This image drew from Kore her own recall, and Dema saw how, not many days before, she had been hunting after a long sleep and sensed above her a human, walking a dark alley. This one was thinking loud, fearful thoughts of snakes, and of a woman that Kore somehow felt linked to. She had been drawn by this image to make her way upward through the drains and out onto the dark street, where she approached him.

He became petrified with fear when he saw her, and the image of the Lamia, with her promise of death for him, had blossomed vividly in his mind. This response had roused in Kore's snake-mind a strong sense that he was an enemy to be destroyed. She had wrapped him in her coils, crushing him, and drained his blood.

Then something strange and unexpected had happened to her. As his warm human blood entered her body, she had begun to awaken from her long snake-dream. A dim recollection of who the Lamia was began to dawn in her, and she partially regained her human form. With the change came a dim understanding of the blood vengeance she had unknowingly fulfilled.

As she withdrew from her victim, she had marveled at the human hands and arms she now held him with. She had raised the hands to her face and felt its human shape. She had moved away then, back down the dark alley, puzzled and alarmed by this development. When she reached the drain she had realized that she would not be able to enter it in this form. But the thought no sooner came than her familiar snake-shape returned, and she was able to retreat to her lair.

Dema knew that the victim of this encounter had been Joey Bonnuchi, for she had been the Lamia who gave him his death sentence. "Do not continue to prey on the innocent. If you would live, heed my words," she had said. He knew he was violating that command when he entered the alley. His mind had been screaming his inner fear of the consequences, and it was that very fear which had roused Kore's snake-mind to act. Dema wanted to know more, and she encouraged Kore to recall the days that followed.

The new awareness, dim though it was, had not left her. Kore's life had acquired a purpose, to seek out enemies like the one she had encountered that day, and destroy them. Somehow, once aroused in her, this purpose became very strong, very personal. She became the Lamia of the streets, finding drug-dealers and striking them down, repeating the blood-vengeance again and again. Each time she did she regained more of her humanity, until at last she could stand before her victims as the Lamia in full human shape. But Dema sensed that even then her consciousness had remained more snake than human. There was as yet no hint that Kore had recalled her earlier life. She as yet had no notion that Dema was her human sister.

When Kore recalled approaching a victim in human form, it was with a dull wonder. She seemed to not now possess the ability to will herself into that form. Dema did not yet understand why this was so. She continued to gently encourage Kore to follow her snake dream through the ensuing days. It was in this way that she eventually saw the Lamia's approach to Vince Mattock through her sister's eyes. She was with her as she recalled sinking her teeth into his neck, and drinking his blood.

Now Dema understood, because Vince Mattock had been high on drugs. When the drug-tainted blood entered Kore's body, she had lost her ability to hold her human form. She once again became the snake, and quickly retreated to her lair. Dema sensed that Kore, too, understood this reaction in some way. She found it dimly familiar. Dema thought this might be a key, and encouraged Kore to probe her memory for the earlier event the incident was evoking. It took her back to when she first became the snake. Gradually, over many recountings, Dema drew from her the full story.

On that long-ago night of her disappearance, Kore had rashly confronted a group of drug-pushers known to her, intending to face them down. She had been driven by a confused need to convince herself that she was not just another victim.

They had countered her threats and accusations by overpowering her physically, injecting her with a massive overdose, and leaving her abandoned on a back street. In the extremity of a drugged delirium that would have meant death to an ordinary person, Kore's shaman heritage had taken over and she had instinctively shifted into snake-form.

In that form she had taken refuge in the vast Chicago storm drain system. Her reptilian metabolism had gradually thrown off the physical effects of the drug, but her drug-addled human consciousness had been abandoned, and she was left with the mind and instincts of a snake. It was through those instincts that she had survived, and adapted to life in the sewers. For all these many years, she had remained in snake-form, living on rats and other vermin. Until now, all memory of her previous existence had been gone, with the exception of an occasional wistful dream.

But in attacking Vince Mattock she had again fallen victim, for drinking the blood of a drug-user had rekindled the addiction she had lost during the long years when she had existed only as a snake. The purpose of the Lamia became suborned to the need for drugs, and now she knew how to get them. She still thought of the dealers as her enemy, but users as well had begun to fall victim to her blood-cravings.