CREPT HOME IN THE CAR AS CAUTIOUSLY AS I COULD, my hands shaking on the wheel. What Zandra, Adele or Titus Logan had told me filled me with both terror and hope. I ran into Mrs. Ramona in the hall on the way in. She seemed very curious about me, but I wasn’t forthcoming. I didn’t ask her who was sneaking out her door in the night with an armful of laundry. Soon I knew the whole building would be buzzing about Ritter’s new girlfriend. But that was the least of my troubles just then.

Another delivery from Eyrie Street had arrived. Black evening wear. Very expensive and stylish, with some undergarments that would’ve raised the flag if I still had a pole. In a bottle shaped like a female genii, a new perfume called Misbehavin’. Her instructions were to come for dinner. Eight o’clock. What undid me was the command to “bring the cat.” The words of the Seer kept coming back to me.

But I wasn’t ready for war. Such a gross collision of will—an irrevocable challenge—needed more planning and intel. Genevieve was the only one who knew what was really happening to me. This was my one chance to see if I could get her to tell me. If not, then the Devil or Midnight first, more drastic action would be required. I suited and scented up. Then I shut off my cell and left it on top of the scanner. One of the songs on the oldies station heading over to Cliffhaven was called “My Girl Bill.”

When I arrived at Eyrie Street, Genevieve’s appearance once more astonished me. She was all crepe and powder like a moth, elegantly dressed in white with an accent of lilac, like some Four Seasons matron—a patron of the fine arts, not a priestess of the Black Ones. Clutching Pico, who seemed none too happy to be back in that house, I would’ve said the woman before me was in her late 60’s. Still, I knew it was Genevieve, and she grew progressively younger and more beautiful as the evening wore on.

For reasons she didn’t explain, dinner was served in the lower depths, in one of the private gaming rooms off the darkened casino, a candlelit chamber of oak with an immaculate white linen and crystal table set for two. Mutza was not to be seen, but maybe he had already done his service, for everything was in place, and the Madame of Eyrie Street dished out the food for us herself, an aromatic Mediterranean concoction, with some superb wine.

The quiet was so deep, I thought I could make out the distinctive ticking of that ornate clock I remembered from my first night. Or maybe it was the rhythmic revolutions of a rodent wheel. Pico heard it too. The Dark Mistress had made me stuff the miserable thing in a cage stowed at my feet below the table.

We ate in silence. Or rather, I ate in silence. She knew my questions were gnawing at me, but she refused to address them, saying firmly that there would be time for them after dinner. “We are, after all, civilized.”

Instead, she told me about her travels, interrupting herself only to adjust my posture or correct my table etiquette. She’d been everywhere—Istanbul, Copenhagen, Montreal, Nairobi. She was on my last good nerve, but I had no choice but to listen, to bide my time—as her mesmerizing voice wandered, telling me about the guitars and cathedrals of Cebu where Magellan planted his cross … the Bund in Shanghai … or the sunlit apartment on the Reforma near Chapultepec Park in Mexico City where she’d brought more than a hundred men.

Then, after we’d finished the crème brulée with berries that she served for dessert with a sweeter wine, I got lost in her reminiscence about a hot summer night in Cairo, listening to the lute-like sound of the oud, a fat-bellied string instrument meandering up from the Nile. Suddenly, the story stopped cold, and with a foreboding change in her voice, like the snap of a doctor’s glove, she said, “Now it’s time for you to express further devotion. Bring the cat.”

I didn’t have a choice, so I gripped the handle on the cage as she led me back up through the labyrinth of hallways to a room in the back of the first floor. It had a glass roof and smelled like a hothouse, which in part it was. But in the center, on the white tiled floor, stood a large terrarium, inside of which was a long, thick and beautifully patterned snake—black predominantly with a white underbelly and gold diamonds along the top of its body and on its head.

“This is Caligula,” she said. “A diamond python. Isn’t he handsome? He’s not venomous, although he has a lethally strong grip, and the capacity to open his jaws to accommodate extraordinarily large prey. But he hasn’t been fed in a long, long time. So he’s very hungry.”

