanical, ticking off details as if she was inventorying a still-life.

A room. Two men-both living-one by a table and the other at the pilot's wheel, backlit by river and sky. The light streaming through the windows, thin and bloody. Ingram stepping forward, filling the space with his presence. Andrez moving toward the pilot, raising his pistol. The blood spattering the walls and windows glistening in the weak half-light from outside. The room smelling of iron and incense and...

She felt her pulse throbbing in her temples, her chest heaving. A panic filled her, suffusing all of her awareness, senses distilled down in to short, sharp shocks. Her mind registered what was in the middle of the room.

Franny lay splayed on the table, surrounded by candles and incense. Her once bright blue eyes shone wide and horrified and dim, her mouth gaped in a rictus of pain and fear. Her flaxen hair ringed her face in a soft halo, darkened in places by blood. Her delicate fingers-once so chubby as they grasped Sarah's fingers-curled inward towards the nails that fixed her to the table.

Too late. They were too late.

They'd split Franny from vagina to throat and spread her ribcage to display her organs in gory loops. She died terrified. Her corpse gleamed red in the low light of the pilot house. Sarah could feel her mind breaking as she gazed on the remains of her daughter.

Where Franny's heart should have been was a swirling blackness like a whirlpool. And in the instant that Sarah's mind comprehended her daughter's fate, the darkness grew. It pulsed, expanding, sending small tendrils of blackness spilling over the edges of Franny's chest cavity. At its edges, phantoms twisted like tentacles coalescing from smoke and vapor and blood. It grew.

The Pale Man stood beside Franny's body chanting and moving his hands in obscure patterns. His nakedness didn't register on Sarah immediately, the blood caking his body-his legs, chest and flaccid penis-gave the impression of clothing. He looked up at Sarah with blue, piercing eyes that held her. His lips withdrew to show yellowed teeth and a black tongue.

Oun tulu ia denu fin ia.

Everything happened all at once. From the corner of her eye, she saw the silhouette that stood at the pilot's wheel turn and bat away Andrez's gun as it fired. The priest fell backward and the pilot-a dark-skinned man with tight kinky hair and a well-groomed mustache-raised a pistol and snarled at them, firing. In the flash of Andrez's gunfire, Sarah saw that the pilot was as naked as the Pale Man.

The pilot's gun barked three times quickly, flashing in the room, deafening her. Sarah stood tranfixed. Red flowers blossomed on Andrez's back and his skull. A bloody mist remained in the air as the priest slumped to the floor.

Ingram bellowed wordlessly and lurched toward the pilot. The pilot wheeled, brought the gun up into Ingram's stomach, and fired again. The larger man jumped, his body jerking with the gunshot. Another bloody flower blossomed, this time from Ingram's back.

Oun tulu ia denu fin ia!

Bringing up his mangled right arm, Ingram grabbed the pilot's throat. Before the man could pull the trigger again, Ingram raked the sword across the man's face, cutting deeply into the pilot's cheek and peeling off the man's features-his nose, his lips, his brow-like a butcher denuding a pig of skin. A high-pitched scream pierced the air. The air whistled and burbled in the open wound of the pilot's face. Where his nose had been was now only white cartilage and blood. Sarah couldn't tell if the sound was the pilot's screams or her own.

As Ingram raised the sword again, to drive it into his eye, the pilot squeezed the trigger convulsively, and Sarah saw Ingram's body jump once more. He screamed and shoved the sword home, impaling the man through the mouth. Spattered with red, Ingram fell.

"Bull!" Her voice didn't sound like her own anymore. He toppled over as she reached him. He hit the floor heavily, coughing crimson at the impact.

"Get..." The words burbled in his throat. "Get the Pale Man."

She realized that the chanting had stopped. She stood and whirled. The Pale Man watched her over the body of her dead daughter.

"Now, at the end of all things, it would be a Rheinhart to thwart me," the Pale Man said.

Sarah gasped.

"Wilhelm!"

The Pale Man grinned and flicked the black tongue in his mouth.

"Yessss," he hissed. Then suddenly he coughed, a deep hacking sound coming from someplace further than his chest. Blood darkened his lips.

"I was once Wilhelm Rheinhart. And you are my blood. And so was she."

Sarah's eyes burned with the gunsmoke in the room. She brought up her hands to her chest and glanced wildly about, looking for something to use as a weapon. In the smoke, she couldn't see Andrez's or the pilot's guns. Ingram must have landed on his own sword as he fell. She clutched her chest, felt hardness there, and remembered.

"She was..." The Pale Man smiled, bloody lips like heated and fluid wax. "She was blood of my blood? My niece. My great niece. Ah. That explains why it was so sweet. Her pain... exquisite." He shook his head. In the light, his skin looked like paraffin, waxy and inhuman.

"But it's too late now. He's coming over the threshold."

Sarah looked down at Franny's remains. The blackness spilled over the sides of her daughter's chest cavity like water flowing from a high place. It spread out from the table and lapped at the walls. Sarah felt the cold of the darkness touching her legs. As she watched it, her perceptions skewed, tilting sickeningly. For an instant, she felt like she stood at the precipice of a gigantic vortex, massive and unknown. The rim of the abyss. At the center, she sensed something vast and monstrous moving through limitless dark spaces.

