But what were they doing to them, to create such extreme torment? It was more than pain by fire, more than any physical pain. In that building, souls were being tortured.

And it was … fascinating.

Dear heaven, how could such a thought even enter his mind? He put it firmly aside.

An especially loud scream came, male, from pain beyond pain. It was joined by another and by bitter sobbing, gabbled, incoherent pleas, and the eager thrumming of the drums these creatures seemed to enjoy.

He entered the restaurant. He would kill them all, all the hybrids, every one.

Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE STRICKEN

The air in the kitchen was dense with foul, greasy smoke, the music was a searing roar, and a big soup pot was boiling hard on the stove. In it were what he thought for a moment were sausages, until he understood that he was looking at parts of human beings.

Seeing this made him not just hear the screams, but think of the suffering that was going on in the dining room … and he was surprised to find himself feeling something other than revulsion. It was a bizarre emotion. He couldn’t even describe it to himself, except to say that it was ugly and made him ashamed.

He turned off the fire under the pot and stepped through into the dining room. Here, the smoke was even thicker, and a great crowd of hybrids danced around a clutching group of tattered, bleeding people.

There were kids in pajamas, men in jeans, women naked, one, a young woman with a pageboy, lying slumped against her weeping husband. Had she been beaten? That’s what it looked like. The bodies of the murdered lay in heaps.

He guessed that not a single resident of Willoughby had escaped the hybrids, any more than fruit could escape from a tree or wheat from a harvest field.

Along the front of the bar, moving past its beer pulls and lit FAT TIRE LAGER sign, three people, two women and a man, walked as if in procession. They were purple, the women’s breasts as translucent as enormous grapes.

As he watched their tormented steps, the bizarre flash of emotion that he’d just pushed away resurfaced and grew stronger, finally focusing into something like pleasure, which brought with it the deepest of fears, that one is not oneself, and not in control, and that you might be someone, or something, that you very much despise.

Another scream rose, popping with agony. Its intensity caused to erupt within him an inferno of stabbing pleasure that momentarily overwhelmed him, and before he could stop himself, he had thrown back his head and joined his own howl to that of the excited hybrid mob in the dining room.

Choking back the shout didn’t change the way he felt, or that a hybrid woman was watching him and laughing brightly. She was delicate porcelain, her body delicious with eager curves.