River’s End

it away and saw the blood. It was soaking into the ground, going pale with wet. Shaking, she dropped to her knees, touched her fingertips to the stain, and brought them back, red and wet.
    “Not again. No. not again.” She rocked herself, mourning in the sizzle of rain, cringing into a ball as the fear hammered at her, screamed into her mind, burst through her body like a storm of ice.
    “Noah!” She shouted it once, listened to the grieving echo of it. Shoving to her feet, she ran her smeared fingers over her face, then screamed it.
    With her only thought to find him, she began to run.
    He’d lost his direction, but he thought he still had the scent of his quarry. The gun was familiar in his hand now. as if it had always been there. He never doubted he could use it. It was part of him now. Everything that was primitive about the world he was in was inside him now.
    Life and death and the cold-blooded will to survive.
    Twenty years, the man had hidden what he was, what he’d done. He’d let another grow old in a cage, had played the devoted husband to his victim’s sister, the indulgent uncle to her daughter.
    Murder, bloody murder had been locked inside him, while he prospered, while he posed. And when the key had started to turn in the door to Sam Tanner’s cage, it had set murder free again.
    The break-ins, the attack on Mike. An attempt to stop the book, Noah thought as he moved with deliberate strides through the teeming woods. To beat back the guilt, the fear of exposure that must have tried to claw out of him hundreds of times over twenty long years.
    And once again, he’d turned the focus on Sam, once again structured his acts to point the accusations at an innocent man.
    But this time it was Olivia he’d hunted. Fear that she’d seen him that night, would remember some small detail that had been tucked in a corner of her mind all this time. A detail that might jibe with the story Sam wanted to tell. Yes, it was logical, the cold-blooded logic that would fit a man who could murder his wife’s sister, then live cozily with her family for another generation. Then the balance had shifted on him, with the possibility of a book, another in-depth look at the case, the interviews with Olivia urging her to talk about the night her family had conveniently buried along with Julie.
    But she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, couldn’t remember if she was too afraid. Or if she was dead.
    Then he heard her scream his name.

Thirty-three
    The monster was back. The smell of him was blood. The sound of him was terror. She had no choice but to run. and this time to run toward him. The lush wonder of forest that had once been her haven, that had always been her sanctuary, spun into a nightmare. The towering majesty of the trees was no longer a grand testament to nature’s vigor, but a living cage that could trap her, conceal him. The luminous carpet of moss was a bubbling bog that sucked at her boots. She ripped through ferns, rending their sodden fans to slimy tatters, skidded over a rotted log and destroyed the burgeoning life it nursed.
    Green shadows slipped in front of her, beside her. behind her. seemed to whisper her name.
    Livvy, my love. Let me tell you a story.
    Breath sobbed out of her lungs, set to grieving by fear and loss. The blood that still stained her fingertips had gone ice-cold.
    Rain fell, a steady drumming against the windswept canopy, a sly trickle over lichen-draped bark. It soaked into the greedy-ground until the whole world was wet and ripe and somehow hungry.
    She forgot if she was hunter or hunted, only knew in some deep primal instinct that movement was survival.
    She would find him, or he would find her. And somehow it would be finished. She would not end as a coward. And if there was any light in the world, she would find the man she loved. Alive.
    She curled the blood she knew was his into the palm of her hand and held it like hope.
    Fog snaked around her boots, broke apart at her long, reckless strides. Her heartbeat battered her ribs, her temples, her fingertips in a feral, pulsing rhythm. She heard the crack overhead, the thunder snap of it, and leaped aside as a branch, weighed down by water and wind and time, crashed to the forest floor. A little death meant fresh life.
    She closed her hand over the only weapon she had and knew she would kill to live. And through the deep green light haunted by darker shadows, she saw the monster as she remembered him in her