Tasìa jumped down on the floor and she rushed towards Alex. She leaned over him to see his mouth squeezed together tightly, and contorted in pain.

"Sacréd Virgin," she gasped. "What happened?"

His voice croaked as his breath shook unevenly through the green scales that covered his throat. He told her what occurred in slow, labored gasps.

"I was down in the lab only long enough to grab the vial. I heard a growl on the opposite end of the room. The door to the caged room below was open. The hellhounds were kept there as guards. They are too vicious for anywhere else. They chased me up the steps and caught me here."

Tasìa had many questions to ask him, but he needed assistance first. She examined him with quick scrutiny.

His shirt was torn in the back, scratch marks covered it. Some of the gashes opened deep. Still, they were not as serious as the three wounds on his legs.

A bite above his knee pulsed blood down his thigh.

As bad as it appeared, if she managed to close it off in time, he would not likely die.

Alex pushed up on to his elbows.

Their chitinous folds scraped against the floor.

With his other arm, he reached up and offered her the vial. Tasìa took it with a bowed head and a thank you.

She glanced back up the corridor and she listened. The hellhounds were still well out of her hearing.

"We need to get you into a room. You have no chance to fight them off."

Alex spoke through clenched teeth.

"Oh, my Blesséd Madré, it hurts. I didn't know that I had enough receptors left in my entire body to feel this much pain."

Tasìa clasped his shoulder sympathetically.

"Can you stand up?"

He laughed like a broken, raggéd doll with a caught pull string.

"'Can't' is not one of the choices I have at the moment."

As he attempted to get up, Tasìa grimaced. The flesh on the bite wound above his knee stretched misshapen with his movement. The blood spilled out in a quickened pulse.

She would have to treat him here, out in the open.

Tasìa grabbed the leg above the bite, applying pressure with her thumb.

It helped stem the blood flow.

"I can tell that is where the hellhound bit to take you down. He tried to cripple you."

Alex guffawed in an explosive cough. She watched him with a diagnostician's eye, relieved that no blood spat out.

She continued to speak.

"Before you stretch that wound out and make it worse, let me put a clamping band on that ripped artery to keep it from tearing even more."

"Were you a field surgeon, too?" He asked.

Tasìa nodded, beaming pridefully.

"That is just one of the many skills you pick up running a B&E crew in the Esconda Vida."

Tasìa unsheathed her stiletto with which she cut into the trouser pant leg around the bite.

Alex rose up his head to speak.

"Esconda Vida? That sounds like an insane, low life expectancy kind of thing to do."

"It's the Quadra," she answered. "With these nanospores inside us all, who doesn't make insane choices?"

Tasìa cleaned up the wound with a sterilized wipe. The artery exposed, it appeared better articulated than a normal human one.

Good. Normal human ones could be slippery and difficult to manipulate. She slid her thumb down the sheared side from which the artery bled.

It even felt oddly rubbery.

"What are you thinking, little Tasìa?"

She chortled.

"I am starting to appreciate some of the physiological trade-offs that you ghouls live with."

Her lips felt dry and they itched something fierce. With one of her hands applying pressure down on the wound, and the other hand treating it, she could not scratch the itch.

She was also too engaged in saving Alex's life to take the LSD and save her own.

When did I, of all people, become so altruistic?

Tasìa asked in near disgust with herself. That voice of conscience that often cursed her existence rose up through her defenses.

Patience, girl. This is worth doing. Just another few minutes you can ingest your LSD salvation.

The band-aid she now held was a specialized surgical one. Long and thin with stretch clamps tapered on the ends. Tasìa placed it along the length of the exposed artery.

It would eventually dissolve itself as the artery healed and his body would then harmlessly absorb it as minerals and simple waste matter.

With it secured in place, the bleeding stopped. She cleaned the wound once more with a fresh wipe before applying a gauze over it.

Satisfied with her own handiwork, Tasìa nodded to herself.

"Come on," she said. "Let's get you up. There is only so much roof up there to keep the hellhounds preoccupied."

Alex twisted around and he pushed up. Tasìa held a grip on his shoulder to keep him steady.

