Midnight Rising

Over her head, the cave's nocturnal residents were getting restless. The bats stirred, then bolted past her in a hurried rush of motion. Dylan ducked to let them pass, figuring she'd better get the hell out of there too.

As she pivoted to find the crevice exit, she heard another rustle of movement. This one was bigger than bats, a low snarl of sound followed by a disturbance of loose rock somewhere in the cave.

Oh, God. Maybe she wasn't alone in here after all.

The hairs at the back of her neck tingled and before she could remind herself that she didn't believe in monsters, her heart started beating in overdrive.

She fumbled around for the way out of the cave, her pulse jackhammering in her ears. By the time she found daylight, she was gasping for air. Her legs felt rubbery as she scrambled back down the ridge, then raced to rejoin her friends in the safety of the bright midday sun below.

He'd been dreaming of Eva again.

It wasn't enough that the female had betrayed him in life - now, in her death, she invaded his mind while he slept. Still beautiful, still treacherous, she spoke to him of regret and how she wanted to make things right.

All lies.

Eva's visiting ghost was only a part of Rio's long slide into madness.

His dead mate wept in his dreams, begging him to forgive her for the deception she'd orchestrated a year ago. She was sorry. She still loved him, and always would.

She wasn't real. Just a taunting reminder of a past he would be glad to leave behind.

Trusting the female had cost him much. His face had been ruined in the warehouse explosion. His body was broken in places, still recovering from injuries that would have killed a mortal man.

And his mind...?

Rio's sanity had been fracturing apart, bit by bit, worsening in the time he'd been holed up alone on this Bohemian mountainside.

He could bring it all to a halt. As one of the Breed - a hybrid race of humans bearing vampiric, alien genes - he could drag himself into the sunlight and let the UV rays devour him. He'd considered doing just that, but there remained the task of closing the cave and destroying the damning evidence it contained.

He didn't know how long he'd been there. The days and nights, weeks and months, had at some point merged into an endless suspension of time. He wasn't sure how it had happened. He'd arrived there with his brethren of the Order. The warriors had been on a mission to locate and destroy an old evil secreted away in the rocks centuries ago.

But they were too late.

The crypt was empty; the evil had already been freed.

It was Rio who volunteered to stay behind and seal the cave while the others returned home to Boston. He couldn't go back with them. He didn't know where he belonged. He'd intended to find his own way - maybe go back to Spain, his homeland.

That's what he'd told the warriors who'd long been like brothers to him. But he hadn't carried out any of his plans. He had delayed, tormented by indecision and the weight of the sin he'd been contemplating.

In his heart, he'd known he had no intention of leaving this tomb. But he had put off the inevitable with weak excuses, waiting for the right time, the right conditions, for him to do what he had to do. But those excuses were just that. They only served to make the hours stretch into days, the days into weeks.

Now, easily months later, he lurked in the darkness of the cave like the bats that inhabited the dank space with him. He no longer hunted, no longer had the desire to feed. He merely existed, conscious of his steady descent into a hell of his own making.

For Rio, that descent had finally proven too much.

Beside him on a hollowed-out ledge of rock ten feet up from the floor of the cave rested a detonator and a small cache of C-4. It was enough boom to seal up the hidden crypt forever. Rio intended to set it off that night...from the inside.

Tonight, he would finish it.

When his lethargic senses had roused him from a heavy sleep to warn him of an intruder, he'd thought it to be just another tormenting phantom. He caught the scent of a human - a young female, judging by the musky warmth that clung to her skin. His eyes peeled open in the dark, nostrils flaring to pull more of her fragrance into his lungs.

She was no trick of his madness.

She was flesh and blood, the first human to venture anywhere near the obscure mouth of the cave in all the time he'd been there. The woman shined a bright light around the cave, temporarily blinding him, even from his concealed position above her head. He heard her footsteps scuffing on the sandstone floor of the cavern. Heard her sudden gasp as she knocked into some of the skeletal litter left behind by the original occupant of the place.

