She rounded a final corner and the statue of Mary suddenly appeared, arms uplifted, greeting her in pale white, accompanied by the s.h.i.+ver of the branches and the musty smell of dead leaves and mud. The girl stumbled and a tiny stick snapped beneath her shoe. She glanced backward, crouched, poised like a hunted animal. Behind her, in the maze, he came onward, steadily. She knelt at the statue and mouthed, "Mother Mary, save my soul..."

She hadn't been good.

But she wasn't all bad, either.

Behind her, she heard him move ever forward. No rush, no rush at all.

He knew he had her.

She kept silently, desperately praying.

Mother Mary save my soul.

She can't help you. You have no soul to save, he said.

Or, did he? Was that the voice inside her head?

Desperately she thought, I am sixteen years old and I am going to die.

Head pounding, heart beating wildly, her ears filled with the roar of the ocean, the battering of the sea against distant cliffs...though she was nowhere near the ocean. But it had always been this way. She had always heard these oddly familiar sounds, always sensed a remote place.

How stupid she was to have goaded him-teased him. Dared him.

What had she been thinking?

That was the problem with her. Not only could she see the future, she sometimes tried to change it.

And now he was going to kill her. But because that could not be-simply could not be-she dug her teeth into her bottom lip and surrept.i.tiously dragged a small knife from her pocket.

She'd been foolish to lure him here, to let him follow her, to tease him into this meeting. He was a danger to her, and he was relentless. There would be no satisfactory ending. No loving reconciliation.

With all her strength she prayed for her life, her soul. Above her pulsing heart she heard the hunter's footsteps. Nearer. Relentlessly closer. Slowly she rose to her feet and turned to meet him. She knew she was in for the fight of her life. She must be strong. She couldn't hesitate.

Then suddenly his dark figure appeared, hovering near the wet and waving laurel branches. Words trembled on her lips. Questions he could answer but wouldn't. She knew that.

"I will kill you," she warned him harshly, and was answered by the glimmer of his deadly, self-satisfied smile in the darkness.

He knows he has me. The creep's enjoying this.

No way!

Lunging forward, she drove her knife toward him with all her strength.

But it wasn't enough.

Her gaze clashed with his...and strong fingers bent her wrist back. Pain burned through her muscles. Fear congealed in her heart. His breath a hiss through his teeth, he snapped her wrist back and tore the knife from her nerveless fingers. Before she could scream, he thrust the blade deftly between her ribs. "No more." he rasped.

She cried out. The night swirled around her, a kaleidoscope of pain and regret. She crumpled to the ground at the feet of the statue, aware that her attacker was staring down at her, his breath excited gasps.

She lay still as death at the feet of the Madonna and thought: I am a sacrifice.

Then the darkness descended.

St. Elizabeth's campus, February, 2009, midnight...

Kyle Baskin held the flashlight under his chin, beaming its illumination upward, highlighting the planes and hollows of his face.

"b.l.o.o.d.y Bones entered the house," he whispered in his deepest, most ghoulish voice. His eyes darted around the circle of boys seated on the ground at his feet, their scared faces turned up earnestly. "b.l.o.o.d.y Bones crossed to the stairs. b.l.o.o.d.y Bones looked up and could see the children through the walls."

"Like X-ray vision?" Mikey Ferguson squeaked.

"Shut up," his older brother, James, whispered harshly.

The branches overhead s.h.i.+vered. There was a moon, but it wasn't visible over the height of the maze's hedge. Only the faintest trickle of light wavered through the leaves.

"I'm on the first step."

Kyle hesitated for maximum effect. He gazed across the beam of the flashlight at the kids he and James had brought to the center of the maze. They were supposed to be babysitting, but that was boring as h.e.l.l. "I'm on the second step." He drew a shaking breath and said slowly, "I'm on...the...third step..."

Mikey shot a look of terror over his shoulder and edged closer to James, whose smirk was fully visible to Kyle.

