she was driven by something, and fought it with whatever remained of her former loyalty. He knew something of her torment, which must in a way be similar to his own. For while he lusted after the blood of certain men, still he remembered a handful of times when men had been good to him; and while she came upon him to kill him, she yet loved him with at least a spark of her old love.
And even as he drew back the string of his crossbow until it nocked, and even as he slid a bolt into the tiller's groove, Radu Lykan grieved over what he must do, for the companionship they had known together. But plainly Singer was mad and al of that was over now, and like the fox in the swamp she'd be better off dead and out of her misery.
He aimed direct at her forehead - her brain, to make a quick end of it - and knew he couldn't miss. For even though Singer had witnessed the power of his weapon, still she crept closer, and closer yet, almost as if begging him to kill her! And all the while she stared fixedly at Radu, pleadingly with eyes he knew yet didn't know, not any longer. She was almost upon him; her eyes were yellow lamps shining on him; powerful jaws yawned open! And:
'Goodbye, old friend,' Radu told her, squeezing the trigger.
In the last moment Singer had lunged forward . . . only to be stopped dead by the ironwood bolt that chopped through her sloping skull into her brain; so that she fell twitching upon Radu's chest where he had jerked back away from her. Her jaws still gaped open, however; his, too, as he saw something writhing in the dark cavern of her mouth!
Then, but too late, he once again remembered the diseased fox in the swamp: the thing he had seen passing from the one to the other, which he'd mistakenly thought was the fox's tongue, torn out at the roots by Singer.
It was the same now, but as the shiny-black, corrugated body of the leech-thing ejected from the wolfs mouth, and in the instant that it transferred to Radu's, he saw that it was no tongue! It lived - it thought, reasoned, or instinctively knew - and it moved like lightning as it sought...
... A new, better, stronger, more intelligent host!
Impossible to close his mouth! Such was the girth of the horror that his jaws were made powerless, like taking too big a bite of an apple and stalling on it - except this loathsome thing was no apple. Head-first, it fed itself to him, putting out hooks into his throat to draw itself down inch by choking, vile-tasting, stomach-heaving inch. Then ... it was in him and he could breathe again. He did -gasping, coughing, and massaging his throat - and came lurching to his feet as he tried desperately to vomit, to rid himself of the nightmarish parasite within. And it knew that, too!
Radu would never know just exactly what the horror did to his insides then, but even as he blacked out he guessed it was the same thing that it had done to Singer's. And as incredible pain hounded him into a merciful oblivion, he could more fully appreciate how she had felt when she'd collapsed at the rim of the swamp ...
... And something of how she must have felt when she came awake. His throat burned; it was dry, cracked, bruised inside from the thing's passage into his body. And so it had been no nightmare, no subconscious association of ideas lingering from his recent visit to the swamps, but the real thing. A real Thing had vacated Singer's body in favour of his! It was in there even now, hiding in his body, lodged there where he could neither see nor feel it, nor affect it in any way. Like the fox, and then Singer, he was now the host of this parasitic creature, this leech that he imagined to be similar to the tapeworms that occasionally got into the systems of the Szgany.
Well, Radu knew the cure for that well enough! He'd seen how the sufferers of such infestation submitted to starvation, and when they were almost dead of hunger allowed themselves to be tied down with their mouths propped open, so that the parasite could be lured out of them by the stench of rotting fish or meat! But that was