a perfectly calibrated killing machine, waiting for the on switch to engage.
Somehow I would stop him.
I melded into Hayes, insisting on occupying the same place in time and space. I paid a terrible price for it. Pain swallowed me instantly, filling every fiber of my being. My torso and legs felt as if they were on fire, yet my blood remained cold, much colder than when I’d been alive. I could feel it moving through me like ice, freezing everything it touched, leaving me paralyzed as if I, too, had turned to ice. Screams filled my head, obliterating my ability to think. They were high-pitched cries of agony, and below the terrible sounds of that suffering, I heard the sobs of hundreds more wailing in grief.
This was what Hayes fed on. This was what Maggie was walking into.
Hayes had left several of the lights on intentionally, hoping to lure Maggie inside. They illuminated the front half of the cave as she entered, creeping forward slowly, advancing only when she saw that the way was clear. She stepped forward and saw no one. She glanced toward the dark half of the cavern, examining it for signs of danger. The beam of her flashlight danced across the rock walls and the two stone altars. She caught a glimpse of the old man’s body crumpled behind one of them and, forgetting all else, rushed to him. Turning her back to us, she knelt beside the old man and placed her flashlight on the ground next to his head before she checked his pulse.
Hayes struck.
Maggie was in perfect physical shape, and she was armed, but Hayes had the advantage of surprise. It took him a single step to reach her. He knocked the gun out of her hand and it hit the flashlight, spinning it in a circle until it came to rest with its beam pointing mockingly toward the only way out. Before she knew he was even there, Hayes had his arm wrapped tightly around her throat and was pressing in relentlessly, choking off her air supply. Maggie bucked and kicked furiously, stomped backward with her heels, bit at his hands, twisted and turned, trying to inflict damage. She was strong, but not as strong as Hayes. Her struggles only infuriated him and made him more determined to bring her under his control. She could not break free. The lack of oxygen started to take its toll and her struggling grew weaker. Soon she would be his.
I was mad with rage. There was nothing I could do. I lacked corporeal substance. “Maggie,” I screamed, though I knew she could not hear me. “Fight him, Maggie. Fight him.”
I cried out for no one but myself. I felt the consciousness slipping from her as her life force dimmed and her strength began to ebb away. Alan Hayes now had his other arm wrapped over her chest, holding her half aloft, as he used his right arm to play with the pressure on her larynx. He did not want her dead. He wanted her alive—and under his control. I could feel the excitement rising in him, alive and unstoppable.
I would lose her.
I was mad with grief, I was cursing the heavens that kept me here to see it, when the cave exploded with sound, a reverberating blast that lingered even as a dark spot in the very center of Alan Hayes’s forehead bloomed and began to ooze blood.
His life was over in a heartbeat.
He wavered, released Maggie, and let her fall at his feet, then slumped against the rock wall and slid to the floor. He was dead by the time he hit the dirt, his life erased as completely as if someone had flicked a light switch off. He did not fight, he did not linger, he was not claimed by anyone or anything. I felt nothing leave him, nothing fighting to stay.
He was simply there one moment and gone the next.
Maggie lay sprawled on the floor, fighting her way back to consciousness, unaware of who her savior had been. Me? I was overcome at what I saw. At first, I did not recognize the figure rushing toward her from the entranceway, gun in hand, panting from his journey up the hill. My mind refused to process that it was him. But as he drew closer, my mind acknowledged what I was seeing at last. I put together the overweight body, disheveled clothes, sweating face, ginger hair, the smell of stale liquor: Danny.
My old