overpowering perfume.
"My greetings, handsome Cadderly," purred the shapely priestess in the crimson gown. "You cannot imagine how pleased I am that you have returned."
Danica's grip nearly cut off Cadderly's blood flow; he felt his fingers tingling. He knew that his face had blushed a
deep scarlet, as reddish as Priestess Histra's revealing gown. He realized, sensibly, that this was probably the most modest outfit he had ever seen the lusty priestess of Sune, the Goddess of Love, wearing, but that did not make it modest by anyone else's standards. The front was cut in a low V, so low that Cadderly felt he might glimpse Histra's navel if he got up on his toes, and though the gown was long, its front slit was incredibly high, displaying all of Histra's shapely leg when she brought one foot out in front of the other in her typically alluring stance.
Histra did not seem displeased by Cadderly's obvious discomfort or by Danica's growing scowl. She bent one leg at the knee, her thigh slipping completely free of the gown's meager folds.
Cadderly heard himself gulp, didn't realize that he was gawking at the brazen display until Danica's small fingernails dug deep lines into his upper arm.
"Do come and visit, dear young Cadderly," Histra purred. She looked disdainfully at the woman on Cadderly's arm. "When you are not so tightly leashed, of course." Histra slowly, teasingly moved into her room, the door's gentle click as she closed it lost beneath the sound of Cadderly's repeated swallowing.
"I - * he stammered, at last looking Dariica in the eye.
Danica laughed and led him on down the hall. "Fear not," she said, her tone more than a little condescending. "I understand your relationship with the priestess of Sune. She is quite pitiful, actually."
Cadderly looked down at Danica, perplexed. If Danica was speaking the truth, then why had little lines of blood begun their descent on his muscled arm?
"I am not jealous of Histra, certainly," Danica went on. "I trust you, with all my heart." Just outside her room, she stopped and faced Cadderly squarely, one hand brushing the outline of his face, the other tight about his waist
"I trust you," Danica said again.
"Besides," added the fiery young monk in very different, stronger tones as she turned into her room, "if anything romantic ever happened between you and that single-minded, over-painted lump of too-too quivering flesh, I would put her nose somewhere in back of one of her ears."
Danica abruptly disappeared into her room to retrieve the book of notes she and Cadderly had prepared for their meeting with Dean Thobicus. The young priest remained in the hall, considering the threat and privately laughing at how true it could be. Danica was fully a foot shorter than he, and easily a hundred pounds lighter. She walked with the grace of a dancer - and fought with the tenacity of a bee-stung bear.
The young priest was far from worried, though. Histra had spent all of her life in the practice of being alluring, and she made no secret of her designs on Cadderly. But she hadn't a chance; not a woman in the world had a chance of breaking Cadderly's bond with his Danica.
*****
A blackened, charred hand tore up through the newly turned earth, reaching desperately for the open air above. A second arm, similarly charred and broken at a gruesome angle halfway between the wrist and the elbow, followed, grasping at the mud, tearing at the natural prison that held the wretched body.
Finally the creature found enough of a hold to pull his hairless head from the shallow grave, to look again upon the world of the living.
The blackened head swiveled on a neck that was no more than skin shriveled tight to the bone, surveying the scene. For a fleeting instant, the wretch wondered what had happened. How had he been buried?
A short distance away, down a little hill, the creature saw the glow of the evening lamps of a small farmhouse. Beside it stood another structure, a barn.
A barn!
Chapter Two
The thin sliver of the consciousness that had once belonged to a man known as Ghost remembered that barn. Ghost had seen this body, his body, charred by that wicked Cadderly in that very barn! The evil corpse drew in some air - the action could not be called breathing where this undead thing was concerned - and dragged his blackened and shriveled body the rest of the way out of the hole. The notes of that distant, yet