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Night is the Time for Killing.

Inspector Quinn loves coffee.

Cappuchino, espresso, cortado - just give him a decent cup of joe and he'll love it with a passion that makes you suspect him of being secretly French. Only, I don't have hard proof to back it up. I don't have proof of him being a werewolf either, though he keeps talking about it like it's a part of everyday life.

"I caught the scent of the suspect long before he could see me; it really comes in handy when they don't wash."

When I arrived at the hospital, Quinn was already there. He was waiting outside, carrying two large lattes in a cardboard tray and kicking at an empty trash container with the tip of his Chelsea boot. "They drove the dumpsters away two hours ago," he grumbled. "Irene knew exactly what she was doing. Now the evidence is long gone."

I couldn't help laughing and Quinn shot me an angry glance.

"Not funny."

I tried to hide a grin with both hands, but it was no use. Last night, Irene admitted she took the bottle of bourbon from Gill's office and ditched it to_protect his reputation_. We had her cornered -our improbable duo of therian and demonspawn. But it only took a single human girl to distract us from collecting the evidence. One pretty girl with a pretty voice, and now our exhibit "A" was heading towards the city dump at thirty miles per hour.

"Where WERE you?" I asked.

Quinn shrugged. "Something Irene said made me ache for the woods. So, I drove up to Farvale."

Farvale was seventy miles away from Oakenford, and a round trip at night took hours. When Irene talked about long strolls under the full moon, I only thought it was a cute remark. But it triggered something deep within Quinn. Something as irresistible as Irene had been to me when she stripped naked, and she made us both drive all night.

I took a coffee from the tray and found it so strong it almost corroded its way through the paper cup. I guessed Quinn had ordered a triple shot to stay awake after his nocturnal escapades, but he'd never admit as much.

"Why Farvale of all places?" I asked.

"When I discovered I was a_were_, I'd drive up to Farvale every month to shift," answered Quinn. "I'd pace the woods all night and howl. Last night I needed to be there again - I wanted to go home."

I scratched my head. Sure, I didn't understand the inner workings of a werewolf or what makes them tick, but how could the call of the wild be so powerful it made him get up and leave mid-interrogation with our key witness? Eventually I took comfort in the fact that I was the one with a diagnose. My friend was plain wolf-shit crazy.

"And yourself?" Asked Quinn.

I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. "My night was a bit more intimate than that. I...spent it with Irene, while you were out doing your thing."

Quinn almost choked on his coffee.

"You had sex with our key witness?"

"I was starvin' man!" I laughed. "Guys like me don't get laid every day."

"Count yourself lucky she didn't talk you into jumping in front of a train," sneered Quinn. "That broad is dangerous."

I was confused. Irene didn't strike me as mean spirited, yet we had both fallen victim to her ability to manipulate those around her. Somehow she had tugged at Quinn's nostalgic heartstrings, and I had been a clean pushover. But why would she go to extremes to protect the reputation of a dead man she hardly knew?

Quinn and I spent the morning going through the hospital journals to track the last hours in Dr. Gill's life. He met in at 8:30, and the CCTV recordings showed him making a phone call shortly after.

"Can you trace that call?" I asked.

"The phone was in his pocket when he jumped," replied Quinn. "It's trashed, but I've got the techies trying to decode the SIM card."

At 12:30 Gill performed an operation on a patient. The journal stated his name simply as "Curly", a hobo living in a downtown shelter. He was scheduled for capping of a small brain aneurysm. That's when a weak blood vessel in the brain forms a bubble that can bleed at any moment. It was no trivial surgery, but still it was one of Gill's charity operations, and my respect for this man skyrocketed.

14:55, the front desk CCTV captured Gill leaving the hospital by the front door, carrying a styrofoam box.

17:10, Gill returns to the hospital, this time empty handed. The wing of the hospital where Gill had his office was not covered by CCTV, and once he disappeared off the lobby camera, we couldn't trace him any further. We replayed the last few seconds over and over, one frame at a time, looking for any clue why he'd leap from his window a few hours later.