Though she was very strong for her size, Tasìa would still only be able to assist as a support but not actually carry his weight.

She grabbed both of his hands and she helped pull him up. She pressed the modest width of her butt cheeks against a wall to steady herself when he started wobbling on her.

Halfway up, but still crouched over, he collapsed. Tasìa caught him before he could fall over. She twisted around in a counter lever. Her foot jammed against the floorboard.

Tasìa pleaded to him in a firm tone.

"Come on, Alex. We don't have time for failure. Press your knees together."

Alex regained his balance as he leaned into her shoulders.

A discomfort grew inside her eyes. As she tried to blink the sensation away, her vision grew in intensity.

A headache formed in her skull just above her eyes. It felt as if something was trying to merge through her skin

A scampering noise scraped down the stairs above in a hellish sounding gallop.

"Over on our left," Alex gasped. ". . . is a room. A mere . . . thirty yards."

He struggled through the words. The scales on his neck contorted grotesquely as he spoke.

Standing erect, he appeared to be experiencing a lot of pain.

Tasìa pulled him up against her bosom.

"Don't speak," she commanded.

Tasìa led him forward. She now saw the door. A metal frame with thick matted glass windows above the handle.

The hellhounds pace quickened. Tasìa and Alex were making too much noise in their attempt to flee.

She opened the door just as the hellhounds spotted them. They howled like an avant-garde belonging to the host of a demonic huntress.

Which in this reconfigured world, Tasìa thought, they may very well be.

All that is missing is a mort horn.

Their heads twisted wiry on thick taut necks as they snarled and called in staggered howls to their mistress.

Then they glared their eyes upon her and the two hellhounds charged.

Tasìa shoved Alex into the room. She jumped up with her legs pulled up to her torso so she could pull her gun out of her holster.

The hellhound in the lead, directly in front of her, lowered its head as it rushed forward.

She recognized the blood-hunt tactic for what it was. It allowed her to anticipate the second hound's attempt to maneuver her backward.

The second hound slowed to circle in a feint.

It was a good tactic for hunting rabbits, but against Tasìa, a beastly mistake.

An extra second it gave her to exploit.

As she landed on her back with her legs still rolled up, Tasìa pushed off the lead hellhound's chest. It jerked its head back with the long, ugly ridges of its throat now stretched out and exposed.

She emptied the magazine into the nastily prominent larynx just above the center mass of its chest.

Its head, nearly decapitated, plunged violently against its chest as it tumbled over her.

The second hellhound overshot her position, wrongly anticipating that she would flee backward.

It stumbled over its dead companion's corpse when it twisted around to get to her.

As she grabbed for a second magazine to take advantage of the vulnerable second hound, Tasìa's hand began to feel like it was on fire. She dangled it up before her eyes to better view it.

It appeared like an old crone witch's gray claw. It twitched, uncontrollably.

Ah, shit.

Tasìa rolled into the room before the hellhound could regain its footing. She shut the door behind her.

"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!"

Hot pain shot up into the hand. As the hand throbbed in agony, to her relief, at least it now appeared normal once more.

She twitched her nose. It smelled like gunpowder in the confined space of the room. Tasìa looked around. Near her was a workbench with a clutter of tools along its edge.

On the far end, a reloading station sat with stacks of empty shells and rounds lined neatly on a bottom shelf.

Out in the corridor, the hellhound threw its body against the door. The sound pounded in hard reverberation inside the shop room.

"Son of a bitch," someone with a raspy ghoul's voice yelled from down the corridor. "They are loose!"

Several shots from a semi-automatic rifle echoed loud through the air. Rounds in ricochet scraped against the wall.

Tasìa grimaced. She could tell from the sounds that the shooter's hands had trembled.

Sweet Virgin, man. Missing is not an option.

The hellhound responded in a menacing growl before it took off down the corridor. In seconds the sound of the ghoul being slaughtered caused Tasìa to wince as the devastating noise continued on.

By the workbench, a ten-gauge shotgun stood upright in a grounded hold. Pretty and sleek, the maple wood body and chrome-moly steel barrel stood, but the gun was hollowed out.

