The Witch Doctor

Chapter Twenty-Four

They appeared as black dots on the face of the rising sun, then expanded hugely, seeming to zoom out of the ruddy disk - the duke, with a dozen of his men behind him. Most of the men carried shovels, but one of them was nice enough to be carrying a big water skin - probably for them, not for me.

I debated whether I should play dessicated semicorpse, or just be sitting up obviously alive, well, and nonchalant. That last sounded suspiciously like bragging, but what the Hell, it was the truth, so I went with it.

They loomed dark and darker until they were close enough to begin seeing features. That's when I sat up.

They shied off like elephants confronting a lemming, and the duke took time for some loudly intoned verses in his archaic language, with a few mystic passes. I just sat there and watched, studying his technique - but I didn't feel anything, so he must have been working on de-ghosting a risen corpse. Wouldn't have any effect on me, of course, since I was still alive and in my body ...

The duke finished his gestures and chants, and his eyes widened when I didn't disappear or even waver. He came closer, very carefully, as if I were a rattlesnake that might strike any minute, the whites showing all around his irises. He edged up near enough for a close inspection, reached out toward me as if he were going to prod me to make sure I was really there, but said instead, "You live!"

"That's my main occupation," I agreed.

"He should be dried!" one of the boys in the back row muttered, with a quaver that would have done credit to a vibraphone. "He should be leather!"

"I'm not feeling too chipper," I admitted. "But I'm still juicy."

" 'Tis not unknown." You could see the duke was doing a quick revision on his estimates. "Yet those few who have endured till the second morn were feverish, seeing sights that mortal eyes seldom view I felt a chill; that sounded uncomfortably like the Demon's home."

"They told you about that, did they?"

"Some one or two who endured to reclaim life," the duke admitted.

"Most have not lived to see a third dawn, no matter how gently we tend them, for they are the chattels of the god, look you ... "

The god? Suddenly I realized why this man's magic seemed to be halfway between good and evil - he was a pagan and didn't realize the source of the powers he was drawing on. " ...and surely none can speak of the holy sights they have seen, when we find them, for their tongues are swollen." A look of foreboding came over his face. "How is it yours is not."

I didn't see any reason to lie. "I conjured up something to drink."

"That, I did sense - and did seek to block! How is it you were able to go around my wall, and without my knowing of it?" I wondered where he thought I'd brought that drink from - and I began to see what he was afraid I'd been doing. "I went away. I called up some friendly spirits, and one of them took me to one of those places your victims see, but can't tell you about. He and his friends took care of me and sent me back as you see me." I didn't figure I needed to tell him about the time shift - that would just have complicated matters.

The man in the back row spoke up again, his voice trembling.

"What spirits are these he can call upon?"

"Be silent!" the duke snapped, so viciously that I knew he must be scared - and overawed, or he would have thrown a whammy at me.

"In truth," he said to me, "you must be a far more puissant wizard than I had thought. I caught the subtext - that he was afraid I was more powerful than he was. Maybe I could play on that. "I guess so," I agreed. "Things being as they are, maybe you'll go a step further than just letting me live, the way you promised."

"What step is that?" He was braced for the worst.

"A boat," I said. "Nothing elaborate - just a one-man craft, with a sail and a rudder. Say, about twenty feet long."

He looked startled, and another anonymous voice from the ranks muttered, "What will he conjure up to sail it for him?" Now, that was a thought. For a moment, I toyed with asking Sir Francis Drake or Christopher Columbus in for an excursion, but I decided they might be otherwise occupied. "I'll manage," I assured the duke. "You might put in a few goodies, too - say, a week's worth of journey rations. And water."

"Oh, aye!" He nodded his head, most emphatically. "For one who has survived the Ordeal? Oh, most surely."

You bet he thought it was a good idea. Get me out of his hair, for only a longboat and a week's worth of rations? Cheap at the price. For all he knew, I might have been sore enough to turn against him. Which wasn't that bad an idea, now that I thought of it - but I didn't have time; I had bigger fish to spear.

"And speaking of water I glanced suggestively at the water skin. The duke snapped his fingers, and the water carrier hurried to the front with the skin. He started to hand it to me, then thought better of it and shoved it at his boss. Let him take the risks.

"All praise to he who has survived the ordeal," the duke said, presenting the skin as if it were a trophy.

