SHE WOKE AGAIN SOMETIME LATER.
She felt…funny. She felt weak, yes, but she wasn’t sore. She remembered vividly waking up in the hospital after the last time she’d been attacked, feeling the IV lines, the smell of the sheets, the little sounds of the hospital wing. But it was much darker here.
She tried to move her hand and found that she could. She patted herself, and realized she was a terrible mess. And there was someone in this dark place with her. Someone else who wasn’t breathing.
Someone else…who wasn’t breathing.
She opened her mouth to scream.
“Don’t, darling.”
Sean.
“We’re…I’m…”
“It was the only way to save your life.”
“I remember now.” She began shivering all over, and Sean’s arms surrounded her. He kissed her on the forehead, then on the mouth. She could feel his touch as she’d never felt anyone’s touch before. She could feel the texture of his skin, hear the minute sound of the cloth moving over his body. The smell of him was a sharp arousal. When his mouth fell on hers, she was ready.
“Turn on your side, angel,” Sean said raggedly, and she maneuvered to face him. Together, they worked down her panty hose, and then he was in her, and she made a noise of sheer pleasure. Nothing had ever felt so good. He was rougher with her, and she knew it was because she was as he was, now, and his strength would not hurt her. Her climax was shattering in its intensity. When it was over, she felt curiously exhausted. She was, she discovered, very hungry.
She said, “When can we get out?”
“They’ll come lift the lid soon,” he said. “I could do it myself, but I’m afraid I’d push it off too hard and break it. We don’t want anyone to know we were here.”
In a few minutes, she heard the scrape of the heavy lid being moved to one side, and a dim light showed her Rick and Phil standing above them, holding the heavy stone lid at each end.
Other hands reached down, and Julie and Thompson helped them out of the sarcophagus.
“How is it?” Julie asked shyly, when she and Rue were alone in the women’s bathroom. The men were cleaning up all traces of their occupancy of the sarcophagus, and Rue had decided she just had to wash her face and rinse out her mouth. She might as well have spared the effort, she decided, evaluating her image in the mirror—delighted she could see herself, despite the old myth. Her clothes were torn, bloody and crumpled. At least Julie had kindly loaned her a brush.
“Being this way?”
Julie nodded. “Is it really that different?”
“Oh, yes,” Rue said. In fact, it was a little hard to concentrate, with Julie’s heart beating so near her. This was going to take some coping; she needed a bottle of TrueBlood, and she needed it badly.
“The police want to talk to you,” Julie said. “A detective named Wallingford.”
“Lead me to him,” Rue said. “But I’d better have a drink first.”
It wasn’t often a murder victim got to accuse her attacker in person. Rue’s arrival at the police station in her bloodstained dress was a sensation. Despite his broken arm, Carver Hutton IV was paraded in the next room in a lineup, with stand-ins bandaged to match him, and she enjoyed picking him from the group.
Then Sean did the same.
Then Mustafa.
Then Abilene.
Three vampires and a human sex performer were not the kind of witnesses the police relished, but several museum patrons had seen the attack clearly, among them Rue’s old dance partner, John Jaslow.
“There’ll be a trial, of course,” Detective Wallingford told her. He was a dour man in his forties, who looked as though he’d never laughed. “But with his past history with you, and his fingerprints on the knife, and all the eyewitness testimony, we shouldn’t have too much trouble getting a conviction. We’re not in his daddy’s backyard this time.”
“I had to die to get justice,” she said. There was a moment of silence in the room.
Julie said. “We’ll go over to my place so you two can shower, and then we can go dancing. It’s a new life, Rue!”
She took Sean’s hand. “Layla,” she said gently. “My name is Layla.”
HER BEST ENEMY
Maggie Shayne
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE TIME IT TOOK Kiley Brigham to submerge her head, rinse out the shampoo and sit up again, the temperature in the bathroom had plummeted from “steamy sauna” to somewhere around “clutch your arms and shiver.” Sitting up straighter, with rivulets fleeing her skin for warmer climes, Kiley frowned. Her skin sprouted goose bumps. She muttered, “Well, what the hell is this?” and then frowned harder because she could see her breath when she spoke.
