35. Talking to Deer Head (D1)

__ Ardy Jacobi dreamed she was being dragged to the edge of a glowing orange lake of fire. Freezing air burned her face, but her arms and legs were warm. In fact, her right leg and right arm, the ones held out to ward off the heat of the lake, were beginning to bleed smoke.
__ "No."
__ Thrashing from side to side, Ardy saw what was taking her to the lava pit. On the one side was R. Lee Munson brandishing the slippery grin of a mass murderer, just as she remembered the first time she saw him. The other shape belonged to Pizza Kid. His pimply expression was wild and lustful. And he was naked.
__ As she approached the lake, fire snapped and crackled from her shin and thigh. In just a couple of seconds her entire right leg was engulfed in searing flames.
__ "Don't! No, please! Don't!"


__ Though the pain in the dream was intense, and the circumstance increasingly urgent, Ardy felt herself wake slowly, groggily, and realized the pain was genuine and crackled without the snapping sound. But her right leg and arm weren't burning. They were broken and contorted. And, from what she could see in the hissing yellow glow of a Coleman gas lantern, they had been crudely splinted with curtain rods, a dirty two-by-four, and tied with torn sheets.
__ Delirious with agony, Ardy lolled her head and forced her eyes to focus on her surroundings. She didn't remember getting hit by the car. She only remembered being in Doug's Datsun, pulling over for some unknown reason, and running out into the snow. Now she was here.
__ "Where--?" She croaked. Her voice was weak and cracked, but she had to hear it to make sure she wasn't still dreaming. A pulsing cramp ached in the part of her thigh that didn't burn, but she dare not move it to get comfortable, if that were possible.
__ The place looked like some kind of windowless cabin. Dark red-brown plank wood made up the walls and ceiling. Cobwebs laced the air like the remaining filaments of nightmares. The only door was heavy oak but stood slightly ajar. Snow drifted in with tiny swirls on the hardwood floor. The bed Ardy currently occupied was musty smelling and the blankets under her body were itchy and oily at the same time, and its springs were large and uncomfortable through the thin mattress pad.
__ Despite the freak winter chill outside and the breeze coming through the slightly-open door, Ardy felt as though she were burning up. Her head pounded in time with the throbbing explosions of pain in her leg and arm. The pain and discomfort screamed and refused to let her make sense of what was going on around her or even recall the events of the day that lead her to this place. Her only calming thoughts were fleeting memories of the Kind Ones, the angels or whatever they were who touched her gently on the other side when she had died for a short time.
__ When was that? I died? Impossible.
__ That odd memory or delusion seemed to be the only strand of mental webs she could reach, so she concentrated as best she could on that. What on earth made me believe I was dead? Am I dead now, suffering and burning in hell--?
__ Then she remembered the other death, the one that wasn't hers. The one she "rode along" on. Who was that?
__ Then, as quickly as she was starting to remember, her visions faded away.
__ The oaken door creaked as it slowly opened.
__ Ardy's eyes alternately grew wide, then squinted, as she tried to focus on what was surely a living nightmare.
__ Into the cabin-room walked a creature with the body of a man, naked and muscular from the waist-up, with the head of a deer. The antlers on his head numbered six points and, to Ardy, resembled the horns of the devil.
__ Reflexively trying to scoot away from the creature as it reached out for her, Ardy felt a surge of pain peel through her insides from her ruined thigh, into her groin, and up into her chest.
__ Then she was mercifully unconscious.


