Midnight Rising

It didn't matter he couldn't remember placing it there, or that based on the mangled appearance of another of the cakes, he'd probably gone through this very exercise at least once before. He gathered up the supply of C-4 and carried them into the narrow mouth of the cave. He packed them into carved niches in the sandstone, just like Niko had told him to do. Then he went back into the cavern to retrieve the detonator.

Damn it!

The wires on the thing were all fucked up.

He had fucked them up. How? And when?

"Son of a bitch!" he roared, glaring down at the device, blind with a swift, sudden rage.

He felt dizzy with anger, his head spinning so badly it buckled his knees. He went down on the hard ground like his body was made of lead. He heard the detonator skid into the dust somewhere, but he didn't reach for it. His arms were too heavy and his head was weightless, his consciousness floating, detached from reality, like his mind wanted to separate from the wreck of the body that caged it and fly away to escape.

A thick nausea pressed him down, and he knew if he didn't work fast to get a hold of himself he was going to pass out.

It had been foolish to stop hunting all those weeks ago. He was Breed. He needed human blood for strength, for life. Blood would help him to stave off the pain and madness. But he could no longer trust himself to hunt without killing. He'd come too close, too many times, since he'd arrived here on this towering forest crag.

Too often on those few times he ventured out in hunger he'd nearly been seen by the humans living in the surrounding towns and villages. And since the explosion he'd survived in Boston a year ago, his was a face not soon forgotten.

Maldecido.

The word hissed at him from somewhere distant. Not the night outside, but from deep out of his past, in the language of his mother's country.

Manos del diablo.

Comedor de la sangre.

Monstruo.

Even through the fog of his tormented mind, he recognized the epithets. Names he heard from his earliest childhood. Words that haunted him, even now.

The cursed one.

Devil's hands.

Blood-eater.

Monster.

And so he was, more now than ever. Ironic that his life would begin in hiding, skulking like an animal among the night-dark woodlands and hills...only to end much the same way.

"Madre de Dios," he whispered as he made a feeble, but failed grab for the detonator. "Please...let me end it."

Dylan had barely set down her empty pilsner glass before another full one came to rest in front of her. It was the third round for the table since she'd arrived in the tavern and met up with her travel companions - this latest serving delivered with an extra-wide grin from the young man tending the bar.

"With my compliments, ladies," he announced in thickly accented English, one of the few locals in the rural village who spoke anything more than Czech or German.

"Oh, my goodness! Thank you, Goran," Janet exclaimed, giggling as she surrendered her empty for a fresh glass of frothy amber beer. "What a dear you are, telling us all about your lovely town and now bringing us free drinks. You really don't have to do this."

"My pleasure," he murmured.

His friendly brown eyes lingered the longest on Dylan, which she might have taken as a bigger compliment if her companions weren't all qualified for AARP membership. Dylan herself probably had five to ten years on the boyishly handsome barkeep, but that didn't stop her from working his obvious attraction to her best advantage.

Not that she was interested in drinks or dating. It was Goran's talk of the surrounding mountains and their various lore that held Dylan captivated. The young Czech had grown up in the area, and had spent a good amount of time exploring the very range where Dylan had been climbing that morning.

"It's so beautiful here," Nancy told him. "The tourist brochure didn't lie; this truly is a paradise."

"And such a vast, unusual terrain," Marie added. "I think we'd need a whole month to see everything out there. Too bad we have to return to Prague tomorrow."

"Yes, that is too bad," Goran said, directing the comment at Dylan.

"What about caves?" She'd been trying to gather details for her story without being too conspicuous, knowing that the locals probably wouldn't appreciate the fact that she'd ventured off the established trails to climb the mountains on her own. "I saw a few caves marked on our map, but I imagine there's a lot more out there. Even some that haven't been uncovered yet, stuff that's not open to the public?"

The young man nodded. "Oh, yes. There are maybe hundreds of caves and several abysses too. Most of them are still being documented."

