Blood Red

She did not see him. She had eyes only for one man, one purpose at the moment.

She hissed the name like a curse and moved away from the charnel house she’d created. “Tom . . .”

She was perfect, a creature of pure instinct. He guided her, letting her see what she could do with simple mental pushes. Maggie took four steps forward, from a run to a walk, and lifted into the night air. She was gone in moments, leaving Soulis behind in the shadows. He worked quickly, gathering the bodies and moving them to a safe spot.

Chapter 16

I

Brian Freemont paced around his house like a caged animal. He could leave, he could go anywhere he wanted to inside the town limits, but he wasn’t exactly sure that he was willing to risk it.

There were too many things in the woods. He didn’t want to run across any of them.

He looked around his house and shivered. Those pricks, Boyd and Holdstedter, had laughed when they found him. They’d looked down and laughed while he was crying. That was after they got done looking disgusted.

He didn’t get it. He’d made a very small mistake, okay, he could see them being pissed off about the whole drawing his gun thing. He would have been, too, but they were still all cops and he was still one of them.

They wouldn’t have treated anyone else that way, like a common criminal.

Then again, not everyone was under suspicion for murder.

No, that can’t be right. If they had any real evidence they’d have already booked him, and the chance of him getting out on bail for murder was none around these parts. There might be some places where it happened, but Black Stone Bay was not one of them.

So it was all just them being pricks.

He hated Boyd and Holdstedter with all the passion of an infant getting hurt for the first time. The pain came more from the sense of betrayal than from the actual deed.

All that, and the nightmares he’d been having every time he tried to sleep, was making him positively cranky.

The nightmares; he shivered just thinking about them. They were a repeat of what had happened in the woods, but worse, because he saw what was after him.

In the darkness, when he was all alone, they came from everywhere. They were young, mostly, the women he’d taken advantage of, the ones he’d forced to have sex with him. And they were always beautiful or at least cute. He had his standards, after all.

But when they came back for him in the darkness, they were less than lovely. Moving like nothing human could move, crawling along the trees and slithering through long grass in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. They looked human enough, but their eyes were rolled back in their heads and the whites glowed with a silvery light. Their faces were pale and dead and almost completely incapable of expression, but he could still sense their hunger.

The dream always ended with them crawling toward him and touching his body while he was frozen and unable to help himself. Oh, he’d beg, he’d cry and whine and ask for mercy a hundred times. They didn’t care, didn’t react, save to flash lascivious grins and lick their lips with cold, dead tongues.

They would open their mouths to feed, and he would wake up, his heart ready to explode inside his chest and his breaths coming in ragged gasps.

It wasn’t once or twice. It was every fucking time he closed his eyes. The thought wouldn’t leave him alone.

He’d never seen what was coming for him in the woods. Boyd and Holdstedter had come back before they ever came into view clearly enough for him to see them.

He was grateful for that at least; he still would have loved to watch the two men suffer. He’d seen pictures of Danny’s sister. She looked like a supermodel. He smiled at the thought of ever getting his hands on her. Bet Danny would be pissed. Bet he’d go crazy. Man, I might have to see about finding her address.