Copyright October 2000, Lyka. This story may be copied for personal use so long as the author's credits are kept, but may not be posted, archived elsewhere, otherwise distributed or sold without the author's permission.

Terry Smith saw the white van parked in front of her house, but she didn't pay it much attention. Probably carpet cleaners or something. The fact that it was unmarked didn't register with her.

The sky was as gray as her mood. It hadn't rained yet all winter, but the breeze felt humid and chill on her face.

She'd spent fully an hour at Erinyes Books this time, talking with Mary over coffee -- this time about an art show in Santa Monica. Erinyes was as much a coffeehouse as it was a bookstore, which was how it stayed in business; you bought the coffee, then you could sit around and rummage through the used books until you found one you wanted to pay for, but it was still called Erinyes Books and not Erinyes Coffeehouse.

They'd kicked back in the mismatched overstuffed easy chairs, talking about the artists, none of whom Terry had ever heard of, and once again Terry was able to look into a whole new world outside.

If it were up to her parents, she'd never have known there was an "outside." That was how she thought of it - the world outside her house, outside the round of church and private school (carefully chosen by them for the proper Christian outlook and curriculum) and chores at home and Mom's nagging and Dad's near-constant disapproval.

Last year they'd found out about Christine and forbidden her to "associate" with her, as they put it. Dad had really been enraged; he gave her a black eye that was visible for five days afterward. She'd told a teacher who asked that it was from an accident on her bike, and then he'd asked why she wasn't driving to school, like they'd even let her learn to drive.

God only knew what they'd do if they found out about Erinyes. Now she spent her stolen moments after classes at the bookstore, talking with Mary or the other afternoon worker, Josephine.

If only she could move out of the house - but she wouldn't be sixteen for a year yet. And without even a driver's license . . .

She reached the sidewalk that ran to the front door, feeling her stomach tense as she anticipated the usual grilling. Oh, she hated facing this, coming down from the euphoria being at Erinyes always brought her. "Weren't you supposed to come straight home from school? Where were you? With that Slater girl again? Don't lie to us . . ."

She stepped up onto the concrete porch with its two terracotta pots of yellowed geraniums and dug in her pocket for the key.

Muffled heavy footsteps approached from the other side. Then the door opened before she could unlock it.

Her father stood there, his pale blue eyes looking at her in that flat, cold way that let her know she was in real trouble.

"Your mother and I want you in the living room," he ordered, his voice flat.

He stepped aside - barely -- to let her in, then closed the door behind her and locked it. Then he turned on his heel and walked down the hall toward the living room.

Her stomach churned as she went into her bedroom to get rid of the backpack.

The small white-painted room was almost barren: a single-sized bed with a worn quilt, white nightstand with a cheap touch lamp, two pictures of Jesus hanging on the walls, and nothing else. She would have liked more pictures, but Mom wouldn't permit it, calling such things "idolatry."

She'd given up on Jesus quite a while ago. Not the kind of thing she could talk to her parents about, either.

She dropped her backpack on the bed. She gritted her teeth, feeling the near-tears burning in her eyes, the lump in her throat.

Glancing out the window, she could see the nearly leafless branches of the magnolia, swaying in the cold wind outside.

She briefly considered just slipping out the window and running, going downtown, vanishing somehow. No, that would only lead to more trouble later when she got caught. If this weren't already about sending her to the long-threatened boarding school, they'd sure do it then.

Later, she would wish she had done it. No matter what awaited her on the street, it couldn't have been any worse.

Her parents were in the living room, but this time they weren't sitting in the chairs or sofa. Instead, Dad stood in the middle of the room, arms folded, his blunt face hard, eyes like ice. At his side, Mom stood with her arms folded the same way, face pinched and hard in that way she always got when she was angry.

With them stood three husky-looking men with determined, expressionless faces. Their arms weren't folded across their chests but hanging almost loosely at their sides, as if ready for some kind of action.

Her nerves went into full, shrieking alert, a strange sensation prickling on the back of her neck. The living room smelled of tension, anxiety, rage.

