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Darkness was falling, and she was alone in the woods

Even her ghost was far behind her now

Interlude

People were easy

Pathetically easy

Once you knehat they wanted and you dangled it before thele a carrot before a horse, they came They came--just as the stupid aniot just a gliuessed that he was Jake She’d giggled

He’d alled, too, it was so damned perfect

And what an idiot woh some kind of school to broadcast the news But a pretty blonde was all you had to be, it seemed Maybe not Maybe others were s the overgrown andas she did so Actually, he watched her for a while He didn’t knohat it was about her that had made him want to do this He’d plotted and planned his first kill forever; he’d thought that it would be his only kill But he started hearing the voice again She was nosy She was going to start dredging things up and just ht have soo And looking at her, he had begun to anticipate the kill

He glanced toward Beauh the trees But there was nothing going on there--the plantation offered its last tour at four, and people were usually off the property by five Even the actors and historians would all be by the road now, ready to head out

She stu Her little red spiked heels were coh she was irritated, she wanted the storydown at her shoes and cursing about how much they had cost her

"Da here?" she de back her head of bleached blond curls "I was expecting--"

She never voiced what she was expecting He was quick The needle got her with such speed that she barely gasped, et out a screa over on the next trail

He had to move with speed

He rolled her down to the true swampy area just before the bayou

He held her head under in just a half foot of water

She didn’t struggle She was out, and she was easy to kill

When she was dead, he couldn’t help but roll her over He s at her face That pretty, bitchy face, all clotted withFalse lashes; she’d been all makeup and hype and selfishness Actually, he’d done the daood on the eleven o’clock ne Of course, they wouldn’t find her right away, and they wouldn’t expect to find her out here

But somebody was out here now He had to ht, cursing herher

Poor mare; it wasn’t her fault--she had been startled Scared

"Damn you, foul rodent!" she cried into the bushes She swore softly; it was tihost into the woods!" she host? Or did she have deep-seated host of Marshall Donegal was a way of doing it? Hood one for a shrink

Maybe, just hosts And ift, and she’d been far too terrified to ever recognize the possibility before

Jake had that gift--that sixth sense or intuition And when he’d come to her with it, she had simply panicked

Well, too late on that one!

She paused; she heard so from the pines and brush closer to the bayou Gator? It was unlikely that one of the giant crocodilians she’d known all her life was going to come this far in off the bayou and stalk her

She quickened her pace

Of course, she knew that even on land an alligator could move damned fast as well

But, no The woods here were filled with birds, the bayou was briator had not had a whiff of her and decided that it was tiain Definitely not a gator, because she kept hearing the rustling, would stop--and then the rustling would stop as well A beast of prey would coht for her

She started to run As she did so, she heard a thrashing in the woods ahead of her and then from one of the other trails

She swore and looked around her There was a fallen slender pine near her, leaning against an oak She tested the trunk carefully, found that it would bear her weight and crawled up to the branches of the hardier oak She kept crawling, hoping that whatever was out there didn’t clirew louder, as if aht She finally realized that she could hear hoofbeats, and a rider was co to breathe

Of course, Cliff knew that she was out here When herto find her

But even as she heard the sound of a horse, she saw so dark below her Not a creature--a man A man who looked like a shadow because he was dressed in black: black boots, jeans, sweatshirt and hoodie He ht have been a black shadow

Was she seeing shado instead of ghosts?

No, he was real

He was approaching the tree; he paused as if listening