By extreme self-control, I managed not to snatch it; I only took it from his hands slowly, popped the cork, and shot a jet from it into my mouth, reflecting on the irony of cool wetness tasting so good, so soon after I had almost hoped I would never have to see another drop of it. I was going to have to be careful what I wished for.

A couple of men-at-arms were very willing to push the boat into the waves for me, saving my legs from wetness at the cost of their own dousing. I could have done it myself easily enough, but if they wanted to honor me, I was willing to let them. I was beginning to realize the value of status and prestige in a world like this one. Besides, it helped them feel as if they were doing something to get rid of me. I let go of an oar long enough to wave bye-bye, then managed to catch it again before it had quite slipped away into the next wave. It was going to take me a while to get used to having just a couple of pegs for an oarlock.

Nonetheless, I did manage to get the boat through the breakers and out beyond the bar - I could almost hear the soldiers snickering at my lack of seamanship, all the way out here. After all, on a little island like this, every able-bodied man must have started out as a fisherman or a sailor, even if he later became a soldier. They'd make fantastic marines.

Out into the swells, I shipped the oars and hoisted canvas. I'd learned to sail in the summers, out of sheer boredom - when you grow up near the Great Lakes, you have all sorts of opportunities for water sports. So I managed to get the sail up and catch a breeze without capsizing. My wake began to foam, and I was off.

Very quickly the wind picked up. I frowned, shivering and wishing I'd thought to ask the duke for a cloak, then glanced up at the sun. There wasn't much of it there.

I glared up at the clouds, willing them away - but I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. The day had dawned clear and sunny - very sunny. If it was clouding up so soon, it could just be a storm front moving in - or it could be Suettay, out to have another try at drowning me. If I had another storm blow up, there wouldn't be any Frisson around to hand me magic verses. I'd have to try to lull it by myself and I hated working magic on my own. It felt like surrender, somehow. Besides, I wasn't all that sure I could succeed.

None of that! I reminded myself sternly. Defeatist attitudes wouldn't help. Besides, I didn't really need to make the storm go away - just manage to get safely to shore.

Safely?

A nasty suspicion budded in my head and blossomed into the fullgrown conviction that the storm dying down just where it did hadn't been completely my doing. Suettay could have seen that I was going to win that round and kept wrestling just long enough to drive us onto the island, hoping that its xenophobic duke would do her dirty work for her, conveniently killing us off before we could do her any more damage. Maybe I hadn't won such a great victory, after all. Maybe it had really been a very deliberate conjuration by a very nasty sorceress.

Of course, she might have been doing me a favor - as a ghost, I could no doubt have had a much better time with Angelique than I could as a man.

I clamped down on that thought, hard. That way lay suicide, and losing all hope of getting Angelique completely free Of Suettay's machinations.

Careful, there, boy, I warned myself. You're coming perilously close to admitting that magic works in the here-and-now. No. Absolutely impossible. A philosophical absurdity. Which, of course, was the point - magic was completely illogical.

Completely?

I reined in my thoughts, exasperated. When would I ever learn to stop making sweeping generalizations? They always had exceptions. Okay - so maybe this universe was one of the exceptions?

I backed up against that one like a Missouri mule against an overloaded wagon. Somehow, I was constitutionally unable to accept the notion that magic might work, outside of a massively detailed hallucination. Possibly because if I allowed that it did, I would find it very hard to come up with a reason to avoid committing myself to one side or the other.

Or to Angelique?

Well, now, that was the advantage to being in love with a ghost. The vow, after all, reads, "Till death do us part," and death already had parted us - before we even got together.

Somehow, that sounded pretty thin, but I held onto it. All right. Try something else then. And hurry, stupid - those clouds have grown awfully thick and awfully low, and that breeze has a definite taste of rain to it.

Okay. I decided to suppose, just suppose, magic really did work in this world. How would I work my way out of this storm?

All right, so I was cheating. I put that issue aside and decided to deal with it when I had time.

Actually, I wasn't all that sure I wanted to get rid of the storm. Drifting without any wind at all wasn't exactly my idea of a picnic, either. If I could throttle it down, maybe, or direct it ... Or both. After all, the nymph Thyme was supposedly nearby, on one of these Mediterranean islands. I decided to work from that.