"Look! he's patting himself on the chest right there," said Quinn and froze the recording on one frame.

"Heart trouble?"

Quinn mirrored the gesture on his own jacket.

"No, he's checking if something's there."

"That's where I keep my wallet," I said. "Not that there's a whole lot in it to check."

Quinn slammed his fist on the table, causing a few nurses to send us annoyed glances. "This is getting us nowhere." Then he added in a whisper "-and I can't catch a scent from a video recording."

I took a deep breath and prepared myself. If Irene was somehow involved with the case, I needed to know before I got even more involved with her.

"Dude, I'm going to look back in time and see what really happened."

Quinn frowned. "Are you sure you can handle it?"

The last time I provoked an episode, it had taken me days to recover. Days filled with frightening hallucinations, paranoia and voices, and Quinn felt guilty because it had been his idea.

"I've got to know, man."

Quinn sighed. "I'll get you something to drink."

---

I sat down with a bottle of bourbon in the waiting room next to the operating theater, and put in a brave effort to get staggeringly drunk as fast as I could. One of the nurses caught me drinking and threatened to call security. Quinn took her outside and through a round porthole in the double doors I saw him explaining the situation to her. While I drank, I tried to imagine what he was telling the nurse to keep her calm.

Everything is cool. My friend is a half-demon from hell. When he drinks, he sees an alternate reality.

Or, Hi toots! I'm a werewolf, he's a schizo and we solve crime.

Then, an episode washed over me, hard and unexpected. The whole world turned into a black and white piece of moving line-art, and I dropped to my knees and retched. I needed to puke and everything spun as I was stuck halfway between the reality of now and that of yesterweek. A transparent porter passed by, wheeling a ghostly patient on a gurney. The patient was sedated and covered with a thin blanket, head shaven clean.

_A brain surgery?_The face of the patient was gaunt and his cheeks were hollow and sported several days worth of stubble growth.

This must be one of the charity operations that made Gill so popular. The doors closed behind the porter with a soft whoosh, and I was left in the waiting room with an old man in a hospital gown, who read an issue of TIME magazine upside down. I staggered from my chair and was about to enter the operating room, when the nurse opened the door from inside.

"You're not supposed to be in here, Sir".

I peeked through the round porthole and saw that an operation was taking place.

"Gill?" I blurted out, and the image of the nurse walking back to her post split into a long series of frozen time-shots. An army of identical nurses crowded around tens of changing patients, all with their skulls sawed open and the soft tissue of their exposed brains glistening in shades of eerie gray.

So many days, so many brain operations, and they were all collected into one singularity somewhere in time and mind.

There was a strange tension in the air -a sense of unease. As the minutes passed by, anger replaced unease and then, burning rage replaced anger. Someone was bottling up emotions and was about to blow.

Where does it come from?

I looked around, but I was still alone in the waiting room with the confused octogenarian.

_Are you the one burning up with fury?_I wondered.

"Hey, pops," I asked. "Did you see any angry strangers around?"

Honestly, I didn't expect an answer and I guess I was only thinking out loud, but he looked up very slowly, with glaucomic eyes focused on infinity.

"You," he mumbled. "You'll hurt Winnie the Pooh."

I tried to get eye contact with the old guy, but his blank stare was fixed firmly on a door labeled_utility_. I was drunk out of my skull and staggered towards the door, but the moment I put my hand on the handle, a noise like that of a thousand licking tongues erupted from behind it. I drew a deep breath.

Remember, whatever you see in there isn't real - it's only in your mind, I reminded myself. Then I yanked the door open. The room was filled with buckets, broom and mops - and snakes. They scaled the walls, slithered around on the floor and hissed with seething anger. Each of them bore an identical human face. A face I had come to know much too well.

It was the face of Irene.

---

The shock of recognising Irene sobered me up so much I could drive back to her place of work at the_Phantom Cat Nightclub,_

"You did it!" I screamed. "You pushed Gill out of that window.

Mind telling me WHY?"

"I guess I lost my cool," said Irene.

