His face is becoming a jade mask with eyes that burn a fiery red, a spirit of evil. He's plunging something deep into me, metal, cold and cutting. Far inside, reaching, while my mind fights through the waves of pain that course down my lower body. I struggle back, but my arms just pass through empty air. Stop. The eyes, the hard metal . . . Time turns fluid, minutes are hours, lost, and I don't know . . .
Finally-—it could be years later—he growls one last time and the room begins fading to darkness. Then a blessed numbness washes over me. He's gone. . . .
And I dream I am dead.
Sometime, probably hours later, I sensed my consciousness gradually returning. Around me the room was still dark and, remembering the "dream," I came fully awake with a start, my heart pounding. What had . . . it done to me? I was shivering, with a piercing, pointed ache in my groin. I needed air.
I rose up unsteadily and reached out, and realized I was in a hospital bed with metal bars along one side.
What! How did I come to be in this? Then I began remembering. I was at Baalum, in Alex Goddard's Ninos del Mundo clinic. And I'd been trying to get Sarah and take her home.
Instead, I'd passed out and then . . . an attack, some unspeakably evil . . .
Get out of here. Now.
I settled my feet onto the floor with a surge of determination, and that was when I sensed I was in a different place from where I'd . . . Where—!
I gazed around in the dark, then reached out and felt something on a table beside the bed. It was a clay bowl full of wax. What . . . a candle. And next to it I touched a plain book of matches. My hand was trembling from the pain in my groin, but I managed to light the candle, a flickering glow.