Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

As he left, and before Janet could enthuse over what a great idea it would be for Dylan to invite the adorable young Goran to the States, marry him, and have his babies, Dylan faked a brilliant, big yawn.

"Wow, guess I had too much fresh air today - I'm really beat. I think I'm going to turn in early. I have a bit of work to do yet tonight, and some e-mails I need to take a look at before I hit the hay."

"You sure, honey?"

Dylan gave Janet a weak bob of her head. "Yeah. Long day." She got up and grabbed her messenger bag from the back of her wooden pub chair. Pulling out enough Czech koruny to cover her portion of the bar tab and a nice tip for their host, Dylan set the money down on the table. "I'll see you back at the room."

As she made the short walk from the tavern to the hotel down the street, Dylan's fingers were itching to hit her keyboard. She closed herself inside the room, fired up her computer, and tried to keep up as the story spilled out of her. Dylan smiled as the piece took shape. It was no longer simply a report of an old cavern tomb and some dusty skeletons, but a blood-curdling account of a living, breathing evil that may well be still at large in the wilderness terrain above an otherwise tranquil European town.

She had the words.

All she needed now were some pictures of the demon's mountain lair.

Chapter Three

It was early morning in the mountain region, too early for most of the tourist groups and day hikers to be out and about. Still, Dylan avoided the main entrance and ventured into the woods on her own. A light rain began soon after she entered the forest, the soft summer shower falling from gunmetal gray clouds overhead. Dylan's trail shoes padded wetly on the damp pine needles beneath her feet as she picked up the pace and located the mountain path she'd been on the day before with her companions.

There was no sign of the dark-haired lady in white today, but Dylan didn't need the apparition's help in finding her way to the cave. Guided there by memory and a rising thrum in her veins, she climbed the steep, tricky incline to the ledge of sandstone outside the hidden cave.

In the overcast haze, the narrow crevice opening seemed even darker today, the sandstone giving off an earthy, ancient scent. Dylan swung her backpack down off her arm and grabbed her small flashlight from one of the pack's zippered pockets. She twisted the thin metal barrel and sent a beam of light ahead of her into the dark passageway of the cave.

Go in, get a few pictures of the crypt and the funky wall art, then get the hell out.

Not that she was afraid. Why should she be? This was just an old burial site of some sort - and a long-abandoned one at that. Absolutely nothing to fear.

And wasn't that just what those clueless horror movie actresses would say right before they ate it in gory detail on-screen?

Dylan mentally scoffed at herself. This was real life after all. The odds of a chainsaw-wielding lunatic or a flesh-eating zombie lurking in the dark of this cave were about the same as her coming face-to-face with the bloodsucking monster Goran's grandfather claimed to have seen. In other words, less than nil.

With the rain pattering gently behind her, Dylan stepped between the narrow walls of rock and carefully navigated her way into the cave, the beam of her flashlight leading the way. Several feet in, the passageway opened up onto more darkness. Dylan swung the light around the perimeter of the cave, as awestruck as she had been yesterday, by the elaborate wall markings and the rectangular slab of stone at the center of the space.

She didn't see the man lying in a careless sprawl on the ground until she was nearly on top of him.

"Jesus!"

She sucked in a startled breath and leaped back, the beam of her flashlight ricocheting crazily in the second it took for her to get over the shock. She angled the light back down to where he lay...and found nothing.

But he'd been right there. In her mind she could still see his head of shaggy dark brown hair, and his dusty, tattered black clothing. A vagrant, no doubt. It probably wasn't that unusual for some of the region's homeless poor to squat in this area.

"Hello?" she said, swinging the beam across the entire floor of the cave. A couple of ancient skulls and scattered bones lay about in morbid disarray, but that was it. No sign of anything living - not within the past hundred years or so, by Dylan's guess.

Where had he gone? She slid a glance at the large, open crypt a few feet away.

"Look, I know you're in here. It's okay. I didn't mean to frighten you," she added, even though it seemed absurd that she should be reassuring him. The guy had to be more than six feet tall, and even from the brief glimpse she'd gotten of him, she noted that his long arms and legs were thick with muscle. But his broken crumple on the floor of the cave had emanated pain and despair. "Are you hurt? Do you need some help? What's your name?"

No reply. Not a sound of any kind.

"Dobry den?" she called, trying to reach out to him with her pitifully limited knowledge of Czech. "Mluvite anglicky?"

No such luck.

"Sprechen zie Deutsch?"

Nothing.

"Sorry, but that's about all I've got unless you want me to break out some of my rusty junior high Spanish and really embarrass myself." She pivoted with her flashlight, angling it upward as she scanned the high walls of the cavern. "Somehow I don't think ?Como esta usted? is going to get us any further here. Do you?"

As she slowly turned, the light glanced off a jutting ledge high above her head. Some ten feet up was a sheer, arcing rise of sandstone. No way anyone could get up there.