It was after midnight when the red Jeep pulled into the Heights again. Dema found the building and parked nearby.

It was an old two-story brick building. She walked around the outside, trying doors until she found one that was open, then slipped inside. Except for a number of rats that scampered out of her way as she looked around, the first floor appeared to be thoroughly abandoned.

But there was faint light and sound coming from somewhere above. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and looked down a long central hallway. The light was coming from a room off to the left.

Dema looked up, and saw that the walls ended short of the ceiling rafters. From up there she would be able to look down on the activity inside the room. She went into the shaman-dream and shifted into snake-form, leaving her clothing beside a pile of fabric ends next to the wall. Raising her long white snake-body to full height, she was easily able to climb into the rafters. Moving from beam to beam she made her way toward the lighted room.

Hidden high in the rafters above the few dim lights, she looked down on rows of tables. Once they would have been occupied by women operating sewing machines. Some of the old machines remained on a table in one corner. But tonight the tables under the lights were occupied by a number of young men, the Skids no doubt, and what they were doing was cutting and repackaging heroin.

Dema immediately understood the problem. Under the dim lights, bags of heroin, and the corn starch it was being cut with, had been opened on tabletops that had probably not been cleaned in decades. Whatever rats and other vermin had deposited there over the years was getting scraped into piles and scooped into little plastic bags along with the drugs.

The amounts of drugs going into the little bags was stingy even by usual street practice. Clearly the target market was kids. But it was doubtless enough to weaken a body's defenses against whatever else was contaminating the mix.

She watched, and waited. She thought she recognized both Jesse and Derek, from the dream-images of Becky and Leroy. There was one boy older than the rest, lounging at the end of a table, doling out the heroin. No doubt he was Dexter Jackson, the one called Dog Meat.

The rest were kids, and their attitude toward what they were doing showed it. They constantly joked and fooled around, distracting each other so that they measured and mixed the drugs haphazardly, sometimes adding double measures, or adding none at all.

They worked with the drugs bare-handed, the mix of corn starch and heroin dusting their hands and arms, so they were no doubt absorbing some of the drugs through their skin. Occasionally one would even lick his fingers. As the night wore on they got more and more giddy, occasionally pushing and punching one another when they got in each other's way. Every such incident became uproariously funny, interrupting the packaging process and causing even more mix-ups in the measurements.

Dog Meat sat back and watched the proceedings, looking bored. Eventually the packaging was done and Jackson doled the packets out to the boys, evidently for their next day of business. Then gradually the boys filed out of the room, leaving him alone.

He took what remained of the heroin to one corner and hid it under a pile of old fabric bolts. Then he returned to the table and started counting money. Dema sensed that he preferred to do this alone, so the boys would not see all of the money at once. Apparently Jackson realized that as long as they had only seen their own contributions disappear into his pockets they would not easily guess just how much it all added up to.

As Dog Meat busied himself with counting the bills into stacks, Dema made her way across the rafters until she was directly above his table. Anchoring herself with a tail coil, she swung the rest of her long body down until several feet of it were resting on the tabletop. Then she released her hold and brought her tail down as well.

This happened so quickly that Dog Meat had no idea where she had come from. He looked up and there was a huge white snake on the table in front of him. He sat back, stunned. Dema approached him, raising her head as she did so, and dream-shifted her human head and arms into being.

Dog Meat reacted with palpable fear to her yellow eyes and death-like pallor. He began to tremble, but otherwise did not move and made no sound. He was already in her thrall. The Lamia reached out and picked up one of the small knives that had been used to scrape the drugs into little piles, and brandished it as she drew closer to him.

Putting a hand in his hair, she tilted his head back to expose his neck. Then saying, "Thus does the earth-mother claim the blood of the evil-doer to replenish the lost blood of the innocent," she opened a small vein in his throat and began to lick the blood.

As before, the blood brought with it a link to his mind, and she saw where he had obtained the drugs and where he would bring the money. She saw how little thought he had for how the drugs were processed or how the boys distributed the little bags, as long as they came back with a suitable amount of cash.

There was no need to carry this further, so she released him and drew back. One call to the local police would end it. Already she knew that her normal color would now return when she wanted it to.

She said, "I'll be watching you," then shifted back to snake-form and disappeared up into the rafters, leaving Dog Meat in utter confusion about what had just happened to him.

She quickly traversed the intervening distance and dropped back down to the floor next to the fabric pile where she had left her clothing. She returned to normal, noting with satisfaction the dusky color of her skin, put on her clothes and left the building. Back in the Jeep, she headed north, using her police radio to alert the local precinct to what they could find in the old factory building. When she glanced in the mirror, big green eyes flecked with yellow smiled back at her.