here at Trickster’s.
She saw.
She screamed.
Beside her, Jeremy was still yelling at the crowd. Across the club, Tom Segura was running from the bloody man and throwing chairs at him. Most of the chairs were hitting the guys who were trying to throw punches at the intruder.
The bloody man snatched one of the chairs out of the air and swung it into the face of a burly football player who was winding up a haymaker. The football player went down hard.
Two other guys piled atop the bloody man, punching him with both fists. Lydia lost sight of the killer for a moment, then she heard a piercing shriek, and one of the guys reeled back clutching a hand from which blood spurted from the stumps of two fingers that were now missing beyond the first knuckles. The second guy rolled off, clutching his throat, and Lydia couldn’t tell what the bloody man had done to him. Punched him?
Tom waded in as the killer was rising to his feet, swinging yet another chair, but someone stepped into the path of the swing, and for a moment Lydia couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
It was the woman who’d been bitten.
Her face and clothes were splashed with her own blood and there was a black, ragged hole in the front of her throat, but she bared her teeth and leapt at Tom like a cat. They both went down and Lydia lost sight of her friend.
Then she was moving. She snatched the microphone stand from in front of Jeremy and leaped off the stage. She was only five-one and the mike stand was taller than she was, but Lydia took it in a two-handed grip and swung it with all the force and focus of a Major League ballplayer. The chrome shaft made a glittering arc and the heavy black base hit the woman who was atop Tom right in the side of the head. There was a meaty crunch that sent such a shockwave up the length of the stand that it shivered it right out of Lydia’s hands. She staggered backward and collided with someone. She felt hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her backward. Lydia pivoted and swung her right arm as hard as she could to dislodge the grabbing hands. She didn’t need any Galahad to pull her to safety. Lydia knew how to fight, mean and dirty, and she wasn’t about to let some psycho bastard hurt Tom.
But as she spun she looked up into the face of the man who’d grabbed her.
A tall man.
Bare-chested.
Ugly and powerful.
Covered in blood from eyes to knees.
A man who smiled at her. A man whose dark eyes looked her up and down.
“Nice,” he said. “Juicy.”
And they he lunged at her, teeth snapping.
It’s not funny, she thought. This isn’t funny.
Those were her last thoughts and then all she saw was a big, black nothing.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN
DOLL FACTORY ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
It was too dark down in the hole and there were too many monsters, so Billy Trout fought his way back to the surface. He came awake with a cry.
For a moment he did not know where he was. The world seemed to be moving.
The ceiling was low and curved and seemed to be made out of metal.
He heard voices.
Prayers and whispers.
People crying with dry, broken sobs that seemed to cling to the ragged edge of sanity. Other voices, younger and more plaintive, called for mothers and fathers and were not answered. One voice kept repeating the word “no” in a relentless monotone.
Pain was the next thing Trout became aware of. Intense pain, and in many places. His nose, his chest, his ribs. His shoulder.