"d.a.m.n." She paused, debating whether to answer it or not. Most likely it was a reporter who'd noticed the lights on in the clinic.

Or it could be John.

Unlikely. But could she take the chance that it wasn't? A delightful shiver ran through her and she cursed herself for antic.i.p.ating something that surely wasn't reality. Odds were, she'd open the door and get barraged with unwanted questions.

Still...

The door buzzed again.

Oh h.e.l.l. Just open it.

A peek through the blinds covering the gla.s.s revealed the face of a man she didn't recognize. He wore a dark suit and sungla.s.ses, and she immediately crossed reporter off her list. A cop? Possibly. If so, a detective. Or was he FBI? Had something else been uncovered during the investigation? Had they found out about her?

For one brief instant Leah considered turning and running. Then common sense took over. The man knew she was here, had seen her looking at him. And if the government was really there to take her away, they'd have come in force.

She opened the door, just enough to lean out.

"Can I help you?"

The man nodded and flashed a badge, the black leather case flipping open and closed again so quickly she only had time to catch a glimpse of gold.

"Dr. DeGarmo? There's an urgent matter I need to speak to you about."

She wished the man would take his gla.s.ses off. What was it about detectives and government types that they always wore dark gla.s.ses? It made reading their expressions so hard. Maybe that was the reason they did it, even at night.

At night...?

The man was already stepping forward. Leah put more weight against the door, blocking him. Something wasn't kosher...

"Can I have your name, please? And see your ID again?"

He nodded again, but this time when his hand came out from inside his suit it held a small but deadly-looking pistol.

"Inside, lady. Now." Like a chameleon, his voice and manner changed, becoming rougher. The formal tone of his words disappeared as well.

Leah stepped back, her heart slamming against her ribs.

Not again!

She turned to run away. There was no thought, no plan of action. Just an instinctive reaction to the sight of the gun.

Six men stood in the hallway leading to the examination rooms. All of them held guns.

Their unexpected presence was enough to freeze Leah in her tracks. Worse was recognizing one of them.

"h.e.l.lo, Ms. DeGarmo," said the man she knew as Del.

"We have some unfinished business."

Chapter Fourteen.

Leah tried to make sense of what was happening. Men. Guns. Del. Here. But her brain refused to work correctly. It stuttered and stopped and went nowhere, like a car stuck in the mud. A car with a record player that had a wicked scratch.

You're not making sense!

Reboot. Reboot. She had no idea where the computer reference came from, but it seemed to help. The flurry of words and ideas settled into a semblance of logical order.

Del didn't die. Jesus Christ. I killed practically everyone in that building, but Del didn't die.

And now he's going to kill me.

That had to be the reason he'd shown up. He'd escaped the slaughterhouse, evaded the police and waited until she was alone. Considering he'd already shown that he had no problem kidnapping her in public, the only reason for secrecy now had to be because he wanted revenge.

She wondered how he'd gotten away. It couldn't have been easy, judging by the bruises and cuts on his face. He looked like he'd gone through the windshield of a car. His injuries weren't the only difference about him, either. Before, she'd only ever seen him either with a calm, serious expression or a sardonic smile. Now, however, his face was a mask of barely controlled fury.

Together with his wounds, it made him finally look as dangerous as he actually was.

"How did you get in here?" The moment the words came out, Leah cursed them. It wasn't what she wanted to say; it wasn't even what she'd been thinking. What the h.e.l.l was her brain doing?

"I think that's the last thing you should be worrying about," Del said. "Grab her."

At his words, two of his men holstered their guns and stepped forward. Their eagerness, combined with their air of menace, promised pain.

"No!" Leah stepped back, only to have her arms grabbed by the man who'd posed as a cop.

Del shook his head. "Sorry, Ms. DeGarmo. We've been watching you for hours. You haven't worked your magic on any animals, which means you can't make anyone sick by touching them. And that means..." he stepped forward, his expression growing even uglier, "...I can do this."

She never saw the fist that struck her in the stomach. All she knew was one instant she was standing there, and the next her whole world exploded in a supernova of pain. Colored lights flashed in her eyes, her lungs refused to work, and her legs buckled. Only the strong hands gripping her arms kept her from falling.

Her first thought was that he'd shot her. Then her lungs turned back on and she recognized the bruising trauma in her midsection.

Del let her take two huge, gasping breaths before he punched her again in the same spot.

Leah saw it coming this time. Not that it mattered. His fist hit her like a battering ram. Her feet slid out from beneath her and her stomach, unable to take the abuse, let loose its contents in a volcanic eruption of half-digested cheese, dough and pepperoni. Some of the puke splattered on Del's shoes.

He cursed and pulled her out of the other man's grasp. Shook her so hard her teeth clacked together and pinched her tongue. The metallic taste of blood added to the burning acids of the pizza sauce and stomach juices, and she gagged again.

"Don't you dare puke on me."

The hands holding her let go and then she was falling. She tried to cover her face but ended up landing chest and elbows first on the hard tile. The pain stabbed at her like steak knives dipped in vinegar.

As she lay moaning in the warm puddle of her own vomit, she heard one of the men laugh.

"She don't seem so tough to me, boss."

