"Hold on!" Marc rasped, placing a restraining hand on her arm. "If they think you're an apparition, let's not disillusion them. Get out there in that patch of moonlight and try to look ethereal ... if it's possible ... while Harold and I sneak up on them from the shadows." He swung about and mistrustingly confronted the weaving Harold. "Grab a rock," he directed. "We're going to tuck them in for the night."
"Going to play a trick, eh?" Harold winked happily, grabbing an undersized boulder. "I'm just crazy about tricks." And staggering under his burden of liquor and rock, he started after Marc, who was already moving cautiously along the shadowed wall.
Slowly, rhythmically, Toffee moved into the moonlight, her arms swaying gracefully over her head. In the diffused, silver spotlight, she looked more like a lovely other-world figure than any hallucination would ever dare.
"Yipes!" a voice, Mac's, breathed worshipfully. "Look, Walt! Now I'm seeing it. This is the best one yet."
"Yeah," whispered Walt, apparently overcome. "She's too beautiful to be true. I wish she were real."
The angel was strangely responsive to flattery. It renewed its efforts.
"Wow!" Walt moaned happily. "It's the first time I ever had a vision that did a strip tease! This is better than a show!"
Instantly, as though to punctuate the remark, there were two almost simultaneous thuds, and Toffee's enthusiastic audience, looking like bobby soxers at a Frank Sinatra matinee, tumbled blissfully to the ground.
"Stop that!" Marc rasped, stepping over one of the slumbering guards, "Can't you do anything without taking off your clothes?"