I couldn’t help notice that the serpent, which before had seemed rather languorous, had tensed—its shape all spine and nerve now. A verb instead of a noun.

“Why don’t you go ahead and do what you’re going to do?” I asked, hating her.

“You don’t ask why?” she questioned with a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Disappointed?” Maybe I could find my inner bitch.

“No,” she replied, batting me down. “I take it as a sign of ever more complete submission. You know the answer too well. This is the sacrifice you must make to learn the answer to your question.”

I felt a nail strike deep in my heart, then the fit passed. I was cold and shiny again. Brighter than the python.

“Yes,” I shrugged and handed her the cage. I was hungry for answers.

She opened the cage and took out the cat I’d saved and had cuddled at night, then she lifted the lid to the snake case and dropped it in. The doomed feline was stunned with betrayal and fright. But only for a moment. Then its animality took over. It tried to find a way out of the terrarium. It circled its adversary. The serpent moved with a totally different kind of agility. Pico hissed and raised her back. She snarled and lashed out with a claw. I was proud to see how she defended herself. But as Genevieve had said, the snake was very hungry. I turned away. I had to defend myself too.

“That’s very good, Sunny,” she said.

“Blame the teacher,” I said between gritted teeth. God how I wanted to see her squirm.

“I’m flattered,” Genevieve replied.

“So, what are you?” I asked. “Notice I didn’t say who?”

“I noticed.”

“A witch? A succubus?”

“Do you know much about succubi?” she asked, with a splinter in her eye.

“Just that they’re to be avoided like the plague.”

“Too bad they’re so beguiling.”

“Even a crack whore can be in the right mood.”

“You’re very sexy when you’re cornered, Sunny.”

“So, what are you?” I repeated. “Female, male, reptile, long distance traveler? I can’t understand it, but I know you’re not human. Are you from outer space—or out of time? You’re not really a dragon, any more than I’m really a woman.”

She nodded slowly at this and opened her jacket like a butterfly opening its wings. I was shocked to see not a body underneath, and certainly not her beautiful, pendulous breasts. Instead it was like looking at a series of silk screens that had been blasted by a shotgun or slashed by machetes. My eyes were drawn through the ruptured fabric into a chamber swarming with roaches and centipedes. Effigies covered in cobwebs appeared—and I fell forward … into catacombs full of acts and shadows—more autopsy than orgy.

There were naked men in a trance mindlessly trying to mate with elaborate torture machines like iron maidens. Priests and nuns groaned from crosses beside men in three-piece suits impaled like expensively dressed scarecrows. Screaming men contorted in hot metal cages in the shape of female torsos. Men with their eyes sewn shut thrashed in crab pits or sloshed in quicksand. Other men were forced to jig as ridiculous automatons in an enormous cuckoo clock—or were decapitated by valkyrie machines with battle axes shining like mirrors. There were men and women sealed in clamshells the size of grand pianos. Young girls and boys sacrificed to giant carnivorous plants, their bodies encased in a sticky dissolving membrane as the tendrils closed around them. Other figures were embedded alive in cement pillars that formed the braces for a hived cave system full of shrieking bats with eyes that burned like sulfur.

Then I saw it. Her. She had the multiple hunting eyes of a furry rainforest spider, only more alien still—with a squishy maw of body—mandibles and dark moist tentacles, each of them rich with sucking mouths. Beneath this was a swollen bladder of transparent tissue the color of a termite queen’s abdomen. It pulsed with the heartbeats of nests of fetuses … slick pink tadpole things, becoming blind cave fish … amphibians, then at last fully formed humans, strangling in their bubbles—their rubber faces stretched against the film of the sacs before some kind of enzyme, like clouds of diatoms, attacked them, absorbing them back into the host as nutrients—their entire brief lives lived in captivity within the Creature. For the Creature.

