In which Dema is drawn into the lair of a dark sorceress
responsible for a series of ritual murders.

In a candle-lit chamber hidden deep below the city, a woman clad entirely in red strides toward a raised platform. As she moves, a long red cloak billows out behind her. A halo of lustrous white hair frames her face, but her gaunt features are covered, hidden entirely by a closefitting red mask. She styles herself Chaos, and to the minions who surround her she preaches a code of anarchy and rebellion against control. She claims to be a shaman and a priestess, who will return her followers to the spiritual ascendance of the ancients.

She offers visions of a past golden age, when all men were free in spirit, before the multitudes fell under the yoke of civilization, before the many were enslaved to the benefit of the few.

She speaks of the earth-mother, of the natural cycles of life and death, of the spiritual realms to which all men are rightful heirs, of the need to reject the demands of a materialistic world in order to claim ones spiritual due.

As she speaks, she leans over a low table mounted on the platform where she stands. An unconscious form rests upon the table, a man, his body stripped to the waist. Her gaze sweeps over the minions surrounding her, and her hand caresses the hilt of a stone dagger at her waist...

Dema Culver woke in her normal human form. That was something of a relief, for in her dream she had taken the form of the Lamia, snake-bodied below her shoulders. Not since she found and recovered her lost sister Kore had the ancestral snake dream come to her so vividly.

In those days any threat to innocent lives would summon the Lamia in her, too powerfully to resist, and she would often awaken in snake form. She had thought those days behind her, but after this night she was not as certain.

In the dream she had returned to the days of the original Lamia, shaman and spirit-guardian to an ancient tribe for whom a deep cavern in the earth represented the abyss, the womb of the earth mother. There as the Lamia of old she had taken on the half snake form to deal with a threat to her tribe from an evil outsider.

Perhaps, she thought, the dream was a premonition. Perhaps some hidden danger was tickling at the edges of her own shaman awareness. As she lay in bed, she opened that awareness and let it expand outward, sensing the spiritual presence of life all around her.

She focused first on the neighborhood near the Chicago townhouse where she lived with her family, then on her mother Naga's medical clinic, and then on the Drug Enforcement Administration office where she worked, and the case she was currently investigating. As always when she did this, a background of doubts and regrets washed through her awareness. These were the negative emotions that preyed upon people, which they tried to deny, to hide from themselves and others. She felt as well the petty hostilities these people projected outward, subconscious attempts to lessen their own imagined failings by finding fault with others.

But she could detect no unusual threat. She swung her legs out of bed, rose and dressed herself in preparation for the day ahead, pausing as she did to glance in the mirror for reassurance that her chestnut hair had not turned Lamia-white.