“You are out of your fucking mind.” Heather swallowed hard. Standing up felt like the hardest thing in the world, and there was a ringing noise in her ears. Distantly she was aware of blood pooling inside her jeans, and every time she moved fresh lines of pain encircled her body. “All of you.”
Bert pursed his lips together. Now that he was looking at her dead on, she could see that one of his eyes was false; it looked dull under the fierce white lights.
“Michael, he didn’t care who he took. He was always so primitive, that one. That little beast. But I was interested in the perfect victim, one bred for the very purpose of dying. Don’t you see how fine that is? How apt? Livestock, ready for the culling.” He grinned, revealing his long teeth. “We raised the boy to have more refined tastes. And if the police started to think that perhaps they hadn’t got the real Red Wolf, all those years ago, well … The lad was keen to see his father again. A boy like Lyle, he can’t exactly go visiting people, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“You mad old bastard. Haven’t you got it yet? This is the end of your nonsense. Your weapon is dead, and me and Nikki and Cathy are bloody walking out of here right now.”
He cocked his head to one side again. The dog sat up, its ears pricked.
“You have to get through me, lass. You’ll have to kill me. And you don’t have what it takes to do that, because your blood is weak. Michael was a suggestible idiot, easily molded into what I wanted him to be, and in the end, Lyle was even worse, tainted by the blood of your mother. And what are you? Just some other little offshoot of a damaged, incestuous family.” Seeing the look of surprise that passed over her face, he grinned a little wider. “You wouldn’t know, of course, but the woman Michael killed when he was a child wasn’t his real mother. Ask him sometime about the woman in the red coat. Ask him what she did to him.”
“Enough.” Heather raised the knife. “Get out of my way. Now.”
“I told you, you’ll have to kill me.” He raised his hands up, palms flat. “And you don’t have it in you, little girl.”
Behind her, Heather heard Nikki moving against the concrete, but sounds in the square concrete room were growing distant and distorted. She could see the old man in front of her, his sneering expression of disgust twisting his face into something goblinlike, but hanging over him and obscuring him was a stark, red landscape—a place that beckoned to her, that called her home. She held the knife up.
“You don’t know me at all.”
She slammed the knife into his chest. A fierce bolt of joy passed through her, and briefly all the pain from her own wounds was wiped out. The old goblin made a strangled noise and he seemed to crumple in front of her. There was a dog barking, somewhere.
Heather, Heather, Heather.
And then reality crashed back into her in a rush. At some point, she had pulled the knife back out again—she had stabbed him in the upper part of his chest, not far from his collar bone—and bright spurts of his blood covered her hands and arms. In a shudder of revulsion and horror she dropped the knife, and it clanged against the concrete floor.
“Fuck!”
“I knew it,” he croaked. “All of you, so weak.” He pressed one gnarled hand to the wound turning his shirt black. “Why … do I even … waste … my time?”
“I can’t …” Heather glanced at the knife, then back to the old man. “I’m not —”
From the shadowy stairwell behind him, an arm reached out of the dark and circled his neck. The old man was yanked backwards, and this time he did scream, just before something shiny and lethal ripped his throat into a giant gaping mouth. There was a brief struggle, Bert’s arms flapping at nothing, and then he fell back to the floor in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. Heather had a glimpse of the figure on the stairs—he wore her face, though his eyes were not human, not human at all—and then Lyle was gone. His footsteps were light scuffles on the steps, and there was the crash of a door opening and closing. Gone.
With some difficulty, Heather reached down and plucked the knife from the floor, then staggered back to Nikki and the woman called Cathy. She tugged away her friend’s gag, then used the last of her strength to cut the bonds around her hands.
“Hev? Are you all right? Christ, you’re bleeding all over.”
Heather nodded dumbly. She sat down, and she now had the distinct feeling she couldn’t get back up. Nikki was still looking at her even as she untied the other woman.
Heather looked slowly around the room. It was growing darker. “Hey, where’s the dog? I didn’t see where the dog went.”
“What dog?” Nikki took her arm then and shook it. “Stay awake, Hev. What dog? There wasn’t any dog. Hev?”
CHAPTER46
BEFORE
THE NIGHTMARE OF Fiddler’s Mill retreated for Colleen, but only so far. The creatures she had left behind in the woods didn’t forget about her, after all—and all her life, she felt them watching.
There was the summer fête, where she had seen the Oak Leaf symbol on an awning, where small children were queuing to pick up their prizes. It was his company, his way of keeping track, and although he wasn’t there, it was as though she could smell his fetid old man breath on the back of her neck. In a blind panic, she had scooped Heather up into her arms and turned toward the carpark.
There was the card, left outside their front door. When she thought
