Myrmeen Lhal was not her mother. The Devlaines were not her true parents. She was, in truth, an orphan, with more in common with the Krystin Lord Sixx unwittingly had manufactured than she ever would have guessed.

She had to tell Myrmeen, had to warn her that she had betrayed them to the Night Parade, that time was short. But she could not make herself move. Her limbs were too sluggish to respond to her mental commands, and when she tried to rise, she nearly toppled into the pit. She fell back, darkness stealing over her. She was unaware that the deep, thin wound in her leg from the "insect" that had bitten her was now black and swollen. As her consciousness faded, she glimpsed a single nightmarish flash of the creature that had inflicted the wound as it climbed out over the lip of the pit, the emerald locket caught in its vicelike pincers.

Within seconds, Krystin was unconscious. If she had remained awake for another few moments, she would have been witness to a sight that was at once horrifying and beautiful. Where a monstrosity had been only moments before now stood a tall, lithe woman with long, dark hair and an ethereal beauty.

Widow Tamara, the Weaver, stopped before the sleeping girl. Her poison snaked through the child's system, incapacitating her without stopping her heart. She had no quarrel with Krystin. Tamara went down the corridor where she had heard Myrmeen walk some time earlier. The child's locket was clutched in her hand. She smiled and hurried to the long overdue reunion that she had left Calimport to experience.

Less than five minutes earlier, Erin Shandower had heard a voice that had nearly driven him to suicide before he identified its owner. He turned and was startled to see the familiar, gaunt face of a man he had presumed dead.

"Lucius!" Shandower said as he rushed to the mage, whose white smock was covered in blood from his wounds. Lucius Cardoc stood with open arms and buckling legs. Shandower caught the mage as he fell to his bed. The sorcerer's eyes lolled back in his head; his lips trembled.

Shandower suddenly realized his mistake. "You're-you're not breathing."

Lucius looked up at him with a sad, tortured expression, a deep, powerful sympathy in his eyes. The lanterns Shandower had lighted started to dim, the candles dying one by one. Suddenly the room was wreathed in shadows. From the darkness Shandower heard skittering and laughter.

Turning, he found a man he had never seen standing between him and the gauntlet, which he had allowed his dead lover to remove from him earlier. In a startling moment of complete lucidity, Shandower understood that it had been Lucius who had appeared to him, Lucius using his magic because the sorceries of the Night Parade would be worthless against him as long as he wore the gauntlet. Lucius had betrayed them, but why he had done so was a mystery to the assassin, and would remain as such.

"Greetings," Lord Sixx said with a smile. Shandower tried to dart past the Night Parade leader, but Lord Sixx grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. He repeated the maneuver several times until Shandower was delirious with pain, the stump of his arm bleeding from the impact.

"We found your ally trying to follow you. He died during questioning, but I was determined not to let that stop our little game," Lord Sixx said as several figures strode forward from the shadows. They were misshapen figures that would never be taken for human, even in silhouette. Lord Sixx looked over his shoulder and said, "This is the man who has killed so many of your brethren!"

The creatures advanced in a murderous frenzy, halting only when Lord Sixx held out his free hand to order them back. Shandower glimpsed the deformities of the first few monsters and thought he might gag in disgust.

"Now," Lord Sixx said, "you can tell me what you've done with the apparatus, or you can tell them."

Shandower anxiously looked over Sixx's shoulder, then whispered, "Go back to whatever hell you came from."

"I would, but I'm not welcome there anymore," Lord Sixx said as he flung Shandower with inhuman strength toward the monstrosities. They reached out for him with claws and tentacles, the razor-sharp teeth in their eye sockets grinding in anticipation. Shandower tried to scream as he was dragged into the shadows, but something cold and wet was jammed deep into his throat, preventing him from warning the others. Lord Sixx sighed as he watched his minions consume the man.

"I glimpsed your secrets when you slept," Lord Sixx said. "I was merely hoping to make you feel the anguish of betraying all you believed in before you died. Ah, well. I would say you left this world with dignity, but that would be a lie."

The creatures Lord Sixx had taken with him giggled obscenely as they feasted on the assassin's hot flesh.

From the bed, Lucius moaned. "Release me. I have done what you asked. I am dead. Release me!"

Lord Sixx grinned. He took a staff standing in a corner and stabbed at the gauntlet until he was able to slip one end into the glove and raise the deadly item into the air.

"Please," Lucius begged. "You promised that you would spare my wife and children and that you would release me!"

"Not just yet," Lord Sixx said as his gaze slithered across the undead mage's face. "I still have plans for you."

The nightmare was always the same:

Myrmeen was a child, living at home with her parents in the boarding house she one day would burn to the ground. Her father was trying to perfect a new composition, plucking notes on his lute with passion and skill, while her mother allowed her to help stuff a pillow that she would place inside a beautifully woven slipcover and sell in the market. They lay together on the sky-blue rug that Myrmeen loved so much. All she had to do was roll onto her back and look up to see the painting she treasured, the portrait of her parents, with her sandwiched between them.

I didn't want a sister anyway, she thought. Then we would have to get a new painting.

The notes her father played suddenly changed. The music became discordant and a heavy thumping replaced the light strum of his fingers upon the strings. "I'm dripping," he said in a murky voice. Myrmeen looked up and saw she was an adult dressed in silver armor with a phoenix headdress. The sword that had been forged for her by her second husband was in her hand.

"I'm dripping," he repeated. "I hate that."

This time she saw what he meant. His flesh was leaking from his bones, his eyeballs drooping to his jaw.

"Honey," he said insistently, though his tongue was now curling up in the back of his skull, "can't we do something about this?"

Her father had always wanted her mother to do something when a situation distressed him. Myrmeen was never quite sure what that meant. At the moment, she did not want to find out.

"All right," her mother said, in a voice that made it clear that she no longer was her mother, or, at least, no longer human. Myrmeen heard a thump beside her and refused to look up. Another thump. Then another. Something leathery brushed against her and she felt its texture despite the armor she wore. Myrmeen twisted out of the monster's path, refusing to believe that this was her mother.

The thing reared up to its full height, tall enough to scrape the ceiling with the top of its head. Its body was thin and skeletal, a burnt sienna mass of twisted bones and looping muscle filled with gobs of pure white feathers. Wings with the patterns of spider webs branched out from the small of the creature's back, and its head still contained the gentle features of her mother, marred by insect eyes and pincers that had been driven outward through the cheeks.