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He finally became aware of someone standing close to him, and started to sob in relief. His face boiling
with fevered sweat, he raised his head.
A woman was standing not four feet from him.
The dizziness had turned into an agonizing pain that tore through his muscles and joints, sending them into
spasm. He felt his shoulder dislocate as the muscles pulled out of their natural shape. But the sudden relief
of knowing that someone was there, someone was going to bring help, drove the pain to some
anesthetized pocket in his brain.
Andrew reached out to her, every movement a new experience in torment "Please," he pleaded, "help
me!"
There was something strange about the way she looked at him: with an intense curiosity, but no
sympathy.
He was suddenly terrified of her.
He screamed then, as the agony ripped through him once more in fresh waves. He thought he could see
the cells in his body, distended and bursting as they distorted inside him.
The pale beauty, a fieur du mal if ever he'd seen one, bent down to look a little closer, so that he could
see into her diabolical eyes.
"The greatest night of your life, is it?" she asked, quietly, but with a venomous edge. "You're right, priest;
your life will never be the same after tonight."
She bent over him, covering his face with her incredible veil of silver hair, its strange incense inducing
hallucinations of a cold flame that burned the very air. That flame, alive and moving, gathered into
pictures: A young girl with eyes like his, screaming in the dark; Walter, a monster, running through the
woods; a flash of young men and women, future generations of Marleys, all devastated by the blood
clinging to their hands and their souls. In that hot silver fire he watched them change, watched them kill,
and at last, watched them go mad.
"Do you understand what's happening to you or shall I tell you?" the woman asked.
As soon as she said it, he did understand. The instant the knowledge came to him, the woman burst into
the screaming laugh of a maniac, the same laugh he had heard in his dreams of his father.
"Why?" he asked her, his throat burning around the words. "Why is this happening to me? Who are
you?"
The pain returned worse than before, the breath crushed out of him by the bones thickening against his
lungs.
He saw his hand, clutched to his belly, and watched in horror as the fingers stretched, the nails darkened
and grew hard, as black hair covered the skin.
The woman's eyes glittered as she stooped over him. "You're about to make a payment, priest, on an old
debt. It won't be enough, but it will do."
Even as she spoke, the woman was fading into the night.
"Bless yourself, Father, for your sin is great!" she sang, her laugh like smoke on the rising wind.
In unbearable pain, he fainted. The last thing he saw was the moon, its placid face changed to the rictus
of nightmares.
When Andrew awakened a few minutes later, he was calm and purposeful, renewed, as if he had been
forged in fire and remade in another image. The werewolf threw back his massive head, his wolf's teeth
gleaming like the scythe of Death, and bayed his pleasure at being alive and released.
He bounded easily over the wall, and the cathedral garden was as silent as before he came.
Jerry Moffatt, defensive lineman for the toughest team in the NFL, was plenty pissed. Here it was, the
middle of the night, and he was stranded who knew how many miles from a phone. Hell, he hadn't even
passed a house for at least five miles.
That nasty little tramp would pay for this, if he could ever find her, which was doubtful. When Jerry
thought of her, he got all hot and bothered again, though not quite in the same way.
It had been partly his own fault. He always went a little wild on these out-of-town games. Well, the old
boys on the team liked to do that: They'd all run around, whoop it up, let the yokels know they were in
town. The front office didn't approve bad PR and all that junk but hell! Didn't hurt nobody. So here
he had been, with a winning game behind him and a couple of days of freedom ahead of him, so he had
done what you're supposed to do in New Orleans: hit the bars, do a little blow, and find a nice dolly to
hang on his arm.
He'd had a lot of nervous energy left. The Saints had given his team a hard time. He remembered when
the Saints were a pussy team, and playing them was only a little diversion from the nonstop partying in
New Orleans. Now you had to work your butt off to keep them from running your ass into the ground,
and like as not, they'd do it anyway. But he and his boys had squeaked by them this afternoon, making it
in the last second by a point conversion. Jerry loved playing when it was that closely matched, when he
had to work at it, when he felt that what he was doing was really football, the way it should be. No
matter how physically beat he was, he was mentally up for hours after he'd recovered from the game.
So he'd jumped nervously from one bar to another until he spotted her. She looked real good sitting on
that barstool. She had on one of those shiny, sexy dresses that clung to her body and was cut so low that
she was practically falling out of it. The little lady had no secrets, that was sure. She said she was a
dancer. Maybe she really was, she sure moved like it. When she got him out of the floor she practically
raped him right there. She knew the things he'd wanted to hear, too. He didn't think she was a pro: she
was trying too hard.
He bought her drinks, those faggy, lady things made with three or four kinds of booze and dyed pink.
She kept slapping them back but he couldn't see any effect.
This place was really boring, she told him, strictly tourist. She knew this really great place with a really
great dance floor and a really great R&B band. He didn't want to stay here, did he? Didn't he want to
see the real New Orleans?
He'd have agreed to anything; he was so homy that he could barely walk to the car.
The car did it for her. It always did. That was why he preferred to drive to out-of-town games if he
could. It was a red Ferrari that the guys on the team had nicknamed the Pussymobile.
The place she wanted to go turned out to be way out in the middle of nowhere with a dark stretch of
highway in between, the kind of paved path that passed for a highway in Louisiana. She snuggled up
close to him with a little wiggle that didn't make his hard-on any better. Boy, that girl had educated
hands! The team's wide receivers should have hands that good.
"Oh, honey," she said, her eyes wide, "can I drive it? Just a little ways? Please?"
He considered it, then decided it was probably best. He was drunk, stoned, and hated these dark roads.
If she drove, he could just sit back and do a couple more toots.
They pulled over and got out, switching sides. She slid in behind the wheel, squealing with excitement. As
soon as Jerry was about to sit down, she let out a little cry of distress.
"Oh! My earring! I must have dropped it out there! Oh, honey, it was real diamonds! Could you look
around on the pavement while I look in here?"
"Shit, baby," Jerry complained, "couldn't you have lost it before the highway lights ran out?" It was dark
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