As the women seemed soft and desirable, the males appeared powerful but friendly, and the children amusingly naughty as they capered around striking the humans with thin rods that cut deep.

But these feelings were wrong, he must not feel them, it was a descent into some unholy cavern of the mind—but he did feel them, he was frantic with them, beside himself with the pleasure they brought.

Deep within him, he could hear a caressing whisper, as sensual as a summer breeze, urging them on, “Do it, do it again, oh, yes … children, my children … oh, yes.” And also for him, a special thought layered in above the whisper, “Welcome home, my son, welcome back.”

No!

By contrast with the hybrids, the faces of the people now appeared masklike, but their screams shot streams of energy that seemed to spark every cell of him with youth and life and, above all, with this new pleasure, so sweet that it hurt.

The small part of his mind still loyal to his humanity cried out to him to break the spell, to come back on mission. But pleasure so great wants intensification, and it was all he could do not to grab one of the humans and do some intricate, ripping thing that would lift him to ecstasy on a wave of screams.

Then he was dancing, and the hybrid woman who had caught his eye took his hand, and her touch sent a fabulous electricity through him. She laughed, the sound a shattering tinkle.

They danced closer and closer to the human crowd, which shrank in upon itself, and he heard the cries and the prayers, and they filled him with a lust that at once disgusted him and drove him on.

A boy had three human children tied together, and he was slowly flaying them with little nicks of a silver, hooked blade, and they were screaming, and it was being done in rhythm to the drumming. The boy’s whole body was flushed with energy, sweat pouring from under his black headband.

The hybrid woman who was dancing with Mark grabbed a man by the hair and pulled him out of the group, then drew Mark toward the struggling prey. Her eyes were crystals.

Other humans were being cut out, and the mass of them was getting smaller. Some of the hybrids were gathering to one side, looking toward the door. They were running out of quarry.

The voice within him and, he knew, within them all said, “Go to the next town, they’re sleeping, take them, take them all.”

Their minds were linked—his, too, it seemed. Or perhaps it was just that they were programmed—and he was, also—to think the same way. He could see that they were not a cumbersome, argumentative society, but more like a single person with many bodies and many brains.