"I didn't see Christine . . ." she began to protest, though she wasn't supposed to speak first.

Her father cut across her. "No, but Mrs. Pulanski spotted you going into a bookstore downtown," he said, the words dropping like stones. No preliminaries, no cat-and-mouse. "Erinyes Books. It's run by lesbians. But you knew that already - that's why you were there." His tone would permit no denial.

"Apparently this runs even deeper than we thought. Your mother and I had a talk, because we're done talking to you. We've given you as good and Christian an upbringing as we could, but it looks like we'll really have to get tough with you now."

Her mother nodded in cold agreement. The three men stared directly at her in a relaxed but watchful way, like Rottweilers waiting for the signal to attack.

"We're sending you to the Lighthouse Institute," her mother said. "It's a very good place. A Christian place, where they heal teenagers with problems like yours. We've decided this is the best thing for you. One day you'll be grateful we cared enough to do this."

The three men moved forward.

She screamed, and then it happened again: that dark mist of rage was in her eyes, clouding her mind. She fought and shrieked and cursed, but the men were well trained and it did no good.

The haze didn't clear until a long time later, with the three men holding her down in the back of the van, pinning her wrists and ankles as they grinned and cracked crude jokes to each other.

Five months later, Terry stared at the flyspecked wall as she wondered again how to escape.

She'd spent a bleak Christmas at the Lighthouse Institute. No presents; that was too "pagan." Instead, the staff had just herded her and the other girls into the main room under a white fake Christmas tree, and one had sat down and read them Bible stories and then led them in singing hymns. The fake tree had been taken away the next day.

Today, the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Feldstein, had shouted her down during therapy and then decided she needed more "quiet time" - which, at the Lighthouse, consisted of sitting facing the wall for several hours - the more severe the offense, the longer the time.

So Marilyn, a hulking fat woman with a complexion like a pineapple, pushed her into the tiny "quiet room" and shoved her into a hard wooden chair facing the wall and told her not to move, "or I'll beat the shit out of you, you little bitch."

Terry took the threat seriously. Last week two other staff members had broken Joanne's arm. They wouldn't send her to the infirmary until the next day.

As she was forced into the chair, she'd felt the mist coming on again, but this time she was able to fight it off.

Now, she sat and stared at the wall, already familiar with every bump and valley in its surface. It was late afternoon.

Every now and then Marilyn would walk by and glance at her. Keeping an eye on her.

The angry black mist seemed to come more and more often now. She'd had to fight it down several times in the course of her captivity. She still didn't know what it meant, what would happen if she let it take over, but she was afraid to find out. Would she kill someone? Would she just go insane?

She remembered the first time it happened, more than a year ago. Mom had caught her reading an old copy of Cosmopolitan that she'd found in a trash can on her way home from school and of course had thrown a shrieking fit.

Dad came home in the middle of it and, after listening a few moments to find out what it was about, had joined in shouting at her.

The unfamiliar fog of fury had provoked a nameless terror in her that was worse than Mom's shouting. She'd frantically shoved it down - until Dad slapped her across the face.

Then she had done something she'd never done before: she'd hit him back, leaping at him and punching him in the nose before she had even thought about it, screaming curses she barely even knew. All the while, a black fog seemed to hang in front of her eyes; she could barely see him through it.

He was startled, but still much bigger and stronger; he simply beat her down. All that week she had to go to school with a long-sleeved sweater on to cover the bruises, in the middle of July.

The second time the rage struck was six months later, during another beating, this one over her seeing Christine.

She'd never told anyone about that dark fog. She wondered if she should tell Dr. Feldstein. No, probably not. They'd say it was from the Devil. Maybe it was.

I don't really give a shit any more, she thought, rolling the unfamiliar cuss word in her mind.

Now another sort of darkness rose in her, one of despair, the despair she had begun to feel since she had been imprisoned here, in this decrepit building stinking of cheap disinfectant and of human fear, hate and depression.

She was never going to get out of here. They'd keep her here until she was eighteen, then lock her up in the adult ward and throw away the key.

