"I know you hear me," she called, voice low with wrath. "I can feel you. Go ahead and hide, but I've got you in me now. You're miner

He opened his eyes in time to see her stalking away, her white shape fading into darkness.

Monks lay there trembling in his cold rebirth. Around him, the night creatures moved with tiny rustlings, stealthy, timid with fear or fierce with readiness to pounce. In the distance, an owl hooted, whuh oo-ooo. The presence hovered around him, electric with menace: Hecate, queen of the night, mistress of spellcasters. They had powered their magic with effluvia from the victim's body, believed to contain the vital essence – hair, nail clippings, menstrual blood. Semen.

Monks forced himself to rise. Getting out of here was what mattered most in the world. He could see the lights of the house downhill and steered himself by them, crashing naked through the brush, barking in pain from his tormented bare feet. The invisible fury fought him like a headwind, while the voices chittered in his brain.

The parking area was deserted. He trotted in a crouch to the Bronco, pausing to peer in the windows, to make sure it was empty, then dropped to the ground and pulled himself under the rear end. His fingers found the set of spare keys he kept wired there, hidden by a carefully applied clump of mud. He got in and shuddered with relief when the big engine caught.

He found the narrow road and piloted the vehicle like a grandmother, hardly faster than a crawl, hands clenching the wheel at ten and three, staring wide-eyed through the windshield in the desperate effort to keep that winding line of pavement between the front tires. The overwhelming sense was that he and the Bronco were staying still. Everything else was moving, in a fluid shifting tapestry that obeyed no rules of physical order.

It got quickly unendurable. His panicked gaze searched for a place to hide, and spotted the moonlit tall tops of a eucalyptus grove across a field. He aimed for it, jarring his bones over ruts and hummocks, and finally pulled in behind the trees.

Little by little, the fury around him eased and the voices in his head receded. Awareness of cold seeped back in, and his body responded to meet its need, rummaging in the Bronco's rear for jeans and a sweatshirt. He went teary-eyed at their delicious warmth. He was feeling pain again now, too, from his cuts and bruises. Dark blood seeped from his flesh where the branches had slashed. But he knew that the healing had already begun – that invisible forces, like brownies in a fairy tale, were gathering to rebuild the torn tissue and replace the lost fluids. It was a marvel, this fleshly system that carried him around. As a physician, he was only a clumsy mechanic, able to guide the process a little. But the real work was taken care of on a molecular level, by some mysterious organic instinct that knew exactly what it was doing.

For a time he could not measure, he huddled in the front seat, drifting off into fantastic inner landscapes, getting hints of insights that seemed to have stupendous importance, then snapping back into watchful fear.

At last, he could feel that the drug was wearing off. The moon was near the horizon now. He guessed that four or five hours had passed since he had first arrived at the house. He got out and walked around for a minute to clear his head, then started the engine again. This time, things around him stayed put. He drove carefully, still a little shaky, but all right on the predawn back country roads.

Monks's mind was already filling with doubt. Had any of it really happened? Had she actually tried to drown him – or was that only a drug-induced fantasy, generated by a compounding of his fear, suspicions, and long-buried guilt about Alison? Had he imagined the words he thought she had screamed?

Or was he only being allowed to escape because of a deeper and far more fearsome truth?

It had not only happened, but she was right.

He was hers now.

Gwen Bricknell stalked into the big house through Julia's studio, avoiding the party still going on out front, and quickly climbed the back stairs to her apartment. She had put her skirt and blouse back on, but she was wet, and pale with cold and rage. When she threw open the door, her trembling gaze landed on a vase of a dozen glorious red roses on her vanity. She had brought them up earlier, from the flowers delivered for the party, to celebrate. But now they mocked her.

She yanked off the garments and stuffed them in the trash, then grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked at the scarf, ripping it into shreds. It had failed her. She had had Monks so close. Everyone had seen him stoned. He would have been found in the spring, tomorrow morning, where he had wandered and fallen in. And that would have been the end of the prying.

Then her hands fell to her sides, dropping the scissors and scarf. The truth was, something in her had not wanted him dead. She had failed herself.

But she could not afford that weakness again.

She put on a fluffy terry robe, kept warm on an electrically heated rack, and started hot water running in the Jacuzzi. Then she laid out a long line of finely powdered cocaine on a china plate. She inhaled it sharply, standing quiet while its sweet energy mushroomed in her brain. When the tub was half full, she added a few drops of Rigaud bath oil and stepped in. She sank back, eyes closing, feeling the steaming warmth recharging her cells. There was nothing for that like hot water, but one had to be careful. Water was not friendly to the skin.

She rose and patted herself dry with deliciously soft towels, like the robe, kept electrically warm. She studied herself at her full-length mirror. Most of the flaws – the tiny crow's-feet developing at the corners of her eyes, the slight slackness in her jaw-line, the softening of flesh where no amount of exercise would tighten it – could be artfully concealed. Her skin was supple with the oil. But it was not what it once had been. It was losing elasticity, that smooth tautness over the muscles. There was even evidence of checking, and traces of cellulite on her buttocks and thighs.

In spite of all the exercising, the vitamins, the skin care, she was losing ground at the age of forty-one. There was no longer any denying it.

The days when men with cameras had adored her, when the phone never stopped ringing and all the good things in the world were hers to pick and choose, were long gone. She had stretched them by going to work for D' Anton – becoming the prime example of his art, a living sculpture that women envied and men were still awed by. But she had nearly lost that, too. She shivered, and dressed quickly in jeans and a sweater.

Then she stepped to the vanity and picked up the vase of roses that no admirer had sent, and threw it, with a hnnhh of exploding breath, against the mirror. The vase shattered and the mirror cracked in all directions, like a giant spiderweb with spreading fingers.