Blood lure

Making herself small in mind if not in body, she wriggled out of her day pack and set it squarely in front of her where probing light would not fire its burgundy hue in a dun and green landscape. Working by feel, A

The light flew erratically past. She waited a moment for the sound of a rifle shot and the sudden blasting away of an exposed elbow or knee, but she'd not been spotted. Further out into the trees, drowned in the impossible ink of a woodland night, she heard the stealthy sound of padded feet moving over duff.

Nothing she could do about that. She pushed it from her mind.

A quick peek let her know McCaskil had turned again and faced away from her. He stopped shouting. In a voice dead calm and more frightening because of it, he spoke to the darkness, "In one minute I will kill the boy. You can save him. Balthazar's life for the boy's. One minute." He began counting down in a loud voice.

Out of the frying pan, A

Joan's head turned. Without light A

Closing her mind to the possibilities, A

"Twenty-nine," McCaskil called. "Twenty-eight."

Snip, snip.

A

"He's turning," Joan hissed.

"Run," A

A hailstorm of words, shrieked and screamed from what sounded like the throats of a multitude of demons, rained down. McCaskil's threats, Rory's squeaks, Joan's exhortations and A

Rory disappeared in darkness followed by a gunshot close and loud, a blow on A

"No!"

That was Joan. A

McCaskil had thrown aside the flashlight. The beam ran along the ground catching up the rust of the needles, illuminating the man's booted feet. A

Writhing across the slippery bed of needles, as single-minded as a sidewinder, A

McCaskil retreated. He hit the fallen flashlight and the beam spun, a drunken beacon, then stopped, spotlighting the two of them. McCaskil had the thirty-ought-six, a Weatherby, A

"Easy, Bill. You're okay, Bill. It won't work. Rory's gone; a witness. You can't do it, Bill. Give it up, Bill."

Joan was talking: smooth, calming as if to a wounded and wild beast. She was doing, saying all the right things, using the man's name, trying to bring him back to himself.

It was too late. Whatever indicates reason, an indefinable i

A roar shattered the tableau, so close, so visceral, the wild rage of the world and of the mind gathered into a sound so dark and awful, the night itself seemed to have turned on them. Mingling with it were terrible screams and the hopeless sound of a David being torn to pieces by a Goliath of fur and fury.

"Rory!" Joan cried.

McCaskil jumped. The rifle barrel moved an inch off center. A

The horrible roaring deepened, intensified, and A

The roaring went on and on pi

The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. A

The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. A