As usual, Naga had left early for her medical offices, so Dema was free to use the bathroom to color-rinse her hair from white to brown. She finished the make-up job on her pale face and hands and got dressed for her drive to Philadelphia. Then she joined Sedna for breakfast. 

Their conversation was light, and Dema was grateful to Sedna for simply being Sedna, for she said nothing of her concern for the risks facing Dema, nor did she need to voice her confidence in Dema's ability to face them. After breakfast Dema said goodbye to her grandmother, and as she donned her wrap-around sunglasses to hide her yellow eyes, she could read in Sedna's green ones the fullness of her quiet concern and confidence. She put her bags in the rental car and headed east.

As the long miles across the flatlands of Indiana and Ohio rolled away beneath her wheels, Dema allowed herself to go deeper into her shaman dream state, and began drifting outside her body, in what Sedna had called the first level of shaman awareness. No longer focused solely on herself, she was equally aware of the other cars around her, and of the drivers and passengers within them.

Her awareness spread outward to encompass the fields on either side of the highway, and the life that drove the grasses toward the sun. She sensed the timelessness of this life impulse, and was in the second level of awareness. In this state she let the miles slip by, until the road began winding through the hills of western Pennsylvania.

The ancient Alleghenies, so like the place where the shrine of the Lamia once stood, infused the atmosphere with their own special power, and opened her awareness to the third level, so that driving down the interstate highway became somehow like gliding through the forest from the cavern to the shrine.

Then as she approached Philadelphia, with Allentown and the Poconos off to the north, her awareness rose to the fourth level, where the past and present blend to make all futures possible, and she knew that the power and the will to achieve her goal were within her.

It was getting late when she reached the DEA office in Philadelphia. It was still open, but there were only a couple of officers at their desks. Somewhat to Dema's relief, Jeff Strauss wasn't one of them. The others didn't pay much attention to her, and she went straight to the file drawers. It didn't take her long to find what she wanted in the files: the location of a camp in the mountains that was suspected of being connected to a drug ring. Dema saw enough familiar names in the file to know it was the right one. There had never been enough evidence to justify a raid. She intended to change that.

With her plan on track so far, she went back to the motel she had stayed at originally and took a room there. The desk clerk recognized her, possibly, she thought, from the sunglasses, and gave her a room near the one she had before. She quickly settled in for the night and went to bed. But she did not sleep. Instead, she opened herself fully to the shaman dream and shifted into snake form. Arranging her long coils comfortably on the bed, she regained the fourth level of awareness, and honed her intention for the day to come, her will strengthened by thoughts of Kore, the file photo of the girl who looked like her, and her own need.