But the hunger could never be sated. I realized at last what I was up against. Some ungodly transformation, grand theft body—a crime against nature had been committed—and I’d been an unwitting or at least a witless accomplice. I’d changed forever, I knew that now. But I was not really a woman. I was only a nerve inside a Creature. A shape of perfumed meat within a shadow within an ancient blackness perhaps too dreadful to comprehend itself.

“Well?” I heard her voice call, as the eyes and mouths and membranes receded.

“No,” I sobbed. “Why me for God sakes? Why me!”

“Stop your crying, pretty girl,” she cooed, without malice or irony. “It won’t help you and it won’t erase what’s happened. Or what must happen. You ask why? Because you answered the call. You matched the profile. You wanted to change your life and you couldn’t do it yourself. And you’ve been able to withstand the process, where others have not. That’s all you need to think about now. I could tell you that it’s because I’m devoted to you, but you wouldn’t believe me. Even a Mistress needs an apprentice. And you know what it’s like to train an apprentice. I don’t have children—and you know what it’s like to want a child. I’ve had centuries of lovers—yet I’m still searching for love. You know that search. How desperate it can be. It doesn’t change a thing. Soon it will be time for you to stop changing—at least so dramatically. You’ll need to stabilize, to get used to your new form. Your new appetites.”

“I won’t,” I said, trying to control myself, feeling my breasts rise and fall with the exertion. “I know a way out.”

“Like Violet?”

“Who?”

“McInnes. Your buddy. Or those other two? I think you have a strength of character they lacked. And a weakness for living. You’re a survivor, Sunny. That’s one of the important things we have in common. It’s one of the reasons you were chosen.”

She uttered this last remark with a trace of a pathological smile, and some of the despicable images I’d just seen passed through my mind again.

“What in hell are you?”

“You think I’m a monster,” she replied, and she looked luscious once more. Pure desire.

“A Gorgon of some kind. And you may be right. But don’t forget—from Medusa’s head sprang Pegasus. In any case, I don’t really care. I am … what I’ve always been. I don’t remember being different and I’ve never met anyone able to explain, so I haven’t bothered to worry. Before you met me, you only thought you knew who you were. You believed what others who were equally lost told you. And you didn’t like it anyway. You hated yourself. All those nights and years feeling in the dark for the doorknob of your own goodbye. I accept myself and I just grow stronger.”

“Not if I can help it,” I sniffed, pulling a Kleenex from my new purse.

“But you can’t help it,” she said. “Your transformation isn’t complete. You have to hunt and consume to stay whole. Otherwise …”

“Otherwise—what?” I hiccupped. “What more can you do?”

“The scenes and images you saw—what you think I look like behind this shape? That wasn’t me. Those are the waking nightmares that will overtake you if fail to hunt and nourish your new being—the private hells of all the prey who can’t embrace the metamorphosis. Just as your body needs food and water to survive, your new being needs continuous nourishment too. Intimacies with strangers. The soft flesh of their fears and obsessions.”

“So, you haven’t just turned me into a woman, you’ve made me into a whore. Or worse. Some kind of life sucking …!”

She shrugged and produced from a hidden pocket in the wing coat her enameled box full of the beige cigarettes that smelled like an Arab market.

“You’ll develop your own style. But creatures like us can’t prey without also relieving and enlightening.”

“How many … others … are there?” I whispered.

She laughed and lit up a cigarette.

“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

“Then you’ve seen a glimpse of the torment that awaits you. Have you heard of Harpies—and the Furies? Those terrors of Greek mythology are nothing compared to what will pursue you, because you have your own private mythology—like your El Miedo. You can bring it to life in a way that gives you power and makes you more desirable, or you can be its principal casualty. It’s your choice. Your own monsters or your own allies. If you can’t maintain physical form, you can’t live amongst other people openly. You’ll wind up down in the sewer tunnels. The morphological trial will be unthinkable. Suicide will be a blessing. But it’s harder to achieve now. Your transition is too advanced. You’ve become much tougher in body. You won’t have the integrity of purpose to end your life unless you hunt, and the more you hunt, the more you’ll hunger for prey. You won’t believe how exhilarating that will be. How lucid you’ll feel! Imagine being intoxicated with clarity. The juice and aroma of it will make you radiant. You won’t be able to imagine turning your back on that supreme stimulation and rejuvenation. And why should you? For the sake of a lurid, violent death that will require all your will and then some? Or a skulking, vegetative existence with pariahs?