The wind veered. I knew, because my sail swung about almost ninety degrees. it creaked as the strength of the wind bellied it out to its limit, and the wind sang in the stays-sure enough, the music played! I noticed that, just as a burst of spray drenched my back and shoulders. I yelped - it was cold! But that didn't matter, because just then a giant kettledrum boomed overhead and rolled all about me, and its owner pulled the plug. Rain sluiced down, not bothering with individual drops, and I was soaked to the skin. Shivering, too, and my canvas sail groaned. I hitched around, alarmed, to lower it and my feet sloshed through a few inches of water. I stared down, feeling the first faint fingers of fear take hold as I realized I might ship enough water to sink.

All of a sudden, I was in favor of half measures. A little thunderstorm can be a blast, when you can revel in the wildness of the wind and the power of the storm-but when it's all directed right at you, it can be a little unnerving. Scaled down, mind you, I would probably have loved it - if I'd had a soulwester.

What harm could it do? I tried.

The thunder cracked and growled, and I could have sworn it cursed. But it faded even as it snarled, and the wind slackened. My sail groaned with relief, and the rain toned down to a heavy soaker with headstrong winds. I shivered and sneezed. Landing near Thyme's hideout wouldn't do me much good if I was dead of pneumonia when I got there, or even just delirious with fever. I thought of trying for that sou'wester, then rebuked myself for being greedy, not to say soft. What was a little rain, anyway? After all, yesterday I would have given anything for this. I gritted my teeth and held on. Over the waves that gale blew me. I lashed the line around a thwart and held on to the tiller for dear life. It wasn't too bad for the first hour, but then I began to get tired. It didn't help that I couldn't see too far in front of me, either-but after the second hour, my eyelids were drooping so much that it didn't matter terribly, either. How far could it be to Thyme's island, anyway? I thought these Mediterranean mountaintops came in archipelagoes.

Finally, the sky lightened. The last thunderclap sounded far behind me, and the rain lightened to a drizzle. Not that I stopped shivering, though. Fortunately, the wind was still strong enough to keep my boat going into the waves, instead of veering crosswise; unfortunately, it was also hard enough to keep my teeth from chattering.

Then I realized there was a dark blob on the skyline ahead of me. My spirits lifted amazingly. I tightened my weary grip on the tiller and grinned into the salt spray that doused me in the face. Relief was in sight.

Relief swelled up mighty fast, too, the blob growing into something that filled most of the horizon. Almost too late, I realized that the wind behind the boat was going to keep driving me until I was right up on the shore-which would be just fine if there weren't any rocks in the way, but I heard a suspicious booming, dead ahead. I managed to pry my fingers loose, pulled my right hand off the tiller, and just barely got the knot loose in time. Then I hung on as the rope sizzled through my fingers so that the sail would collapse, not blow away. I yelped as the rough hemp burned me, then reflected that it was the first heat I'd had in hours. First too much heat and dryness, then too much heat and coldness-I longed for a happy medium. The boat slowed down just in time for me to notice rocks rising up to left and right, but I could see a narrow gap between them. I heaved and pushed at the tiller, just barely managing to slip the boat through without shoaling. Then I realized that there was a pole in the bottom of the boat. I caught it up and fended off the rocks on either side until, amazingly, they were gone.

I turned and looked ahead to see the beach heaving toward me. I figured it was my boat that was doing the heaving, not the shore, and held on to try to enjoy the ride. Okay, after those rocks took out the worst of it, the surf wasn't anything you'd find on Malibu, but it was still enough to drive my longboat ashore.

It jammed into sand, and I barely had enough presence of mind left to jump out, wade to the bow, and haul it onto the beach before the backwash could pull it out to sea again. Then another wave came along and pushed, and I gained another yard or two, enough to keep the boat secure from the next tug of receding water. I waited for the next wave. It came, I closed my eyes and threw my weight back against the boat - and it came. Easily.

Too easily.

I had to run backward to keep from being bowled over. I opened my eyes to see what had happened and saw a huge pair of hands clamped onto the far side of the boat, pulling. I kept pulling, too, as I followed the hands up arms like hawsers, to a huge and hairy chest with eyes like saucers at the top, looking down at me while a huge mouth curved open into a grin set with shark teeth.

I stared up as my heart dropped down, trying to hide in my boot tops.

Then I recognized him - I hoped. "Gruesome!" The grin widened even further, and his top half nodded eagerly.

"Yuh! Yoh! Goosum!" And the huge arms crunched me up against his stony hide while his basso voice chirped, "Goosum so happy see Saw!