Rio shifted himself on the ledge, testing his limbs in preparation of a leap to the floor below. The stirring of the air disturbed the bats clinging to the ceiling. They flew out, but the woman remained. Her light traveled more of the cave, then came to rest on the tomb that lay open.

Rio felt her curiosity chill toward fear as she neared the crypt. Even her human instincts picked up on the evil that had once slept in that block of stone.

But she shouldn't be there.

Rio couldn't let her see any more than she already had. He heard himself snarl as he moved on the rocky jut overhead. The woman heard it too. She tensed with alarm. The beam of her flashlight ricocheted crazily off the walls as she made a panicked search for the cave's exit.

Before Rio could command his limbs to move, she was already slipping away.

She was gone.

She'd seen too much, but soon it wouldn't matter.

Once night fell, there would be no further trace of the crypt, the cave, or of Rio himself.

Chapter Two

Hidden Crypt Unlocks Secrets of an Ancient Civilization!

Dylan scowled and held down the backspace key on her notebook computer. She needed a different title for the piece she was working on - something sexier, less National Geographic . She pecked out a second attempt, trying for something that would shout just as loudly from the newsstands as the latest Hollywood starlet in rehab story plastered on the front pages any given week.

Ancient Human Sacrifices Discovered in Dracula's Backyard!

Yeah, that was better. The Dracula bit was a stretch since the Czech Republic was several hundred miles away from bloodthirsty Vlad Tepes's place in Romania, but it was a start. Dylan stretched her legs out on her hotel room bed, balanced her computer in her lap, and began typing the first draft of her story.

Two paragraphs into it, she stalled out. Pressed the backspace key until the page was blank again.

The words simply weren't coming. She couldn't focus. The ghostly visitation she'd had on the mountain had put her on edge, but it was the phone call to her mother that really had Dylan distracted. Sharon had tried to sound cheerful and strong, telling her all about a river cruise fund-raiser the shelter was putting on in a few nights and how she looked forward to attending.

After losing another girl to the street life recently - a young runaway named Toni, whom Sharon had really thought was going to make it - she had ideas for a new program she wanted to pitch to the runaway shelter's founder, Mr. Fasso. Sharon was hoping for a private audience with him, a man she had admitted on more than one occasion that she was a little infatuated with, to no one's surprise, especially not her daughter's.

Where her mother was always ready - even eager - to fall in love, Dylan's romantic life was a complete contrast. She'd had a handful of relationships, but nothing meaningful, and nothing she'd ever allowed to last. A cynical part of her doubted the entire concept of forever, despite her mother's attempts to convince her that she would find it, someday, when she least expected it.

Sharon was a free spirit with a big, open heart that had been stomped on far too often by unworthy men, and, now, by the unfairness of fate. Still, she kept smiling, kept soldiering on. She had been giggling as she confided in Dylan that she bought a new dress for the shelter's cruise, which she chose for its flattering cut and the color that was so similar to Mr. Fasso's eyes. But even while Dylan joked with her mom not to flirt too outrageously with the reportedly handsome and evidently unmarried philanthropist, her heart was breaking.

Sharon was trying to act her normal upbeat self, but Dylan knew her too well. There was an out-of-breath quality to her voice that couldn't be explained away by the long distance phone service in the little Bohemian town of Jicin, where Dylan and her travel companions were spending the night. She'd only spoken with her mother for about twenty minutes, but when they hung up, Sharon had sounded thoroughly exhausted.

Dylan exhaled a shaky sigh as she closed her computer and set it beside her on the narrow bed. Maybe she should have gone for beer and brats in the pub with Janet, Marie, and Nancy, instead of staying behind to work. She hadn't felt much like socializing - still didn't, in fact - but the longer she sat by herself in the tiny bunk room, the more aware she became of just how alone she truly was. The quiet made it hard to think about anything but the final, dreaded silence that was going to fill her life once her mother...

Oh, God.

Dylan wasn't even prepared to let the word form in her mind.