I leaned against the bar of the Phantom Cat to get my bearings. The room spun, partially because I was still drunk, and partially from the shock that our key witness was now our prime suspect, and the one girl I had a major crush on.

I should have waited, I realised. Waited until my mind was clear again, but I also knew that I had a few days of living nightmares ahead of me - the price of drink-induced insight.

"You went through all that trouble of sending Quinn off to Farvale and spending time with me, just so we wouldn't recover that damn bottle. What prints were we going to find on it?" I slurred.

Irene laughed. "The bottle came from a grocery store, you'd find a whole bunch of prints on it - but not mine."

"So why the trouble of covering your tracks?"

"Word gets around. When the nurses talked about a stranger who could see into the past, I knew you'd look me up sooner or later, if I hid the bottle."

"Wait! You WANTED me to find you?" I was stunned.

"I know what you and your friend are," said Irene. "I knew it from the moment you stepped into the club. The way your friend chose a table by the window, the way he stared at the moon during the show. I knew it was tugging at him... so, I primed him."

"Primed?"

"I made him open to my suggestions by singing for him."

"Fly me to the moon?"

"Exactly."

"And you made him drive to Farvale."

"I wanted to get to know you, and your friend was in my way."

I laughed. "I'm hardly the most inspiring company. I hear voices and see things that never leave my brain. I get paranoid, and..." I hesitated before the last bit, but she had to know.

"And I believe I can turn into a demon."

Then I backtracked, "-but only now and then..."

Irene reached out and grabbed my hand firmly.

"Carter," she said. "Circus freaks get lonely too."

---

The tiny Circus Mascot was part circus part freakshow, and all mixed up. The artists travelled the lengths of Namairith and entertained towns large and small with acrobatic acts, freaks of nature and illusionists. Local artists joined the circus along the route, did their act for a few stops and left pairwise when relationships grew more relevant than performing for fifty patrons under a leaky top.

Irene showed me a faded photo of the troupe. "Not all acts were exactly professional, but Carlo and I used our talent to make the audience believe so. He played the guitar and I sang, so when the townies thought they saw a nine-ball juggler, it was in fact old Rusty, a three-ball juggler who dropped his balls half the time. Carlo and I turned a mediocre show into an experience."

"Sounds innocent enough."

"It was." Irene let out a sigh and stroked the photo of Carlo with the back of her little finger. "Right until he teamed up with the ice-cream guy."

"Did they turn bad ice-cream into_Ben and Jerry_'s?".

"Nope, they cruised the gas stations at night and sang the clerks into handing over their brass and whites."

I couldn't help laughing out loud at the thought of an operatic criminal. "So, we're talking robbery at counterpoint. Then what happened?"

"Surveillance cameras happened." Irene tucked the photo back into a crumbled brown envelope. "The police couldn't do much because Carlo and Zak hypnotized the mark, but we were kicked out of the circus. Carlo started drinking and we moved into the shelter for the homeless."

Six years ago, Dr Gill and Carlo became drinking buddies. Carlo had complained about a numbness in his right shoulder that made it difficult for him to play, and Gill offered to treat him for free. They found a small tumor at the top of the spine and Carlo was scheduled for an operation.

"Gill was drunk that night," said Irene. "More than usual, and Carlo died during the operation. He was weakened from living on the streets... at least, that's what they told us."

"So, You've been out for revenge for six years?

Irene shook her head. "I forgave him years ago. Gill was an alcoholic - but so was Carlo. When my brother died, the hospital covered for Gill and he cleaned his act up. He visited the shelter and started taking in patients for free. He became a friend to the homeless - someone we could turn to when we couldn't afford medical attention."

Three years later, Irene noticed a gradual change of things. Too many homeless were taken from the shelter and operated on. Many of them died during operations, and with no insurance or relatives to contact, nobody cared enough to look into the deaths. Nobody, except Irene. She took a job at the hospital to snoop around. When she watched Curly being wheeled in to be operated on, she feared the worst.

Irene paused and lit a cigarette. "My fears came true three days ago."