__ Whatever it was that grabbed Doug Testerbird's pant leg had released it and withdrawn. Sure the trickster Alterling was baiting him somehow, he kicked angrily in the direction of the retreating gripper only to meet nothing but air.
__ "You're on your own, now, Douglas," came the paper-tear voice from somewhere far off to the right. "Try not to hurt her before you take her to Legad."
__ All Doug could do -- considering living through death, witnessing murder and despair, feeling the day and temperature give way to a freezing and frost-filled night in August -- was stare and scream. His yells echoed in the woods but his raspy-voiced friend was true to his word and did not take the bait.
__ "Please! Please! I need you." Knowing full well that he was beseeching an agent of God's own enemy, but feeling this evil shadow was the only thing that could help him find and rescue Ardy, Doug dropped to his knees and cried. He leaned back, bellowing to the treetops skirted with snow, "Please! I have to find her. Help me! Somebody, help me!"
__ "It'll b-be okay, D-D-Doug. N-N-Now that you're he-he-here."
__ The voice belonged to a young girl, her clicking teeth tapping out I'm freezing in Morse Code. She was behind the small arm that had gripped Doug and was now huddled next to a snow-covered, and apparently dead man and wrapped in the filthy jacket of another corpse rapidly becroming part of the snowscape nearby.
__ Doug stumbled back and fell against a tree before sliding down onto his rump. "W-Who are you?"
__ When the girl didn't answer right away, he persisted with, "Are you okay? Where are your parents?"
__ The girl coughed and said, "My name is M-Maggie. I don't have any parents."
__ Doug started to ask, "Then who--?" but Maggie cut him off.
__ "This is Mr. Munson. I think you know him."
__ If he wasn't already on the ground, the last comment would have knocked him there.
__ The girl seemed to warm with Doug's presence as he continued to grow colder. She stood and brushed herself off before turning to Munson's corpse to brush the snow out of his hair, off his shoulders, out of his ruined eye sockets--
__ "Don't," Doug commanded. He reached out to pull her away from the body. Who was this kid? How does she know R. Lee? Why isn't she scared out of her wits?
__ Must be demented, Doug reasoned as the girl retreated from his reach. She's lost it. Who wouldn't in all this? This crazy night?
__ "Please don't touch him. He's... He's not... umm."
__ "He's dead. I know that." Maggie stared down at Doug, then glanced to Munson's body as if to say, Well, aren't you going to do anything?
__ Doug eased off the ground but didn't rise higher than a squat. He waved a finger loosely in Munson's direction. "How-- H-How do you know--?"
__ "R. Lee Munson."
__ Doug nodded, stare vacant.
__ "He found me. He saved me from the crazy boy."
__ "C-Crazy boy? Who--?"
__ "The one who took your girlfriend. Ardelene."
__ Doug stood, almost hit his head on a low dark branch lost in the shadows of cris-crossing trees. "Ardelene?"
__ "Ardy to her friends," Maggie filled in, perplexed that she had to fill in so many blanks that Doug should already know.
__ "I-I know. She--"
__ "The crazy boy's got 'er. He drove off in Mr. Munson's car before you got here. Long before." She emphasized the time she spent waiting by brusquely rubbing warmth into her arms.
__ Doug stepped closer to her, crouched down to eye-level. "Tell me how you know these things."
__ Maggie shrugged. "After you wake up Mr. Munson."
__ Doug glanced at the body. "I can't do that. I don't--"
__ "Yes you can. You can do it just like you did it before, like you did it for Ardy."
__ "But I didn't--" Doug started to protest, swinging his arm back and brushing his fingertips inadvertently over Munson's cold hard shoulder. In that imperceivable instant, tiny jolts of lightning fired through Doug's fingernails and surged into the corpse. "--have anything to do with those things. It's Ardy. She's the--"
__ And that's when Munson drew his first breath in over an hour.

__ Ardy lay shaking, staring up at the dead black eyes of the deer-headed creature who sat next to her bed. Fear and pain, not the cold, had her head quivering and thrumming from side to side.
__ When she woke she found her good arm and leg were bound to the bed where she lay and a broken syringe lay on her stomach which heaved with each laborious breath.
__ The creature checked her pulse, pressed the back of a bloodied hand to her cheek to feel her temperature. It let out a short grunt of satisfaction but it showed no other emotion. Ardy was so out of it from the trauma of the accident she still wasn't believing her eyes. Having been to hell twice already, she was sure this was yet another layer of it.
__ "Who?" she croaked.
__ The creature twitched at her voice, leaned its deer snout closer as if to hear better. A drop of pussy blood dripped from a torn nostril and tapped her t-shirt just above her left breast. It made her wince and pinch her eyes shut. She tried to wish it away, tried to cry out from her soul for the warm loving spirits she knew before.
__ But when she opened her eyes, it was still there, silent and horrifying.
__ "P-Please. Who?" Ardy muttered through a sudden flow of hot tears. "Where am I?"
__ No reaction from Deer Head.
__ Going only by what she knew of the past insane 24 hours, Ardy did the only thing she could. She plead for her soul. She wept through the words, "I'm sorry. Please don't hurt me anymore. I-I'm so sorry."
__ The creature bellowed something from its throat that sounded like, "Muhr Maharmu!?"
__ Ardy flinched and cried out. Pain echoed through her bones as the Deer Head reared back, then forward again.
__ "Muhr Maharmu!? Mvoaw vahkum nahr mu!"
__ "No!"
__ Then Ardy's eye glimpsed a twinkle from another dangling snot in the creature's nose as the ambient light of the cabin were suddenly concentrated in that point for the purpose of catching her eye....
__ And drawing her in.
__ Within seconds, Ardy understood everything.

