“I can be whoever you want me to be,” she responded evasively. “I can be the one who you desire most.”

She stirred, then, moving more into the firelight, and pulled back her veil, and he gasped and stared in spite of himself, and his jaw dropped.

“Mary Ann… ” he breathed.

For a moment all defenses were down, all rationality fled, as she came closer and closer to him. She was more beautiful even than he had remembered her, more sensuous than the fantasies that had gotten him through this much of his quest.

Now she was to him, and they were in an embrace, and for the briefest moment it was the closest to Heaven he would ever come, but there was something wrong, something that triggered all those defenses that had kept him alive all this time.

Through all that exotic perfume, she smelled like warmed-over horse dung.

He broke free of the kiss. “You—you’re not Mary Ann!” he gasped. “You—you’re all the rest!”

Where the strength came from he would never know, but he lashed out hard and shoved her away, unbalancing her for just a moment. As she staggered and tried to retain her balance, the wind began to swirl and then scream around him.

“I tried to make this pleasant,” she snapped. “Now we’ll have to do it the hard way. Look, how about you just relax and don’t fight it? After all, you have no strength left, and I did sit here and listen to that interminable crap for hours and hours!”

The wind began to swirl and scream at him.

It was as if all the gods suddenly supercharged him with energy. “Crap!” he exclaimed. “CRAP!”

His new energy and his sudden rage loosened her grip on his mind; the girl seemed to blur and fade out in the firelight, and a new, more sinister shape slowly emerged from the mass: A skeletal body covered with coarse brown fur; thin arms linked to leathery wings, and a ratlike face with eyes of burning coal and a mouth with pointed teeth designed only to rend flesh. …