Alright, Mr. Winters continued, mercifully breaking the silence. What about you, young lady? What's your name. Karen Larkin, sir. Please, call me Stev...en. Okay, Steven, I said softly, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. So let me ask you something. And please be completely honest because I've been around long enough to already know the answer. Okay, go ahead, I replied. Why are you here tonight? Robert immediately tried to interject but Steven stopped him and said, I was asking the lady,. The council had originally planned to castrate them magically, turning theminto living Ken dolls, but when they heard my plan they voted to go withit. It was much more blatant, but much more punishing.Two weeks later I got together with a group of sorceresses who were likeme, men who had been too powerful to be inducted in to the male order, sowere transformed into women in order to be absorbed into the WhiteSisterhood. I did this for two reasons. One, these ex-men tended to beamongst the. ."A harem? I'd never really thought about 'The Girls' being Gary's harem. It did kind of fit, sort of. But it sort of didn't."It's not really a harem," I told her. "Like, harem women are all kept locked up, aren't they? With, what do you call those guys – eunuchs – guarding them. And they aren't allowed to do anything except wait for the master to call for them. It isn't like that with Gary. We can do whatever we want, and we don't have to sleep with Gary if we don't want to. And, like, Joanne. Kayla didn't see it that way. Time was a simply a formality and nothing more. Soon, it wouldn't matter to her at all. Hours, days, weeks, months, years didn't matter when you had a limitless supply of them.Angel ran. She always ran. Away. From people, from her pain, and from her past, but, she never fast enough, never far enough. And it always caught up with her. She stood at the highest point of the bluffs on a narrow cleft of bleak gray shale, overlooking a pale, icy, winter-white landscape.