"Ooh! Big man!" she said, through her laughter.

Bill wanted to embrace her even as he attacked her. He put his fingers back together, aimed for her right shoulder. His hand was hot and swollen, as if it had just been stung by a swarm of hornets.

"Sorry," he said, raising his hand.

"No," she said.

Her left arm shot out. A warmth surrounded Bill, almost as if she were embracing him. But then the warmth turned hot and wet, and Bill found himself staggering backwards.

He tried to thrust his arms out behind him for balance, but found that they moved slowly, as if he were swimming through mud.

"Meat for the man!" shouted Constance.

The red substance surrounding his body was increasing in temperature, making sweat prickle in his pores.

Bill felt himself falling. He couldn't move his limbs as he hit the floor. But the substance covering him cushioned the fall, as if he were wrapped in a balloon. His momentum carried him past the TV stand and into a dresser. He felt himself hit, but the substance around him absorbed most of the impact.

"Bad husband!" his wife yelled.

Bill froze for a moment, trying to assess the situation. The red substance around him had cooled slightly. Its color was darkened, and it shone like candy. It covered his entire lower body and his arms, and stopped at his chest. His face was thankfully untouched. The stuff would have smothered him, filled his nostrils and his mouth.

A white and pink flash, and he realized Constance was kneeling next to him. Her little face was grim.

"I was going to bring you with me. Would have been fun to get people here together, Bill. But stay here."

"No," said Bill. "You're not going to do anything..."

"I am," said Constance. "I am."

"You're sick!" he bellowed. "Don't!"

Constance gave her shoulder a shake. Her arm slapped against her side, still limp.

"I can feel the sensation coming back again," she said. "It's going to take a while. No waita"there it is."

She raised her arm and made a fist.

"You see, Bill? Can't do anything to this body for good. I'm much better than you."

"Please," said Bill. "Don't do this."

But Constance had turned away. "Maybe," she mused, "I'll do this one much messier. Maybe I'll have a knife. Yes, I think so. That sounds great. I'll have a knifea*yes, a knife. A big long fucking cutthroat knife."

When she turned back to him, she was holding a knife. It was easily a foot long, with a blue blade curved like a scimitar.

"Cut them up into little pieces!" Constance giggled like a girl. She jumped up and down, her toes crunching softly on the low pile of the carpet.

"She liked this color," she said.

Bill struggled to sit up. The red stuff flexed against him like a contracting muscle. He stole another look down at himself, and realized that the simile wasn't far off the mark.

In fact, it was completely accurate.

She had wrapped him in muscle.

Bill choked down nausea. The stuff had lines and striations and a white marbling of fat. Bill saw blood vessels, and he guessed the silvery cords were nerves.

Constance raised the knife in front of her face. The wide blade cast a blue shadow over her face.

"The edge of this blade is only a couple of atoms wide," she said. "It'll cut anything. It could cut diamonds."

She leaned forward, bringing the knife down in a slow arc. Bill cringed, fearing she might bury it in his head.

But she lowered the blade to the side.

"I love my new knife," she said. "Remember, I can do whatever I want. I made it and I got it because I wanted it."

"If you can do whatever, why don't you let me go?"

He thought he saw a flicker pass through her purple eyes. Just a tightening of the eyelids, registering some emotion at his words.

"Darling," said Bill, shuffling himself as close to her as he could. The muscles contracted around him. "You don't have to do this. I don't know what happened to you. I went to the place, too, and I didn't come back...like you."

"You don't understand, William," she said.

"You never wanted any of this," he said. "Never. Like I told you, you wouldn't hurt a fly."

"I am not the same person. I am not her." She smiled and gave him a peck on the cheek. "I'll dedicate all the little lives I take to your love."

"No!" shouted Bill.

She walked toward the door, swinging the blue blade like a cane.

Bill had known few moments of despair in his life. There had been shitty little disappointments, a few bits of genuine sadness. When his grandmother died when he was seven, he remembered locking himself in his room and throwing himself of the bed and crying. The wild grief inside of him was worse than a rabid animal. That's what he thought then: his sadness was a beast, living inside of him and only waiting for the right time to burst out and run along the inside of his skull.

Now, the beast was loose. During the past day, he'd been relying mostly on bravado, and his own notions of masculinity; protecting his wife had made everything else go down smoother, given him a purpose, something every man needed. Now Constance was, in his thoughts, gone, and replaced by this thing that looked and sounded like her but had none of her soul. Though they were young, and God knew people told them that at every turn, they were in love. They were meant to be husband and wife, even though they were only in their teens. They were meant to be.

As he watched his wifea*he could still hope it was really hera*walk to the door, he felt beyond tears, beyond sadness. He'd worried earlier that he was losing his mind; that the shocks of too much strangeness and too much blood would jar his sanity loose.

He forced himself to draw a breath. Yes, that was ita*deep breathing. It was what all those Zen masters and yogis and shit did to keep themselves calm: just breathe. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Keep the madness away.

