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quickly realized the material was not something on the frame, but on the floor in front of him.   Gradually he eased the painting down, and as he did so, the red slowly lengthened.   Arms joined it; the bow of hips became visible, finally a pair of bent legs and bared feet.   It was a woman, lying on her side in front of his bed, clad in a vivid red dress.   Her eyes were slightly parted—as best he could tell in the dimness of the room—but her gaze was frighteningly stiff, directed eerily into the floor.   She looked dead.
    Jack felt a bulge of dread, as hard and heavy as a steel ball, thicken in his belly.   He turned, sat the painting back on the dresser and, looking back, grimaced, horrified at the thought that there actually might be a corpse in the middle of his bedroom.
    He took two very cautious steps forward, paused, sucked in a deep breath, and then forced himself on.   He knelt before the woman and reluctantly pressed two fingers to her neck.   At that her mouth yawed open, making him shudder badly.   He took another deep breath, settled himself, and kept feeling for a pulse.   Nothing.   He rolled the woman onto her back and placed a hand firmly to her chest.   He closed his eyes, waiting with desperation for the slightest tremor of a heartbeat.   After an eternity, he got something: a single hard throb that came with such force that it almost made him lose his balance.   Several seconds later, another followed.
    A wave of relief passed through him.   She was alive, albeit barely, but she was alive just the same.   She was probably some leftover from his party, he thought, the friend of a friend who had gotten drunk, passed out somewhere, and had been left behind by her equally inebriated friends.   And just as likely, she was the reason for the thud that had awakened him.   She’d probably been wandering around his bedroom, still drunk, when she tripped, struck her head on something, and clomped rather loudly to the floor, where she now lay barely hanging on to life.
    He slipped his hands beneath the woman and picked her up.   Her body sagged hopelessly as he carried her, arms dangling, her mouth bucking open.   He had expected to struggle with the dead weight but she was very light, strangely so.   He carefully laid her on the bed, seated himself sideways on its edge, then looked down the hall and called Gabrielle.
    He waited anxiously, expecting her to suddenly emerge from the bathroom.   She did not.   The light still radiated from within, but the shadows had ceased.   He called again, this time louder. “Gabrielle?”
    Only a return of heavy silence.
    He was about to call again when he heard a soft voice whisper: “She’s gone.”
    Jack jerked around toward the woman.   “Where?” he said, more from surprise than anything else.
    “You sent her home,” the woman said softly.
    Jack reared a bit, confused not only by the woman’s proclamation about him sending Gabrielle home, but her ability to speak while in such poor condition.   And there was something else, an even greater oddity.   The woman’s voice was strikingly familiar.
    He looked away, reached over and flicked on a lamp.   He turned back, and was stunned by what he saw.   There, looking up at him with soft, slightly dazed eyes, was Portia Childress.
    Though not as he had ever seen her before.
    Her hair, normally long and golden, was now short and extremely dark.   Her complexion seemed paler than usual, and her eyes, normally a crystalline blue, were now, somehow, as black and barren as coal.
    “Portia?” he said weakly.
    She blinked at him once, and then turned her head away, as if not certain he was even real.
    “Portia!” he repeated harshly, trying to rouse the woman from her seeming stupor.
    She lazily rolled her head back.   “No,” she said.   “Not exactly.”
    Jack bristled.   “What is this?   What the hell are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night like this?”
    She rolled