Rachel had already lit two kerosene lanterns and placed one of them on a table in the front room, giving them pale light, but the blackness that devoured the rest of the house was so thick it might have been a solid substance. Joshua realized that on a sparsely populated, mostly undeveloped island, there were no streetlamps to light the neighborhoods, no big buildings blazing in the night. He had lost power at their home in Atlanta yesterday, but that had been nothing compared to this. Here, the absence of light was breathtaking.

He switched on his flashlight. Rachel did the same.

Darkness, at last, had come.

Upon closer inspection, it was a nicer house than Dexter expected. A two-story Cape Cod, in good shape, with a fresh coat of light paint. He could see the beach, and the wind-whipped sea, through the palmettos and live oaks that flanked the property.

The bitch had never told him that her family owned a house on a goddamn island. It had been wise of her to keep it from him. He would have forced her to sell it. Developers were probably frothing at the mouth to get their grubby hands on this prime piece of beachfront real estate, and would have paid a handsome price.

Night had come, and the fierce wind had knocked out power. As he stood at the mouth of the long driveway, he reflected that he probably did not need to cloak himself in order to approach the house. The natural darkness would conceal him.

Keeping to the perimeter of the front yard, he walked through the short, dry grass. He took refuge behind a live oak that bordered the driveway. Wind tore through the boughs overhead, ripping crisp, dead leaves from the branches.

He deliberated his next move. The bitch and her illegitimate husband were likely anticipating his arrival, and would have made preparations. He could not simply walk to the front door, ring the bell, and hope to draw them out. He would have to be more cunning.

Clouds as tattered as cheesecloth scudded across the sky, pushed by the high velocity winds. A nearly full moon, freed of the masking clouds, cast a deathly pale glow.

The silvery luminescence bathed the beach house, making it appear to shimmer like a magical place in a fairy tale. There was actual glitter around the front porch, as if a Christmas party had taken place there a short while ago and they had neglected to clean up.

Dexter looked closer.

Not party glitter. Broken glass. Mixed in with leaves that had been disturbed by the wind.

Cloaking himself again lest the moonlight give him away, he circled to the rear of the house.

There was a wide patio. A set of steps led to a balcony, too. Slivers of crushed glass, half-concealed with a blend of wind-blown leaves, covered both areas.

He didn't see glass twinkling in the grass beneath the first-floor window on the west side of the house, but he was sure that it was scattered inside, underneath the sill.

"Smart," he said.

He returned to the oak tree in the front. The long, sturdy branches extended to embrace the roof of the house. A dormer window reflected the ghostly moonlight.

"But I'm smarter."

He hadn't climbed a tree since he was a kid. But he made quick work of this one, scaling the trunk and branches with relative ease.

The powerful wind hardly slowed him. He was on a divine mission. It was not his destiny to fall from a tree and crack his skull on the ground. Matter of fact, he'd become so impervious to injury that he doubted falling to the earth from a height fatal to a normal man would have harmed him at all.

A thick, sturdy bough stretched toward the roof and the dormer window. With the sure-footedness of a ninja, he crept across the bough, and hopped lightly onto the steeply pitched roof, confident that the screeching wind masked the sounds of his drop.

However, the wind did rattle loose a branch. It spun to the ground, snapping against the pool of broken glass around the porch steps.

They might have heard that-the wind had suddenly abated. It would put them on high alert, which the broken glass was obviously designed to do.

He looked inside the dormer window. An attic lay beyond the pane, as he'd known it would.

He waited until the wind howled again.

Then, when it was at its peak, he drew back his elbow and swung it toward the glass.

Holding their flashlights, Joshua and Rachel waited in the front room, listening for the telling tinkle of glass. The wailing wind, however, posed a problem. If Dexter stepped on the glass shards while the gale was screaming at a high pitch, they might not hear him.

"He's out there," Rachel said, suddenly. "I feel him."

"Feel him, like psychically?"

She nodded. Shivered. "It feels like cold air coming from an open freezer."

"Can you feel what he's doing, too?"

"No, I can only sense him. His aura is . . . very strong. Much stronger than it was the last time I saw him."

The coldness she felt seemed to have transferred to Joshua, as if by psychic osmosis, because he shivered, too.

He removed the .357 from his holster and thumbed off the safety. Rachel followed suit with the .38.

The wind wailed for a few seconds . . . and then faded. In the well-deep silence that followed, Joshua heard a soft crackle. Breaking glass.

It came from near the front porch.

"He's right outside." Joshua's pounding heart felt as if it had crawled into his mouth, making it difficult to breathe. Beside him, Rachel's jaws were clenched, and her knuckles were milk-white around the flashlight and the gun. "Rachel, I want you to go upstairs."

"What?" Her whisper was indignant.

His voice was low, but firm. "You'll be safe up there. You're the one he really wants. Hide in one of the bedrooms. Please."

The wind spoke again, a mournful keening. Joshua thought he detected another crackle of breaking glass, somewhere around the front of the house again.

Rachel seemed to hear the sound, too. She turned to the staircase, paused. "What're you going to do?"

"I'm going to stay down here and hold him off. Cut him down, if I can."

"Okay. Be careful."

"I'll be fine."

She gnawed her bottom lip. He could tell that she didn't like what he was asking her to do, but she wasn't going to debate it with him further. Holding the gun and the flashlight in front of her, she edged past him and climbed the stairs.

