And they her.

Glancing one last time at her suita"no lint, no dandruff, lookin' finea"Delia ventured out into the night.

The evening before, when her lovers returned from Claude's house without Pill, they'd told her the little girl was doing fine. Tweed and Dexter Poindexter, the young fools who had escaped the blade on prom night, had begged to have Pill sleep over so they could take her out tonight for trick-or-treating.

Though Delia's bedmates begged off s.e.x, they made her hot with plans to meet them this evening near the crypt Bix Donner was immured in for some steamy lobeplay.

The graveyard lay less than a mile from their house. Delia saw no need to drive. Besides, it was a beautiful night to watch the starlight spill across square after square of sidewalk, her heels hard and sharp as she walked.

Monsters and goblins parted to let her pa.s.s.

Delia gave cheery hi-there's to cl.u.s.ters of them. She exchanged good-natured grins with moms and dads holding some apparition's little hand.

One foolish vampire, out all by himself, she swatted with sufficient force that he rose nearly a foot into the air. The solitary tyke's glow-in-the-dark fangs flew out of his mouth and skittered across the pavement, as did his candy, his apples, and his coins. He ran off bawling into the night.

That'd teach the little dummy a lesson in safety, thought Delia. She ought to have dragged the little s.h.i.t behind a bush and broken his neck. Up out of the flesh-twist of his throat would his final breath have struggled, his blanched makeup a deathmask ready-made.

But Delia had s.e.x on her mind.

When that was so, little else mattered.

She reached the end of Pine Street, went one block north to Maple, and turned west.

A hundred yards ahead lay the entrance to the cemetery. The long swung locked metal gate kept cars out, but night visitors on foot could easily and legally sidestep it.

Her old flame, Kitty b.u.t.tweiler, was buried in the far corner of the cemetery. Kitty was no doubt resting easier since the night Delia had avenged her death.

It had been the right thing to do.

Of that she was certain.

But it was good that Bix's crypt lay farther south, in a different part of the grounds.

As Delia approached it, she marveled anew at the upkeep Corundum put into its cemetery: Tall dark oaks lofting like dancers into the night sky. Immaculately kept lawns. Fat gravestones huddled close together. All of it attested to the town's wealth and neighborliness.

She didn't notice the wisps of . . . could it be fog? . . . until they began to curl about her ankles.

Odd.

The night air felt on the edge of nippy.

But fog, even the slightest lick of it, seemed not quite right.

For the first time in ages, Delia tasted fear, a cold thumb on the back of her neck that sent shivers up into her brain and down along her spine.

But then Brest appeared, Trilby too, around a corner of the crypt.

Brest blew her a kiss.

Delia waved and swept forward. The low white fog now definitely lingered longer, claiming more ground. It coiled in cable-thick wisps that appeared, absurdly, to seep from the crypt itself.

Dry ice, came the recognition.

And the next: I've got to get out of here.

Then the fog darkened up from behind the markers. Only it wasn't fog.

It was heads and torsos.

As if by prearranged signal they emerged, and Delia backed into arms, arms that enfolded her and rushed her forward.

Her feet left the ground.

She fell back and up, secured from falling, abruptly horizontal, the stars going by overhead, imperfections underfoot making the way unsteady.

Her limbs were caught in vises.

As she craned about, Delia recognized the faces of those that carried her.

Students. Faculty. Fellow staffers. They refused to meet her eyes. Their faces grim-set, they ignored her protests.

Delia twisted and strained.

To no avail.

It was like her frustration when her older brother locked her in whatever wrestling grip he liked back when she was eight.

"No!" she cried. Deaf ears. "Please!"

The princ.i.p.al and mousy Miss Phipps joined Brest and Trilby. Futzy made a gesture and the ma.s.s of people swung around the crypt.

A burly figure lofted into moonlight.

The Ice Ghoul.

Or what had been left of it and retrievable from the theater prop room.

His head and half of his chest topped a tall pair of stepladders, his height half what it had been last May, but his angle of menace caught to perfection.

Between the shoulders of two of the heedless automatons that carried her, Delia saw Jonquil Brindisi and Claude Versailles standing beside the homeless pair who had, in the wake of prom night, become media darlings.