As the afternoon turned to evening and the other girls were sent upstairs to bed and Marilyn was replaced by the equally hulking Francis, she sank into a trance state. Even the discomfort of sitting in the hard wooden chair dulled into an ache.

Unbidden, her dream of last night came back to her.

It was The Dream, the one she'd had so often before, since she was a little kid. She'd never told anyone about that, either.

It was the first time she'd had it here.

She'd been running through trees, through a forest.

It was night, yet she could see easily enough, but it seemed her head was lower than it usually was. In fact, she was on four legs -- she was some kind of animal, she wasn't sure what, and she leaped and bounded almost without effort.

The forest was filled with smells that seemed alive, bursting with almost psychedelic intensity: the light yellow tang of pinesap, the earth scent of the loose forest duff cushioning her running feet.

It never got any clearer than that; it hadn't last night, but the Dream always filled her with joy.

She didn't know why. In waking life, she'd never been in a forest.

She didn't even know she was smiling, until Francis' voice broke through her thoughts.

"What are you smiling about?"

She looked up, confused. She must have still had a trace of the smile, because Francis' jowly face went shrewish, a nasty light flaring in her hard little black eyes.

She'd seen Francis angry before, but this time there was something in that face and those beady eyes that scared her, and scared her more as Francis glared.

"Answer me!" Francis demanded.

But speech seemed to have abandoned her. Her mind whirled.

Francis' muscular blue-veined hand shot out and grabbed her shoulder, gripping hard enough to leave bruises. The eyes held a touch of madness now.

"Answer me!" Terry's tongue still would not move. "You know, we try to be nice to you, but you're the worst of this bunch! You sit in a little world of your own, ignoring us, thinking you're better than us --"

The black tide surged in her - the rage again. Her surroundings, even the hard chair underneath her vanished.

Oh, God, oh, please, Jesus, not now . . .

Between her terror of Francis and her terror of the rage, she was neatly paralyzed, trapped in the jaws of a vice.

She stared back as Francis' free hand drew back, balling into a fist, her face now truly demonic --

Terry felt the blow on her face, rocking her head back, making her see stars.

Then the dark fury rose and roared in her mind. There was no stopping it this time; it dragged her under in an instant.

She could never remember afterward what she did in those black moments when the rage had its way. One might as well ask what an epileptic feels during a seizure.

But the first impressions she registered when awareness returned would be burned into her brain forever, like the afterimages of burned-away people that can be seen against the walls of buildings after a nuclear bomb has destroyed a city.

First, there was the smell -- like the stink of menstruation, but fresher, harsher.

She wasn't sitting on the chair any more. She was standing. The walls of the quiet room were dripping with what she thought at first was some sort of dark-red paint, but it was too thin and didn't smell at all like paint.

On the floor was something big, something like a side of beef. Even with that first uncomprehending glimpse she could tell it had been ripped up, torn open forcibly.

A shredded fragment of cloth, maybe as big as her hand, was visible nearby, along with less identifiable objects.

It took her a moment to recognize those twisted, wrinkled dark tubes as intestines. Then the stench hit her, making her vomit onto the floor.

Her vomit was stained with swirls of blood.

And then she noticed her hands: they were drenched with blood, and covered with some kind of dark fur -- and even now the hair was disappearing, accompanied by a strange sensation in her skin.

At first she didn't understand.

Then she began to understand what the object on the floor was, and a gulf of madness yawned wide open in her.

The sound of footsteps interrupted her descent into catatonia. She looked up.

A figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the hall light - female, of middling height, slim. Curly hair cascaded down its shoulders. At first Terry thought she was one of the staff women, but she spoke in an unfamiliar deep voice.

"Easy there. Easy," she was saying. "Calm down. It's okay, Terry. Come with me, Terry."

Terry looked at her, and the horror in her mind began to dissipate, changing into a feeling of unreality.

Maybe she was just having a nightmare.

The woman stepped into the room and was revealed in the illumination of the ceiling light. She had black, curly hair that flowed past her shoulders, classic Grecian features, strong yet beautiful -- and arms that more than hinted at muscle, though with none of the crude bulk of the attendants.