34. The Dance of the Alterling (D1)

__ Doug had only wasted a few minutes trying to re-start the Datsun before giving it up. Abandoning the car as Chris McCandless had done, Doug noted the irony, and hoped he wouldn't be found dead in an abandoned bus.
__ Hugging himself against the cold, he looked into the darkness where Ardy vanished with her abductor, then he glanced toward the dark woods where the Alterling had vanished with its dry tinny laugh.
__ Without a car, he didn't stand a chance of catching up with the Pizza King kid. He could only hope Ardy was alive, okay, and strong enough to fight off whatever it was the kid was going to do. Doug knew he stood a better chance trying to run down the creature that appeared as suddenly and strangely as the night-for-day snowstorm in the middle of August.
__ Glancing once more down the road, he muttered a brief prayer of promise, "I'll find you Ardy. I swear," and jogged into the woods after the Alterling.


__ Legad almost wrecked the stolen car a half dozen times as he found it difficult to concentrate on the icy road. There she was, the gypsy girl, unconscious next to him. He kept pulling his eyes away from the road to watch her chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. He watched her hair toss in the harsh breeze from the ruined windshield. He rested his palm on her bare thigh, feeling the coldness of the skin, rubbing it to keep it warm. He wanted to touch her in other places too, but knew enough to remain patient until he found a place to have his fun. Legad needed a quiet place, a warm place, a place hidden from passersby.
__ He couldn't believe the absolute luck and power he was experiencing. And it was all thanks to her.
__ Another stolen glance, another rub on her thigh. He avoided touching the other thigh. It looked funny. In fact, that whole leg looked funny. Too many knees and it was turning colors.
__ It was this woman who scorned him like so many others, like all the girls in school who put out for guys like, like.... He couldn't remember his friends, the ones he killed and devoured.
__ "Huh. Funny."
__ It didn't matter anyway. He took his eyes off the road again and forced his hand, his poking fingers, between the passenger seat and the woman's bottom.
__ Withdrawing his hand when the car whirred on a sudden patch of black ice, Legad gripped the wheel tightly.
__ Her fault, he decided. She distracted me to make the car slide like that. I can't wait to tear her to pieces. He proclaimed silently then that he would dispose of her body by eating it -- raw.
__ When he was done doing other things that is. He smiled. His teeth felt sharp.
__ Legad gave the woman's leg a pinch and she moaned but didn't wake.
__ "Good. Brain still works."
__ Taking his eyes off the road again, he raised his hand to her chest and cupped his palm around a breast. The cold air was doing wonderful things to her--
__ The car slammed into a brick wall. Somebody screamed, short and shrill. What was left of the glass shattered in and rained down on Legad. His head cracked the steering wheel and the car's forward momentum turned into a shunting corkscrew. The woman's head thumped the passenger glass, but her seatbelt held firm. Blood sprayed Legad's face and bare chest and a giant fist with matted hair poked--master!?-- through the broken windshield and punched him square on the nose, sending shivers of color through his vision before everything went black.


__ "You're leaving your girlfriend behind." The voice was dry but coarse, like tearing sandpaper.
__ Doug stopped his run through Palley's Woods and rubbed his arms to generate some brief warmth. He glanced left and right, up, right again but couldn't figure out where the voice had come from. He knew the Alterling was close, but had lost the foot path some time ago.
__ It was dark. Doug could only make out dim tree-like shapes in front of him. He couldn't see the thickness of the forest beyond. It was just a black velvet curtain.
__ From the darkness, it came again. "The boy is going to murder her, you know."
__ "Where are you? Show yourself to me you coward."
__ "They are all going to be mine," the paper voice rasped. "Legad is going to bring them to me. All the souls. After he makes them turn away."
__ Doug wanted to ask from what, but was suddenly afraid the only reason the creature didn't move back inside him had something to do with the answer to that question. So he pretended he knew. "Why do you need him to turn them away. Do it yourself."
__ A shadow, darker than the dim around him, passed by. Doug tried to lock onto it with his straining vision, but he couldn't. Then the voice returned, even closer, from the opposite direction.
__ "Because I am tired of doing all the work. This is my springtime. This is my birthday."
__ "Happy birthday," Doug sneered, and whirled on what he thought was the source of the voice only to get poked in the cheek by a twig.
__ From a new location, higher in a tree: "He's going to rape her corpse, you know. Stupid boy. He can't get the order right on anything."
__ "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Doug clamped his eyes shut and put his hands over his ears. He screamed until his throat burned, "Go away! Leave us alone! Shut up! Why are you doing this?"
__ When he finally stopped, Doug put his hands on his knees and slumped. He labored to catch his breath. It was too dark to see the plumes of breath billowing down from his mouth, but he figured that's what the shapes were.
__ Until one of the shapes reached out and grabbed his pant leg.

