<strong>Piledriver Lane</strong><br/><br/>"The best thing you can do right now is to stay calm, find a place where you'll be safe and don't put yourself in immediate danger," the woman replied, rambling through the list of reassurances that she'd long since memorized without any warmth or human emotion.  "I'll have an ambulance and the police down there as soon as possible, likely within the next thirty to forty minutes."<br/><br/>The chanting picked up audibly the moment that the doorknob was turned, followed sharply by the stink of blood.  It was easy to see why the man Greg had been so horribly stained; there was little area that one could move in this room without being covered.  A young woman lay naked upon a table, her neck and wrists slashed open by some sort of talons.  Crudely slanting the table was supposed to pool the flowing gore down into a cauldron, but so much of it just seemed to have sprayed everywhere.  Now, though, it had fallen to a mere trickle, the woman so weakened and drained that she barely had the strength to breathe.  No restraints were visible, but in her wounded state, none were likely needed.  It was hard to tell if she was even aware of her surroundings, though her eyes were open, and her chest gently rose and fell.<br/><br/>At the bottom of the table, by the cauldron was another young man who was chanting in some foreign language, the same sentence over and over.  Wisps of dark smoke were coiling out from the giant pot, blackening the blood to a crispy ebon as it went, and he just kept breathing it in.  Yet the moment Lorraine saw him and looked into his eyes, it was preternaturally clear that he didn't want to do any of this, that Greg was somehow forcing him.  The more that he breathed in the wretched, coiling fumes, the more that his skin seemed to twitch, broiling beneath just as Greg's had been doing.