She was wearing sneakers, pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, all as black as her hair.

There was no fear or disgust in her face even when she stepped into the edge of the great splattering of blood on the floor. It was as if she had no reason to fear.

Now she was between Terry and Francis' corpse, partly hiding it from her view.

"Look at me. Don't look at anything else right now," the gentle, deep voice soothed, and the woman stepped toward her again, and for a moment Terry felt a stab of panic in her gut, but only for a moment. Something about her felt . . . right. Friendly.

The woman reached out now, offered a hand.

"I see we got here just in time," she said.

Just in time? Terry stared, unable to comprehend.

"Come on now," she went on. "Come with me. You've got to come with me now."

Terry's numb legs moved as if by their own volition, stumbling toward her. She could feel blood, sticky and cooling, drying on her skin.

The strange woman took her right hand gently, not seeming to care that it, too, was sticky with clotting blood. She was careful not to look back at the mutilated corpse on the floor as the woman led her around it.

She wasn't aware that her T-shirt had torn wide open and her breasts hung half-exposed, that her pants and shoes were entirely gone, in shreds on the floor behind her.

The woman led her down the hallway toward the exit, holding her hand all the while, but she didn't speak again. She seemed intent on going somewhere. At first she walked slowly, letting Terry recover, but then she speeded up.

Terry halted, tried to yank her hand out of her grip, but the woman was too strong for her to break free so easily. "Where are you taking me?" she demanded.

The woman grinned, almost as if she approved of Terry's defiance, and let go of her own accord. "Away. Out of here." She spread her hands in gesture.

"Where to?"

"You'll find out when we get there," and her chiseled face showed a bit of impatience. For the first time, Terry noticed the crow's-feet around her eyes; she was maybe in her late thirties. "There's no time to talk. Come on."

She stared at her a moment longer, trying to sense any trace of something really wrong in her face or manner -- malice, anger -- but there was none. Something about this strange woman made Terry want to trust her. She couldn't tell what.

After a moment, she gave up trying to figure it out and started walking toward the door of her own accord. The woman walked beside her but didn't try to take her hand again.

They reached the stout metal door that exited the ward. It was a massive steel-reinforced affair with a window of heavy glass reinforced with wire mesh, and it would have taken a battering ram or the like to take it down. Now it gaped open, unlocked.

They passed through it, and no one was visible in the outer hallway -- not even the security guards that were normally there. The woman led her past darkened, empty offices toward the exit. Terry wondered vaguely where the security guards were; this part of the building seemed abandoned.

The stout wooden double-doors that led to the outside world were closed, but not locked any more, because the woman pushed them open with one hand.

They stepped out together onto the concrete porch, and for the first time in five months Terry was outside, the cold night air on her face and bare flesh.

That was when she realized she was nearly naked. Mingling with her shock came an odd flash of last night's dream.

The bright yard light threw their shadows across the ragged dead weeds and sand of the lawn. Two other women in dark cloth jackets were standing there as if waiting for them: another black-haired woman, the same age as the first one but shorter and with plainer, less memorable features, and a tall African-American woman in her twenties with a hard face that warmed when she saw Terry.

Neither showed any reaction to the fact that she was more than half naked and covered with blood.

The black woman smiled, large front teeth gleaming in the porch light. "Hello, little sister," she said.

Terry blinked.

The first woman put a hand on her back and pushed gently, urging her down the sidewalk. "Come on, let's get moving," she said softly.

The three of them hurried her down the sidewalk to the tall wrought-metal gates that barred passage to the street. By now, she wasn't surprised to see that they, too, were unlocked, the usual padlocked chain dangling loosely from one bar.

On the street beyond, an unmarked black van loomed. Its engine was running, purring in the quiet night.

The black woman and the shorter white woman went to the passenger-side front door. The short woman opened it and climbed inside with easy grace, followed by the black woman. They squeezed past the seat into the back, vanishing.

She froze, scenarios of being carried off to a den of gang members or worse flashing through her mind, but the first woman said, "Go on, get inside."