"But, there's always a risk when they poke around in your brain,"I argued.

"Curly was never diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. He had a bum liver from drinking and bad lungs from smoking, but there was never anything wrong with his head.

She grabbed my arm and squeezed. "They killed him, Carter! Gill killed him and took something out of his head."

That night, Irene placed the flask of bourbon in Gill's office to prime him. It triggered a guilt-ridden memory from his drunken days and made him open to Irene's suggestions.

"I'm a gitano," said Irene. "of the Sapéré clan. We have the gift of convincing people through our singing."

"Manipulating, you mean?"

"More like encouraging. It's not magic - everyone needs some kind of trigger."

"And in Gill's case, that trigger was bourbon?"

"No, it was guilt. The bourbon triggered his guilt and it was easy to sing him into..."

"And Quinn?"

"Nostalgia. He kept staring out the window when I sang_Fly me to the moon_. I knew he longed to be out there."

"And me?"

Irene laughed. "The ones who are starved for sex are always the easiest targets."

I felt uncomfortable about being labeled an easy target, but Irene was right. My guardian demons had warned me of her, and I ignored them.

I should have called Quinn and told him to book Irene for talking a man into committing suicide, but I had no evidence that would hold up in court. No judge or jury would ever believe the existence of a modern day siren, not unless Quinn and I also transformed inside the courtroom.

Besides, Irene and I had something in common:

we were freaks.

---

Over the next few days, Irene and I trawled Pubmed for publications by Dr. Gill. He had written a stream of papers, all about brain hormones. Then he stopped his output the year he began working at St. Mary's Grace. The papers were hidden behind paywalls, so we were stuck with a handful of short abstracts only.

Isolation and purification of amygdala regulating factor (ARF-I) by Gill T and Crane D.

A novel treatment for persistent angst in PTSD patients. Gill T and Crane D.

Most of his later papers were all co-written with a Professor named Desmond Crane.

"I think I know this guy," said Irene after some thought. "I made a recording for him once."

"Desmond Crane?"

"He hired me to write songs. Songs that would keep morale high with the army soldiers."

"Like battle songs?"

"More like a one-girl brass band; he kept calling me the_modern day Vera Lynn_."

Irene opened a drawer in her desk and rummaged through a pile of writable CD-roms. She put on a CD on her stereo and a quiet piece of piano music poured out of the speakers.

"It's pretty," I said. "But it doesn't make me want to fight."

"I couldn't do it," she said. "I can sing people into loving or leaving."

"... but not into fighting." I finished the sentence for her and picked up the jewel case. "Song for Carlo" was handwritten in green ink across the cover.

"I made this one because I couldn't stop thinking of my brother. It was all I could write."

when Irene handed in the CD, Crane was not pleased.

"This won't make our boys fight," he complained. Then Irene got paid and laid off. At the time, she was almost broke and only happy to be paid in cash.Who cared if cash payment was outside standard practice? Relieved that Crane hadn't blown a fuse she quickly stuffed the envelope into her bag and left the building. Outside she recognized Gill's car pulling up to the lab, and she was almost about to ask him for a ride back to town, when she noticed how uncomfortable the doctor looked. Instead, Irene stayed put and quietly observed Gill taking a large glass jar out of the trunk of his car.

Then she recognized the shape of its contents and had to clasp both hand to her mouth to avoid screaming.

Gill wasn't only taking money; he was delivering brains.

---

"You're shitting me!" Laughed Quinn. "Brains?"

"I know it sounds like something out of a zombie film, but."

"Brains? Seriously."

"Maybe he didn't scoop out the whole damn thing -but bits and pieces of it."

"You know how crazy that sounds, right?"

I shrugged. Irene sang people into leaping out of windows, Quinn ran on all fours and howled at the moon, so why couldn't Gill be a brain collector. Everything in this damn case was crazy anyway, and that included everyone involved. By the looks of it, I was the only one with an official diagnosis.

"Did the techies come up with anything from the SIM card?" I asked.

Quinn nodded. "He made a phone call to one Desmond Crane at eight thirty." Then he added "You know him?" when he saw me wince.

