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heart was heavy for it. But wolves must be wolves—even
those who would rather be artists.
It had been too long since I had the opportunity to put on
my dreams. It was like slipping into a brook at the height
of summer, renewing and cool. I was pleased to see that the
collective dream was still in place, still populated by the
players of the Shepherd’s game. The dream was an almost
seamless whole now, having coagulated from time and
persistence and many, many deaths. I wandered careworn
and filthy warrens, urban hidey holes, attics heaped with old
bones, and extravagant murder chambers fit for mad kings. I
sensed many eyes upon me, peering out from secret killing
places. I wondered if any of them belonged to a certain
pumpkin-faced killer.
Although the dream had been designed for the Shepherd’s
hungry flock, it had clearly attracted the dreams of other
killers, who for whatever reason had not been invited to play.
I watched the pitchy waters of an ancient lake retreat behind
a toothsome shoreline, where were stacked the blazing forms
of countless dead—all of which had briefly come to know
the wicked hands of the killer known only as Pyre.
I even made the mistake of stumbling into a very singular
dream filled with dying screams and frenetic, pain-inducing
machines, all of them housed within a gigantic inhabitable
torture chamber—or Tortuary, to those familiar with the
legend of Agatha Pain. I saw her staring back at me from the
blackened dream. Her wickedly hooked and bladed armor,
her steel gloves bristling like a thicket of knives—she was
a true vision. She was indeed a Wolf in the Shepherd’s
Game. In fact, her dream was a dismal recollection of what
she had done to the last Wolf on her list. He was bound and
lowered into a glass tank of slow-acting acid, naked but for
an oxygen mask and goggles. She looked on as her victim
felt himself slowly dissolve into an opaque broth, her smile
as sharp as any worn by my sisters. When she discovered
me looking on, her hungry smile lowered to a grin. She only
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