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didn’t have the strength.  The fog was so thick it blocked sight of the walls.  He floated in a silver nowhere. 
    All he could do was lie down and wait for them to come for him again.
     
    Screams of ecstasy and anguish rang through his ears.  He spilled his seed into the dark-haired woman as she raked her nails across his chest.  He fell back, yelling in pleasure and pain.  He felt hollow inside.
    Everything was fading.  He felt the poison in his blood, turgid and thick. 
    Every time one of the women came for him he felt less alive.  They were killing him slowly with their passion.  He knew he didn’t have much longer.
    Will they keep me alive until they find another, like they did with the man I killed? he wondered.  They’d already proved their healing abilities – how long had his predecessor been their slave?  How long had they prolonged his life to serve their need, even after his mind had gone?
    He tried to hang on to something, anything .  He knew he had to find someone.  Sometimes he could even see her face.
    I can ’t fail her, like I failed before.
    Who did he fail before?  He couldn ’t remember.  He tried, but he couldn’t.
    One woman, and then the next.  They licked his flesh with icy tongues and took him inside, roughly ground their bodies against his and clawed open his skin.  He swam through a haze of naked flesh and juices.  Pleasure drowned his agony.
    Drowned.  She didn’t drown.
    He lay still in the dark.  His body felt soft and liquid, as if rotting from within.  Drugged smoke filled the air.  He clawed his way towards consciousness, fought to narrow his vision through the ice blue light.  Scabs and blisters and scar tissue covered his back.
    She didn’t drown.  She died burning on the train.
    He stumbled forward.  He didn ’t remember getting up.  He moved slowly through the dark.  His bare feet scraped against sheets of rough ice and broken stone.  Pale mold ran down the cracks in the walls.
    She died on the train.  Snow…burning on the train.
    Anger welled inside him.  Blood pumped through veins turned frozen and stiff.  His muscles ached with every step, but he had momentum, and he used it.  He left the narcotic fog behind him.  His mind slowly started to clear as he moved through the darkness of the tunnels.
    Danica .  I have to find Danica.   I won’t fail her, like I failed my sister. 
    Cross wandered through a labyrinth of stone and ice. He passed dark pools of black gel and rows of knife-like icicles.  There was no telling how long he wandered.  His skin was frozen, but his blood burned.
    He found a cold stone chamber with walls of glittering sapphire ice.  A wolf-skin bed occupied one corner.  Bone firmaments and frozen fingers dangled from strings tied to hooks in the ceiling.  Another tunnel led away, blocked by a bear-skin curtain.  He smelled cinnamon and blood. 
    Cross made it halfway across the chamber when the blonde woman entered from the other direction.  She held a human skull in her hands, and she was so preoccupied with examining it that for a moment she didn’t notice him.
    His blade was strapped to her back, and a bone knife hung from her belt.  He shouldn ’t have been able to move at all with how fatigued he was, but some power filled him, rage or desperation or something else, something darker.  Whatever it was, Cross launched himself at the woman with a snarl.  He didn’t know himself, didn’t recognize this creature wearing his skin.  He’d become like the other, the one he’d killed. 
    The blonde woman slashed him across the stomach, but it was only a glancing wound. He surged forward, tackled her, and brought them both to the ground.  She dropped the knife but lashed at him with her claws, ripped open his cheek.  Growling, he took her face in his hands and slammed her head against the floor, once, twice, a third time, and he kept smashing down until her head cracked and came apart in his fingers.  Blood