"I'm gonna know him shortly," I said. "You're coming or not?"

"Can't go with you," said Quinn. "Last night a bunch of army boys went on a rampage downtown, so I'm stuck behind the desk all day writing reports."

He showed me a stack of photos. Five soldiers on weekend leave had gone berserk and attacked three civilians outside a restaurant.

"They were high on drugs or something," said Quinn. "We're still waiting for the lab report."

In that moment, I was glad I didn't have Quinn's job. There are some things that are so gruesome you wish you can unsee them, but the images still stay with you forever - and this was one of those moments. The five soldiers had maimed and killed three innocents in an orgy of mindless violence.

"Don't show me this kind of shit," I cursed, but it was too late. The images of mangled bodies had already etched themselves onto the canvas of my mind.

"Two men and one woman," said Quinn. But we can only tell by their clothes. Dental records are of no use, because..."

"Don't..." I snapped. "Don't even go there."

"We had to put down three of the soldiers," said Quinn. "They didn't care about warning shots or anything. They just kept coming at us."

"And the last two?"

"They collapsed. One is in a coma, and we can't make any sense of the other guy. They were riding high on something like cocaine or PCP. Definitely something that makes you real freaky. These guys were wired out of their skulls."

I turned and was about to leave when Quinn called.

"Wait! You're in love with her, aren't you?"

I sighed. "I guess I am."

"You know she's our prime suspect."

"Being around her makes me feel..."

"Human?" Quinn intercepted my thoughts.

I nodded. "She accepts me for what I am."

"Just...Be careful with her," said Quinn. Then he went back to his paperwork.

For the first time in weeks, I whistled as I left the precinct. Quinn had given me a subtle warning: be careful_with_ her, not around her. He trusted I wasn't in any danger from her, but that she might be the one at risk.

---

Desmond Crane was an impressive looking man in his late forties. His hair was gray around the temples, same color as his eyes. He wore expensive shoes and a cheap shirt two sizes too small.He lives alone, I realized. Same as me.

"Horror!" he said, and handed me a cup of coffee, "is not rational. You don't have the time to stop and consider your options when you're chased by a predator. So, the primitive part of your brain takes over and decides whether to stay and fight - or run like hell."

Crane kept his lab facilities in a rented office building by the harbor, and he was giving me the grand tour like some kid showing off his toys. For a government funded project, the lab was surprisingly small.

I don't need much," he said as we put on lab coats. "Standard equipment for protein purification, mass spectrometry for reading the protein sequence and this here baby..." he stroked a machine holding twenty transparent vials, "-a Bioneer system for protein synthesis."

"About Dr. Gill..." I tried to steer the conversation towards Gill's involvement in the experiments. "He supplied you with sample material?"

"Material?" Crane eyed me with some suspicion. He was eager to share his ideas with someone and he was fiercely proud of his progress, but he didn't trust me.

"Brains."

The word felt foreign in my mouth. The brain was the part of my body that had caused me the most grief for the past nine years. It conjured up voices, delusions, illusions and then grew confused because my mind doesn't even trust itself. But it was never a physical thing to me. You can massage a sore muscle or have a dentist fix a chipped tooth, but the brain is safely locked away in its cranium. But to Crane and Gill, the brain was a physical object, something you could cut open and slice into chunks.

"He supplied you with brains." I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. It felt funny, as if I had scalded it on the hot coffee.

Dr. Crane stopped the tour and rubbed the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "Ever heard of_Urbach-Wiethe_?"

"Sounds like a brand of ice-cream."

"It's a disease that effects the amygdala. Patients don't feel any fear.

"I could use a bit of that," I admitted.

Crane laughed. "Wouldn't we all? We all have our private terrors; darkness, dentists, death! Just imagine troops going into battle without knowing fear."

"They wouldn't stop fighting until they die?" I guessed.

"Exactly!" grinned Crane. "They don't give a shit about getting wounded, tortured or maimed."

"Is Urbach-Wiethe related to the ARF-1 in your papers?"