"It was more of a croak than a chirp, actually, and he stank abominably. I made a mental note to teach him about bathing and squirmed around enough to gasp, "I'm glad to see you, too, Gruesome." And I was, surprisingly-after that stint in the desert and all that ocean, anything familiar looked good. Besides, he had saved my life once or twice, or had at least helped out.

But that clinch was inching me uncomfortably close to those shark teeth. "Yeah, glad to see you. Uh-how about putting me down, Gruesome? " He started to, but hesitated with both huge mitts wrapped around my ribs, holding me up, and I could have sworn I saw a hungry glint in his eye. I was sure about the drops of drool glinting on his canines.

They made him swallow, and it sure sounded as if he smacked his lips.

"Down, Gruesome!"

"Yuh, yuh! Down! " He finally lowered me till my feet touched sand, and loosened his hold. I twisted the rest of the way out of his grip with a sigh of relief, telling myself that I really hadn't had anything to worry about-but myself wasn't listening too well. "You won't believe this, but I'm really glad to see you. What're you doing here, though? I thought you were still on the mainland!"

"Mainland?" He scowled.

I decided that was better than the grin - it showed fewer teeth.

"You know-Allustria? The place where I met you? Where we fought Sue ... uh, the wicked queen?"

"Queen! Uh-h-h-h!" He shrank away. "Queen found us! Shellmen! Sharp!"

Us? Had Gruesome somehow found the others? If so, I gathered that they had made it back to the mainland, but Suettay had ambushed them with a dozen or so knights - and panic stirred in my depths, assuming I had any. "Couldn't Frisson make them disappear?"

"Yuh, yuh!" He nodded. "Got two! But shell men had spell man!"

"The war party had a sorcerer?"

"Yuh, yuh! Bad, bad! Stopped Fish-un's spells! Shell men hit himboom!" He slammed one huge fist into the other for emphasis. I braced myself against the shock wave, then said, "You mean a couple of the knights knocked him out?"

"Yuh, Yuh! Sleep! More shell men hit Gibbet! And me!"

"I was wondering if you'd done any fighting." Frankly, I had difficulty imagining that he hadn't. I hoped he'd remembered that just because something's in a shell doesn't mean it's fair game for eating.

"How many of them did you knock out?"

"Two! Tree! Five!" Gruesome held up one combination of fingers after another, and his brow furrowed at the immense task of counting. I decided to spare him the trouble. "You knocked out a lot of them, anyway. How come that didn't stop them?"

"Spell man! Threw fire! Fire sticks! Hurt, hurt!" I got the message. The party's sorcerer had thrown lighted torches at Gruesome, thick enough and fast enough to drive him away. But that didn't sound like your garden-variety sorcerer to me. Alarm thrilled through me. "So they captured all of them?"

"No, no!" Gruesome shook his head most emphatically. "On'y Angel!"

"Angelique!" I yelped. "How could they capture her? She's a ghost!

"Bad spell! Bad, bad spell!" Gruesome shook his head to show how thoroughly he disapproved, scrunching up his whole face. "Held up jug! Skinny jug! Angel go skinny, too, and go in jug ... Thhhhhw-pp!" He made a sucking noise through pursed lips. "Shriek! Loud!" He clapped his hand over his ears, remembering. "Bad, bad!" Now the anger started.

"Into a bottle?" I howled. "He said a spell that sucked her into a bottle? And it hurt her?"

"Yuh, yuh!" Gruesome nodded. "Shriek!" Of course, she might have just been scared, but either way, I was c out, even if I did have to mad enough to go turn that sorcerer inside work magic to do it - and even if he was more powerful than the average spell-caster. "Which way did he go? where did he take her?"

"No, the'!" Gruesome waved his spread hands back and forth.

"Changed! Like lizard skin! Not magic man, magic woman!" My heart sank. "Once Angelique's ghost was in the bottle, the sorcerer changed into Sue ... into the queen?"

"Yuh, Yoh! Gruesome nodded vigorously. "Wanted Saw! Mad, mad!"

"I'll just bet she was," I growled.

It all made sense. Suettay had come out in disguise, expecting me to be with the party and knowing that once I saw her, I'd forget about everything else and just get Frisson working on immobilizing her spells. But with your ordinary infantry sorcerer, I would have put him on the back burner and set Frisson to knocking over the knights. Once she saw I wasn't there, she changed herself back into Suettay, especially since, by then, Gilbert and Frisson had been knocked out, and she'd driven Gruesome away.