Her heart fainted in disappointment when she saw the trigger assembly and fire mechanism had been disassembled.

Tasìa glanced over to Alex who lay tucked under a desk. He breathed slow and steadily.

"Tasìa? You're alive."

The words chirped high pitched and staccato from Alex's throat. He sounded as if he was amazed at the fact.

Clenching the vial in her hand, Tasìa acknowledged his words while popping open the top. She took out a gauze and wetted it with the liquid acid.

She had to estimate the concentration level. It had not been properly labeled.

No matter, Tasìa thought as she placed the gauze on her tongue and started chewing. A normal human body possessed a high tolerance for the substance.

From experience, she knew hers certainly did.

The hellhound scratched rapidly at the door. The sound was like a set of train wheels locking up on a track.

Something odd was happening to the light in the room. It flickered from a deep azure tone to a golden hew, and then back again.

She realized immediately that it was not the lights in the room that flickered. The effect was in her eyes and mind.

It was the kind of sensory experience she would have expected from the acid, but there had not been enough time for it to have taken effect just yet.

Tasìa looked over to Alex, questioningly.

"The flicker in my lips. It is every second now, yes?"

Alex nodded slowly as he spoke.

"I didn't want to say anything to alarm you as the LSD should eventually take care of the problem, but a third eye is forming in the middle of your forehead."

Tasìa wrapped her knees in the fold of her elbows.

She giggled.

"Well, ain't that some fucked-up shit?"

Alex coughed into the palm of his hand and he then examined the phlegm.

He responded.

"You are taking this all in remarkably well. I was and to be honest am suicidal at all of this"

His free hand rolled in emphasis over his body.

"I'm too emotionally exhausted to be heavily invested in whatever this is that is happening to me," Tasìa answered with a shrug. She switched gears. "Alex? That is short for Alejandro, right?"

"Actually, no. Alexander. My mother is a British subject by way of Grenada. My mother. She is my heroine and my inspiration. She served in over a dozen hot zones as a surgeon for Médecins Sans Frontières before she retired."

Tasìa rested her head against a bench. The hellhound had disappeared down the corridor. She needed to take a moment to enjoy the silence.

"Damn," she whispered. "No more noble calling than that."

Then, a moment of gnosis interrupted the sought for peace. It felt like the pressure of something liquid was oozing out of her forehead.

The headache intensified before it turned into something quite different from pain. Something like symphonic music with many parts operating in parallel.

However, it was not sound. It was information. Guided in its function by tens of thousands of nanospores.

Tasìa lifted her fingers above her brows and gently felt around. The third eye was there.

"The third eye, Alex. I can feel its internal workings."

She could see beyond the room. The slaughtered ghoul, Alex's trail of blood. She followed the trickles of blood into a stairwell whose walls were of bricks shaded in the oddest of glimmering molded greens.

She could hear a moaning noise.

"What do you see," Alex asked.

"It feels almost like magic. The nanospores read me into their sensors and read it out into an intelligible sensorium."

Someone down the stairway cried and wailed. She followed the trail further down into a dusky chambered hall.

Geminetta and Geminiäs stood over someone wearing a silvery robe. It appeared to be an oddly filigree-filled medieval lab coat.

The two Black Eyed Ones spoke so slowly as to be almost unintelligible to her impaired perception.

"What could you say, Maestre Rubinne, that would justify sparing your life," they asked in unison.

The man appeared gravely wounded. The hellhounds had torn into him.

His words croaked, pained, and winced from his lungs.

"You have to understand what you are. You are unique in human history, with you, we have created nothing short of essence; an essence of spirit, itself!"

The vision shifted. A vision now engulfed her mind made of a madness, rabid and evil. It veered and careened forward like an object in infrared overheated in a monochrome of deep and even deeper scarlets. Its motion sped through the corridor at an inhuman pace.

The hellhound was returning.

Tasìa felt her third eye collapse. She lunged up on her feet with the stiletto blade in her hand.

When the hellhound burst through the matted window he lunged directly towards her.

A mercurial heat ruptured throughout Tasìa's body. The adrenaline found her.