communicated with them telepathically.

"We've hurt them, and they've fled to hide and lick their wounds. As long as

we

remain alive, they'll never be as strong as they once were. They'll be

vulnerable. We'll find them. And when they're ready, they'll try to find us."

"That's what the dream was all about last night," she said softly.

They had both awakened abruptly in the middle of the night, at the same time.

Each of them had had a dream where they sat up in bed and saw the wall across

the bedroom from them, where a bookshelf stood, transformed into a bare wall

constructed of huge blocks of mortared stone, dark and damp and ancient.

Large

iron rings were set into the wall, and Modred hung from them in chains. He

was

bare-chested, sagging down, and the vision was so real that they could hear

the

chains clink as he moved weakly, raising his head to look directly at them.

The

runestone over his heart was glowing faintly. He opened his mouth to say

something, and at that moment the vision abruptly faded away and they both

awoke, sat up in bed, and stared at each other. The both had had exactly the

same dream, and they knew that it was no coincidence.

Kira swallowed hard. "They've got him, haven't they?" she said.

Wyrdrune took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm afraid they do," he

said. "But where?"

"They've got him," Kira said again, as if she were trying to make herself

believe it. "And now they're after us."

Billy Slade kept hearing voices. This worried Billy a great deal, especially

since he had never taken drugs or gotten drunk or even suffered a strong blow

to

the head. He had no idea if there was any history of insanity in his family,

because he had never known his family. He didn't even know what his ethnic

background was. Looking in the mirror didn't help much. He was either a very

light-skinned black or an Hispanic, he couldn't tell for sure. Maybe he was

Italian. For all he knew, he might be part Jamaican. Or perhaps he was a

Creole.

And it also looked like maybe there was a little Asian in there somewhere,

Indian or Oriental. What the hell, he thought, they threw a bit of everything

into a blender and I was what came out.

He was small and why, with attractive, delicate features that gave him a

slightly androgynous look. His lips were-thin and had a natural tendency to

drop

down a little at the corners of his mouth. His nose was straight and

blade-edged, almost elfin, and his cheekbones were high and pronounced. His

eyes

were dark and almond-shaped, Eurasian-looking, and his eyebrows had a thin,

graceful arch. He was, in fact, insufferably pretty, so he tried to cultivate

a

mean look to offset it. His dark hair was worn very short on the sides and

luxuriantly thick and long in the center, descending in a ponytail down the

middle of his back, almost to his waist. It had the appearance of a horse's

flowing mane. He dressed in the manner of a tatterdemalion thug—scuffed black