The thing left behind wasn’t sex. It was fear of sex. It was repression and ignorance and unfulfilled lust.

It was as if some drunken CGI -artist had taken a cruel and crude caricature on a junior-high school bathroom wall and rendered it in 3D.

It was a slathering vagina on crooked, goatlike legs. A bearded vagina dentata full of steel teeth that gnashed and spun, sometimes sparking against each other with such force that several would fly out and land on the street, to be replaced by two or three that grew in from behind. The thing was bent back almost 90° at the hip, thrusting the pelvis forward; the torso appeared to have been sawed off – torn and gangrenous entrails hung like matted hair and dripped scalding vitriol onto the street.

“I really did not need to see that,” Alec said, appearing from a mist rising out of a grate.

Wincing, Simon shifted. Pain stabbed up and down his twisted leg when he moved. He pulled the Five Sword Banishing Pentacle from his pocket and began whispering in Latin.