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couldn't pin down how she had gotten there.
    The man in the truck, she thought, straining. He'd picked her up. He'd been a farmer. Hadn't he? They'd stopped by his farm. She was almost sure of that. Then he'd turned on her. She'd fought him, but he'd been strong, awfully strong. Then he'd hit her with something.
    The rest was all a blur. Being tied up in a dark place. Howlong had she been there? An hour, a day? Men coming, talking in whispers. Then the prick of a needle in her arm.
    She was outside again. She could see the moon and the stars. She could smell smoke. It rolled in her head, as did the silver ring of the bell. And the chanting. She couldn't make out the words, foreign maybe. They didn't make sense.
    She wept a little, wanting her mother.
    She turned her head and saw the black-clad figures. They had animal heads, like something out of a horror movie. Or a dream. It was a dream, she promised herself as her eyes heated with tears. She'd wake up. Her mother would come in and wake her for school any minute, and all of this would go away.
    It had to be a dream. She knew there were no such things as creatures with men's bodies and animals′ heads. Monsters only existed in movies and stuff, the kind she and Sharie Murray rented for the VCR when they had a sleep-over.
    The thing with the goat's head put a silver cup between her breasts. In her drugged state she wondered how it could be that she could actually feel the cold metal against her flesh. Did you feel things when you were dreaming?
    He lifted his arms high, and his voice boomed inside her head. He placed a black candle between her thighs.
    She began to cry hard now, afraid she wasn't dreaming. Yet everything was shifting in and out of focus, and the sounds seemed to come from very far away. There were shouts and wails and keening, much too human a sound to come from those horrible animal heads.
    He tipped the cup over, pouring the liquid in it down her body. It smelled like blood. She whimpered. He was touching her, drawing signs on her body with the red liquid. She could see his eyes gleam in the goat's head as hebegan to do things to her with his all too human hands, things her mother had warned her would happen if she hitched rides and teased boys.
    Even through her fear, she felt shame, a hot, liquid sensation in her belly.
    Then they were naked, the men beneath the cloaks and the heads of goats and wolves and lizards.
    Even before the first one crouched above her, his penis hard and ready, she knew she would be raped. At the first thrust, she screamed. And the sound echoed, mocking and hollow, through the trees.
    They sucked at her blood-spattered breasts, making horrible grunting sounds as they lapped and suckled. She gagged and struggled weakly as her mouth was savagely raped. Growling and keening, they pinched and nipped and pumped.
    They were wild, all of them, dancing and capering and groaning as each one took his turn with her. Heartless, heedless, even as her screams turned to sobs and sobs to mindless mewling.
    She went under, to some deep, secret place where she could hide from all the pain and all the fear. Hiding there, she never saw the knife.

Chapter 3
    T HE GALLERY WAS PACKED. An hour after the opening of Clare's show, people streamed through the lofty, three-storied space. Not just people, Clare thought as she sipped champagne, but People. Those capital
P
sorts who would expand Angie's heart to the size of Kansas. Representatives from the business world, the art world, the theater, the literati, the glitterati. From Madonna to the mayor, they came to look, to comment, and apparently to buy.
    Reporters schmoozed their way through, gulping canapès and French bubbly. That old standby,
Entertainment Tonight
, had sent a crew who even now were doing a stand-up in front of Clare's three-foot iron-and-bronze work titled
Return of Power.
Controversial, they called it, because of the blatant sexuality and overt feminism in its image of three women,