Midnight Jewels

stopped shaking.
    It was cold in the starlit shadows, but there was a sense of lightness as well. The darkness offered concealment while allowing his primitive senses full rein. Mercy would probably say this was his kind of place, Croft thought grimly, a ghost town.
    The Jeep roared back into town and halted abruptly at the end of the street. Two male figures leaped from the front seat. Croft saw me odd shapes jutting from their hands and knew that Dallas and Lance were both carrying guns.

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Chapter FIFTEEN

    Mercy huddled in the shadows of the ruined structure and listened to the sound of the returning Jeep. Croft was right, as usual.
    Mercy wished disappearing was a viable option. Under the circumstances it looked like the best way out of an untenable situation. She inched carefully toward the wall, wary of unseen objects lurking the shadows waiting to trip her. There was one window in the old shack, but it had been boarded up long ago, her questing fingers discovered. Fortunately there were plenty of cracks and knotholes in the wooden walls. When she pressed her face close to the boards she could see a couple of other disintegrating buildings looming in the shadows outside. Their outlines seemed a little clearer now than they had earlier. Maybe her eyes were getting more accustomed to the darkness.
    She hugged herself against the chill. It wasn't just cold in Drifter's Creek. There was something more. She remembered the vague uneasiness she had experienced when she and Croft had first driven through the ghost town. Croft hadn't seemed aware of anything out of the ordinary, she recalled.
    Possibly because the strangeness she had felt hadn't seemed particularly out of the ordinary to him, Mercy thought wryly. The man was an enigma. It was awkward being in love with an enigma.
    Mercy caught the flash of the Jeep lights between a staggered row of buildings as the vehicle stopped right in the middle of the road. Whoever was driving probably wasn't unduly worried about blocking oncoming traffic. There wasn't much likelihood of any traffic on this road, especially at this hour of the night.
    The lights of the Jeep were left on to illuminate the road between the dry, rotting hulks of buildings. The vehicle itself was in deep shadow, but Mercy thought she saw a shape jump out of the front seat and move forward to crouch beside the fender. Perhaps there were two shapes. She couldn't be sure. It seemed very probable that Dallas and Lance traveled as a pair. Snakes were said to do exactly that.
    She knew she couldn't be seen, but Mercy drew back instinctively, wondering where Croft was. She glanced around blindly, desperately trying to quiet the panic that threatened to inundate her. She hated being cooped tip like this. She felt like a trapped animal waiting for the arrival of the hunters.
    She had to get out.
    Under normal circumstances it was possible Croft could handle the situation outside. There was a terrifying kind of strength in him that had its roots in the emotional as well as physical side of his being, and he freely admitted that violence held some sort of fascination for him. Mercy forced herself to acknowledge that he was one of the hunters of the world, a predator who was at home in the darkness.
    But tonight Croft was weakened by whatever had been used to poison or drug him. The! thought of him trying to take on Gladstone's two musclemen was appalling.
    Croft could get himself killed out there in the shadows and she wouldn't even know it until Dallas and Lance finally tracked her down in her poor hiding place.
    Mercy shuddered. She hated this dark, cold room. She wondered what it had been when Drifter's Creek was a flourishing mining community. It wouldn't surprise her to find out this particular building had once served as the town's morgue.
    Tile thought made her almost sick to her stomach. She tried telling herself that towns the size of Drifter's Creek wouldn't have had morgues, but somehow the image of a dead body sprawled on a table nearby wouldn't vanish.
    She could see the body very clearly in her mind's eye. The dead man was dressed in miner's doming, his dirty shirt stained reddish brown from the bullet wound in his chest. The town doctor was leaning over him, shaking his head. It was too late. Just another victim of a claim feud.
    The miner's small store of personal belongings were stacked on another table. A gun in its holster, an iron shovel with a wooden handle, a battered hat.
    He had never