"You've done your homework," said Crane. "I'm impressed.Urbach-Wiethe patients don't degrade ARF-1, so the hormone is always in their system. If the amygdala tries to raise any fear or unease, the ARF-I suppresses it right away. It's like a_Whack-a-mole_ game. Fear is the mole, and ARF-I is the hammer."

Crane shook a small, corked test tube that contained a few grains of white powder. "Synthetic ARF-I can replicate that effect, you know."

The Bioneer made a series of clicking sounds, and a pipette tip sucked up fifty microliters of liquid from a vial.

"I know the sequence of ARF-I in my sleep," he beamed. "MGTPGQDVVCNCN..." He held up a glass vial containing a speck of white powder. "One hundred and eighty one residues - that's all it takes to_kill fear dead_."

"Speaking of death," I said. I'm looking into some irregularities in connection with the Gill suicide."

If Crane was surprised about me knowing of Gill's death, he sure didn't show it. Instead he gave me a friendly smile.

"It's hardly a secret that Gill provided me with sample material."

"Well," I said. "That source died out five days ago."

Crane shrugged. "Ah well, I don't need any samples anyway. We're fully synthetic now." He waved an excited hand at the Bioneer system.

"Half a microgram of synthetic peptide and the enemy WILL know what hit them."

"ARF-I," I said and tried to sound sarcastic. "-your modern day Vera Lynn."

"Vera Lynn?" Crane gave me a curious look. The reference had slipped off my tongue without a thought, and I could have kicked myself. I didn't want him to know about Irene's helping with the investigation.

"You seem to have two vials going at the same time," I noted.

Crane flashed a proud smile.

"The Bioneer can synthesize two proteins at the same time. The other one is ARF-II."

"Wait! You mean, there's TWO of them?"

"ARF-II stimulates the amygdala reward centre," said Crane proudly. "It was MY own idea to combine the two."

"So, for each kill?"

"-the brain gets a reward boost. It makes good sense when you think about it."

"You're working on how to create killer machines?"

"I prefer to call my volunteers_DuraFighters -_ like the batteries, they just keep going."

"You're insane!" I cried.

"Maybe so," smiled Crane "But I hold a Ph.D - plus I'm highly paid."

The clicking noises from the Bioneer system seemed to grow louder and increasingly annoying.

"You and Gill prey on the homeless and the weak for your experiments!"

I wanted to shout at Dr. Crane, but I couldn't seem to find the energy, and my words poured out muffled and thick like molasses.

"The weak?" Laughed Crane, "Quite the contrary." He pointed to his stomach where two shirt buttons struggled to keep a bulging belly inside. A few strands of greying hair poked out from gaps where his shirt was too tight.

"How long do you think someone like me would survive on the street? A week? Two at most. These people are not homeless because they're weak. They survive because they're strong. They produce ARF1 like no one else, and it keeps them going; sleeping in stairwells, on park benches, under the bridge on seventh. You wouldn't believe the amounts of ARF-I I can purify from a fifty year old hobo."

For some reason, the noises from the Bioneer didn't bother me anymore. In fact, I thought they made an interesting rythm.

"Would you care to see my new HPLC system?" asked Crane.

I shrugged, "Sure, why not" and I followed him sluggishly through the lab, to a piece of equipment with two pumps connected to a short metallic column. I blinked at an annoying disturbance in my field of vision. A small cluster of broken glass noodles stuck together just off center of my field of vision. Crane kept talking about his machine and I pretended to listen, but my focus was on the strange visual disturbance. Growing clusters of tiny, broken rods began to leak oily patches that expanded into C-shapes surrounded by iridiscent, pulsating lines. I couldn't see very well.

I'm going blind?

The outer ridges of the disturbance collapsed into a pattern of multicoloured zig-zag lines that reminded me of the bellows of an accordion.There are two words to zig and zag, I mused and the patterns constantly changed between two colour patterns.

It's fascinating.