Had late Halloween week in Burnt Hills, New York, turned suddenly bitterly cold? There hadn’t been any warning on the weather report. And even if there had been a sudden cold snap, the furnace would have kicked on. According to the overall-wearing, toolbox-carrying guy she’d hired to inspect the hundred-year-old house before agreeing to buy it, the heating system was in great shape. True, she hadn’t run it much in the three days since she’d moved into her dream house, just once or twice during the late October nights when the mercury dipped outside. But it had been working fine.
She tilted her head, listening for the telltale rattle of hot water being forced through aging radiators, but she heard nothing. The furnace wasn’t running.
Sighing, she rose from the water, stepped over the side of the tub onto the plush powder-blue bath mat and reached for the matching towel. Her new shell-pink-and-white ceramic tiles might look great, but they definitely added to the chill, she decided, peering at the completely fogged-up mirror and then scurrying quickly through the door and into her bedroom for the biggest, warmest robe she could find.
As soon as she stepped into the bedroom, the chill was gone. She stood there wondering what the hell to make of that. Leaning back through the bathroom door, she felt that iciness hanging in the air. It was like stepping into a meat cooler, she thought. Leaning back out into the bedroom, she felt the same cozy warmth she always felt there.
Kiley shrugged, pulled the bathroom door closed and battled a delayed-reaction shiver. She closed her eyes briefly, just to tamp down the notion that the shiver was caused by something beyond the temperature, then turned to face her bedroom with its hardwood wainscoting so dark it looked like ebony, its crown molding the same, its freshly applied antique ivory paint in between. Her bedroom suite came close to matching: deep black cherry wood that bore the barest hint of bloodred. The bedding and curtains in the tall, narrow windows were the color of French cream, as were the throw rugs on the dark hardwood floor. Ebony and ivory had been her notion for this room, and it worked.
“I love my new house,” she said aloud, even as she sent a troubled glance back toward the bathroom. “And I’m going to stop looking for deep, dark secrets to explain the bargain-basement asking price. So my bathroom has a draft. So what?”
Nodding in resolve, she moved to the closet, opened the door, then paused, staring. One of the dresses was moving, just slightly, the hanger rocking back and forth mere millimeters, as if someone had jostled it.
Only, no one had.
She could have kicked herself for the little shiver that ran up her spine. She didn’t even believe in the sorts of things that were whispering through her brain right now. And had been ever since she’d moved in.
I jerked open the door, it caused a breeze, the dress moved a little. Big deal.
In spite of her internal scolding, her eyes felt wider than she would have liked as she perused the closet’s interior. Her handyman-slash-house-inspector had asked if she’d like a light installed in there. She’d said no. Now she was thinking about calling him tomorrow morning to change her answer. Meanwhile, she spotted her robe and snatched it off its hanger with the speed of a cobra snatching a fieldmouse. She back-stepped, slammed the closet door, and felt her heart start to pound in her chest.
&nbs
p; B-r-e-a-t-h-e, she thought. And then she did, a long, deep, slow inhalation that filled her lungs to bursting, a brief delay while she counted to four, and a thorough, cleansing exhalation that emptied her lungs entirely. She repeated it several times, got a grip on herself and then felt stupid.
She did not believe in closet-dwelling bogeymen. Hell, she’d made her career debunking nonsense like that. More precisely, putting phony psychics, gurus and ghost busters out of business in this spooky little tourist town. And no one liked it. Not the town supervisor, the town council, the tourism bureau, and least of all, the phony psychics, gurus and ghost busters.
But thanks to the Constitution, freedom of the press couldn’t be banned on the grounds that it was bad for tourism.
