And then I slipped out of this echolocation-induced magic carpet ride as my being was swept down a dark funnel.

And then I saw through the cephaloped’s eyes.

What I saw was evil.

The biped was hovering twenty paces before us, its outstretched batlike wings catching the wind, its face masked by the predawn night. Reddish brown eyes shimmered catlike in the darkness as they inspected the redwood trunks, ours one of five sprung from a fertile limb that hung two hundred feet above the forest floor.

Uncertain, the sentry remained.

Dawn announced its intentions, first as a morning mist, then as filtered gray light—gray light that vanquished the night and with it the demon’s silhouette.

I could see the wings, but not well enough to tell if they were organic or artificial. The demon, however, was quite human, its flesh muddied and pasty and camouflaged in a tight-fitting cephaloped hide that barely concealed the sultry female’s breasts.

That’s right, the hunter was a huntress—a vixen of the forest. Her long raven hair hung in dark coils past elfish ears and down her muscular torso; her lips, thick and full and pouting, launched a thousand memories.

The vixen was my vixen, and I ached at the sight of her through the cephaloped’s partially closed eye stalks.

For her part, Andria continued to scan the flora and fauna, the coldness in her brown eyes and the barbed electrified lance coiled in her fist enough to suppress my overwhelming urge to reveal myself.

Brighter curtains of gray filtered through the redwood labyrinth, dawn’s threat chasing my long-lost lover back into the forest canopy where she boarded her awaiting chariot.

Oscar and I remained bound to the tree until the gray bled gold and the nightmare melted into day, our thoughts and emotions fusing as one.

Chapter 22

22

I believe that we are all standing on an evolutionary threshold in which we have the possibility not only of creating a new culture, but actually becoming a new kind of human being that will understand how to live with connection with ourselves, with each other and with the earth. So much of the suffering and acts that will happen in the meantime, we have to be prepared for. But if we can work with it instead of resist it, that evolutionary leap may be possible.

—CAROLYN BAKER, therapist and survivalist

Oscar released me and I fell to my knees on the forest floor, my brain buzzing from echolocation sickness as if I had overdosed on LSD. I rolled over and saw a frog belch colors; I looked up and willed a centipede to tap dance on a branch—the branch growing … reaching out for me—ABE quickly adjusting the serotonin levels in my cerebral cortex, dousing the bizarre effects of synesthesia.