33. The Babysitter (D1)

__ Maggie May had a hard time dragging R. Lee Munson's lifeless corpse to the tree on higher ground. It was dark and wet and the sleeting snow was starting to become more razor sharp and frigidly cold.
__ Her teeth chattered incessantly, but Maggie knew if she kept moving, kept push-, pull-, dragging R. Lee's heavy body up the slight incline, the exertion would warm her up. It was working a little bit, but the freeze was just too much and she had to keep stopping to rub her hands together and stomping her feet.
__ "It's okay, Mr. M-Munson. D-Doug will be here soon and then we'll all be okay."
__ Maggie couldn't take the cold much longer. She didn't know much about frostbite or other things that happened to you when you were freezing, but she knew enough to know it hurt real bad, your fingers and toes turned black and fell off and you died.
__ Glancing at Munson's body, then to Clye Morrow's frozen corpse, she compared their clothes to her own. Either man's suit jacket might be enough to wrap around her twice. That would keep her warm. Mr. Munson's, she mused, was probably still fairly warm from his body heat and it wasn't as caked with ice and snow as Mr. Morrow's, but she couldn't do that to her friend.
__ Mr. Munson would need his jacket when he woke up. He'd be very cold.
__ Maggie crouched over the other man's body and worked at peeling him out of his suit jacket. the material seemed hard like paper because of the snow and frozen mud and crackled when she pulled it away from him. His body beneath the suit was as cold and hard as plastic when she poked it. His glazed eyes had collected little cups of snow but still stared skyward.
__ After she wrapped the cold hard fabric around her shoulders, she sat next to Mr. Munson under the tree and held his hand. Every once in awhile she squeezed it and rubbed it and said, "It'll b-be okay, Mr. M. D-D-Doug-g's c-coming."

__ Legad, who was once called Todd, could not believe his luck. He couldn't wait to eventually meet his master face to face and give himself over for reward and the bliss of careless enslavement.
__ But for now, this was his slave. This was the songbird flown away to avoid him, now back to the roost. Back to the master.
__ The woman was more beautiful than he remembered. Despite the bizarre freeze coming down from the bizarre night, she was dressed in an over sized tee with a sailboat on it and a pair of baggy shorts. Her untied sneakers made splashes in the wet snow as she mindlessly flailed toward him, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly at a pursuer Legad could not see.
__ Slamming on the brakes, Legad gripped the wheel hard and howled. The road was too icy under the fresh coat of summer snow and now the dead guy's heavy wheels were sliding and rotating toward her.
__ She kept coming and noticed too late that her own momentum and the momentum of the car were going to collide.
__ "Noooo!" Legad cried, envisioning the crunch and thump of her body breaking in half over the hood, denying him his prize. "Nooooooo!"

