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Dillon stood up, wobbly, weak, and deeply unhappy

“Nasty little punk, stinking up the place!” Tattoo said

This, Dillon thought, was really not fair: the place already reeked of puke and piss and worse There was a man passed out facedown on the bench, a brown stain in his trousers

Tattoo swaggered over, grabbed Dillon’s T-shirt, and kicked hi painfully on the concrete “Clean that up, boy!”

What? What? How had this happened? Hoas he here, on his knees? Part of hier and had friends But part of him, despite the alcohol-fueled misery in his brain, simply could not shut up

“Can I use that mop on your head?”

First rule of stand-up coet the upper hand

Tattoo, whose liuably, re

se a row of overly bright, cheap false teeth “Well, I guess I get to hand outof the day!”

Dillon closed his eyes and focused and alover faded, and subtle but utterly ian to transfor, or ass-kissing?”

This earned him a hard kick meant for his sto his hand into his own puddle of puke Bad But on the other hand, his hangover pain was fast receding

A relief, but not the point, really The point was that Dillon Poe was changing Physically The change was subtle at first and mostly visible in his eyes, which had shifted froold color His pupils narrowed and forated diamond-shaped slits His hair seeed at the back and tapered to a version of his own face rendered in the green of a new spring leaf

Dillon knew about the physical change, or at least thought he did He’d caught a terrifying gli a reptilian version of his face visible past the bottles of booze

But he had also begun to guess that there was so about this snakelike version of hi, the few people whose reactions he’d been able to gauge see They stared, but not in horror Even his fellow denizens of the drunk tank did not recoil in fear or disgust, but turned fascinated, enthralled faces to him

Dillon was not in a happy or generous fra hie with er and tougher than he—well, aside fro tourist in the chinos and canary-yellow polo shirt But it didn’t matter, because Dillon Poe—this hypnotic, serpentine version of Dillon Poe—waswith Tattoo