Tyler, that little p.i.s.s-ant, started to snivel.

"I'm on...the...fourth...step..."

"How many steps are there?" Mikey cried, clutching at James' arm.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up."

"I wanna go home!" Tyler wailed.

"I'm on...the fifth step!"

"I'm calling my dad." Preston, the overweight p.r.i.c.k, clambered to his feet, his normally toneless voice quaking a bit.

"The phone's in the car, moron."

"I'm on the sixth step. I'm on the seventh step, I'm on the eighth step!" Kyle declared in a rush.

The boys leapt to their feet as if yanked by strings, crying, heads jerking around, searching vainly for escape, but the hedges loomed, branches sticking out like skeletal arms.

Kyle's voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm on the ninth step..."

James started to worry a little. They couldn't have these dumba.s.ses charging off in all directions in the dark. "Sid-down!"

"I'm on the tenth step...and now I'm walking down the hall...I'm outside your door...I'm pus.h.i.+ng it open...cree-eeaa-kkk!!!"

It sounded sorta dumb, the way Kyle did it, but it sure as h.e.l.l did the trick. The kids started running around like Keystone Kops, shying from the dirty old statue of that lady, screaming and blubbering. James and Kyle started laughing. They couldn't help themselves. That ratcheted the kids to near hysteria, and Mikey stumbled right into the statue-the idiot-and knocked the d.a.m.n thing to one side. The bulldozers had been at the site. The school was being razed and they were taking down the maze as well. That's why Kyle had come up with the idea in the first place. One last spooky hurrah where they could scare the snot out of the little kids.

"Moron, you knocked over the old lady," James said in a long-suffering tone.

He went to pick up his younger brother while Kyle corralled Tyler and Preston, who were crying like the babies they were. Mikey had practically turned to a statue himself. He stood frozen, staring. He slowly lifted one hand as Kyle approached and pointed toward a mound of earth that had humped up when the statue tilted.

"b.l.o.o.d.y Bones," he whispered, his finger quivering.

James looked in the direction he was pointing. From the ground a skeletal human hand lay upturned, its bones both dirty and oddly white, its fingers reaching upward, as if for help.

James' eyes bugged out. He started shrieking like a banshee and couldn't quit. Little Mikey grabbed his older brother's hand and hauled them both out of the maze, the rest of the gang thundering behind them, the touch of b.l.o.o.d.y Bones feathering their napes as they ran for their lives.

CHAPTER ONE.

"I feel it...that change in the atmosphere, subtle but strong, like the slight tremor of a gentle earthquake with its aftershocks. I know what it means.

I'm being summoned to her.

I've stayed here, waiting, believing the time would come again. I've known since the last one that my mission was not done, would never be finished. But for a long while, I've waited.

But tonight the waiting is over.

I can't resist. I'm lured. Excited. My blood thrumming hot through my veins, the thought of the next kill, that exquisite moment of pure power when one life is extinguished causes my heart to race, my skin to sweat with anxious beads of eager antic.i.p.ation.

I sit up and imagine the scent of her skin. Like a rain-washed beach.

Tantalizing...

I can almost smell her. Almost...

But I know where she is.

Slowly I roll from my bed. My self-imposed prison where I've waited for so long.

It's time to leave.

Time, once again, to right an age-old wrong.

Time, at long last, for another sacrifice.

And I'm ready.

A frisson slid down Becca Sutcliff's spine. She inhaled sharply and glanced behind her. The girl at the counter of Mutts & Stuff slid her a look from the corner of her eyes. "You okay?"

"Someone walking on my grave, I guess," Becca murmured.

The girl's brows lifted and Becca could practically read her mind: Yeah. Right. Whatever. She rang up Becca's purchases and stuffed them in a bag. Thanking her, Becca s.h.i.+fted the packages she was already carrying to accommodate them. Yes, she was filling a need, shopping like it was an Olympic sport, a result of the messy, lingering aftermath of unsettled feelings that still followed from her split with Ben. And now Ben was dead. Gone, Never to come back. And it all felt...well...weird.