__ Doug sat in the passenger seat of the Datsun staring at the snow coming down through the open driver's door. He hadn't moved accept to lean toward the open door to accommodate the angle of the car's dip toward the ditch.
__ Ardy had bolted from the car and ran out into the street, into the darkness of the single lane road cutting Palley's Woods in half. Doug had no idea why.
__ The last thing he remembered was approaching the police officer and reaching for his wallet. Next thing he knew, he was sitting in the passenger seat of his own car as it listed toward a ditch on the side of the road, watching as Ardy ran out into the storm--.
__ Toward a pair of speeding headlights.
__ "Ardy!"
__ Doug's first impulse, to bolt up the angled seat and through the door that was already open, only brought him to a halt as the center console gearshift jammed his knee. The crack of the gearshift harmonized with his shout of pain and covered the shushing roar of the sliding tires and the sickening crunch as Ardy was hit by the car. But he sensed the hit without hearing it.
__ "Ardy! No!"
__ The pain in his knee gone, Doug pushed against his own door but it wouldn't budge. The styrofoam shriek between the metal parts told him his door was rapidly freezing.
__ "No, no, no, no, no...." Crack! the door finally gave as he shouldered into it with all his weight. Doug slipped and fell between the door and the car, and was momentarily pinned as the car door jammed against something unforgiving. His mind realized the sick angle and he remembered from somewhere that Ardy had pulled over angling the Datsun into a ditch. The narrow cleft in the earth didn't allow for the door to open all the way and Doug's momentum only landed him in the precarious and painful position on his side with the door pinning him.
__ "Ardy!" he cried, but only heard shuffling of snow under loose footfalls and the sound of something being dragged through the slush. A car door opened, then slammed shut. "Ardy! Ardy, answer me!"
__ Even as another car door slammed -- Did somebody pick her up and put her in their car? Are they taking her to the hospital? -- Doug squirmed and inched his way out of the Datsun and into the ditch. His palms broke through thin layers of ice and splashed in shallow freezing water. Sharp reeds frozen by the sudden winter flash storm cut at his legs, back, and arms.
__ The car that hit Ardy was now releasing plumes of steam from its exhaust, kicking up fans of loose snow, and making a whirring sound like a tortured banshee as its tires found purchase on the sleeted pavement. By the time Doug had limped to the edge of the road, waving his hands for the hit-and-run-Samaritan to stop, the car was already roaring past.
__ Through the shattered portions of the windshield on the passenger side, Doug noticed Ardy slumped over, her head lolling on the shoulder of -- wait. Is that the kid that took a shot at me earlier? The one who killed Munson with the shotgun!? ... It is.
__ But there was nothing Doug could do but watch as the car sped away, its red tail lights fading into the blackness churning with snow.
__ Laughter, cold and hollow as if it were coming from a tiny recording within a tin can, found Doug's ear and spun him on a heel.
__ There, leaning against the car, was the Alterling. The creature resembled a human in shape but no light, not even the reflection of the Datsun's headlights bouncing back off the snow, were enough to give this shadow form.
__ But Doug knew what it was. He had been held in its arms before, pinned by its teeth, poked by its bony finger.
__ The laugh told Doug he had just played an unwitting role in a grander scheme.
__ Having seen and felt hell with his own soul already, Doug was sobered against the creature and knew how its deceptions worked.
__ The Alterling pushed off from the car and stood up straight facing Doug. It hissed, "Your girl isss dead now, ssso you die."
__ "No," Doug defied, "You can't frighten me or get me to deal with you. I won't give you the grace."
__ He didn't know where the words came from, nor was he even sure what they meant, but they seemed to have an effect. The creature cringed as if hurt, and turned and started to walk into the woods.
__ It glanced once more at Doug and smiled crookedly. "You don't have the power to offer grace." It hissed the last word as it turned and vanished.

__ Deep within Palley's Woods, Maggie gave up trying to stay warm against Mr. Munson's cold corpse. She lay with her head on his shoulder, snow powdering her tiny weak frame. A body that had taken on the stillness of her partner.
__ She no longer felt the cold, only tired.
__ Very, very tired.

32. Legad (D1)

__ Ardy pulled the Datsun to the side of the road after rolling over the thickening slush for fifteen minutes. The tires protested against the icy gravel as the car slid to a stop half-slumped in a ditch off the back road to Palley's Woods.
__ Doug blinked out the windshield, his face still drilling into the snowy night, determined. But for what Ardy didn't know. Not sure if he was still possessed by... by whatever that was, she stopped the car.
__ "What're you doing?" Doug said, glancing at her. His eyes were wild and unsettling.
__ "You're scaring me," Ardy muttered. The car remained idling, but she had one hand on the key in the ignition and the other on the handle.
__ Doug forced himself to glance from the key hand to the handle hand. "W-What are you doing, Ardy?"
__ "How do I know it's you?" Her chin quivered and she felt tears heat the corners of her eyes. She remembered the horrifying scene, the holes in his head -- now no more than pimple-sized scars -- the hiss and groan of the Alterling within him. "He's a deceiver," she said, remembering a felt warning from the beings she herself had touched on the other side of death.
__ "Who is?"
__ "Doug, don't."
__ He twitched. "I don't understand," he said and sniffed.
__ Ardy turned off the car and clutched the keys to her chest. Something wasn't right. Doug's sniff wasn't as the others had been, not to draw back tears. No, this sniff was feral, animal. He was smelling the air in the car, gathering her scent to determine her next action.
__ "Ardy, don't--" Doug started. But it was too late.
__ Slamming her shoulder into the door as she pulled the handle, Ardy rolled into the road and scrambled to her feet. Lights from an oncoming car grew slowly from the blurred horizon. Turning toward the lights more to escape the darkness, Ardy raised her hands in the air and started waving wildly. "Stop!"


