On bare feet she went silently down the hall, through shadows and light, striped like a stalking tiger, invisible in the tall grass. She could hear Sydny mewling like a cat, and felt her gorge rise. She swallowed hard to keep from retching.

Faster now, compelled by the desperate urgency in the noises coming from the middle of Sydny’s chest. To save her meant everything, so she ran, as desperate now as Sydny, clinging to the last bloody threads of life.

She burst out of the hallway and into the spotlights of the living room, and the moment she did so she knew she was a dead woman because the man standing over Sydny was Luther St. Vincent, head of NSA Directorate N, and his head came up, he saw her, and Julie knew it was the end. He knew how to use a handgun; he was trained. What did she have except scenes of Olivia Benson flying through her head like clouds ahead of an oncoming storm?

Chapter 31

31

“You were once Whitman’s property, his fuck-mama,” St. Vincent said as he stood over the female body. “Now you’re nothing but a bloody piece of meat. Think he’ll like what he sees?”

Between his spread legs, Sydny, curled on her side in a fetal position, moaned.

“Still trying to talk?” He bent over her. “But you can’t. You’re a thing, and things can’t talk. They can only spread their legs, suck cock, immerse themselves in the basest perversions.” He bent lower. “You disgust me. People like you belong in the gutter to waste away. I’m here to accelerate the process.”

He was about to grab her ankle, when movement at the periphery of his vision caused him to stand up straight. Someone else in the apartment? But the bedroom had been dark, giving him the impression that Sydny was alone.

And then whatever it was appeared framed by the doorway to the hall. He was in the process of lifting his arm to shoot first, ask questions never, when he caught sight of the head, appearing out of the deep shadows. Except that it seemed to keep the shadows with it. Lamplight spun off the shiny black skin, the horns. The metallic glint of the three zippers completed the picture of a monster, not a human being. Into his mind shot a memory of Desmortiers’s hovel, of his mother’s palpable fear, of the wolf spread across the shack’s rear wall like the bat wings of Cthulhu.

And so, with the handgun halfway lifted toward the fetish image come to life, he froze. He could not believe his eyes, he was unnerved, and because of that the fetish had just enough time to shoot him.