She headed back into the mall, slightly depressed by the cheery red and pink hearts in every store window. Valentine's Day. The most miserable day of the year for the suddenly single.

Okay. She wasn't completely happy. She'd known for a long time that she and Ben weren't going to make it. They'd never been in love. Not in the way she'd wanted, hoped, planned to be. When she'd learned he was seeing someone else, she was angry. At herself, mostly. She couldn't really even recall what had triggered their marriage in the first place. What had she wanted? What had Ben wanted? Had it just been timing? A sense that, if not Ben, then who?

Then she learned he'd died in the arms of his new love. Heart attack. Gone, gone...gone.

She was still processing. Still getting used to the fact that he'd left her for another woman. Left her...when she still believed that maybe, just maybe, there would be that chance for them. That chance to start a family. Have a child. A child of their own. A child of her own...

The window of Pink, Blue and You, a combined baby and maternity store, materialized in front of her. She'd stopped into it earlier and picked out a gift for a friend who'd just had a baby. It was a fine torture to be inside. She wanted a baby. She'd always wanted a baby. She'd lost a baby a long time ago.

Tears hovered behind her eyes. With an effort she held them back, turning her face away from the display of pastel pinks and blues and lemony yellows. Was that why she'd married Ben? To have a baby? To replace the one who'd been taken from her?

Becca gritted her teeth against emotion. She'd asked herself the same question countless times, had toiled and fretted over the answer. But it was all moot now. He was gone. And he'd left his twenty-two-year-old new lover pregnant, something he'd never wanted with Becca.

"I don't want children," he said. "You knew it when you married me."

Had she? She didn't remember that.

"It's just you and me, Beck. You and me."

b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Maybe she had married him to have a child. Correction. To replace a child. Maybe she'd made up the "I love you" parts. Maybe she just wanted the whole thing to be so much prettier than it was.

A lump filled her throat. She turned away from the window. No need to torture herself further. No need at all.

A food court was on her left and she glanced over as she headed the other way. But as she tried to hurry on, her vision grew blurry. Becca stopped short, her pulse suddenly rocketing. d.a.m.n. She was going to faint. She'd been this route before, more times than she'd like to admit. But it wasn't really fainting. No. More like...falling into a spell. A wide awake dream. But it hadn't happened in years. Not for years!

Why now? she asked herself a half-second before white-hot pain screamed through her brain. She staggered and fell to her knees, packages tumbling from her arms. Becca bent her head, instinctively hiding her face from curious onlookers, one last moment of clarity before the vision overcame her.

In a transformation that was both familiar and feared, Becca was no longer at the mall, no longer feeling the wrench of the loss of her baby. No longer in the real world but in a watery, unsubstantial one, a world that had plagued her youth yet had been curiously missing and distant for most of her adult life...until now.

In front of her, a short distance away, a teenaged girl stood on a headland above a gray and frothy sea, her long, dark brown hair teased by a stiff breeze, her s.h.i.+rt and jeans pressed to her skin from its force, her gaze focused across churning waves toward a small island, blurred with rain. Becca followed the girl's gaze, staring past her to the island as well, a forlorn, rocky tor that looked as inhospitable as an alien planet. The girl s.h.i.+vered, and so did Becca. The cold burrowed beneath her skin, and gooseflesh rose on her arms.

The girl was familiar. So familiar....

Becca stared at her hard, putting a physical effort into it.

Is she someone I know?

Becca struggled to remember. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she pulling Becca into her world?

Distantly, she felt the lightheadedness, the clammy warning that she was about to pa.s.s out. No, no, no! Caught between the two worlds, her body falling in one, her mind desperately searching for answers in the other, Becca focused on the girl.

"Who are you?" she called but the rising wind threw the words back into her throat.