Then my legs buckled under me, and I dropped to my knees. What little vision I had left saved me from slamming my head on the floor, but my muscles had turned to fudge. In my mind, I laughed at the irony of the situation. Every paranoid schizophrenic shares the same fear; the one fear that had now come true:

Desmond Crane had slipped something into my coffee.

---

When I woke up, there was an annoying stinging sensation in my leg. I was outside and on the ground somewhere, dazed and sick to my stomach. I struggled to get up on all fours and felt moist grass under my palms.If I couldn't stand or fight, by God I'd crawl to a safe place on my hands and knees. The sky was dark and cloudy, but a waning full moon cast a cool glow over the grassy field.How long had I been unconscious?

It was night, but happy people laughed somewhere off in the distance, and as my vision gradually returned I made out a series of flashing lights coming from the same direction.I would be safe in a crowd, and I crawled a few feet before I doubled over and puked. I finally recognised the place around me as the Oakenford fairground. The sound of laughing people came from the annual spring faire.How did I get here, I wondered, and pulled down my jeans to examine my leg. There was an angry red mark on my right thigh, where something had stung me. A terrible thought rushed through my mind.

I'd been injected with something.

"Have no fear, Mr. Wolf," a familiar voice called out. I looked around and found Dr Crane sitting in a car by the curb no more than twenty feet away. "Literally." he grinned.

"What have you done to me?" I shouted at him. I was still woozy, and I struggled to stay upright while zipping my pants back up.

"I'm treating you to a rare cocktail of ARF-I and ARF-II," said Crane and snapped his fingers. "In a few minutes, all your worries will disappear like that."

"SonofaBITCH!" I cursed and took two unsteady steps towards the car.

"Go kill something for me," said Crane. "I'm sure you'll find it a_rewarding_ experience." Then he started the engine and drove off, leaving me to curse at his tail lights.

Three minutes later, I conceded that Crane had been right all along. As the cloud of sedation evaporated from my mind, so did all my worries.

How will I pay my bills? What if I have an episode in public and make an ass out of myself? What if something bad happens to my sister Kamryn?

_ _None of my everyday concerns mattered any more. I was free and without a trace of the worrying sensation in my stomach. I could do anything and not give a damn.

Normally I was uncomfortable with crowds and loud places, unless I could find a dark corner to hide in every ten minutes, but now I walked with confidence through the arch of the spring faire where happy Oakenforders with pink candy-floss lips threw tennis balls at stuffed toys.

Crane was a genius who deserved the Nobel prize, but I was above them all.

"Three balls for a buck!" shouted a carny with a scrawny beard. "Tip over the tower of tins and win!" He waved at me with a pasty hand that clutched a worn_Mr. Babache_ juggling ball. I slipped him a dollar bill and grabbed the ball. I immediately felt that the ball was loaded. It would fly in a curved arc so there was no way to hit those tins with any precision.

"Tip over the tower and the prize is all yours." The carny pointed at a large plush that vaguely resembled Winnie the Pooh. It was poorly made and definitely neither licensed nor approved by Disney.

I turned the ball over in my hand. It was too light and the filling uneven.

Did the creep think I was some easy mark, a chalk-sucker, a local gazoonie?

_ _A tidal of fury emerged from the void in my stomach where fear had once nested, and I loathed the sight of him.

Someone needs to teach him and his rigged-up alibi store a lesson.

I closed my eyes and tapped into the dark void within me. It was like breathing pure energy to fuel my rage. My arms bulged under my shirt and I knew I was about to_become._

No shifting now, I commanded. I just need a little breath from the abyss. I launched the juggling ball with all my strength, and Winnie the Pooh exploded in a cloud of pink stuffing.

I slammed the two remaining balls on the counter.

"Have a pair on me," I snarled. "You need them."

The carny stared at me, stupidly with his mouth open, and a warm wave of satisfaction shot through me. Hating on the carny had felt good. No, better than good; it had given me a deep primal, predatorial rush, and I wanted more. A new but irresistible urge rose within me as I walked towards the_Big Eli_ and its sugarcoated patrons;

• the urge to destroy,

• the urge to kill.

• TO BE CONTINUED -