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"Roland," said Arion, "I beg you. Don't torture him. This is all so wrong."

Allesandra was weeping.

"Think on it now," said Roland to Derek, "and when we return, have something to offer us in exchange for your right arm, or perhaps for your right eye, or for your right leg."

Derek closed his eyes. I want to die, he thought. I am finished. It is over. Kapetria lives, but she will never find me. It is too late for me. He was sobbing, but his sobs made no sound, and the tears slid down his face and it didn't matter. He tried to feel his missing left arm and hand as if they were invisibly still connected to him, but they weren't there, and the dull heat throbbed in his left shoulder stronger than before.

"That's enough, I can't bear anymore!" cried Allesandra. "I say we leave him alone now. We have work to do. Rhosh, you have solicitors, men who can use the information about this Garekyn creature..."

"...So does the Court!" said Rhosh. "You don't think they're using a battery of human cohorts to track down these missing beings!"

"And that should stop us from searching for him as well?"

"Let's go now, Rhosh," Arion pleaded. "I need to hunt. I want to hunt. I've had enough of this. This Garekyn has an address in London. Rhosh, your solicitors are in London. You might find out far more about this Garekyn being than you'll ever get from this poor battered boy."

And they were going. He could hear them. He lay, knees to one side, wounded shoulder against the wall still, and his right hand on his leg, and he waited for the sound of the door being closed and bolted. But no sound of the door came.

He turned his head and looked up. Only Rhoshamandes remained in the doorway. And the creature had never looked more calculating and menacing--a mighty angel of Hell with his serene face and soft curling hair. He stepped forward with a quick furtive glance behind him, and then snatched up the arm and once again hurled it into the fire.

Then he was gone and the door was slammed shut and t

he bolt thrown, and Derek sat frozen in terror.

The sobs poured out of him like blood.

He had to get to the fireplace, take his arm from it, he had to, but he could not bear the thought of touching it himself. And he could hear a crackling, a noise as if of logs shifting. Move, Derek. Go, that's your arm burning on the fire!

The demons were gone. All sound of them gone.

Move, Derek, before your own flesh and blood burns! But what does it matter? Despair paralyzed him. What good would it do?

He opened his eyes and attempted to crawl on all fours until the horror of his missing arm struck him full force, and then he sat back on his heels staring forward.

But his arm had rolled out of the fire. It had rolled out of the fire and onto the stone floor again. It lay on the floor, the torn shirtsleeve blackened and smoking as before.

No left hand with which to cover his eyes, only his right hand. No left arm to wrap around his middle, only his right arm.

Demons, some night I will have my revenge. Kapetria is alive. Garekyn is alive. And they will find me. Try keeping your secrets from your wary tribe, your talented tribe of blood drinkers who can read your minds, just try! And they will come to find me here just as Garekyn found you in New York.

He stretched out on the floor full length, and resting his face on his right hand he cried as if he really were a child. And it seemed he'd never been anything else. Why had the Parents given this innocence to him, this capacity for suffering to him, why had the Parents fashioned him as such a tenderhearted being? And he wondered now, as he had any number of times since that long-ago time, had he and Kapetria and Garekyn and Welf been wrong to disobey the Parents--to put the purpose aside?

...to destroy all sentient life, to destroy all life-forms...until the primal chemical innocence is restored and this world may begin its ascent all over again as it would have originally, had not circumstances favored the ascendancy of the mammalian species...

No voice or sound from anywhere in the castle.

Perhaps they'd taken to the air again, spread their invisible wings and flown high towards the stars. If only the hand of God would pluck them out of the sky and rub them to powder between its thumb and forefinger.

A scratching noise distracted him. A low scratching sound. Something alive and moving in this cell. No, not a rat, that he couldn't bear, not a rat come to gloat and mock him and somehow escape beneath a door that rendered his own escape absolutely impossible, a rat that might seek to bite him as they'd done in the past.

But if a rat had come, he would chase it from this place, that much he would do for himself.

He opened his eyes, praying for the strength to do it, and gazed forward.

In the light of the fire he saw a long black shape hunching and moving on the stone floor, propelled, it seemed, by a collection of curling legs at one end, hunching and lurching and coming right towards him!

His mind was wiped clean of words. What he was seeing could not be. Yet he knew what he was seeing.

The arm, his own severed left arm, was crawling away from the fire and straight towards him, by means of the fingers of the left hand, which reached out to gain an inch and pull the arm behind them over and over again. This was impossible. He was hallucinating. Mortals hallucinate. Why couldn't he?