"Dylan saw an old stone coffin in one of the caves today," Janet blurted innocently as she sipped her beer.

Goran chuckled, his expression dubious. "You saw a what?"

"I'm not sure what I saw." Dylan gave a nonchalant shrug, not wanting to tip her hand if she had truly discovered something significant. "It was pitch-black inside, and I think the heat was playing tricks on my mind."

"What cave were you in?" the young man asked. "I know it, maybe."

"Oh, I don't remember where I was exactly. It doesn't really matter."

"She said she felt a presence," Janet piped in again. "Isn't that how you described it, honey? Like a...a dark presence coming awake while you were in the cave. I believe that's what you said."

"It was nothing, I'm sure." Dylan shot a pained scowl across the table at the well-meaning, but aggravatingly chatty older woman. For all the good it did. Janet gave her a sweet little matchmaker's wink as Goran leaned down next to Dylan at the table.

"You know, there used to be talk of evil in those mountains," he said, his voice lowered to a confidential, if amused, tone. "Many old legends warn of demons living in the woods."

"Is that right?" she asked drolly.

"Oh, yes. Terrible beasts that looked like humans, but were not human at all. The villagers were convinced they were living among monsters."

Dylan scoffed lightly as she lifted her glass. "I don't believe in monsters."

"Neither do I, of course," Goran said. "But my grandfather does. So did his grandfather before him and all the rest of my family who farmed in this area, going back hundreds of years. My grandfather owned the property at the edge of the woods. He said he saw one of these creatures just a couple of months ago. It attacked one of his field workers."

"Is that so." Dylan glanced at the barkeep, waiting for a punch line that didn't come.

"According to my grandfather, it was just after dusk. He and Matej were bringing some equipment into the barn for the night when Grandfather heard an odd sound coming from the field. He went to look, and saw Matej on the ground. Another man was bent over him, holding Matej's neck to his mouth - bleeding him from the throat."

"Good Lord!" Janet gasped. "Did the poor man survive?"

"Yes, he did. Grandfather said by the time he ran back inside the barn to get something to use as a weapon against the creature, Matej was lying there alone. There were no marks on him except a bit of blood on his shirt, and he had no memory of the attack at all. The man who attacked Matej - or the demon, if my grandfather's account can be believed - has never been seen again."

Janet clucked her tongue. "And good riddance! Why, it's like something straight out of a horror movie, isn't it?"

Nancy and Marie looked equally aghast, all three women evidently buying Goran's tall tale - hook, line, and sinker. Dylan remained skeptical to say the least. But in the back of her mind she wondered if her story about an empty mountain crypt littered with old human remains might be even juicier with a firsthand account of some kind of demon vampire attack. Never mind the fact that the alleged victim couldn't corroborate with either memory or physical evidence; her boss at the paper wouldn't hesitate to go to print on the word of a superstitious, likely vision-impaired, backwoods old man alone. Hell, they'd gone to print on far less than that before.

"Do you think I could talk to your grandfather about what he saw?"

"Dylan is a journalist," the ever-helpful Janet, to no one's surprise, felt compelled to explain. "She lives in New York City. Have you ever been to New York City, Goran?"

"I have never been there, but I should like very much to see it one day," he replied, glancing at Dylan again. "You are a journalist, really?"

"No, not really. Maybe someday. Right now, the stuff I write is...I guess you could call them human interest stories." She smiled up at the bartender. "So, do you think your grandpa would be willing to speak with me?"

"He is dead, I'm sorry to say. He had a stroke in his sleep last month and never woke up."

"Oh." Dylan's heart clenched with true remorse, her hunger for a story taking an immediate backseat. "I'm very sorry for your loss, Goran."

He gave a tight nod. "He was a lucky man. If only we all live to be ninety-two, like my grandfather, eh?"

"Yeah," Dylan said, feeling the gazes of her mom's friends fixed on her in sympathy. "If only."