A new sensation bloomed in Leah's stomach, a burning that had nothing to do with the punches she'd taken. The fire spread quickly through her, setting her face to tingling. She recognized the feeling. Shame.

On the heels of the shame came something more than anger. A ferocious rage that swept through her thoughts in a red wave, leaving behind only black hatred for the people who had reduced her to this, degraded her.

And with the black came the cold. And the wind.

Leah smiled as her body rose into the air.

This time there would be no forgetting.

Del's first thought was that a freak storm must have rolled in. Papers rolled and twisted in the air as gusts of wind blew through the reception area with enough force to ruffle shirt collars and send hats flying.

"Find that window and shut it!" he yelled, glancing around to see where the wind was coming from. An open window was an invitation for nosy neighbors to look in, something he definitely didn't need.

Then he heard someone gasp.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ!"

Del turned back just in time to witness DeGarmo not just rising to her feet, but floating. f.u.c.king levitating like a G.o.dd.a.m.n magic trick. Her hair was blowing in all directions as if the unexpected storm was centered right over her.

Or came from her, he thought, as an impossible ma.s.s of dark clouds formed around her. Jagged bolts of red lightning, each no larger than one of his fingers, flared in random patterns within the miniature storm.

He was so distracted by the lightning that he never looked at her face until she spoke.

"Del."

The word sounded in his ears and inside his head at the same time. It was DeGarmo's voice, yet it wasn't. It was darker, colder.

Evil.

His eyes moved to her face, which was now directly across from him.

He screamed.

Several of his men cried out as well, but he barely noticed. All he could do was look at the thing hovering in front of him.

Whatever DeGarmo had become, he knew instantly it was something deadly. Her eyes were like the eyes of corpses he'd seen pulled from the river, fish-belly white all the way across. Black tears ran down her cheeks. Blue veins stood out on her face and arms from beneath translucent flesh that was mottled with gray and green blotches.

The storm grew stronger, the winds reaching gale force in the confined s.p.a.ce. Office supplies joined the debris sailing through the room. The blinds on the windows and doors snapped up and slammed down so hard they sounded like cymbals crashing at the end of an opera.

"Del." This time it was only in his head. Her blue, cracked lips never moved. "Del, we have some unfinished business."

Her arms started to rise and in a flash Del understood the cause of those two mummified corpses he'd stumbled across during his escape from the slaughterhouse. At the time he'd thought Nova's team had used some kind of chemical weapon.

Now he knew the truth.

Well, she wasn't going to turn him into a f.u.c.king mummy.

"f.u.c.k you, b.i.t.c.h." He drew his gun and fired. His men, all combat trained, did the same. The roar of the guns in the small room was deafening, louder than the wind or the smashing of objects against the walls. Louder even than the freezing-cold words that continued to speak in his brain, telling him his time was up.

The barrage of bullets punched dozens of holes in DeGarmo's body. They tore her shirt and pants to ribbons. The few that missed created kaleidoscopic patterns within the black clouds around her.

None of the men stopped shooting until their guns were emptied.

What was left of Leah DeGarmo's face and body looked like a road in the rural South, so filled with bullet holes it was unrecognizable.

"You had your fun, Del. Now it's my turn."

For the first time in his life, Del McCormick knew total, utter terror. Nothing in all his years as a military operative, mercenary or private gun for hire had ever come close to what he felt when DeGarmo's words pierced his brain, letting him know she wasn't dead. His gun fell from his hand as the body in front of him healed its wounds. There was no scarring, no blood. Just the holes disappearing like a movie run in reverse.

Someone yelled "Run!" and Del's body reacted in Pavlovian fashion, his muscles tensing in preparation of movement.

That was as far as he got.

Ink-black pseudopods of pure energy appeared from inside the storm cloud. In less time than the blink of an eye they extended out in all directions, dozens of them, elongating like the arms of an octopus. The tentacles whipped and curled among the men, coiling around arms, legs, necks-whatever they could reach.

Screams quickly turned into choking gasps. Del watched in horror as the captured men went into convulsions. Arms and legs kicked and flailed.

Two of the tentacles encircled Del without touching him. He tried to duck underneath one and it dipped in time to his movements. As he straightened up, his arm brushed against the rippling, amorphous surface and a brief but powerful electrical shock burned his skin and sent him to his knees in pain.

By then all of his men lay dead on the floor, their bodies reduced to desiccated, crusty sh.e.l.ls, skin stretched as tight and thin as plastic wrap over tendons and bones.

All of the tentacles withdrew into the supernatural tempest surrounding the apparition hovering in front of him.

"You should have left me alone. That's all I wanted."

Del shook his head, unable to answer the telepathic accusation. The smells of roasted meat and ozone a.s.saulted his nose, mixed with the sickly-sweet odor of a taxidermy shop.

"Look at me, Del."

It took him a second to realize she-it-had spoken the words aloud. He lifted his head.

And stared into the eyes of Death.

There was no other way to describe what DeGarmo had become. She was a living corpse, a dead thing come to life. She looked dead. She smelled dead.

When she smiled, her blue-gray lips cracked in several places, releasing droplets of black, rancid fluids.

"You hurt me, Del. Now I'm going to hurt you."

Her hands reached out towards him, the same hands that had once saved his life when he'd been shot.

Now they would end it.

Del closed his eyes.