He gotten one call from Lieutenant Canady, who'd said he would be coming by. He hadn't explained why, just told Bernie to keep an eye out for him. But that was cool. Canady was a good guy. He was h.e.l.l on wheels if you were a crook, but if you were just an average Joe, schlepping along, he didn't mind what you did with your free time. But Canady hadn't shown yet. There was a sudden noise-right when his spy was meeting up with his Asian nemesis. It startled him from his concentration on the book, and he c.o.c.ked his head to listen.

Nothing.

He wondered what the h.e.l.l the noise had been. Something must have fallen in back. He turned his attention back to his book, but he couldn't help wondering what could have fallen?

He set his book down, swearing softly. Had a door been left open? Or did they have rats or something?

s.h.i.t.

He decided he'd better check it out.

He stood, and looked around. He didn't have a weapon. Attendants at the morgue didn't usually have problems with their...

charges. But what if some jerk had broken in? He looked around and saw his book. "Great," he muttered aloud. He could just see the headline. Courageous Night Attendant at Morgue Foils Thief with Spy Novel No, the book wasn't good enough.

There were all kinds of scalpels and saws in the autopsy rooms, but he didn't want to take a chance of coming across an intruder before he could get to a weapon. He opened the drawer to his desk. Aha! A letter opener.

Clutching it in his hand, he stood. He looked toward the door to the street and noted that it was securely locked. He started down the hallway.

A glance into the first room showed him that everything was sterile and pristine.

And smelling...sanitized.

Like a morgue.

A place of death.

Hardly a surprise, he thought with a shrug, and he moved on.

He found nothing. At last he came to the large insulated stainless steel doors that led to the morgue's current occupants.

He opened the door to what was essentially a giant refrigerator and looked around. Nothing. No, wait.

Something.

s.h.i.t!

There was movement on one of the gurneys. d.a.m.n it, they did have rats! Big rats, if the movement he was seeing gave any clue.

Rats-or a frat brother, trying to freak him out, he thought. He shook his head and walked to the gurney.

"a.s.shole," he said, pulling back the sheet.

But no frat brother was waiting to leap up and yell "Boo!"

He'd seen the corpse earlier. It was the one that had been discovered by a woman chasing after her kid, and it was months dead and decaying. The eyes were...gone. Eaten by insects or who knew what. Most of the flesh had been rotted away, and what was left clinging to the bones looked as if it had been burned. In fact, the smell of burning flesh had hovered around the body. She-because it was a she-had scarcely been recognizable as a human being.

But now...

A sound like...like insects gnawing on flesh and bone was coming from the corpse, but that wasn't the cause It was flesh and bone, all right. Flesh and bone that appeared to be repairing themselves. As he stared, watching blood vessels appear, muscles take form....

Her eyes-eyes that hadn't been there at all earlier-suddenly opened, and she stared at him.

Stared at him.

And then she smiled.

Smiled, only it wasn't a smile, it was like a snarl, and she was baring her teeth, but they weren't teeth at all, they were fangs. She looked like a huge asp, her horrid maw of a mouth opening, and he knew that she meant to sink those fangs into his jugular.

He screamed.

And he struck, batting at her face with his hand and trying to stab her with the letter opener. But those teeth were still coming....

Then, suddenly, he felt something heavy smash down on his head. Stars burst before his eyes, and he crashed to the floor.

He thought vaguely that he heard someone groan "Son of a b.i.t.c.h," but he wasn't sure. And then the world went quiet, as if a black curtain had fallen from the sky, and all seemed to be eternal darkness.

14.

M ark was certain the morgue was empty when he arrived, but as he stood at the door of the seemingly deserted facility, it opened, and Sean Canady was standing there in the dark.

"Took you long enough," he said, then turned and walked away, calling over his shoulder, "Come in. Quickly."

Mark followed, his eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness. There were security lights, but they offered dim illumination at best.

"No night attendant?" Mark asked.

"He's...here."

"Oh?"

"I knocked him out," Sean said impatiently. "I had to."

"Really?"

"Come see."

"I thought you wanted me down here because of that body the cops brought in today?" Mark asked with a frown.

"Yes."

"I destroyed her today."

"She should have been destroyed," Sean said. "What? If she's coming back, we need to talk to her. We need to know where she's been sleeping, who-"

"I'm sorry, but it's too late now."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Come on back. You'll see."

He did see. The morgue attendant was out cold on the floor, and the corpse...

She was half-covered in flesh again, looking like a Hollywood movie prop. Her eyes were open but unseeing. Her mouth was distorted in a snarl.

Her fangs were glistening.

And she had a literal death grip on a stake that was protruding from her chest.

