She walked out of the house, relieved, knowing that someone would follow, someone would carefully follow, and stop whatever terrible thing was being planned.
She felt ill; now her stomach was churning, too.
Cliff!
She couldn’t believe it.
But she couldn’t forget the voice. Cliff is hungry. Cliff wants food.
And then the laughter.
She walked toward the stables; she hadn’t come unprepared.
She didn’t know what she expected. She saw Cliff standing in front of Tigger’s stall, his shotgun in his hand.
Where had he stashed Beth?
He turned to look at her and frowned. She hurried toward him, pretty certain that she was going to have only one chance.
“Here. Take it,” she said, thrusting the bowl of cold gumbo toward him.
Human instinct. He went to grasp the bowl; his shotgun was loose in his hand.
She dropped the bowl into his hands and grabbed the shotgun from him; before he could utter a word, she slammed the butt of it against his head as hard as she could.
He looked at her in disbelief as he fell back against the gate to Tigger’s stall and slumped to the ground.
“Ashley,” he said.
And then the lights on the property went out. Someone had hit the breaker.
Jake drove the car down the long, oak-lined path to the house. Just when he reached the drive in front, the lights went out. All of them.
The world became a misty shade of gray; dusk was upon them.
Jackson swore; Jake set a hand on his arm. “The generators will kick in!” he said.
But the generators didn’t kick in.
Jackson took off for the house; Jake started to follow him, but he stopped.
She was there.
Emma Donegal was there, and she was standing on the path by the side of the house. She beckoned to him.
He followed her. She led him around to the stables. He could barely see in the near dark. The moon was rising, not quite full, but it lent an eerie glow to his surroundings.
“Where, Emma, where?” he demanded.
He heard a groan. He hurried over to the sound. Cliff Boudreaux was down on the ground, holding the side of his head.
“Cliff, what the hell happened?” Jake demanded.
“Ashley…”
“Ashley did this to you?” Jake demanded.
“Behind her…someone behind her.” Cliff grasped his arm. “I couldn’t see…couldn’t tell…it went dark so fast. But I saw her face. He had to have called her out here. I didn’t know what the hell was going on…the horses…I’ll help you….”
Cliff caught his arm and tried to struggle to his feet.
He didn’t make it. He slipped back down to the ground. His head slumped to the side.
Ashley was out there. The killer had her.
Where?
Ashley didn’t know what in the hell had hit her; she’d felt a sting, and then nothing more.
And now, she didn’t know where she was.
Her eyes were open, she thought. But the world was still dark.
She tried to blink; even blinking seemed an in credible effort.
Then she felt…something. She realized that she was being carried. Her head bobbed and smacked against a man’s shoulders, and she had absolutely no control over it. She tried to focus, and she realized that she couldn’t see because there were no lights. Struggling to regain some clarity, she decided that he must be carrying her away from the stables.
She blinked and she could begin to see shapes around her; the moon was rising against the swiftly falling twilight. Her focus was bad, but she could try to see. She felt the man’s exertion as she was hefted over some obstacle in his path.
Cliff!
She had practically shattered his skull, thinking that he was the one who had called. That he was the one who had somehow managed to kidnap Beth.
But it wasn’t Cliff; she had just left him behind, staring at her as if she were the worst traitor known to man, which, of course, she was….
I’m so sorry, Cliff! she thought. But what was that going to matter now?
Thump, thump, grind…
Her chin fell against the man’s back. He was a big man. Strong, powerful in the chest and shoulders.
She heard a creaking sound. They were back in the cemetery, she realized. She was surrounded by the towering white architecture of her ancestral city of the dead. The tombs seemed to glisten a silvery white against the dusky sky.
She’d always been meant for the Donegal tomb eventually.
It seemed that time was now.
She could barely see; barely think, barely function. But she was aware! Was this how it had been for Charles Osgood, Marty Dean and Toby Keaton?
Had they known they were about to die but been unable to respond, to react in any way? Maybe not. Maybe the dosage of the drugs they had received had been stronger. Maybe…
Hope swelled, just the tiniest bit. She needed to do something, or she was going to die.
No, Angela thought that she was with Cliff.
And Angela was trapped in the dark. Angela wouldn’t know until…
Suddenly, she saw Marshall Donegal at her side. He drew his phantom sword and swiped at her carrier’s neck. The sword slashed right through it. Ashley tried to smile. She felt her lips move. She did have some…some…no… She tried to lift her head, but she could not.
