Except there was no oven and no roast, she thought. Hell, no kitchen. There was a piglet out behind the barn, one of Tian and Zalia Jaffords’s. And I was the one who killed it and drank its hot blood, not she. By then she mostly had me, although I still didn’t know it. I wonder if Eddie—

As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed her life. She knew why Mia had done it—because of the chap. The question was why she, Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she’d been possessed before? Because she was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?

She feared it might be true.

Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow

(forge of the King)

on the horizon.

“Over here!” cried a woman’s voice, just as it had cried before. “Over here, out of the wind!”

Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah’s vague dream-memories of the banquet room.

She thought: Fedic, though, was real. Mia’s body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia’s dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.

“To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King’s glow! Come out of the wind and into the lee of this merlon!”

Susannah shook her head. “Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We’ve got to have a baby—aye, somehow, between us—and once it’s out, we’re quits. You’ve poisoned my life, so you have.”

Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair harried backward at the wind’s urging. “’Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! ’Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!”

Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susannah, or Detta?

Susannah thought neither.

She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken the nasty old blue lady’s forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.

“What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!”

“Soon we’ll be together—aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you’ll help me take it.”