I fought to get out of his grip, which seemed to pierce all the way through me in javelins of ice. I felt tears streaking my face, warm tracks in a frozen world. My eyelids ground open against my will.

Wygan held me to the padded wall. His eyes glowed, and red fire and white sparks danced jagged lightning strikes around us in a world of roiling, tormented shadow and coiling mist. His eyes were snake-like. His skin gleamed pearlescent and finely marked with tiny, over-lapping fringes. His ice white hair was a sculpted ridge that camouflaged the true shape of a saurian skull. The Grey surged around us like water from a broken dam, and I was drowning.

I stared back at him in strangled silence, my lungs frozen in my chest. I wanted to bolt, to claw, swim, dig my way out of there, but in the prison of his gaze, I could do no more than shake. Half a smile tore his face.

"Fear," he murmured. His breath smelled of tombs. "I could feed upon you for days. Look at my world. My prison of hunger, cold, unbridgeable distance, without touch, without warmth, but what I can steal. This is my torment, my gift. Look at it!"

He whipped me in front of him, thrusting me into a maelstrom of writhing, tortured shapes and animate cold. Twisting, arctic forms pressed against me, gaping, changing ever and ever into unending nightmares intangible and horrible, stabbing cold fingers of avarice and hunger through me. They devoured me, tore me, inhabited me in mouthless screams. I gasped and sobbed and tried to pull away from them, felt them sucking my thoughts and my life away in unraveling skeins, emptying all thought, even emotion, fear, self-preservation, draining me to bleak despair.

I sagged, and he let me fall to my knees.

"You don't see it," Wygan whispered behind me. "You haven't ascended to your proper place. Worthless fools and incompetents. They discovered you, but could not mold you as I told them to."

My mind flashed hot images: the apparently crazy man in the alley; the unkillable assailant in my garage; the break-ins… I couldn't get words to form properly, only choking out, "You… you?"

As if he could see my thoughts—or had sent them—he laughed, the sound slashing me. "You reentered this world, incomplete, half made. You needed honing to your true shape. But they failed. Cowards. Imbeciles. Faulty tools like Alice, clinging to their own paltry half-lives, petty schemes." His voice spiked upward into my skull. "Ages waited! And at last!"

He stepped to my side and crouched, a slender reptilian creature cloaked in a clot of gruesome shadow and dancing fury-light. "But you aren't here as you should be. You haven't grown to it. Imprisoned, blind, weak! You are no good to me. How can you walk where you can't see? And I must have you or cannot cross. You must see what I can see but cannot touch. Touch what I can take but cannot feel. I will make you what you ought to be."

He reached into the mist and hooked a thread of glimmering blue on one white claw. "Your power is too small. You must embrace it, must grow for me. Take this."

I cringed back with a whimper. "No. No, I don't want it," I protested, my voice a weak trickle of steam in the cold.

"Did I offer you a choice?" He pushed his tangled claw into my chest, ripping me open, unbleeding. I tried to yell, but nothing came out.

The blue thread went taut and vibrated, then shimmered and crawled over me, spreading over my limbs and up to my head. The thread passed over my eyes and blinded me a moment, then faded. The shape of it vanished, seeming to sink into me, knitting me closed again around its adamantine knot within my ribs.

The mist-world blazed and faded like fog under sun. The shape and color of the Grey changed, roaring with a tangle of light, fountains and smudges of illumination, glowing forms of vibrant color and force, lines as straight and hot as highways in the desert, as twisted as tornadoes, wild as wind.

The studio, formed of soft mist, was limned in gleaming threads around us, and the top of Queen Anne Hill spread away beyond it, through inconsequential walls, glimmering with phantom fires and falling into an ink-dark stain of cold nothingness—the Sound. In the distance, the black beast howled in rage and I felt it gather itself and rush toward us, all teeth and claws and unquenchable hatred.

The Grey was alive inside me and I felt it vibrating, coiling, binding into me like a malevolent vine growing from the living seed Wygan had planted. I could feel the pulse of it. I shrieked despair.

Wygan laughed. "Yes! You will grow to the part I need you to play. But we'd best go now, before the hungry one ruins the party."

He let go, his touch withdrawing with the same sensation as cactus spines drawn from my skin. The Grey lapped over me like a wet sheet and slid away, leaving a single, indissoluble thread that vanished between my breasts.

I was on my knees by the studio door. My clothing and face dripped. I fought nausea, gagged and swallowed bile, gasped to catch my breath again. I staggered to my feet.

"You doin' all right?" Wygan asked. He was still in his chair.

I gulped. "Alive."

He giggled, and the sound rubbed against my nerves like ground glass. "More or less. But you should be able to keep yourself that way now, until I need you. Now you see it as it really is, and you can use that. You'll need to learn the part, though, or something may hurt you."

I turned and stared at him, shivering in shock. He looked back and smiled a little, sending a breaker of cold over me. The light in the booth turned blue, though the bulb on the stand was amber.

"I… know all I can stand to."

"For now. You can let yourself out, I think."

He turned his back to me, tugging on his headphones and crouching over the console. Will Robinson pursued Dr. Smith through bars of Led Zeppelin, casting a blue shadow from the video monitor in the shape of a giant reptile, which grinned at me.

I bolted out the door and stumbled, tripping, desperate for distance, toward the door.

"Don't forget me," he called out, a shadow voice gliding on a non-existent breeze. I heard him laughing behind me all the way.

I staggered out to the Rover and leaned against it, bowing my neck to press my face against the cold solidity of the old truck's side. I shivered and gulped mouthfuls of ordinary Seattle air to stop myself howling out loud. There was an ache in my chest where Wygan had touched me, black pain equaled by the tearing horror rampaging through my mind. I hated myself for this trembling weakness, and more so for what had happened. I crawled into the backseat and curled into a sickened ball as my thoughts screamed and raged:

What are you? Raped, ripped, re-formed. What are you, now? Ignorant fool. These are vampires; a monstrous redesign of humans, psychotic by our standard, alien, divorced from humanity. What drives them is not what drives you. It never will be. Never again. They are not human. They are not humans! And neither are you. Not anymore. Insect. Half monster. What are you, now?

I lost track of time, hysterical, quivering in a crumpled wad of misery, despair, and self-disgust. After a while, I noticed I was stiff, cold, and stinking—right after I unclenched long enough to throw up. Hanging upside down, shivering and crying, some kind of common sense reasserted itself. The nearest vampire was just inside the building, laughing still, and I was sitting like a tethered goat.

I had to drive with care, in spite of an urge to speed. I couldn't see well through my swollen eyes and the streets flickered Grey, overlaid in mist and silver, outlined in streaks of neon-bright light. I pulled over a couple of times and tried to breathe slowly and attentively until it stopped. It would not recede. The trip home was very long.

I jerked awake at a sound and cowered under the covers. The beeping continued and the bed shuddered as Will fumbled for his pager on the nightstand.