"I have new customers," he announced as a small group of people came into the tavern. "I must go now. When I come back, Dylan, maybe you will tell me about New York City."

As he left, and before Janet could enthuse over what a great idea it would be for Dylan to invite the adorable young Goran to the States, marry him, and have his babies, Dylan faked a brilliant, big yawn.

"Wow, guess I had too much fresh air today - I'm really beat. I think I'm going to turn in early. I have a bit of work to do yet tonight, and some e-mails I need to take a look at before I hit the hay."

"You sure, honey?"

Dylan gave Janet a weak bob of her head. "Yeah. Long day." She got up and grabbed her messenger bag from the back of her wooden pub chair. Pulling out enough Czech koruny to cover her portion of the bar tab and a nice tip for their host, Dylan set the money down on the table. "I'll see you back at the room."

As she made the short walk from the tavern to the hotel down the street, Dylan's fingers were itching to hit her keyboard. She closed herself inside the room, fired up her computer, and tried to keep up as the story spilled out of her. Dylan smiled as the piece took shape. It was no longer simply a report of an old cavern tomb and some dusty skeletons, but a blood-curdling account of a living, breathing evil that may well be still at large in the wilderness terrain above an otherwise tranquil European town.

She had the words.

All she needed now were some pictures of the demon's mountain lair.

Chapter Three

It was early morning in the mountain region, too early for most of the tourist groups and day hikers to be out and about. Still, Dylan avoided the main entrance and ventured into the woods on her own. A light rain began soon after she entered the forest, the soft summer shower falling from gunmetal gray clouds overhead. Dylan's trail shoes padded wetly on the damp pine needles beneath her feet as she picked up the pace and located the mountain path she'd been on the day before with her companions.

There was no sign of the dark-haired lady in white today, but Dylan didn't need the apparition's help in finding her way to the cave. Guided there by memory and a rising thrum in her veins, she climbed the steep, tricky incline to the ledge of sandstone outside the hidden cave.

In the overcast haze, the narrow crevice opening seemed even darker today, the sandstone giving off an earthy, ancient scent. Dylan swung her backpack down off her arm and grabbed her small flashlight from one of the pack's zippered pockets. She twisted the thin metal barrel and sent a beam of light ahead of her into the dark passageway of the cave.

Go in, get a few pictures of the crypt and the funky wall art, then get the hell out.

Not that she was afraid. Why should she be? This was just an old burial site of some sort - and a long-abandoned one at that. Absolutely nothing to fear.

And wasn't that just what those clueless horror movie actresses would say right before they ate it in gory detail on-screen?

Dylan mentally scoffed at herself. This was real life after all. The odds of a chainsaw-wielding lunatic or a flesh-eating zombie lurking in the dark of this cave were about the same as her coming face-to-face with the bloodsucking monster Goran's grandfather claimed to have seen. In other words, less than nil.

With the rain pattering gently behind her, Dylan stepped between the narrow walls of rock and carefully navigated her way into the cave, the beam of her flashlight leading the way. Several feet in, the passageway opened up onto more darkness. Dylan swung the light around the perimeter of the cave, as awestruck as she had been yesterday, by the elaborate wall markings and the rectangular slab of stone at the center of the space.

She didn't see the man lying in a careless sprawl on the ground until she was nearly on top of him.

"Jesus!"

She sucked in a startled breath and leaped back, the beam of her flashlight ricocheting crazily in the second it took for her to get over the shock. She angled the light back down to where he lay...and found nothing.

But he'd been right there. In her mind she could still see his head of shaggy dark brown hair, and his dusty, tattered black clothing. A vagrant, no doubt. It probably wasn't that unusual for some of the region's homeless poor to squat in this area.

"Hello?" she said, swinging the beam across the entire floor of the cave. A couple of ancient skulls and scattered bones lay about in morbid disarray, but that was it. No sign of anything living - not within the past hundred years or so, by Dylan's guess.