* * *

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.”

* * * * *

The Devil’s Footprints

by Amanda Stevens

PROLOGUE

The legend

On the night of January 10, 1922, a full moon rose over the frozen countryside near Adamant, Arkansas, a tiny community five miles north of the Louisiana state line. The pale light glinted on freshly fallen snow and spotlighted the oil derrick recently constructed in Thomas Duncan’s barren cotton fields.

Despite the gusher that had been discovered on his property a few months after the Busey Number One had come in near El Dorado, Thomas refused to move to more comfortable accommodations in town, preferring instead to remain on the family farm he’d inherited from his father nearly half a century earlier.

Thomas liked being in the country. His nearest neighbor was nearly two miles away and he did sometimes get lonely, but the farm made him feel closer to his wife, Mary, who had passed away five years ago. She’d been laid to rest beneath a stand of cottonwoods on a hillock overlooking the river, and Thomas had tied bells in the branches so she would have music whenever a breeze stirred.

All day long, the chime of the bells had been lost in the icy howl of an Arctic cold front that roared down from the northeast. The gusts had finally abated in the late afternoon, but the weather was still bitter, even for January, and a snowfall—the first Thomas could remember in over a decade—blanketed his yard and fields in a wintry mantel. He watched the swirl of flakes from his front room window until dusk. Inexplicably uneasy, he fixed an early supper and went up to bed.

Something awakened him around midnight. The snow brought a preternatural quiet to the countryside, the silence so profound that Thomas could easily discern the pump out in the field as it siphoned oil from deep within the earth. Early on, the mechanical rhythm had kept him awake until all hours, but he was used to it now and that wasn’t what had disturbed his rest.

Still half-asleep, he thought at first he’d heard a gunshot and he wondered if someone was out tracking a deer. Then he worried there might have been an explosion at the well; he got up to glance out the window where the wooden derrick rose like an inky shadow from the pristine layer of snow.

As he crawled back under the warm covers, he heard the sound again, a loud, steady clank, like something being dropped against the tin roof of his house.

Or like heavy footsteps.

The hair at the back of Thomas’s neck lifted as a terrible dread gripped him. He scrambled out of bed, pulled on his clothes and grabbed a shotgun and coat on his way outside.

Using a side door to avoid the slippery porch, he trudged around to the front of the house where he had a better view of the roof.

The moon was bright on the snow, a luminous glow that turned nighttime into a subdued twilight, and the air was pure and so cold that his nostrils stung when he breathed. He turned, looked up and what he saw chilled him to the bone. Cloven footprints started at the edge of the roof, moved in a straight line up the sloping tin and disappeared over the peak.

Slowly, Thomas turned in a circle, his gaze encompassing the yard, the barn, the cotton fields and finally returning to his house and then up the porch steps right to his front door. He saw now what he had not noticed before. The footprints were everywhere. He’d never seen anything like them. He’d lived in the country all his life and he knew the tracks hadn’t been made by a four-legged animal, but by something that walked upright. And the stride was long and at least twice as wide as the footprints Thomas had left in the snow.

A terrible premonition settled over him. The farmhouse had been his home since he was a boy, and on Sunday mornings when his neighbors headed into town for church services, he had instead walked the fields alone. The peace he found there was deep and profound, the clean silence of the freshly plowed earth more suited to his idea of prayer and reflection. But now, as he stood in his own front yard, Thomas Duncan had the sense that a part of his heritage had been desecrated.

An urgency he couldn’t explain prodded him, and he rushed back to the house, avoiding the prints on the steps and across the frozen porch as he flung open the front door. His heart hammered against his chest as he stepped inside, expecting to see melting tracks on the plank flooring. The only snow, however, was from his own boots.

Quickly he bolted the door and strode down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. As he opened the back door, his gaze dropped. The prints started at the threshold and continued down the steps and across the yard to the open field, as if something had come in the front door, passed through the house without leaving a mark, and let itself out the back way.

More afraid than he’d ever been in his life, Thomas moved back inside and clicked the thumb-lock on the door. He shoved a chair under the knob and sat down at the table, shotgun across his knees, to wait for daylight.

By morning, word of the footprints had spread throughout the town, and with it, speculation as to their source. One of Thomas’s neighbors followed the tracks right up to the edge of the river where they continued in the same straight line on the other side.

For several nights after that, some of the men sat up with Thomas, waiting to see if the strange phenomenon reoccurred. When nothing happened, the community began to breathe a little easier—until a local preacher sermonized that the drillers, in their quest to strike it rich, had somehow punched a hole straight down to hell, unleashing the devil himself to run unbridled across the countryside.

The cloven footprints vanished with the melting snow and were eventually forgotten in the tiny Arkansas community.

Then seven decades later, they reappeared near the mutilated body of sixteen-year-old Rachel DeLaune.

Chapter 1

She had no idea he was there.

Seated on the porch steps of the old Duncan farmhouse, the girl remained blissfully unaware of his vigil. If she had turned she would have seen him, but she didn’t turn. Instead, she pulled her jacket more tightly around her slight body, as if stricken by a sudden chill.

In the distance, the ancient bells up in the cottonwoods tinkled in the shifting twilight. Ghost music, he thought. A serenade for the dead.

He listened for a moment, eyes closed, anticipation strumming the nerve endings along his spine. Then he crept a few steps closer.

And still she heard nothing.

Not surprising. He’d learned a long time ago the importance of a silent approach. No squeaking shoes. No snapping twigs. Not even an exhaled breath. He moved like a shadow, like a stealthy predator bearing down with eagle-eyed precision on his prey.

Her head suddenly lifted, as if yanked by the invisible bond that connected them, and he froze, heart hammering, until the danger passed.

She settled back to her daydreaming as her dog played nearby in the tall grass. Her back was to him; he longed to call out her name, make her turn so he could glimpse her face, stare deeply into those dark, dark eyes.

A shiver coursed through him. He wanted that contact more than anything in the world, but it couldn’t be today. It would be night soon, and the longer he stayed out, the harder it became to control his natural urges. The demons driving him sometimes made him careless and greedy and all too willing to risk everything he needed to keep hidden.

But for her, it might be worth it.

Outwardly, she looked like a normal girl. Straight dark hair with a fringe of bangs across her forehead. Pale skin. Deep brown eyes. Nothing at all extraordinary about her appearance.

On the inside, though, where it counted the most, Sarah DeLaune was anything but normal.

She was young, only thirteen, so he had to be very careful with her. He was older, wiser and—in some ways—worldlier, although he could shed his dreary veneer as easily as peeling away the Goth persona he’d adopted. Unlike normal-looking Sarah, he had embraced the trappings of darkness, because without the black clothes and heavy makeup, he became someone else.

“Gabriel, you leave that squirrel alone. You hear me?” she scolded her dog. “Don’t make me cut a switch!”

He smiled at the idle threat. Sarah would never harm a hair on that mutt’s head. Until now, Gabriel had been her only companion. Until now.

The dog trotted over to the steps, and Sarah cupped his homely face in her hands, scratched behind his shapeless ears. Gabriel started to flop at her feet worshiping her, but a change of wind brought a new scent, a new excitement, and the dog whirled, his keen eyes searching the shadows at the corner of the house.

He started to step back out of sight, but it was too late. He’d gotten careless and now he’d been spotted.

As Gabriel bounded toward him, he reached into his pocket and snagged one of the treats he kept in a plastic bag. He’d learned early on that Sarah’s dog had a weakness for bacon.