Which raised another issue. "You hung around close enough to see all this?"

"All!" Gruesome nodded. "But couldn't stay watch! Queen tell shell men kill friends! Couldn't watch! Shriek, run back, hit!"

"Good troll!" I could just picture Gruesome thundering down on the knights again, bellowing in rage. "I'll bet they pulled back!"

"Yuh, yuh! Shell men run! Goosum put Gibbet and Fish-un in boat!

Queen shout, shell men run back! Hit, hurt! Gibbet and Fish-un wake up! Fish-un make spell, wind come, blow boat into water!" For him, that was a major soliloquy. it wasn't all that bad a job of reporting, either-I'd heard worse on the ten o'clock news. "They left without you?

"No, no! Queen throw fire, Goosum run into water!" He shuddered at the memory, and I could only think that there must have been a lot of fire, considering the troll's fear of water. "Gibbet pull Goosum into boat!"

That must have darn near swamped it, but it sounded like the kind of foolish, gallant thing Gilbert would do. The incongruity struck me. So. They had reached the mainland right enough, but as soon as they had, they'd walked into an ambush. Suettay had looked in her crystal ball, or pool of ink, or whatever, and seen where they were going to land. She'd taken a band of knights and waited for my buddies to show up. When they had, the knights had descended on them, four overwhelming Gilbert while a dozen or so harried Gruesome, who harried them back-but then Suettay, in disguise, threw fireballs at him until he had to run, while a half dozen attacked Frisson. He got two of them with his spells, but the "sorcerer" knocked him out with a magic verse, then recited another one that pulled Angelique's ghost, screaming, into a bottle. No wonder - the sorcerer was Suettay, disguised enough so they wouldn't be able to detect her. She was no doubt outraged to discover that I wasn't with the party, and headed back to her castle with Angelique locked up in the bottle. On the way out, though, she had thoughtfully ordered her soldiers to kill Gilbert and Frisson. That was when Gruesome had flown into a rage and charged from his hiding place, holding off the soldiers just long enough to drag Frisson and Gilbert back to the boat. Apparently the dragging brought Frisson around, reviving him just in time to call up a wind that blew them out to sea. Suettay had come back and thrown fireballs at Gruesome, driving him into his hated enemy element, water - but Gilbert had pulled the troll in at the last second, nearly swamping the boat.

"Wait a minute," I said. "If that all happened on the mainland what're you doing here?"

"Big wind!" Gruesome made whirling motions with his paws.

"Fish-un say queen send! Blew back toward land!"

"The queen conjured up a gale to blow you back to her." I nodded. So did Gruesome, apparently delighted that I'd understood him so easily. I wished he weren't delighted so often - all those shark teeth made me nervous. "But Fish-un make spell! Wind change, blow from land! Goosum look back, see boat sink!" He shuddered. " Goosum see Goosum go into water!"

"It was just an illusion," I said quickly, "like a dream." Gruesome frowned, puzzled; apparently trolls didn't dream.

"Pretend." I struggled to explain a concept. "Something that wasn't real. Like a story, only you could see it happen." His eyes widened, and his mouth formed a saw-toothed O.

"You know it didn't really happen," I pressed the point, "because you're really here. it was just a fake Gruesome that drowned - like a picture."

He nodded, faster and faster, O turning back into a grin. "Then wind blow, land go away. Then wind go away, too. Gilbert push boat.

"I had a sudden vivid vision of Gilbert getting out to walk on the water, pushing the boat in front of him like a wheelbarrow - but of course, Gruesome only meant that Gilbert had rowed the boat.

"Didn't Frisson take a turn?"

Gruesome nodded. "Short."

"No staying power," I agreed, "but I'll bet he got back into shape fast. Didn't he try to raise a wind?"

Gruesome shook his head. "Queen might know," So Frisson had been afraid to whistle up a wind, because Suettay might have detected it and realized they were still alive. I gave him points for foresight, but subtracted them for underestimating his opponent - I wouldn't be surprised to find out Suettay had seen through his illusion. A nasty suspicion occurred to me. "Did a new wind start up?" Gruesome nodded, staring at me in amazement.

"Same thing happened to me," I assured him. "And it blew you here? "

"How know? How know?" Gruesome bleated.