She swung her legs down off the bed and stood up. The first-floor window looking out over the street was open to let in some air, but Dylan felt stifled, suffocating. She lifted the glass wide and took a deep breath, watching as tourists and locals strolled past.

And damn if the ethereal woman in white wasn't out there too.

She stood in the middle of the road, unfazed by the rush of cars and pedestrians all around her. Her image was translucent in the dark, her form far less delineated than it had been earlier that day, and dimming by the second. But her eyes were fixed on Dylan. The ghost didn't speak this time, just stared with a bleak resignation that made Dylan's chest ache.

"Go away," she told the apparition under her breath. "I don't know what you want from me, and I really can't deal with you right now."

Some part of her scoffed at that, because with her job on the line like it was, maybe she shouldn't be so eager to turn away visitors from the Other Side. Nothing would please her boss, Coleman Hogg, more than having a reporter on staff who could honest-to-God see dead people. Hell, the opportunistic bastard probably would insist on bankrolling a brand-new side business with her as the main attraction.

Yeah, right. So not happening.

She'd let one man exploit her for the peculiar, if unreliable, gift she'd been born with - and look how that had turned out. Dylan hadn't seen her father since she was twelve years old. Bobby Alexander's last words to his daughter as he drove out of town and out of her life for good had been a nasty string of profanity and open disgust.

It had been one of the most painful days of Dylan's life, but it had taught her a good hard lesson: there were precious few people you could trust, so if you wanted to survive, you'd better always look out for Number One.

It was a philosophy that had served her well enough, the only exception being when it came to her mom. Sharon Alexander was Dylan's rock, her sole confidante, and the only person she could ever truly count on. She knew all of Dylan's secrets, all of her hopes and dreams. She knew all of her troubles and fears too...except one. Dylan was still trying to be brave for Sharon, too scared to let on to her about how petrified she was that the cancer had come back. She didn't want to admit that fear just yet, or give it strength by speaking it out loud.

"Shit," Dylan whispered irritably as her eyes began to sting with a warning of oncoming tears.

She willed them into submission with the same steely control she'd been practicing most of her life. Dylan Alexander did not cry. She hadn't since she was that brokenhearted, betrayed little girl watching her father speed off into the night.

No, getting sloppy with self-pity and hurt never did her a lick of good. Anger was a much more useful coping method. And where anger failed, there were few things that couldn't be fixed with a healthy dose of denial.

Dylan turned away from the window and shoved her bare feet into her well-worn pair of trail shoes. Not trusting to leave her computer unattended in the room, she slipped the slim silver laptop into her messenger bag, grabbed her pocketbook, and headed out to find Janet and the others. Maybe a little company and chitchat wouldn't be so bad after all.

By dusk, most of the humans traipsing through the woods and along the mountain paths had gone. Now that it was fully dark outside the cave, there wasn't a soul around to hear the explosion Rio was rigging to go off from within the lightless space of rock.

He had just enough C-4 on hand to permanently seal the cave's entrance, but not so much that he would bring the whole damn mountain down. Nikolai had thought to make sure of that before the Order had left Rio there to secure the site. Thank God for that, because Rio sure as hell didn't trust his cracked brain to remember the particulars.

He cursed sharply as he fumbled one of the tiny wires on the detonator. His vision was already starting to swim, irritating him even more. Sweat broke out on his brow, dampening the overlong hanks of hair that hung down into his eyes. With a snarl, he swept his hand over his face and up his scalp, staring fiercely at the lumps of pale explosive material in front of him.

Did he stuff the blasting caps into the cakes yet?

He couldn't remember...

"Focus, idiot," he berated himself, impatient over the idea of something that should come so easily to him - and had, before he'd gotten his bell rung in that warehouse back in Boston - should now take him literally hours to even get started.

Add to that his body's sluggishness from deprivation of vital blood and he was a real piece of work. A goddamn waste of space, that's what he was.

With a surge of self-hatred fueling him, Rio stuck his finger into one of the small puttylike blocks of C-4 and tore it open.

Good. The charge was in there, just like it should be.