Midnight Rising(4)

It was empty.



And for reasons she couldn’t explain, that thought chilled her even more than if she’d found some hideous corpse turning to dust inside.



Over her head, the cave’s nocturnal residents were getting restless. The bats stirred, then bolted past her in a hurried rush of motion. Dylan ducked to let them pass, figuring she’d better get the hell out of there too.



As she pivoted to find the crevice exit, she heard another rustle of movement. This one was bigger than bats, a low snarl of sound followed by a disturbance of loose rock somewhere in the cave.



Oh, God. Maybe she wasn’t alone in here after all.



The hairs at the back of her neck tingled and before she could remind herself that she didn’t believe in monsters, her heart started beating in overdrive.



She fumbled around for the way out of the cave, her pulse jackhammering in her ears. By the time she found daylight, she was gasping for air. Her legs felt rubbery as she scrambled back down the ridge, then raced to rejoin her friends in the safety of the bright midday sun below.





He’d been dreaming of Eva again.



It wasn’t enough that the female had betrayed him in life—now, in her death, she invaded his mind while he slept. Still beautiful, still treacherous, she spoke to him of regret and how she wanted to make things right.



All lies.



Eva’s visiting ghost was only a part of Rio’s long slide into madness.



His dead mate wept in his dreams, begging him to forgive her for the deception she’d orchestrated a year ago. She was sorry. She still loved him, and always would.



She wasn’t real. Just a taunting reminder of a past he would be glad to leave behind.



Trusting the female had cost him much. His face had been ruined in the warehouse explosion. His body was broken in places, still recovering from injuries that would have killed a mortal man.



And his mind…?



Rio’s sanity had been fracturing apart, bit by bit, worsening in the time he’d been holed up alone on this Bohemian mountainside.



He could bring it all to a halt. As one of the Breed—a hybrid race of humans bearing vampiric, alien genes—he could drag himself into the sunlight and let the UV rays devour him. He’d considered doing just that, but there remained the task of closing the cave and destroying the damning evidence it contained.



He didn’t know how long he’d been there. The days and nights, weeks and months, had at some point merged into an endless suspension of time. He wasn’t sure how it had happened. He’d arrived there with his brethren of the Order. The warriors had been on a mission to locate and destroy an old evil secreted away in the rocks centuries ago.



But they were too late.



The crypt was empty; the evil had already been freed.



It was Rio who volunteered to stay behind and seal the cave while the others returned home to Boston. He couldn’t go back with them. He didn’t know where he belonged. He’d intended to find his own way—maybe go back to Spain, his homeland.



That’s what he’d told the warriors who’d long been like brothers to him. But he hadn’t carried out any of his plans. He had delayed, tormented by indecision and the weight of the sin he’d been contemplating.



In his heart, he’d known he had no intention of leaving this tomb. But he had put off the inevitable with weak excuses, waiting for the right time, the right conditions, for him to do what he had to do. But those excuses were just that. They only served to make the hours stretch into days, the days into weeks.



Now, easily months later, he lurked in the darkness of the cave like the bats that inhabited the dank space with him. He no longer hunted, no longer had the desire to feed. He merely existed, conscious of his steady descent into a hell of his own making.



For Rio, that descent had finally proven too much.



Beside him on a hollowed-out ledge of rock ten feet up from the floor of the cave rested a detonator and a small cache of C-4. It was enough boom to seal up the hidden crypt forever. Rio intended to set it off that night…from the inside.



Tonight, he would finish it.



When his lethargic senses had roused him from a heavy sleep to warn him of an intruder, he’d thought it to be just another tormenting phantom. He caught the scent of a human—a young female, judging by the musky warmth that clung to her skin. His eyes peeled open in the dark, nostrils flaring to pull more of her fragrance into his lungs.



She was no trick of his madness.



She was flesh and blood, the first human to venture anywhere near the obscure mouth of the cave in all the time he’d been there. The woman shined a bright light around the cave, temporarily blinding him, even from his concealed position above her head. He heard her footsteps scuffing on the sandstone floor of the cavern. Heard her sudden gasp as she knocked into some of the skeletal litter left behind by the original occupant of the place.