He staggered and tweaked his broken wrist, almost dropping Deck as the pain made him shout. He cursed the storm, he cursed Deck, but most of all he cursed himself.

Back in the car, right before they'd crashed, he'd called Decker a coward. So what did that make him?

Who loves ya, baby?

No, really, he should have said to Sophia, when he'd had her on the phone. Why don't you ever just stop and get your bearings? Take a deep breath and look around you-and see who really loves you.

His world had shrunk down to pain and cold. But he would get through this-he'd been through worse. He'd carry Deck to safety, be the hero of the hour-not that anyone would notice him.

He'd watch, silently, while Sophia fell into Decker's arms.

"I should just drop you in a drift," he told Deck, who, of course, didn't respond.

The smoke alarms screamed-even before Eulie tossed what looked like draperies onto the lit gas stove.

At first Lindsey thought he was trying to cut the light, but then she realized he'd thrown newspaper onto it, too. It burst into flame.

He was trying to set the house on fire.

Gun held at ready-thank God she'd invested in a firearm that could withstand a good dousing-she moved to the hall doorway. He'd vanished again.

But her quick peek down the hall had revealed flickering light-flames-coming from the living room.

Yup. The house was on fire.

The good news was that if he tried to come down the hall again, he'd be silhouetted against the light from the flames.

The bad news was that the house was on fire. Lindsey's phone had been trashed by that high-pressure drenching. She was soaking wet, too.

And, oh yeah, outside? They were having the blizzard of the century.

Leaving the shelter of the house was not an option, but if she didn't put that fire out, soon, it would become a necessity.

Lindsey pulled the curtains and the paper from the stove, stomping out the flames.

She had to go into the living room-put out the fire he'd started there, too. Except that was what Eulie wanted her to do. He'd be waiting for her, ready to kill her, but not with a gun.

No, he'd told her how he wanted to kill her-with the blade of his knife.

Revulsion filled her, along with its companion, fear. And for the first time since she'd left her car and pressed her finger against that doorbell, Lindsey realized that she could very well die. Right here. At this man's hands.

Horribly.

Fear was not a new emotion-she'd been afraid, plenty of times before in her life. No one spent seven years on the LAPD without experiencing total, bowel-clearing fear.

And she'd had the added bonus of living in fear that her mother would die, starting back when she was a child.

Still, this particular fear was intense. She was all but alone in a dark house, in the height of a howling storm, with a true monster of a serial killer.

Lindsey had learned as a cop that it wasn't the fear but rather what she did with it that mattered. She had to set it aside. She had to think clearly, keep her wits about her. She had to find and then kill this beast, put out the fire he'd started, and locate Tracy. Then and only then would there be time to tremble and shake.

She took a deep breath, exhaled hard.

Another. And another.

She wished her phone still worked. Even just looking at Jenk's text messages would've helped. She wasn't afraid when he was around. Or maybe she was. Maybe, though, when she was with him she was just too busy living her life-enjoying her life-to notice just how frightened she was.

I cant fnd shltr. Get it?

Jenk couldn't find shelter the same way Lindsey couldn't leave Tracy. Not couldn't-wouldn't. She got it. She did. But it was too late to tell him so.

Okay, no. That was defeatist thinking. She would tell him. It wasn't too late. She had tentative plans with him. For this coming weekend, and for Christmas. Tentative could become definite-all she had to do was tell him yes.

And she would-as soon as she saw him again.

God, Lindsey was tired of living as if she didn't have a future. She wanted a life that was more than going to work and then hiding in her apartment. This was, of course, a hell of a time to realize that-while on the verge of having all of her choices taken from her in a very permanent way by a man who wanted to add her hair to his nasty-ass collection.

But maybe this was what she'd needed to get her life back on track. Serial killer therapy. Fifty minutes trapped in a house with Richard Eulie. If she survived with her scalp still attached, she'd emerge empowered with the knowledge of what truly was important in life.

Making Mark Jenkins laugh.

Smiling back at him.

Watching his eyes soften as he looked at her, when he thought she didn't notice.

His kisses, so sweet, turning to fire...

No way was she going to let Eulie hurt her. And double no way would she let him hurt Mark.

She was not going to lose him-not to some killer. She may have lived in fear of her mother dying, helpless to prevent things over which she had no control.

But this was completely different.

She knew what Eulie wanted-to look into her eyes and see her fear as she died. It was possible he would shoot her, but he wouldn't shoot to kill, only to wound.

Getting shot would hurt, but she'd been shot before.

She'd let him look into her eyes, all right.

Eulie wanted her in the living room? She'd go into that living room. She had to get this fire out, and then she had to find Tracy.

But first, she'd give this bastard more than he'd ever bargained for.

Number Five was halfway up the stairs-she was so dizzy, each step was a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

It was so dark, it would just be so easy to close her eyes.

"Keep going," Tracy called. Assuming that really was Tracy's voice and not some hallucination.

She was floating in that place where time and space warped and bent. There was a noise-a siren wailing. It got louder as she climbed. Danger. It was dangerous to come up these stairs. If he knew, if he found out...

