Starblood

kitchen, sparkling white-walled place that looked stunningly like an operating theater in some large city hospital. On the table were cuts of meat. They were fresh. They gleamed with beads of blood. Each cut, he saw, was some portion of human anatomy…
    He looked away from that. He did not, at this moment, want to think about the nature of the mind which he had entered, the sort of ugly dreams and visions it contained.
    In the kitchen, he found the pantry door, opened it, went through and carefully went down the cellar steps. The walls here were of natural rock, and odd, dark creatures clung to the wall, staring at him with huge, luminous eyes. He was aware that these creatures knew very little about the house upstairs and that the people up there knew absolutely nothing about the demons below them.
    In the last room of the basement, where dark-winged things cowered from him, he found the power generator of the house, changed the lock upon it with tools he created out of thin air, and forged the only key to that lock…
    The analogue disappeared, and he was in total control of Jon Margle. He looked out through the Brother's eyes at the room in which the man had been sitting. It was a study with thick, green carpeting, oak-paneled walls, bookshelves full of volumes that seemed to have been selected by the most common of literary standards: the color of the bindings and their harmony with the chamber's decor. Margle was seated at a heavy plasti-wood desk, in a tulip-shaped chair on a swivel base. There was no one else in the room.
    Briskly, Ti scanned the man's thoughts and discovered there were three others in the house. Baker, of course. A man named Leopold, from Chicago, was sleeping in a bedroom just down the hall. Timothy was startled to discover, through the captured mind he possessed, that Leopold was Jon Margle's superior. Ti pushed his curiosity about the power structure of the Brethren to the back of his mind and got on with immediate business. The third man was named Siccoli and, like Baker, was a surgically created bodyguard.
    He directed Margle to call Baker into the study. This was accomplished by pressing a stud on the desktop that sent lights flashing throughout the house. On the third burst of color, Baker's footsteps sounded on the stairs. When the giant entered the room, Timothy almost lost control of Margle as his emotions welled up and cracked the shell of his cold psionic intellectualism. He held the anger and hate in check and used Margle to say, "Get Mr. Leopold and Siccoli over here. I have received some orders."
    When Baker left his master's study, unaware that his master now had a master of his own, Timothy rifled Margle's store of knowledge and discovered the location of a nonlethal pin gun in the top left drawer of the desk. He got it out and held it in Margle's lap, under the desk. He waited for almost five minutes before the three men entered, then directed them to sit on the couch facing the desk from the other side of the room.
    "Dammit, I just got to sleep!" Leopold said. He was a brawny man who had begun to let his physique slip and was now entering the first stages of desolation—that desolation of forgetfulness that looks so much worse than the heaviness of a man who was born to be heavy.
    Margle-Timothy raised the narcodart pistol and unloaded a third of a clip of darts at the men across the room. By the time Baker and Siccoli fell, they were halfway across the study, trying to get him. Leopold had only begun to rise, and when half a dozen needles stung his belly, he folded like a collapsible chair. Margle-Timothy directed the barrel of the weapon on his stomach and fired. In a few moments, Jon Margle was asleep.
    He left the quiet house of Margle's mind and returned to his own husk in the basement. Before he did anything else, he had to take care of Polly and make certain she was well out of the way. He drifted over to her and hovered beside her. With invisible fingers of ESP, he reached within her and tenderly exorcised the PBT from her system, restored unhealthy cells to health, leaving her even better than she had been before she had become involved in all of this.
    When she was awake, she was full of questions. He answered only those which he felt like answering, and only for as long as it took him to escort her to a grav-plate car which he found parked before the house. Now that the ESP powers within him had reached maturity, she did not seem so beautiful or so fragile or