When she started toward him, Joe saw the fiend within. Dulcie became semitransparent, as if made of milky glass. Fixed to her brain stem, the parasite hung like a fat inky-black poor broken body on the floor leech, a leech with a long, thin tail spiraling down through her spine. When he saw it, he knew its history, which was broadcast to him in a condensed psychic flash. The thing had passed through millennia, across uncounted universes, a cruel rider of humanity and of other species, feeding on the anguish of those it enslaved and on the violence of the others whom it poisoned and used to
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