Shadowfires

her head down, drew her elbows in to her sides, ran, ran for her
life.
When confronting Rachael on the walk beside
the rest rooms, Eric's initial reaction had surprised him. Seeing her beautiful face, her titian hair, and her lovely body beside which he had once lain, Eric was unexpectedly overcome with remorse for the way he had treated her and was filled with an unbearable sense of loss. The primal fury that had been churning in him abruptly subsided, and more human emotions held sway, though tenuously. Tears stung his eyes. He found it difficult to speak, not only because changes within his throat made speech more difficult, but because he was choked up with regret and grief and a sudden crippling loneliness.
    But she rejected him again, confirming the worst suspicions he had
of her and jolting him out of his anguish and self-pity. Like a wave
of dark water filled with churning ice, the cold rage of an ancient
consciousness surged into him again. The desire to stroke her hair,
to gently touch her smooth skin, to take her in his arms-that
vanished instantly and was replaced by something stronger than
desire, by a profound need to kill her. He wanted to gut her, bury
his mouth in her still-warm flesh, and finally proclaim his triumph
by urinating on her lifeless remains. He threw himself at her, still
wanting her but for different purposes.
    She ran, and he pursued.
    Instinct, racial memory of countless other pursuits-memories not
only in the recesses of his mind but flowing in his blood-gave him an
advantage. He would bring her down. It was only a matter of time.
    She was fast, this arrogant animal, but they were always fast when
propelled by terror and the survival instinct, fast for a while but
not forever. And in their fear, the hunted were never as cunning as
the hunter. Experience assured him of that.
    He wished that he had taken off the boots, for they restricted him
now. But his own adrenaline level was so high that he had blocked out
the pain in his cramped toes and twisted heels; temporarily the
discomfort did not register.
    The prey fled south, though nothing in that direction offered the
smallest hope of sanctuary. Between them and the faraway mountains,
the inhospitable land was home only to things that crawled and crept
and slithered, things that bit and stung and sometimes ate their own
young to stay alive.
Having run only a few hundred yards, Rachael
was already gasping for breath. Her legs felt leaden.
    She was not out of shape; it was just that the desert heat was so
fierce it virtually had substance, and running through it seemed
almost as bad as trying to run through water. For the most part, the
heat did not come down from above, because all but a sliver or two of
sky was clouded over. Instead, the heat came up, rising from
the scorching sand that had been baking in the now-hidden sun,
storing that terrific heat since dawn, until the clouds had arrived
within the last hour or so. The day was still warm, ninety degrees,
but the air rising off the sand must have been well over a hundred.
She felt as if she were running across a furnace grate.
    She glanced back.
    Eric was about twenty yards behind her.
    She looked straight ahead and pushed harder, really pumping her
legs, putting everything she had into it, crashing through that wall
of heat, only to find endless other walls beyond it, sucking in hot
air until her mouth went dry and her tongue cleaved to the roof of
her mouth and her throat began to crack and her lungs began to burn.
A natural hedge line of stunted mesquite lay ahead, extending twenty
or thirty yards to the left, an equal distance to the right. She
didn't want to detour around it, because she was afraid she'd lose
ground to Eric. The mesquite was only knee high, and as far as she
could see it was neither too solid nor too deep, so she plunged
through the hedge, whereupon it proved to be deeper than it looked,
fifteen or twenty feet across, and also somewhat more tightly grown
than it appeared. The spiky, oily plant poked at her legs and snagged
her jeans and delayed her with such tenacity that it seemed to be
sentient and in league with Eric. Her racing heart began to pound
harder, too hard, slamming against her breastbone. Then she was
through the hedge, with hundreds of bits of mesquite bark and leaves
stuck on her jeans and socks. She increased her pace again, gushing
sweat, blinking salty streams of the same effluvient from