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wave of pity sweep through him. |
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Poor old guy, he thought. Somebody's husband. Probably somebody's grandfather. Now all that's left is a shriveled husk. |
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He felt the cooling of his blood that heralded the metamorphosis back into human form and he quickly fanned the fires of his anger. He accomplished this by focusing not on the old man, but on the mind that had set those sad dead feet in motionthe mind that used the dead as pawns to enact its twisted revenge. |
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That's when Kyna screamed. |
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Paula was washing her hair over the sink in her bathroom when the psychic alarm bells started clanging inside her head. She jerked upright and stared into the mirror. Instead of a reflection of a woman with ropes of soapy lather running down into her eyes, she saw a dark, windswept beach, a full moon and two people huddled together near a dead-white tree. At first Paula recognized neither Kyna nor Cyrus, for the stark shadows created by the pale moonlight made their features as nebulous as smoke. Then, when she finally did recognize them, she couldn't see what had triggered the vision. |
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That's when she saw the four shadows stumbling through the high grass, animated by dozens of thin green strands of psychic energy that emerged from their bodies and disappeared up into the ether. To any but the initiated, these strands would have been invisible, but it didn't take a clairvoyant to know where the strands ledthe Dark Man's foul aura was all over them like blowflies on rancid meat. |
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Remembering from the legends that werewolves were supposed to be abnormally receptive to psychic communication, Paula crammed her knuckles tight into her temples and tried to think a warning at Cyrus. But then she noticed that he was already alert to the danger and had started to undress. She glanced at Kyna and noticed something extremely odd. Growing out of the top of Kyna's head was a single lime-green strand of energy. A strand so fine and so pale that a spider's |
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