Constance had reached the hotel room door. Her shoulders moved up and down, and Bill realized she was laughing.

She turned around, her awful eyes wide and shining.

"I'll come back for you, darling," she said.

"Don't do it," he croaked. The words made him light headed, as if they were draining all of the oxygen from his lungs. "I'm not coming back."

"You have to come back, William."

"I don't want to see you again. Murderer."

"Don't be so melodramatic."

She turned her head and made kissing noises at hm.

"Don't come back," said Bill.

"We have to get back. I'm going to hijack a truck to bring all of the bodies there. I think I can manage to drive one. Or I can have someone do it for me. Think of it...a whole army in there! Maybe I should cut off all their heads first. Make room."

"No," Bill managed. The air was going out of his lungs again, making him woozy.

"I'll be back," she said. "Within the hour. Blood-soaked, but it'll still be me. I hear people in the casino. I hope they had a good time spending all of their money."

Then, without looking back, Constance put her hand on the doorknob, twisted it, opened the door, and walked into the hallway.

The door closed behind her, the latch clicking softly.

Bill was alone.

He sat in his cradle of meat or whatever the fuck it was, staring at the walls. He heard footsteps in the hallway, even though the room must have been heavily insulated to keep out the noise from the casino below.

The casino where she'd claim her victims.

His wife.

His fucking wife had turned into something else entirely.

A murderer.

A demon.

Twenty-Two.

Bill forced himself into a sitting position. The muscles around him felt stiffer, as if they were losing tension.

That was good, very good. Concentrate on one obstacle at a time. Focus on the problems that you could solve. Do your best and forget the rest. These and a thousand other motivational slogans applied to this situation.

"Do your best, forget the rest," he said out loud, his voice quiet in the room. "Do your best, forget the rest."

He took a deep breath like the Zen masters again, and looked down at himself.

"Shit," he said. "Constance, what the fuck were you thinking?"

The blanket of meat reached from the bottom of his neck to the tops of his knees.

Bill tried to bend his legs. It was a strain, and the muscles resisted the whole way, but he managed to do it. Next he tried his arms; they were attached to his sides as if glued. But he could wriggle his fingers. He felt them scrape against the coarse fabric of his pants.

He leaned back against the wall. Sweat coated his forehead, dripping down into his eyes.

"Wait," he said. "Wait. I'm kind of a magician, too."

He laughed aloud at himself. But it was true: he'd raised the dead with a touch. And read their minds. And paralyzed his wife's arm with a poke.

But he had no idea how he'd done any of these things. They were beyond his conscious control; like some kind of unnatural mental reflex. Did his powers manifest themselves only when needed? Was there some kind of spell-arsenal in his mind?

"Have to ask fucking old clown-boy when I get back to the woods," he said.

His fingers had been grasping at his side pockets, balling up the fabric of his pants. In his right pocket, there was his wallet, a hand-me-down from his father. Useless now, however much it had cost to begin with. Just a hunk of leather.

But in his left pocket, he felt something harder. A surge of adrenaline surged through his guts when he remembered what it was: his Swiss Army knife.

"All right!" he said.

He ran his fingers against it, feeling the blades lying flush in their metal carapace. The longest blade was still there, intact even after carving up all the demons and his wife's face.

Bill braced himself against the wall. His heart beat a tattoo against his ribs, and his mind wandered back to Constance. What was she doing downstairs?He got a quick mental image of a roulette table, surrounded by corpses of people in tuxedoes and cocktail dresses, with a severed head stuck in the middle of the revolving wheel....

He shook his head to clear it.

Bill forced his hand deeper into his pocket, and grabbed the knife. Straining, he brought it out. The muscle clenched around his hand. The metal of the knife's housing dug into the flesh of his palm.

He got his thumb over the main blade. He felt around for the main groove, and when he found it rammed his thumbnail into the little groove that you used to open it.

"Come on," he said. "Come on and open up."

Working against the muscle's contractions, he managed to flick the knife out of the handle.

"All right," he said again. "Do your best, and forget the rest."

Bill struggled until he held the blade upright, and felt the tip dig into the meat.

"Good, good," he said.

Using what little leverage he had, Bill jammed the blade deeper into the muscle. He felt it enter farther. And then, after a couple more awkward thrusts, the knife's edge did its work and cut through. The knife tip peeked out like a silver tooth.

Bill pushed, and the rest of the knife jabbed out. And he saw his fist underneath, his knuckles pink from the pressure. After another thrust, the tear spread, and his hand was exposed.

He wriggled his wrist, trying to aim the blade downward so that he could make another cut. "All right," he said. "No fucking magic needed."

Soon he made an incision that extended across his stomach like a wound. The more he pushed against the meat, the more it parted, like fabric being ripped at the seams. After a few more contortions he had his hand and most of his arm freed, and could see the other side of his body.