Terry looked back at the squat dark bulk of the Lighthouse Institute. Nothing stirred in the half-circle of light around the porch.

She turned away, but hesitated before getting in the van. She felt clots of drying blood break off her skin, and she smothered a twinge of nausea.

The first woman was standing behind her.

"Hurry up! Don't worry about getting the seat dirty," she said, and pushed at her shoulder again. She roused herself and climbed into the front, using the handlebar to leverage herself.

Then she saw the woman in the driver's seat. She had hair done in a bright, obviously dyed red mohawk, and she was thin to the point of being skinny. She wore a tight sleeveless black nylon top and equally tight black pants, and more jewelry in her pierced ears, around her neck and on her bare arms than Terry had ever seen on one woman before. She looked maybe twenty years old.

Terry froze in astonishment, still braced in the doorframe.

The young woman saw her reaction, looked her up and down and laughed harshly - and not at the blood or her nudity.

"What's the matter?" she asked, and her voice was incongruously light and delicate. "Never seen a mohawk before?"

Terry shook her head, "No."

"Boy, have you been sheltered!" she laughed, teeth gleaming. "Well, you're out in the real world now."

The black woman was there suddenly, standing just behind the front seats. "Go easy on her, Lupa," she said, but her voice was jocular, warm. "She's been through hell you never knew."

She reached over the seats to hand something bundled to Terry, which proved to be a gray nylon jacket.

Lupa chuckled. "Whatever you say, Leona," she answered.

Terry put the jacket on over the remains of her shredded shirt, zipping it up. It didn't do anything for her lower half.

She glanced into the back of the van past Leona and saw it was nearly full of women -- different faces, skin colors, hair styles. Several of them were talking with each other in low voices. Two others looked back at her as if curious, but they said nothing.

The van smelled odd - the smells of lots of people and gasoline fumes, sure, but also other odors she couldn't identify. Maybe some dogs had been in here.

She sat down, feeling the cold plastic seat covering under her bare rump, trying to push down the embarrassment of her nakedness.

The first woman was in the doorway now, pulling herself in. She squeezed past Terry's seat into the back of the van, and Leona made way for her.

Then she turned to stand behind the seat, grasping the back behind Terry's shoulders to steady herself, so that Terry had to twist half-around to see her.

"I'm Hera. Want to ask questions?" she said.

"I just killed someone . . ."

Suddenly she doubled over, seized by another fit of vomiting, and she only dimly heard Lupa's "Hey, puke in the street, not the car!" as the entire contents of her stomach seemed to come up, splattering on the doorframe and the asphalt of the road.

She registered other women speaking but didn't quite understand them: "Was this her First Change?" "Yes." "Jesus Christ shit! That sucks!"

And then Lupa's arms were around her, holding her as she finished retching and began to shake.

She tried to get out more words: "Wh . . . why . . ."

Lupa hugged her gently, and she could hear Hera speaking.

"It's all right. It's all right. Don't fall apart on us now, Terry. Wait 'til we get back to the canyon . . ."

Terry turned her head to look at the dark-haired woman.

"I - why? What's happening?" Her voice rose to a scream.

Hera's dark eyes were ebony wells of compassion, and again she felt that urge to trust her. "Believe me, there's a reason it's okay with us. I know you're scared, and I know you think you're going crazy, but it's going to be all right. For now, you'll just have to trust us. There, wipe your mouth. Your sleeve is fine."

Slowly, the impending panic receded, replaced by numbness. Her emotions were beginning to shut down from overload. She finally managed to speak coherently, still shivering.

"Who are you? What do you want with me?"

Hera smiled. "For now, just accept that we know what happened, that you're one of us and we can help you."

"Where're we're going?"

"Our place. Can't tell you much more than that yet, but it's beautiful. Out in the country, away from this hellhole."

Hera released her and nodded abruptly at Lupa.

"Question time is over now, I'm sorry to say -- we've got to get moving." She crouched and retreated into the depths of the van's interior, joining the other women.

Nobody seemed shocked or disgusted, even though she was almost naked and covered with gore. Maybe that was why nothing seemed real any more.