As Rio stared with feral, thirsting eyes at the woman who'd wandered into his hellish domain, fear of losing control with her was the thing that kept him at heel.
That, and the simple fact that she'd been kind to him.
Unafraid, if only because she couldn't see the beast he really was.
She gave up on following the wall and moved toward the center of the small cave. Rio stood right behind her now, so close the curling ends of her flame-red hair brushed his ragged shirt. That springy strand of silk tempted him sorely, but Rio kept his hands at his sides. He closed his eyes, wishing he had stayed on the ledge above. Then she might still be talking to him, not stiff and panting with rising anxiety.
"You shouldn't be here," he said finally, his voice a rough growl in the darkness.
She sucked in a quick breath, spinning around as soon as her ear had triangulated his location. She backed away, retreating from him again. Rio should have been glad for that.
"You do speak English," she said after a long moment. "But your accent...you're not American?"
He saw no reason to say otherwise. "You are, evidently."
"What is this place? What are you doing up here?"
"You need to leave now," he told her. The words sounded thick to him, hard to push out of his mouth for the obstruction of his extruded fangs. "You're not safe here."
Silence hung between them as she weighed the warning. "Let me see you."
Rio scowled at the pretty, peach-freckled face that searched the gloom for him. She reached out as if to find him with her hands now. He recoiled from her sweeping arm, but only barely.
"Do you know what they say in town?" she asked, a note of challenge in her voice now. "They say there's a demon living up here in the mountains."
"Maybe there is."
"I don't believe in demons."
"Maybe you should." Rio stared at her through the overgrown thicket of his hair, hoping the long hanks would conceal the glow of his eyes. "You have to go. Now."
She slowly lifted the backpack she was carrying and held it in front of her like armor. "Do you know anything about this crypt? That's what it is, right - some kind of old crypt and sacrificial chamber? What about the symbols on the walls in here...what are they, some kind of ancient language?"
Rio went very still, very silent. If he thought he could let her simply walk away, she'd just proved him wrong. Bad enough she saw the cave once, now she was back and making assumptions about it that were far too close to the truth. He could not permit her to leave - not with her memory of the place, or of him, intact.
"Give me your hand," he said as gently as he could. "I'll show you the way out of here."
She didn't budge, not that he expected her to obey. "How long have you been living on this mountain? Why do you hide up here? Why won't you let me see you?"
She asked questions one after the other, with an inquisitiveness that bordered on interrogation.
He heard a zipper rasp on her pack.
Ah, hell. If she pulled out another flashlight, he wouldn't have the mental strength to douse it - not when he'd need all his concentration just to scrub her memory.
"Come," he said, a bit more impatiently now. "I'm not going to hurt you."
He would try his damnedest not to, but already the task of staying upright was draining him. He needed to conserve all he could in order to blow the cave and not black out again before he could finish it. Right now, he had to deal with the more immediate problem in front of him.
Rio started toward her when she remained unmoving. He reached out for her, meaning to grab her backpack and haul her out, but before his fingers could close around it she withdrew something from one of the bag's pockets and brought it up in front of her.
"Okay, I'll go. I just...there's something I need to do first."
Rio scowled in the darkness. "What are you - "
There was a faint click, then a stunning blast of light.
Rio roared, wheeling back on instinct. More explosions of light fired off in rapid succession.
Logic told him it was a digital camera flash blinding him, but in a startling instant, he was hurtled back in time...back inside that Boston warehouse, standing beneath an airborne bomb as it detonated.
He heard the sudden boom of the explosion, felt it vibrate into his bones and knock the breath from his lungs. He felt the shower of heat in his face, the suffocating thickness of clouding ash as it engulfed him like a wave.
He felt the bite of hot shrapnel as it ripped through his body.
It was agony, and he was right there, living it - feeling it - all over again.
"Nooo!" he bellowed, his voice no longer human but transformed to something else, as he was, by the fury that ran through him like acid.
His legs gave way beneath him and he sank to the floor, his vision blinded by reverberating light and ruthless memories.
He heard footsteps scuffing past him in a rush, and through the phantom stench of smoke and metal and ruined flesh, he smelled the faint, fleeting traces of juniper, honey, and rain.
Chapter Four
Dylan's heart was still racing later that morning, after she and her companions had boarded the train that would take them from Jicin to Prague. It seemed ridiculous to let herself get so rattled by the vagrant she'd run into in the cave, even if he probably was a little bit psycho to be living up there like some kind of wild man. He hadn't harmed her after all.
Based on his bizarre meltdown when she tried to get some pictures of the cave before he could physically toss her out of there, she had probably scared him even more than he had her.
Dylan sat back in her compartment seat on the train, her computer open on her lap. Thumbnail images from her digital camera queued up on-screen as they downloaded to her computer from the thin black cable that connected the two devices. Most were from the past couple of days' travel, but it was the final handful Dylan was most interested in now.