the

wall on her right and took the torch down out of its iron sconce, shaped like

a

gargoyle's head. Below it hung a large ring of iron keys. She took those

also.

She hesitated, then started down.

The torchlight threw her shadow on the wall as she descended. It was the

shadow

of a wolf. There were rats down there—she could hear hundreds of them—but as

aggressive as they were, they fled at her approach, almost as if they sensed

something different about her. She got down to the bottom of the stairs and

found herself in a narrow stone corridor with a low ceiling. The top of her

head

just brushed it. The air was damp and musty. The dust lay thick upon the

floor,

but to the right it had been disturbed. She could see a trail of footprints

and

long streaks, as if something heavy had been dragged along the floor.

As she walked slowly down the corridor, ducking under cobwebs, she passed a

number of low, heavy wooden doors reinforced with iron. There was a small

wooden

shutter in the upper portion of each door that could be drawn back, revealing

a

barred window looking through into a cell. So she was in a dungeon! The

thought

excited her. She was discovering new things about her lover.

She knew he was a powerful sorcerer, perhaps even a mage, and because of what

he'd done to her, she knew he practiced necromancy. That made him even more

exciting, Terri didn't know a great deal about thaumaturgy, and she knew even

less about its history. For that matter, there was no historical record of

the

existence of the Dark Ones, necromancers belonging to a race separate from

humans. All Terri knew was that necromancy was black magic and that black

magic

was forbidden, a felony punishable by death. And that was the most exciting

thing of all.

Terri had never killed a man before she had been changed. Andrew Blood had

been

her first. Roger Harris was the second. And she was eagerly looking forward

to

her third. She never would have believed that of herself, that she was

capable

of murder. Capable of destroying men, yes, but certainly not in the literal

sense. Yet she had found it thrilling, more thrilling than anything she had

ever

done before. It was as if she had discovered some long-buried predatory

instinct

that made her long to kill. Had he done that to her? Or had he simply

recognized

it in her and brought it out into the open?

She couldn't remember much of what she had done to Andrew Blood. She

perceived

it all through a haze, a thick, red mist of gore. She remembered everything

up

to the moment she'd attacked him with an astonishing, hard-edged clarity, and