For Dema there remained the matter of Rankine and Ortega. The DEA had nothing new on the yacht. The events of the night before, so personal to Dema and her family, had gone unnoticed.

Dema waited until the following night, then once more went up to the roof of her home. The bats were out, and on entering the bat dream she again found her familiar among them. This time she reveled for a few minutes in the simplicity of the bat dream, sharing the pleasure of their insect snatching flight. Then, confident of her new shape-shifting ability, she assumed bat form herself and began flying out to the yacht.

Once there she circled it a few times, but there seemed to be no one on watch. After landing a bit unsteadily on the deck, she dreamed her body normal, once again sheathed in the black jersey shift. She sensed that the crew were below decks, while Rankine and Ortega were together in the main cabin, the same one where they had greeted Naga the night before. She went into her shaman dream, and walked in on them wearing the pallor of the Lamia.

She locked the door behind her. Having shared their thoughts individually before, she found it easy to access the realities of both of them in her dream. Before their eyes she transformed her lower body to a long snake-tail, and glided forward across the cabin deck, swaying slightly to the roll of the waves beneath them.

Ortega went rigid, but Rankine reached for a pistol on a table near him. Before his hand could close on it, Dema glamoured it into the shape of a book for him. One of Sedna's.

Rankine's eyes widened, and his belligerence evaporated. "So you thought you had captured the Lamia, you thought to weaken her with drugs," she hissed. "The woman you took last night, the one you lost overboard due to your petty incompetence, was not the Lamia at all. You were warned once. Now you will learn what it means to defy the Lamia, to continue to prey on those who are under her protection."

Dema had soon enraptured them both. They were already completely cowed by her mere presence. She was aware that when she bent their inner realities to her own designs she was using the same method her shaman ancestors had used to influence the beliefs of entire tribes.

She loomed hypnotically in their minds, got them to sit back to back in the bamboo chairs, then caused their own clothing to transmute into ropes that looped around and bound them. Rankine had some of his voodoo shrines here, and his marijuana. She piled the marijuana in the bowls before the shrines, and set it smoldering.

This time, knowing well the danger of the cannabis toxin, as the thick smoke billowed into the room she proofed herself against its by simply dreaming the smoke away from around her head.

Rankine and Ortega had no such protection. She guided them into a smoke dream, making them believe the yacht was back in the Caribbean, and slowly sinking just short of an island.

When she had them both deep in the dream and they were reinforcing each other's acceptance of the altered reality, she said, "You are the evil ones. Your crew of lackeys has already abandoned this ship. You are alone here, with no way to escape. Such is the fate that awaits those who defy the will of the Lamia."

Leaving them in their rapture, she made sure the cabin doors were all locked against outside intruders, then undogged and opened a single small porthole. Shifting fully into snake-form, she slid her long slender body out through the port and down the side of the ship into the water. Adopting the now familiar fish-like form once again, she started the long swim home, confident that Rankine and Ortega would not soon recover from this lesson.