"Just a lucky guess." I had remembered that I had told the wind to take me to Thyme. Apparently, this was where she lived. I had twisted the wind to blow me here, but I needn't have bothered Thyme was keeping an eye out for any boat that came close enough to puff into her trap. My friends' arrival on this island was no accident, either. I had a sudden image of a spider again, but this time, it was a black widow. "So where are they? Frisson and Gilbert, I mean." Gruesome started to answer, then shrugged helplessly and pointed inland. "In woods. In cage."

"Cage?" I stared. Jail? Frisson and Gilbert? A nearly-knight and a nouveau wizard? "How? " Gruesome shrugged. "Woman."

"They were captured by a woman? Okay, I can understand that - I guess. But what kind of spell did she use?"

"No spell." Then Gruesome frowned, reconsidering. "Maybe spell. "

" 'Maybe spell'" I frowned. "How can you have a 'maybe' spell?"

"Fish-un and Gibbet see woman. She smile. Gibbet turn red, start shaking, go hide. Fish-un big-eyed, come to her. She lead him into cage. She chase Gibbet into cage."

So. She hadn't needed any magic, other than her own sweet self - or sweet body, I amended; the self was yet to be determined. Just the ordinary magic that any beautiful woman has naturally, or can learn.

Well, I was armored against it. I'd been worked over by champions and had accumulated some thick layers of scar tissue around my heart in the process. Any time a pretty woman started giving me the come-hither look now, all I had to do was remember what the other ones had done to me, and the beautiful lady suddenly seemed much less enticing. Okay, so maybe I had lost out on a good one that way, but I didn't really think so - experience had shown me that every time I'd fallen in love with a woman who turned out to be good, she tactfully and gently let me know it wasn't mutual. I attracted neurotics and sickles, women who wanted to use me for their own twisted purposes, and the hell with what it did to me.

What can I say? Like will to like? I hated to think that. But if it was true, all the more reason to stay single. Which I had.

"Thyme," I informed Gruesome. "The woman's name is Thyme."

"Time?" Gruesome asked, frowning. "Day? Week?" Well. I hadn't known he had grasped the concept. Apparently the spillover from that spell I'd thrown at Gilbert had done more than I'd known. I felt a chill, wondering just how much else Gruesome knew that I didn't know about. "You might be right," I conceded, "but I thought she was named after an herb. After all, she's a nymph."

"Nimf?" Gruesome screwed up his face in trollish concentration.

"A nature spirit," I explained, "a personification of fertility-or at least sexuality. She's not really human, she's supernatural - and, thank Heaven, can't leave this island. She's tied to the plant whose life energy she embodies."

That was too much for the poor troll. He just shook his head, looking frazzled - or shook the upper part of his torso, anyway. "Like Saw say. We go break cage?"

"We can try," I said slowly, "but that brings up another question. Did you try to break them out? " "Me try break!" Gruesome nodded with vigor-something like bowing. "She touch cage, and cage bite Goosum. Jump back and fall - plants tied around feet."

"The cage bit you?" Then I remembered - that was how you explained an electric shock to a toddler. Thyme had touched the cage, and it had given Gruesome a jolt. "Was the cage made of wood?"

"Yuh! Wood! Sticks!"

So. Anything made of plants, she could use to work magic. I laid a bet with myself that the "sticks" were still alive, plants that she had just told to grow into a huge box. "And while you weren't looking, the grass tied itself around your legs?"

"Yuh! Legs! Arms, too, after fell! Try get up, grass pull me down! Roar!" He gave a sample, letting loose a bellow that shook some nearby rocks and left waveforms in the sand. I winced and reminded myself to conjure up some mouthwash for him. "How'd you get loose?"

"Woman tell Goosum go stay near water, watch for Saw. Find him, eat him!"

"Saul!" I stared. "Me?" How the hell had Thyme known I was coming?

Exactly. Maybe she had a message from the Other Side. Or maybe she had asked Frisson. From what Gruesome said, he was so besotted he would have told her anything. Of course, he also would have told her that the moon was made of green cheese, if that was what she had wanted to hear, but she seemed to have overlooked that possibility.

Then the rest of what Gruesome had said percolated through to my undernourished brain. Something about if I showed up, he was supposed to have me for dinner. I swallowed thickly and looked up at him. Was that a hungry gleam in his eye, or was I just imagining it?