Part 2 (1/2)

Then his smile faded.

He was right in front of her face; then he was gone, torn away again by an incredible force that wrenched him cleanly from his feet.

And she was dropped. She fell on the floor hard, striking her head against the stone. She heard the tour guide scream with rage, protest, hurl obscenities at someone named . . .

She saw the stranger again, bending over her. Saw ...

His eyes. Deep, dark eyes. Eyes that burned with the red fire of the torch, with a strange golden touch of flames and moonlight.

Then she felt the pain in her temple deepening. Stone, yes, she had struck the stone, and the world was fading....

The torch she had held still burned on the nearby ground.

She thought that, distantly, she could still hear the sound of screaming.

And she began to fall, fall, into eternal darkness....

Stygian darkness.

Like his eyes, with the fires gone out...

They found her upon the tomb that bore her family name, MacGregor.

She was laid out atop it, stripped, but swathed in white linen.

A shroud.

She was barely aware of her surroundings when she first awoke.

The police were there, and she could hear the sound of a siren. She drifted, then realized that now the siren was being blared by the ambulance that carried her.

She fell in and out of consciousness. She tried to tell the police what had happened; she talked about the tour guide, the tavern, the monster, Sophia de Brus, who had risen from the coffin.

The police believed that she had been under the influence of a narcotic-as the other survivors had been.

Yes, there were other survivors. Several of them. Four had been killed. She, along with five other young people, had been found alive.

Hugh Riley had lived, as had Tom Marlow, Tony Alexander, Ann Thorson, and Marianne Williams. All had been found among the headstones, some naked, some in torn clothing, injured, rattling on in confusion, half maddened, but alive.

She was glad that they had survived, insanely sorry about the others.

See? That's what happens when you're cruel and taunting to a tour guide!

But no one had deserved such a death....

Little by little she learned what had happened- according to the authorities.

The police had determined, through careful investigation, that cultists earning entry into a Satanic sect had been responsible. Jeff, Sally, Julie, and Sam had been drained of blood, their throats slit ear to ear, their heads .. .

Two had remained attached by a few threads of flesh.

Two heads had been missing completely-she had never found out precisely to whom those missing heads had belonged. The others, those lucky enough to make it out of the vault, had been found just as she had been found.

Unconscious.

Then incoherent.

And they had finally admitted to the drugs and alcohol they had ingested.

Jade reminded the police that they had tested her blood and urine; they surely knew she hadn't been on drugs.

But no one had wanted to believe her. They wanted to move on, to look for the murderers, to pray it never happened again.

She needed to go home. To let the police do their work.

She had been lucky, incredibly lucky.

Lucky, yes, except that the police were wrong.

She couldn't remember everything... because what she remembered was so preposterous. What she did remember couldn't be true-what the police were saying certainly could be. Much of it had been an elaborate act. Illusion. Of course. It had to be. Corpses didn't jut come to life.

There were no such things as vampires.

And still ...

They had questioned her relentlessly, so she persisted with her own questions. Something wasn't right. And she hadn't been on drugs.

Whether they admitted it or not, they knew that she hadn't been.

Neither had the man with the haunting eyes.

What man? they had asked.

She described him.

The police hadn't seen him. Such a man, as hero or demon, could not be found. And she hadn't known his name, or where he was staying, or if, indeed, he had been a native or a foreigner. Yes! He had said something about having come from there ... at some time. Whoever he was, wherever he had come from, he had fought the corpses-and the blood-drinking guide-she was certain.

The police, again, thought the terror of the evening had unhinged her thought processes.

The corpses in the tomb were nothing but corpses, the police a.s.sured her. Ashes, decaying, falling apart. There was no Sophia de Brus in Scottish history. What had happened was terrible, terrible. She needed to go home, to forget all about it....

They needed to find the murderer. The guide, the young man who had created such havoc.