“You think of me now as some kind of evil, Sunny. But in time, whenever fragments of the life you suffered before flash through your mind, you may come to think of me as an angel. You asked me what I thought I was, and I answered honestly. I don’t know. But for some I can definitely say I’ve been Salvation. Hope can’t always look soft and pretty and bright. It has to have some teeth and claws, or it won’t be strong enough to be Hope.”

“The only kind of angel you could possibly be is one that’s fallen very far—straight into a lake of fire,” I told her.

“Perhaps. But you started judging me before the door of this house opened. Imagine how old I must be. Yet, am I not beautiful and still youthful looking?”

She changed before my eyes—into a chocolate brunette with a bedroom muss to her waves of fragrant hair … packed into an indigo colored satin corset with eyelash lace trim … high heeled lounge slippers with a ribbon of teal. More woman than I’d ever seen.

“You’re a crusted old demon behind a veil!” I cried.

“It’s your veil too now, Sunny. You were once big and puffy, ugly, violent, repressed, angry—lonely. Look in the mirror now. You’re gorgeous, desirable, powerful. Before, the only people who might’ve turned their heads when they saw you coming were junkie sluts and drunks itching for a fight. Now if you hunt and fulfill yourself, you’ll be worshipped. It will take time and well-chosen prey. But you have the Presence, Sunny. You can become a devourer and inspirer. A goddess.”

“An enchantress turning men into swine,” I replied.

“More like turning sows’ and boars’ ears—or rather boors’ ears—into silk purses,” she grinned, with flechette eyes. “No one can become what they aren’t already at some deeper level. Hunt the animal that comes to you, my dear.”

It suddenly hit me with full force that I was never going back to the Precinct. No more vics, perps or sending evidence to Trace. My career as a police officer was over. I’d been gated out. My mind seized up.

“I have many other residences throughout the world,” she sighed. “Seattle, New York, Berlin—Hong Kong. I’m going traveling soon—for some time. I need new air, new adventures. I’m going to leave you in charge of this house. You’ll have Mutza at your disposal. He’s immune to the Effect. He’ll never disobey but he’ll never transform. He’ll do anything to please you—and you’ve seen for yourself how good he is at that. You may also have my sultry young playmate Marissa for when you desire a woman. They’ll be your slaves, your pets.”

“W-what happened to Sophia? Did she escape?”

“No one escapes me unless I want them to, Sunny. No, we consumed her tonight. She was the tender meat in the special dish I prepared for you.”

I retched and tried to swallow—just like the python. Who knew if she was joking or not. She laughed at the expression on my face.

“Oh, you delightful vixen! As I was saying—you’ll have a wardrobe of custom designed clothes, the limousine, and a generous allowance. All you need to do is hunt. Stabilize your form, learn how to use your new powers, master yourself so that you can master others. Grow your strength and refine your style. Once you do that, you’re free to move and stalk as you see fit. Anywhere in the world you can manage. Your rate of aging will slow with each new capture. You’ll become ever more attractive and lusted after. You’ll never be sick. You’ll only be hungry for the taste of fresh shadows. Oh, Sunny, if you could only see what you really looked like when you first met me, you’d kiss my feet in gratitude. What you mistook for masculinity was only height and bulk—fists and a temper and no faith in anything but your own swagger. Now, like it or not, you have faith in me. You’ve met a female you both lust after and would follow into battle. You may be a long time hating the truth about yourself—and me. But, as I said, you’re a survivor. Now stoop down like a good girl and clean my feet with your lovely tongue and lips.”