Joshua watched the darkness swallow her above. Then he moved away from the staircase, sidled into the hallway, and extinguished the kerosene lantern in the front room. He angled the flashlight toward the floor, too.

From outside, though the blinds were drawn, Dexter might've glimpsed light. Joshua wanted him to think that they had left the front room, to lure him into attempting to enter.

In the hallway, he waited in darkness. Heart knocking. Finger tensed around the trigger.

Rachel didn't like being separated from Joshua. His strength and clarity of purpose had bolstered her confidence, and leaving his side brought back all of her old fears and worries about Dexter.

She would've run, if there was anywhere else to run to. She understood running was not a solution, but it would have delayed the inevitable confrontation. Her old scar was tingling, as if remembering her last violent encounter with Dexter.

I won't have to fight him this time. Joshua's going to keep him away from me.

She wanted to believe that was true, but her nightmares were fresh in her thoughts. Nightmares were not necessarily prophetic-they were sometimes only manifestations of deeply-held fears-but it was impossible for her to push them out of her mind. This entire day had the quality of a terrifying dream.

The second-floor hallway was pitch-black. She'd spent some of the best times of her life in this house, but her fear was so sharp that she might have been wandering through a foreign place, where every shadow held a latent threat.

She panned the flashlight around, to ensure that she was alone. Joshua had asked her to hide. But no room-nowhere on the entire planet-was safe from Dexter.

She was so damn tired of running, of living in fear. She wanted to kill the man. She'd never wanted to harm another human being, but she would hurt him, eagerly and gratefully.

Don't think like that, girl. You'll lower yourself to his level, and then where will you be?

Her meditation room was on the right. It was a chamber of peace that held nothing but comforting memories.

She would hide in there.

Joshua's finger trembled on the revolver's trigger. Dexter was outside-he'd heard him. But the asshole hadn't tried to break-in yet. What was he doing?

Perhaps he had figured out Joshua's broken light bulb ploy. Perhaps he was looking for another way inside the house.

But there was no other way inside. They had covered every entrance.

Joshua cut off the flashlight. He moved to a front window on the right of the doorway.

With one finger, he lifted one of the slats in the blinds, giving himself a narrow side-view of the porch.

A large tree branch had landed at the bottom of the steps, in the midst of the glass shards and leaves.

That was all they had heard. The branch crackling against the glass. Not Dexter.

But Rachel had been so confident that she'd sensed him nearby. Could she have been mistaken?

Joshua squinted outside again.

One branch fell. But we heard glass shatter twice, didn't we?

It was hard to be sure. The noisy wind was conspiring against them.

He backed away from the window. Logic provided a comforting explanation. Intuition, however, offered another, much more disturbing possibility.

Resolve hardening his face, Joshua cocked the hammer of the .357 and flung open the front door.

Cold wind gusted inside and struck him like a many-armed beast. But there was no attack from Dexter.

Silvery moonlight illuminated the porch. Checking both ways, Joshua went down the steps. At the bottom, his shoe crunched on the blend of glass slivers and leaves.

He kicked aside the offending branch. Then he swung around, and looked up, knowing what he was going to see, and dreading it.

The dormer window, which led to the attic, was broken.

On the threshold of her meditation room, Rachel played the flashlight beam around. All clear.

She locked the door, leaned against it.

Her heart hammered. There was a chair beside the doorway, which she used sometimes during her meditations. She brought levered the top of the seat back underneath the door knob, a little extra reinforcement. Better.

Beyond the white cone of her flashlight, the room was tomb-dark. During their preparations, they had drawn the Venetian blinds on the big window that gave the panoramic ocean view.

She decided to open the blinds. It would make her feel better, to be able to observe the ceaselessly rumbling tides.

She pulled the lift cord, raising the blinds to the top of the windowpane. Pale moonlight fell inside. On the beach below, the waves, lashed by strong winds, crashed violently on the shore, as if some gigantic sea creature were thrashing to the surface to devour her.

Disturbed, she was about to close the blinds again, preferring the comfort of the flashlight to this sight, when she heard a sound behind her. Like creaking metal hinges.

In the far corner of the room, there was a rectangular ceiling panel that granted entry to the attic. As she watched, it opened slowly, a set of retractable wooden stairs lowering from the attic to the floor, like the widening jaws of an immense beast.

He's already in the house, oh, Jesus . . .

A sharp stench assailed her nostrils, a blend of offensive odors. Damp earth . . . unchecked male sweat . . . old, spilled blood . . .

Terror bolted her feet in place. She wanted to run. But she couldn't order her muscles to work.

There was a thud, and a creak: the weight of a body dropping onto the hardwood floor.

I smell him, I hear him, but I can't see him. What the hell?

"I kept my promise, baby," a familiar voice said, which had an effect on Rachel like an ice pick piercing her spine. "I found you."

Run, Rachel thought, wildly. Run, run, run.

But she couldn't. She wouldn't.

Not any more.

She trained the flashlight in front of her.

Dexter materialized in the space, as if magically taking shape from the darkness itself. He looked the same, like the man who had haunted her nightmares for so long, but different. Crazier, if that were at all possible. Madness glinted in his eyes.

She had no idea how he did the invisibility trick. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that she was going to put an end to this.