"You certainly did take care of her," Mark said, looking at Canady.

"I had to. I know you were hoping she could be brought back to help us, but it's not going to happen. And after what I saw here tonight, we've got to be very careful." He indicated the morgue attendant on the floor. "She nearly had him. There seem to be some fairly new recruits in Stephan's flock. We can't count on dust to dust to get rid of them. If you make a kill, be d.a.m.n sure you cut the head off. I'll take care of any explanations."

"Like Stephan, when he throws his refuse into the Mississippi," Mark said bitterly.

"You've got to make sure they're down for good," Sean said firmly. "I have a community of the living to protect. I know you need information, but you can't get it at any risk to others."

Mark looked down at the fallen morgue attendant. Poor guy looked well and truly out. "How hard did you hit him?" he asked Canady.

"He'll come to soon enough."

"How much did he see?"

Canady shrugged. "Too much. But with the b.u.mp on his head, he won't say anything. Who the h.e.l.l would believe him?"

"She should begin to rot again quickly," Mark said.

"I want her more than rotted," Canady said curtly.

"If she were to come back..."

"Mark, we can't take chances like that. She almost put paid to Bernie. I barely got to her in time."

Mark winced. "All right. What next?" he asked Canady.

Sean handed him a bone saw. Mark nodded and got to work. Decapitation was not an easy process, he thought halfway through.

When they were done, he asked Canady, "How the h.e.l.l are you going to explain this?"

"I'm not. I'm going to pray she rots again by morning." "What about the morgue attendant?"

"I'm going to prop him back at his desk. With any luck, he's going to think he's worked a few hours too many alone with the dead at night."

"I guess you know what you're doing."

Canady shrugged. "It's the best I can think of, anyway. When I leave here, I'm heading back to the hospital to check on things there. Where will you be? Back at Montresse House?"

Mark shook his head. "No. I can't just sit around and wait. I have to find Stephan's lair. He's using guerilla tactics, going after different people, trying to keep us so busy and scattered that he'll eventually succeed in getting to Lauren. I have to find him first."

"What do you think he'll do next?" Canady asked.

"I don't know, but I hope to G.o.d I can find him before he does it," Mark replied.

Deanna remained very weak, and she was also fretful, worried about Jonas.

Lauren was worried about him, too, though not, she suspected, for quite the same reason.

Stacey managed to cook up a delicious soup that Deanna was able to keep down, so at least her strength was improving, even if the danger was still out there.

But that night, with Stacey, Bobby and Big Jim around, it seemed to Lauren that the siutuation was on the upswing, at the very least.

Deanna actually made it to the shower by herself, with one of them waiting, ready to hand her a towel and support her back to the bed.

Big Jim suggested they gather in Deanna's room for a game of Trivial Pursuit, and though she felt listless about the idea at first, Lauren was pleased to see how eagerly her friends agreed. Still, though she tried, she couldn't get into the game herself; she felt strangely restless and unnerved. Finally she excused herself and went downstairs to brew a pot of tea.

As the tea steeped, she suddenly remembered the paper Susan had given her, which she'd forgotten in the welter of events. She raced upstairs to her own room and found it in the pocket of the jeans she had worn the day before. Eagerly, she sat down on the bed to read.

It was a newspaper article, written ten years earlier about strange events in Louisiana history.

Lauren was perplexed. The event in question dated back to 1870. A plantation owner who had survived the ravages of the "War of Northern Aggression" had been returned to his home for burial after traveling abroad to attend the wedding of his son in Kiev, where he had apparently gone berserk and used a bow and arrow to kill the bride and several of the guests.

On the day of his funeral, the house-a beautiful, graceful home on the river-had gone up in flames. The sh.e.l.l had remained for years. As of the article date, the ruins were still abandoned, and the property had reverted to the state.

Lauren read the article over and over again, unable to puzzle out why Susan had given it to her.

Perplexed, she refolded the sheet of paper and tossed it on the nightstand.

Mark spent over two hours just driving around.

He had been certain at first that Stephan would have chosen a place along Plantation Row for his refuge, but he had apparently been wrong, because he didn't see anything suspicious the entire time He headed back to the hospital, anxious to see how Leticia was doing. All seemed quiet when he reached her room.

For whatever good it might do, Sean had stationed an officer on duty outside the door. And Judith Lockwood was right where he had left her, the knitting project in her hands beginning to look more like a sweater.

He noticed there were more crosses in the room. Several of them-all wooden-lined the window frame.

"h.e.l.lo, Ms. Lockwood," he said quietly.

She looked up calmly and nodded at him. "He's been here already, been here and gone."

"He?" he murmured.