It was worse than he had suspected. The room had been utterly devastated. Her huge oak desk was on its side halfway across the room from its usual place. Her black leather chair had been shattered. Her bookcases had been torn from the walls and the volumes scattered on the floor. The visitors' chairs had been smashed to kindling. Her wooden file cabinets had been upended and their contents strewn all over the floor and the broken furniture. Worst of all was a light spray of blood, barely visible on the patterned wallpaper, splattered low on the wall behind where her desk and chair normally stood.

Brennan had seen a lot of destruction, but this devastation filled him with anger. He took the anger and forced it down, pushing it deep inside himself until it was a glowing pinpoint in the pit of his stomach. This was no time to give in to emotion. Perhaps later he could afford to vent it, but now he needed a cool, dispassionate intellect. Not knowing yet what might constitute an important clue, he memorized the horrible scene in as much detail as he could so that he'd be able to reconstruct it in his mind later.

Brennan left the office with the room locked in his memory. He couldn't face the stuffiness of the tunnels running under the streets. He wanted to breathe fresh, clean air, as fresh and clean, anyway, as could be found in the city. He went to the stairs that led to the exits of the upper floor, and he heard a voice, the last voice he ever expected to hear again, whispering from the dark stairwell ahead of him.

"Yeoman," it said, sending shivers up his spine, "I'm waiting for you. Come to my room. I'll be waiting, my archer."

It was her voice. Chrysalis, speaking in her almostEnglish accent. He stood still for a moment, but heard no one or nothing move in the darkness.

Brennan didn't believe in ghosts, but the wild card made nearly anything possible. Maybe Chrysalis hadn't even been killed, maybe it was all an elaborate hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Chrysalis herself for whatever unfathomable reason. Whatever it was, he couldn't just walk away from it. He drew his Browning Hi-Power from his hip holster and crept up the stairs as quietly as a stalking cat.

The door to Chrysalis's bedroom was open, and as he peered around the jamb he could see that someone had been here before him. The intruder had been searching for something and hadn't bothered to be neat about it. Chrysalis's canopied bed had been pulled apart and its mattress shredded. All her Victorian portraits and elegantly framed antique mirrors had been stripped from the walls and lay in silver slivers scattered about the floor. The crystal decanter that usually stood on the nightstand lay shattered on the floor. A fencing mask sat in its place.

Brennan entered the room and stared about in dismay. Just as he reached the smashed bed, a bulky figure appeared at the mouth of the walk-in closet where Chrysalis had kept her extensive wardrobe. Its face was feminine and beautiful, but etched with what looked like chronic pain. Her body was grotesque, huge and blocky under her floor-length black cloak. Something was moving under the cloak. Something twisted and writhed across her chest and abdomen like a sack full of snakes. The intruder stopped short and stared at Brennan, who stared back and pointed his gun.

"You're the Oddity," Brennan finally said. "Who are you?"

"No one you know. Call me Yeoman."

There was another silence, then the Oddity said, "We see. What are you doing here?"

"That's my question."

"We're looking for something."

Brennan's lips quirked in a grimace. "Let's not draw this out."

"Or what? Shouldn't a threat be in there somewhere?" Brennan's voice was as cold as glacial ice, the hand holding the gun as steady as a statue's. " I don't threaten. I don't play games. I've found you in my friend's bedroom and I'm inclined to believe you had something to do with her death. If you don't want to tell me anything, fine. I'm not going to turn you over to the police. I'm going to leave you dead."

"We believe you would try," the Oddity said softly. Brennan said nothing.

"All right." She sighed. "We had nothing to do. with Chrysalis's death. When we heard about it, we came looking for something… some information that Chrysalis was blackmailing us with. We just wanted to recover it before the police found it."

Brennan scowled. "Blackmailing you? For money?" The Oddity nodded, then her face suddenly screwed up in an expression of intense pain. She gasped and fell to her knees, her arms crossing over her stomach. She threw back her head, her face a rictus of suffering.

"Christ," Brennan murmured. The Oddity wasn't acting. She was in intense, uncontrollable pain. Brennan didn't know what to do or how to help her. He started to approach the helpless joker, but she held out a hand to ward him off. He stared as her features crawled from her face and slid down the side of her throat. Another set of features, swarthy and masculine, began to move around from the back of her head.

The new eyes stared at Brennan with suspicion. Even before they were properly in place, even before the Oddity finished. moaning, he-as Brennan now thought of the joker stood, grabbed the leg of the end table that stood near the bed, and threw it at Brennan with a flick of his wrist. Brennan ducked and squeezed o$ a shot.

He never knew if the bullet hit home, because the Oddity charged at him like a fullback blasting for the goal line, and when they collided, it felt as if he'd been smashed by a sack full of bricks.

He twisted away and placed a powerful side kick into the squirming mass that was the Oddity's torso. A feminine hand gabbed him, and it was much, much stronger than his. It pulled at him and he followed it without resistance as it whirled him around and slammed him against the wall hard enough to make his teeth clatter and his back ache.

His gun flew away. He hit the floor, rolled, and grabbed a knickknack stand of solid oak. He swung it with all his strength and caught the Oddity in the side. The stand shattered. His arms quivered with shock and he tried unsuccessfully to shake the numbness from his hands. The Oddity hadn't even budged.

He swung at Brennan and Brennan dodged, dodged, and dodged again, dangling his hands at his side, trying to get feeling to return to them. He retreated until he felt a wall against his back and the Oddity loomed before him, scowling with ferocious anger.

He swung again and Brennan ducked, sliding down the wall as the Oddity's fist smashed through it, his arm punching into the wall cavity to the shoulder.

Brennan slipped around to the side and grabbed one of the posts that had supported the canopy of Chrysalis's demolished bed. He swung it like an oversized baseball bat and connected solidly with the Oddity's back, right over the kidneys.

The Oddity howled more in anger than pain. Brennan swung again, splintering the post into kindling.

"Christ," Brennan muttered as the Oddity cursed and wrenched at his trapped arm.

There was no sense, Brennan realized, in trying to fight the berserk joker. He dove out of the room as the Oddity pulled free, and ran down the hallway, gritting his teeth at the pain in his back.

"We'll get you, you bastardl" the Oddity cried. His voice was slurred, as if perhaps two people were fighting for control of it. "We'll get youl"

Brennan took a deep breath as he ran. No bones were broken, but his whole back felt bruised. There was no time to waste moaning. The police could arrive at any moment to investigate the commotion. He went up the stairs and out through the roof, replaying the Oddity's story in his mind. Chrysalis might have extorted favors or information as part of the game she liked to play, but she would never blackmail anyone for money. Brennan knew that wasn't in her.