"No," Sarah said, raising her eyes from her daughter's corpse. "No."

She withdrew the straight razor from her breast, and flicked it open.

"No. He won't come through when you're dead. I know that much."

Before she realized what she did, Sarah vaulted the edge of the table and crouched in front of the Pale Man, swinging the razor in short, sharp arcs.

His pale-blue eyes grew large, surprised. He brought up his hands in time to meet her swing. The razor sliced through his flesh as though it truly were wax, drawing a dark line down his forearm and palm. A manic strength overcame Sarah, and she knocked his hands to the side, lashing him with the straight razor again.

A line of black beads crossed the skin of his face, his hands. She reversed her swing, as she'd seen Ingram do with the sword. The Pale Man threw himself backward and jumped to the side. He backed away, trying to keep the table between him and Sarah.

"Wait! We can be... exalted! When he comes past the threshold, he'll grant us anything!"

She rushed forward, swinging the razor in bright steel arcs. The Pale Man feinted, then lashed out with a long white arm, his fist impacting with her cheek, and she reeled back, bright tracers swimming at the edges of her vision. She righted herself with difficulty.

Rage unlike any she'd ever known filled her. She regained her balance and advanced again, keeping her body low, hands up, not swinging blindly now but waiting for an opportunity to strike.

"Blood of my blood! We will wed and be king and queen over the world! Multitudes will beg for our mercy! We will never die!"

As he spoke, he kicked out at her. Pain erupted in her knee and she fell heavily into the table, half on top of her daughter's corpse.

As she fell on top of her daughter, the faintest scent of Franny remained, despite the slaughter, despite the gunsmoke and candles and incense. For the briefest moment, Sarah smelled her daughter, her baby, the scent of her hair fresh from the bath, the smell of her body as they lay together in bed.

She righted herself. Ignoring the pain, she darted forward, ducking under the Pale Man's swing, and swiped his chest with the razor.

When he screamed, it sounded like the whine of a ball-bearing burning itself out, high and grating. He swung his fists wildly, but Sarah crouched low and the blows glanced off her skull. She lashed out again with the razor, opening the Pale Man's cheek.

He jumped backward, trying to get more distance between them.

"We can live forever! We can give your little girl back her life!"

Sarah slashed again, and he moved backward once more.

He stopped and smiled.

"But this is better now. His entrance will be faster if I have your body lying beside your daughter's. Maybe you possess a bit of innocence yet."

As she watched, his blood-caked penis began to rise.

"You might even enjoy it, niece, when I stab you. But I'll bring you back." His smile grew and grew, past any human's capacity for joy. "And do it again, just to teach you not to interfere."

Like a snake striking, he was over the table and upon her, forcing her down to the floor. Hands like a dead man's grabbed her wrists, pinioning her. He opened his mouth and his tongue, black as night, emerged, longer and more grotesque than anything she could imagine.

His eyes became obsidian. Hastur inhabited him. The god had come to partake.

She was screaming now, but his grisly head lowered to hers, black tongue snaking, and he placed his mouth over hers, blocking all sound, and she had no breath anyway. She could feel his tongue growing tendrils that burrowed into her flesh. The Black Kiss. His skin felt like oil upon her, invading her most secret spots.

She thrashed. She writhed. She felt her hand fall on something hard. The smooth, ivory handle of the razor. But she couldn't move.

The god that inhabited Wilhelm thrashed in response, thrusting as far inside Sarah as his flesh would allow. And then, just as it seemed it couldn't get worse, that the darkness pushing in from all sides would shut her mind off like the turning of a light switch and she'd go gibberingly, totally insane, Wilhelm's eyes blinked and they were no longer black but watery blue.

His eyes grew wide as a huge fist grabbed his neck and yanked him away.

Ingram. Still alive. Bellowing.

Sarah felt him withdraw from her mouth. And suddenly, where she'd once been filled with something hideous, now she was filled with rage like some incendiary light firing in her chest.

Ingram screamed. He pulled Wilhelm to him, struggling to hold the thing that had once been a boy. Wilhelm exploded into movement, thrashing and screaming wildly, each limb moving frantically, jerking, spasming, trying to injure the inexorable grip that held him. With his good hand, Ingram began raining blows down.

"Sarah!" Ingram screamed, struggling to hold the white thing in his grasp. "You've got to-"

She lurched forward, flicking open the razor. Wilhelm's fists caught her on the temple, on the jaw, and darkness closed in on her. She fell forward, through the barrage of fists, landing heavily on his chest.

Face to face, once again, she brought the razor up. With the blade, she entered him.

She raked his neck once, twice. She sliced his eyes.

His hands went to his mouth, which opened and closed soundlessly. He began to cough as the black line of blood on his neck widened, then opened, spilling ichor down his front. He coughed, blood spattering Sarah's face and arms.

He coughed, the sound dying away into a burbling hiss. Then he lay still.