loved a man in the Maze. She drove that one away with difficulty; it was wily as
the mercenary and more desperate.
She found a minor-class fiend hiding in an alley; it tried desperately to
pretend it was a man. Know you, know you, it protested, does what you want, oh,
does everything you want. … It wept, which was unusual for a fiend, and hid in
a tumble of old boxes as if that could save it from the gates. I find HER, it
snuffled.
That saved it. That Her was Roxane. The fiend knew instinctively what she
wanted. It proposed treachery (which was its fiendish part) and hoped for mercy
(which was its human vulnerability).
FIND, she told it. And the orange-haired fiend leapt up and gibbered with that
hope for mercy. It went loping and shambling off shattering boxes and wine
bottles and scaring hell out of a sleeping drunk behind the Unicorn.
Ischade’s head tilted back; the breath whistled between her clenched teeth and
the lust came on her with fever-pulse, let loose by this magical exertion. She
had expended a certain kind of energy. It had gone far beyond desire, went
toward need; and she hunted the living now, hunted with a reckless, hateful
vengeance.
Nothing petty this time. No inconsequential, unwashed victim picked up in the
streets, slaking need with something so distasteful to her it was self-inflicted
torment.
She wanted the innocent. She wanted something clean. And restrained herself
short of that. She looked only for the beautiful and the surface-clean,
something that would not haunt her.