But a real-life rock in front of the man nearly tripped him; he stumbled. She was a deadweight, she remembered, even if she wasn’t near the weight he must have struggled with when he attacked Charles Osgood.
She heard the faint sound of a creaking once again, and she realized that she was being brought into her family tomb; the temple tomb.
She felt it! She felt pain when her body was slammed down on the central altar in the tomb. Pain meant life. The still rising moon shed an eerie yellow illumination into the tomb through the grate in the far wall.
She heard her attacker working quickly, lifting the heavy marble siding from one of the shelf tombs nearby.
Marshall Donegal’s tomb.
He turned to her, smiling.
She knew him before she saw his face. HJH. His wife had been Ginnie. Ginnie Hilton. And Ramsay Clayton had written a letter to her for her husband, Henry James Hilton, because Hilton’s hand had been broken. It hadn’t been broken in the skirmish; it had been broken when he had attacked Emma Donegal and Harold Boudreaux had set upon him, dragging him off the woman he had so brutally attacked.
“Ashley, you see me! I should have known that you would see me. You were always so special. So precious. And now…”
He paused, listening. There was commotion going on; people shouting. She couldn’t understand them, but she knew that they were searching the grounds. Angela had known where she was going, and by now they had surely found Cliff, and they would be looking for her.
She twitched her lips and managed to smile at him in return. She couldn’t speak. She willed him to understand her thoughts.
They’ll know that it was you. Angela will be reading those old letters, and they’ll figure it out faster than I did. They’ll know. They already know that it’s a sick grudge you have against my family. So, your ancestor died in the war—because his hand was broken. No one blamed Harold Boudreaux for what he did to your ancestor, because his fellow rebels knew what had happened when they saw Henry’s broken hand; they were appalled that he’d attacked Emma. They didn’t string up Harold Boudreaux, but they didn’t speak about any of it, either. All for honor! Well, the honor here died with Marshall Donegal, didn’t it? And you can’t stand that. Well, I may die, but you will, too. They’ll catch you, and you’ll rot in prison until they stick a needle in your arm, and that will be fitting, won’t it?
He stared at her, his face growing mottled, as if he could hear her thoughts. Of course, he couldn’t—he just saw that she had figured out the truth.
He slapped her, and she felt the sting again. Had he attacked so many people now that he was running out of his drug cocktail?
Perhaps she shouldn’t be so happy to feel. She didn’t know how he intended for her to die. And they were in the vault now with the gate locked. Even if they searched the cemetery, they wouldn’t think to look in the vault. The gates hadn’t been opened since her father had died; the tomb was sealed after every interment.
Yes, they had. Sometime while he’d been on the property, Griffin Grant had unlocked the iron gates and unsealed the tomb entrance. He had planned for a very long time to see that she came here.
The iron gates were closed, as if they’d never been open. The concrete sliding door behind the ornamental iron gates was barely ajar.
“I’ll come back and see you, my dear Ashley,” he promised. “And you won’t try to enter my mind, then. You’ll be dead. Everyone pays, Ashley. It’s your turn to pay for the sins of your fathers. You have it all wrong. I know, because Henry talks to me. He told me that he needed to be avenged. He died at Manassas, but he died because he couldn’t shoot. He died—because of Emma, and she was a filthy whore who teased and tormented him. Ashley, I saw the letter years ago, and then I could hear him—I could hear him crying out to me. Someone had to avenge what had happened.”
She tried to move her lips. Emma was not a whore. She was a grieving widow.
“He came to see her, to take care of her. She led him on, Ashley. I’ve seen you do it, too. So many of your kind do it. You’re like her. Everyone just thinks that you’re honest and caring. But, you see, she didn’t pay. You will. I thought it might be hard, Ashley. Do you realize that? I thought it might be hard to kill. Ramsay would have done just as well as Charles. That didn’t matter. The newswoman, well, she was like a rabid dog. And that ridiculous Toby huffing on over…he wasn’t quite so easy. But you know what, Ashley?”
His face came close to hers, and he smiled. She loathed him; she wanted to back away from him. She couldn’t move.
“Killing is fun. I found out I like it. But this may be the finale. Ashley, beautiful blonde Ashley, the last of the true Donegals—dead with her ancestors. Oh, watching you, Ashley. My ancestor never told me it would feel so good!”