She pulled her bathrobe on, relishing the feel of plush fabric on her skin, and then drew a breath of courage and turned to face the bathroom again. Her hairbrush was in there, along with her skin lotions, cuticle trimmer and toothbrush. And she still had to tug the plug and let the water run out of the bathtub. She was going back in. A cold draft was nothing to be afraid of.
Crossing the room, one foot in front of the other, she moved firmly to the door, closed her hand on its oval, antique porcelain doorknob, and opened it. The air that greeted her was no longer icy. In fact it was as warm as the air in the bedroom.
She sighed in relief as she stepped into the room. But her relief died and the chill returned to her soul when she saw the mirror, no longer coated in fog, but something else. Something far, far worse.
Written across the damp glass surface, in something scarlet that trickled in streams from the bottom of each letter, were the words “House of Death.”
Someone screamed. It wasn’t until she was down the stairs, out the door and about fifteen yards up the heaving, cracked sidewalk, that Kiley realized the scream had been her own.
She stood there in the dead of night, barefoot, clutching her robe against the whipping October wind and staring back at her dream house with its turrets and gables and its widow’s walk at the top. Such a beautiful place, old and solid. And framed right now by the scarlet and shimmering yellow of the sugar maples and poplar trees at the peak of their fall color.
Swallowing hard, she lowered her gaze, focusing on her car in the driveway beside the house. Leaping Lana was an ’87 Buick Regal—a four-door sedan in rust-brown that ate gas like M&Ms and sounded like a tank.
Kiley squared her shoulders and forced herself to march over there—even though it meant moving toward her house when every cell in her body was itching to move away from it instead. She opened Lana’s door and climbed in. She couldn’t quite keep herself from checking the back seat first, the second the interior light came on. It was clear. The keys were in the switch, because if someone was brave enough to steal Kiley Brigham’s car, she’d always thought she would enjoy the vengeance she’d be forced to wreak on their pathetic asses, and besides, who would steal an ’87 Buick, anyway?
She turned the key. Lana growled in protest at being bothered at such an ungodly hour, but finally came around and cooperatively backed her boat-size backside out into the street. As Kiley shifted into Drive, she glanced up at her house again.
There was someone standing in her bedroom window looking back at her.
And then there wasn’t. She squinted, rubbed her eyes. The image hadn’t moved, hadn’t turned away. The dark silhouette she knew she had seen simply vanished. Faded. Like mist.
“Fuck this,” she muttered, and she stomped on Lana’s pedal and didn’t let off until they’d reached the offices of the Burnt Hills Gazette, and her own office there, which held three things Kiley dearly needed just then: a change of clothes, a telephone and a spare pack of smokes.
SHE WAS SO TOGETHER BY THE time the police arrived that they actually seemed skeptical. At least until they headed back to her recently acquired house and saw the message on the mirror for themselves. Kiley preferred to stay out in the bedroom—and even that gave her the creeps—while the cops clustered around her bathroom sink debating whether the substance on her mirror was blood. One opined that it looked like barbecue sauce, and another said it was cherry syrup. At that point the conversation turned to previous cases where what was thought to be blood turned out to be something else entirely, like corn syrup with red food coloring added—a tale that the officers found laugh-worthy.
She interrupted their fun by standing as close to her bathroom door as she wanted to get, and clearing her throat. The laughter stopped, the cops looked up.
“Excuse me, but shouldn’t one of you be taking a sample of that? And maybe checking my house for signs of forced entry?”
“Did that, ma’am,” one cop said, sending a long-suffering look toward another. “No signs of a break-in. You sure the place was locked?”
“Of course I’m sure the place was…” She stopped, pursed her lips, thought it over with brutal honesty. “Actually, I forget to lock up as often as I remember.”
“Mmm-hmm. Well, at least you’re aware this was the work of an intruder.”
She frowned at him. “Well, of course it was an intruder. What else could it have been?”
“You know how folks get around here. Half the time we get a call like this, the homeowner insists some kind of ghost was responsible.”