"Mr. Versailles, Ms. Brindisi!" she cried. "Help me!"

The planes of Jonquil Brindisi's face were as cold and smooth as sheared ice. It was clear she took umbrage at Delia's direct address.

Her chiseled slip of a nose flared. Her eyes glowered.

"Strip her," she commanded, rasping the order in offended tones. "Tie her up."

Hands mauled her, lowered her.

They ripped her garments, the blouse collar choking her until it tore free.

Cool air kissed her naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s, working its way through young rough hands and arms.

Her hips, her thighs, her legs twisted as though machine-caught in the mob's rip of skirt fabric, pantyhose, and frilly crotchless silken panties.

They exposed her, somehow never letting go their grip on her limbs, giving her no chance to escape.

A cool thick clamp snapped about one ankle, about the other. The press of bodies concealed them from view. But the same sensation gripped her wrists, and then she saw the rope. It was thick. Shiny new. Thin sharp bristles randomly porcupined from the twisted wheaten cable.

Rope-ties were tugged and tightened.

Were they trying to quarter her?

Delia guessed not. But the muscles of her thighs strained like whipped sails and the ball sockets at her shoulders threatened to dislocate.

At last, the hands that had held her lifted away. Night air touched her everywhere.

If she failed to tense her neck muscles, her head flopped back onto nothing.

She was stretched taut. Relentless pulls on her arms and legs came from four thick, angled, toddler-high posts sunk in the ground and notched to secure the rope. The moon illumined the flesh-shelf her body made.

By name she appealed to them. The students, Dex, Tweed, Jenna. Pye Pringle, a wispy junior who hung around Jenna and whom Delia, two days prior, had patched up in the nurse's office.

Pye looked away.

Then the princ.i.p.al stepped in. "All right," he said, his face harsh and rough, "peel it off."

They wouldn't.

That was her first thought.

Then it was too late for any thought at all.

They surged in. The urgency of their ma.s.s move puffed a night chill across her naked body.

"Wait, no!" she said.

But the air filled with shouting.

Crudely wielded scalpels carpeted up layers of skin, as fingernails dug into the soft yield of her flesh and tore it away, patch by patch.

Agony sheeted her limbs.

Ankles, calves, thighs, then her arms, caught fire and turned to flameless torches.

Up hip, down torso, at her navel, the flames spread and met. The shock to Delia's system suspended her between screaming and blacking out.

Then they slid the blades beneath the skin on her face, peeling upward from the neck, over chin and cheek, pulling at her eyelids so severely that the inflamed lids were almost torn off before they plipped back down on her eyes.

Clots of hair, as had happened below, came up in impatient hands. Her body became a living suit of ravagement.

Black dots danced amid red. Delia's tears stung like acid as they runneled down her temples.

Her tormentors backed off. The night breeze rippled razors, thin and mult.i.tudinous, along the neural skintorch Delia had become. She willed herself, despite the steady eruption of pain, to escape into oblivion.

But oblivion refused her.

Then she heard a familiar sound, multiplied a hundred times, again, again.

Rustles of burst-open plastic wrap.

The restless sound of many fingers finding their careful way around metal.

Out of the hubbub of mob noise, one word seeped through over and over on hushed, hissed esses.

Syringe.

When Delia's tears cleared, she took in the surround of bodies.

The poised hands.

Chest-high about the moonlit circle, there shimmered, like ice, thin silver down-stabs of frozen rain.

"Slowly," the princ.i.p.al said. "Carefully. Stay away from the vital organs. We want this to last."

Then they began to needle her.

Dex stood arm in arm with Tweed, detached from the melee of torture.

If a press of bodies obscured his view, he let it. So did Tweed.

They were ageless, he thought. An aggrieved couple watching justice meted out but not fired up with bloodl.u.s.t.

He felt excited and jazzed, of course.

What self-respecting American wouldn't?

But more than that, Dex felt pity.

This was one twisted woman. A betrayer, a violator, the executioner of young folks who did not deserve to die.

Oddly enough, she was also his savior.

And Tweed's.