Number Four was there with her, then, with her horrible face, with the whimpers of pain she made behind that mouth that was sewn shut.

"Oh Lord, oh Lord..."

"Beth?"

He'd shown her some of the others-what he'd done to them. But he'd done it after they were dead, after she'd killed them.

Five knew he'd shown them to her as a reminder. This was why she finished them. This was why she obeyed him, why she always did what he said.

"Beth, are you still there?"

Beth. Her name was Beth, not Number Five.

"I'm still here," she called back, her fingers finally closing on the light switch on the wall by the door.

But when she flipped it, nothing happened. No light. No change.

No salvation.

Beth started to cry. She collapsed against the door-which creaked opened. And there she was. In his kitchen.

The stove was on, flames leaping and jumping.

This was where he'd done it-where he'd killed Number Four and cut up all the others.

And there was the key-right where he'd said it was, hanging on the wall, where he'd said she'd never reach it.

She grabbed it and stumbled back downstairs.

Dave's world had narrowed to one step and then one more step and then another step. Each time, he jarred his broken wrist. An inhale. An exhale. He breathed through the pain.

And sometimes he managed it by talking to Decker.

"The next time you give me that you're not a Navy SEAL scornful look, I want you to remember this. That I carried you. All this way. Without complaining. And a few months from now? When you and Sophia are making your wedding plans? I want you to remember who made you make that phone call. Because even though you may not have said the words, you dialed the phone. And she's going to mention that you called her, while she's sitting by your hospital bed, running her fingers through your hair, and you can say Yeah, you know, funny, right before we hit that tree, I'd just pulled my head out of my ass and realized that I was, like, twelve months behind schedule to ask you out to dinner. That's one of the biggest problems about having my head up my ass. It's too dark to see my watch or a calendar. But what do you say? I know this great restaurant in Coronado. It's right on the water..."

Dave stopped talking to Deck, not because Decker wasn't listening, but because a giant truck with a snowplow had appeared in the road in front of them.

It rumbled to a stop, and the driver climbed down from the cab-and morphed into Sophia.

Great. Dave kept walking. He wasn't certain that a symptom of hypothermia was hallucinating, but hallucinating in general was never a good sign.

"Dave!" Sophia followed him. "Come on-let's get Decker into the truck. Lopez-he's a medic-he's heading toward the Thornton place-you know, where Gillman's jacket made the computer blip?"

She was real.

Sophia was real, and she tried to help him with Decker-by grabbing Dave's broken wrist.

Son of a bitch. He went down into the snow, and she realized that he'd left out certain details when they'd spoken on the phone, after the accident.

She was tight-lipped as they got Decker into the truck, as she helped Dave in, too. Then she climbed behind the wheel, put the truck in gear.

"Any other injuries?" she asked, as the plow ground forward, as Dave tried to crawl inside the dashboard heater. "You know, besides your obviously broken nose?"

His nose was broken? He looked into the mirror on the flip side of the sun visor. Yep. Broken.

"No," he said, shivering so hard he could barely speak. "I'm okay."

She was terribly upset-the sight of Decker unconscious was pretty rattling-but she was driving this monster like a total pro.

"Deck's going to be okay, too," he reassured her. "He's going to be just fine."

Sophia just shook her head, glared at the snow, and drove.

Izzy added running through deep snow in a blizzard to his list of crappy ways to spend a December afternoon.

Christmas shopping at a mall where the parking garage was being renovated and was therefore inaccessible would have been more fun. Yeah, death threats from other drivers trying to cram into the remaining parking lot, fender benders as cars played chicken to gain a suddenly available slot, twenty solid minutes of gridlock while people double-parked, shouts of Fuck you, asshole! Way to spread the glad tidings and holiday cheer.

Yeah, that definitely sucked. But this was ten times worse.

Jenkins was determined to set a new world record for the most consecutive seven-minute miles through blizzard conditions. Izzy was winded and lagging, and he wanted to get to the Thornton house very badly.

And Jenkie was the one who was leading the way. He was breaking through the crust on the snow, making it that much easier for the rest of them to follow.

Lopez was muttering in Spanish.

Gillman had actually zipped up his jacket and put on a hat.

Yeah, it was freaking frio, all right.

Jenk turned and shouted something back at them.

"What the fuck did he say?" Izzy asked.

"I think he said halfway there," Gillman repeated.

"We're way more than halfway," Izzy said. Weren't they? Please God.

"I think he said he smelled smoke," Lopez said. Although how he could have heard Jenk with his hood up was a mystery.

But then Izzy smelled it, too. It was definitely smoke. Damn, that couldn't be good. A fire, in this weather?

Ahead of them, Jenk was running even faster-pointing at something just ahead.

Izzy manufactured a second wind, and as he rounded the corner, he saw what Jenk had spotted.

Less than a quarter mile down the hill, there it sat. The biggest fucking haunted house in the world, with smoke pouring out of a first-floor window.