“Especially at this time of year,” another cop said, and they all nodded or shook their heads or rolled their eyes with “isn’t that ridiculous” looks at one another.
“Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” she managed to say, rubbing her arms against the chill that came from within. “As to how the intruder got in, I’m not even sure it’s all that important. The fact is that he did get in. And I know that because I saw him.”
“You saw him? Excellent.” Cop number one—his name tag read Hanlon—pulled out a notepad and pen. “Okay, where and when did you see the intruder?”
“He was standing right there, in that window, looking down at me when I backed the car out.”
“So you didn’t see anyone while you were inside. Only after you’d left?”
“Right.”
“And can you describe him?”
She licked her lips, recalling the misty silhouette behind the veil of her curtains. “Uh, no.”
“But you’re sure it was a male,” Hanlon said.
She narrowed her eyes and searched her memory. “No. No, I can’t even be sure of that much. It was dark. It was just a shadow, a dark silhouette in the window.” She sighed in frustration. “Has there been a rash of break-ins that I should know about, anything like this at all?” she asked, almost hoping the answer would be yes.
Hanlon shook his head. “We’ve got hardly any crime around here, Ms. Brigham. Little enough so you’d be reading about it if there had been anything like that.”
She nodded. “We’re so hungry for stories we’ve been covering the missing prostitutes from Albany.”
“You work for the press?” he asked.
“Yeah. Burnt Hills Gazette.” More people came in. Suits, instead of uniforms. They carried cases and headed for her bathroom. She watched them, her gaze unfocused. One swabbed a sample of the stuff from the mirror, dropped it into a vial and capped it. Another snapped photos. A third started coating her pretty shell-pink-and-white bathroom in what looked like fireplace soot in search of fingerprints.
The guy with the swabs took out an aerosol can of something—the label read Luminol—and sprayed it at the mirror, then he turned off the lights.
Kiley sucked in a breath when the grisly message glowed in the darkness.
“It’s blood, all right,” the guy said, flipping the light back on.
Officer Hanlon moved up beside Kiley and put a hand on her shoulder, as if he thought she might be close to losing it. “We’d probably better start thinking about who your enemies are, Ms. Brigham.”
She swallowed hard. “It would be easier to tell you who they aren’t, and it would make a far shorter list.”
The cop frowned. Another
one nodded, coming out of the bathroom. “That’s probably true.”
Hanlon sent him a questioning look and he went on. “Don’t you recognize the name? She’s the chick who writes those columns discrediting all the mumbo-jumbo types in town.”
“Aah, right. Kiley Brigham. It didn’t click at first.” Hanlon eyed her. “Is this the first death threat you’ve received, Ms. Brigham?”
“You think that’s what it is? A threat?”
He shrugged. “Reads that way to me.”
Kiley sighed. “Yeah, it would be my first.”
“Wow.” His brows arched high, as if he were surprised she didn’t get threatened on a daily basis.
“Look, I’m not a demon here. I don’t eat babies or kick puppies. I just tell the truth.” She shrugged. “Can I help it if that makes the liars of the world angry?”
“Can you think of anyone in particular who could have taken their anger this far?”
“Yeah, I can think of several. Most of them hold public office, though.”
Hanlon looked alarmed by that. “I hope you’re kidding.”
“Maybe. Half. So what should I do?”
“Get yourself a security system,” the officer said. “Something that’s not going to let you get away with forgetting to lock up. In the meantime, is there someone who could stay with you tonight? A friend, relative, something like that?”
The question made her stomach ache, though she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she gave a damn that she didn’t have any friends or family, that she was, in fact, utterly alone in the world. She could care less. Hell, if friends were what she wanted, she’d be out making them, instead of pissing off as many people as possible on a weekly basis. Screw friends.
“Ma’am?”
She shrugged. “I’ll spend the night at my office. There’s security there. Tomorrow I’ll see about that system. Thanks for coming out.”
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