I imagined breaking her leg and getting her down on the floor to batter with both hands—but I found myself instead easing her perfect feet out of the slippers. Without knowing how, I knew the way she liked it. My mouth just knew. I covered every inch, licking and breathing across the moistened skin, nurturing it, kneading the in-steps. Needing to do it. Massaging and gumming her heels. Inhaling the scent of the wet, newly cleaned flesh. I wanted to extend my attentions up her smooth calves—higher—to her warm thighs, and higher still. But she wouldn’t let me. She’d made her point.

“So, when do I move in?” I gibed, remembering back to Jimmie, the track and the bars I used to haunt—the extra tub of BBQ they’d always give me at the Chicken Shack.

“Your eagerness pleases Genevieve,” she said. “But the rewards I spoke of must yet be earned. Something else is required. Simple. Definable. And very likely, deeply enjoyable. You must return to Ritter’s apartment. For the last time.”

“What will people think happened—to him,” I asked, my voice breaking.

The turn of phrase was to her satisfaction. As was the tone.

“People have known he was unstable for a long time. And they will wonder. But fairly soon they’ll posit suicide. Foul play will be considered—he did after all have enemies. He’d spent so much of his life making them. But there will be no body, so there will be no fanfare or police honor guard. He’d always feared he was just doing a job for a wage, and that’s all it will amount to in the end. Every indiscretion, every infraction of the rules, every file note from what he called the ‘Bureau of Infernal Affairs’—will all be scrutinized, and a unanimous verdict will be reached. He was a ticking timebomb, and if he took himself off to detonate, so much the better.”

“Praise God,” I said, stifling a tear.

“This is goodbye to all that—and that depressing apartment. But before you leave and embark on your new life—as a way of embarking on your new life—I’m sending a man to visit you there. Break him down so that his inner self comes forth. Dominate him through your submission. Let him have your high firm breasts. Let him tongue your voluptuous ass. Kiss him. Ride him. Let him take you from behind. Let him have you all the ways he can manage. But I want him when you’re done. Deliver him to me when you’ve had your fill and this house and all the resources I’ve mentioned will be yours. Your new life will begin, with the incandescent meal that you cannibalize from him. I’ll have my reward, you’ll have your initiation. He’ll know satisfaction and then recompense like he has never envisaged. Then we’ll all grope on from there, each according to our destiny.”

“So, I’m hunting—but on the leash.”

“It’s a long soft leash,” she replied throatily. “As befits my belief in you. I would so much rather lick you than slap you. Don’t make me scald you. You won’t understand this yet, but it’s extremely painful for you to think me grotesque.”

“That doesn’t even come close!” I snarled.

“Then we grow closer, in spite of your feelings. Imagine mine. The power I have over you and you still not loving me. Hating me. One day you’ll know this scathing ambivalence. How wet it will make you. How angry. And how delectably sad.

“Here …” she said, and handed me the soft yellow scarf she’d used the first night. “This will give you strength and heighten your lust to be powerful in your new life. Because you will be powerful. I can feel it. There are new clothes and accessories laid out for you in the front room.”

I killed her a hundred times in my mind on that endless journey through the halls of that endless house. But all that happened in fact was that I kept tasting her feet in my mouth, longing to have tasted more. As both a woman and a man. It didn’t matter. She was as I said, pure desire. What could be more monstrous than that?

I got back to the old apartment and felt a twang of grief about Pico. Then I put on some Chet Baker. I stroked my fleshy clit and had an orgasm that wracked my whole body, curling under just a sheet, with the window open, listening to the night traffic, wondering about the man Genevieve would send to me in the morning. I hoped he’d be thick and vital so that I might feed and grow strong. Perhaps strong enough to fight back—or at least stick in the Mistress’ throat like Pico in the long gullet of that diamond snake.

And I remembered what Zandra had said about the only way to kill a therian. You had to use some of its own magic. Something she’d touched. Something intimate. Like the soft yellow scarf. It was still heavily scented—redolent of Genevieve’s body. When I clicked off the bedside lamp, it seemed to give off a breathing light. I slept without dreams for the first time since opening the gate at Eyrie Street.