Mark advanced toward him. He was perhaps fifteen, this boy, and Mark hated to hurt him. But looking at him, the vicious dark eyes, the glitter of hate in them, Mark knew why he was so fast, and it was because he had eaten more than any of the others at the trough of human suffering, and the energy that it brought conferred on him the speed of a sun-quickened snake.

The boy backed against the wall, uttering a high, scared snarl. What choice did Mark have? This was a pathological monster.

Bringing the knife down from above, he slashed the creature into vertical halves. For an instant, they continued to stand. The eyes vibrated with the frenetic energy of trapped wasps. Then the halves fell away from one another.

Noise exploded, voices screaming, crying, bellowing in rage and terror, a few thanking God, most calling for help, as the humans leaped to their dead, throwing themselves on the shattered remains, and went to the skinless man, who still moved slowly along muttering. His teeth flashed and his eyes flashed. Both of the women who had been with him had fallen dead.

Linda gave Mark, he thought, one of the darkest, most dangerous looks he had ever seen. Did she intuit what he was coming to see as the truth about himself, that he was not what he had believed himself to be?

“Dr. Turner” had not been lying, he saw that now.

“We need to do what we can here,” he said.

The injured would still die, many of them, and the last of the skinless ones had just crumpled as softly as a fading cloud and now lay beside the row of barstools. A woman knelt beside him, her hands wanting to touch, fearing to touch.

“He’s past helping,” Mark said. He lifted her, a slight woman in a blood-spattered jacket, and drew her close to him. She buried her sorrowing cries in his chest.

It went on like that, as he and Linda and Pete brought what mercies they could to the stricken of Willoughby. As they worked, they said little beyond what was necessary to the job, but Mark remained deep in thought: You’re half-human.

It had been wrong to think that his heart was all human, because that was not true, was it? In fact, his heart was at war with itself. He was as much two halves as the poor hybrid he had just splayed. He loathed the boy and what he had done, but also felt for him a compassion that he would have burned out of his soul if he could.