Dema parked her Jeep in the lot behind Rankine's building, close to the service entrance. There was no traffic through this area, and no one in sight. No surveillance camera either. Perfect. She shifted into snake form and slithered out of her clothes. In the back she had a simple black sleeveless jersey-knit tube dress. She slipped into it and then reformed her body so that her arms came out through the armholes. In shifting to snake form her makeup and hair coloring had all fallen away, but that was part of the plan. She was the Lamia now, in human form.

When she had faced Jackson in snake form, she had not needed to bind him in her coils to get inside his mind. And again with Bonnuchi, the death pallor of the Lamia had been enough to overcome him. So Rankine would see the Lamia in human form as well. If by chance she did need to become the snake, the simple dress was quick and easy to get back into. And it would display the Lamia's pallor to good effect. She looked around again to be sure no one would see her getting out of the car. Then she stood up and smoothed the dress down over her white thighs.

She glanced up at the third floor windows that would be Rankine's rooms, then walked quickly over to the service entrance and went inside. Again luck was with her, the door was unlocked, and there was no one in the back hallway. She went through a fire door into the stairwell and climbed the two flights to the third floor. The door Bonnuchi had entered Rankine's rooms through would be the second one down the hall.

According to Bonnuchi's memory, this door would not be locked either. It was part of Rankine's intimidation strategy to not lock his doors. Rankine feared no one, but anyone entering here uninvited should fear him.

Unless she was the Lamia, Dema thought, as she turned the knob and stepped inside. She was greeted by a cloud of marijuana smoke. Rankine, the Rastafarian, was celebrating his faith. He was seated next to a low table across the room, tapping a complex rhythm on a small drum and quietly chanting a tune. He did not look up when she entered. His head was bobbing to the rhythm so his dreadlocks were in constant motion. He was naked to the waist except for an ornate leather vest. A curl of smoke rose from the bong that sat on the table beside him.

Dema closed the door behind her and glanced around the room, taking in several voodoo shrines that matched the ones in her dream. There was no sign of any chickens. She walked forward until she was standing a few feet in front of Rankine. At the same time, she opened her shaman senses to his mind.

Rankine looked up, but his glazed eyes were not seeing what was in the room. In place of Dema he saw a naked Jamaican woman, body and hair whitened with chalky clay. "Ahhh," he said, "Tis the Loa Damballah, come to answer the summons of Rankine! Welcome, good Mama! Come and dance with me!"

Rankine did not rise from his chair to dance with Dema. He continued to tap out a gentle rhythm on his drum. But in his mind he stepped forward and bowed to the woman he called Damballah. She in turn began stepping and swaying to the rhythm he was playing. Snakes were coiled around her arms and draped over her shoulders, undulating with her graceful movements.

Dema knew that the Loa Damballah was a voodoo spirit, who would enter the body of a woman such as the one Rankine had conjured in his marijuana dream, and that woman would become the embodiment of the spirit while a voodoo rite was enacted. She watched the scene in Rankine's mind as he danced around the woman he had dreamed up in response to Dema's appearance. It was a jungle setting, with bamboo shrines for the voodoo spirits.

And chickens. The dream Rankine grabbed one and bit its neck, just as he had done in Dema's dream the night before. Blood splashed everywhere, and he sprayed mouthfuls of it at each of the shrines. The Damballah woman laughed and swayed, her snakes writhing around her body. Rankine was deep in his marijuana rapture, and Dema let herself be drawn into becoming the Damballah woman he wanted to see her as.

Rankine must have some real knowledge of snakes, she realized, for his dream snakes responded to her just as readily as real ones would have. She could tell that the woman was someone Rankine knew from the islands, but Dema replaced this woman's persona with her own, so that in Rankine's mind it was the Lamia he now saw standing in front of him.

Rankine was enthralled, and his eyes widened. In his dream-consciousness he thought that this must be the true Loa Damballah, visiting him in pure spirit form, not simply animating a human body in the usual way. He did not know he was inside a dream. To him, the jungle setting he had conjured up was more real than the room he was sitting in.

The dream Lamia stepped closer to him and said, "Rum-Belly Rankine, before you left the islands you were a good man, trusting in the Loa spirits and respectful of others, knowing the importance of balance in all things.

"But you moved to the Big Country, and became infected by evil. You are upsetting the balance, and the Loa are not pleased. You must end this, or your own spirit will wither and die. You know that this is so."

His confidence was shaken, she had struck a nerve. His mental image of himself lost its aura of power, and stopped dancing. He dropped the chicken and it fell inert, no longer gushing blood. The reality of the dream jungle began to pale.

But this was not enough. The jungle imagery was all on the surface, she needed to get deeper into his mind, to learn the keys to his operations. The dream Lamia stepped forward and grasped the dreadlocks of the dream Rankine, and at the same time Dema leaned over Rankine seated in his chair and did the same. In both realities, the Lamia's mouth opened to reveal sharp snake-teeth, and sank them into Rankine's neck.

It was real blood that Dema licked from the wound and swallowed. With it came the deep awareness of Rankine's mind. She saw his connections to a Colombian drug cartel, how they supplied him with cocaine and opium, as well as the marijuana he indulged in. She absorbed details of how his organization was structured, how his supply and distribution lines worked.

Rankine's blood flowed easily, and he did not resist. He was in thrall to the Loa Damballah, and submitted willingly. Dema was deep inside his mind, and when she began to feel a sensation of light-headedness, she thought it was Rankine reacting to the loss of blood.