__ Todd blasted the metal station loud enough to vibrate the seat of the dead guy's car and make the broken safety glass crinkle and crack with each beat. He wasn't running the car's heater. The sudden wintry blast didn't bother him.
__ He had only one purpose in life, to find the woman who pained him and brought him to this route. The gypsy fortune-telling woman would soon fall into his grasp and he would delight in so many torturous pleasures he wouldn't be able to contain himself. Already he was starting to sing a toneless droning song that ran through his brain like a tune that won't go away. Though he had never heard it before, it was stronger than the heavy rock blasting the car speakers. It was simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
__ But he didn't care.
__ He didn't care about what he had left behind either. The fingerprints left on the discarded .357 entered and left his mind as he left the forest and followed his animal instincts down the side road. It didn't seem to matter that he was leading a forensics trail a blind CSI officer from TV could find in... well, in a snowstorm.
__ Todd no longer remembered his parents, his home, or his friends dead at his own hands. His memories were erasing with each flake of snow that drifted in the shattered glass and melted on the vinyl of the ruined seat next to him.
__ He only had his lust.
__ And the voice in his head telling him he was strong. He was infinite. He was powerful. No man could harm him. No god could touch him. As long as he dwelt in the darkness of the Alterlings' home, nothing could touch him.
__ For a creature without a soul is more infinite than the legions of saints gone before.
__ "I'll have to remember that one," he growled to himself, the smile almost pointed as though his teeth were already sharp and filed such to rend flesh.
__ Then a momentary flash of frustration raged in him. He jammed the brakes and rode the twisting slide. The car stopped at a forty-five degree angle across the center lane. "Where the hell am I going? Where is she?"
__ The voice within him said, She's here. She will come to you if you will it. If you demand it.
__ "But how? I don't have that kind of power."
__ But you do. You do, Legad.
__ "Legad. What is that?"
__ The name he gives you.
__ "Who is he?"
__ Your master.
__ "But I have no master. I am power."
__ No. You are his tool. It is his power you feel.
__ This made Todd pause, to doubt. Immediately the cold air from outside began to razor cut the flesh of his arms and chest. He felt weak. He felt memories ebb back into his heart, a vision of his mother crying as she tended a gash he got on his knee as a child.
__ "No! No, don't leave me this way!"
__ Who commands you, Legad?
__ "Him. The master."
__ Are you sure? You have to give yourself fully to him. No doubts. And his power shall be yours to wield.
__ Todd didn't even think about it as he savored the name. "Legad is ready, master. I am your will."
__ With each breath Todd -- now Legad -- felt the strength and heat and determination fill his heart and turn it black. The brief image of his crying mother became a flash of his mother tortured by his own hands, her fear and godlessness filling him and making him even more powerful.
__ Jamming the car back into gear, Legad straightened the wheel and continued driving into the snowy downpour. He rocked from side to side as he chanted his name and vowed to use his master's power to fill his rage and lust.
__ Just as the master wills it.
__ "Now, my master," Legad groaned, "I am yours to abuse and to raze." A cold tear streaked his cheek but he wasn't crying from fear, rage or even happiness. He was overcome with the pure bliss of surrendering himself to another's will. He knew that his master would continue to monitor him, to guide him. And, should he bring the woman to her knees, the voice in the darkness would breathe hot kisses on his neck and anoint him with the blood of a thousand lost souls. And if Legad should fail, each sense would be filled with the sharp pain of his master's lessons. He would accept punishment with relish and possibly even find sexual gratification in the rage of his master's disappointment.
__ Perhaps, Legad mused, he will have both. He will have the woman and do to her what the master would do to him. Then he would surrender himself to the dark one's will and allow himself the pleasure of his lord's tendering.
__ He didn't realize that he was still Todd and that the ancient name Legad meant "slave."
__ He didn't realize that his master had already carved out a plan to use him and discard him in a cold black fire.
__ He didn't realize there is no bliss in torment.
__ "Bring her to me, master." Legad whispered through the broken howling windshield.
__ And was instantly rewarded as the gypsy woman came running directly into the path of his headlights, waving and screaming for him to stop and pick her up.
__ "Thank you, master," Legad grinned and licked his chapped lips.