She was closer to the kid now. She could make out his pale face and scraggly beard. She had to believe that she could reach him, crush his skull and stop this nightmare.

She stopped at that thought. The last time she’d “had to believe” something, it had been that KerriAnne could be saved!

Now she was trying desperately to believe that she could commit cold-blooded murder.

But KerriAnne had been saved, somehow, she’d felt it. And now she stood over Rich Poore, looking with loathing and pity at the still face, so rabbit like, so unhappy and, in an odd way, so like KerriAnne.

The face of one who had tried to save his life by calling in evil.

She raised the sharp-edged marble chunk, breathing hard. The insane laughter had turned to screams again, that had to mean she was on the right track.

But she set the rock down again. (Had she just given up her only chance?)

She had to try to reach him first. Everyone was worth trying to save.

(But was that true? A terrorist who drove a truck into a crowd and crushed the bodies of children? Warlords who created child soldiers? Would they be worth trying to save? She shook her head to clear out this hopeless line of thought.)

She knelt once more beside Rich, trying to keep half an eye on the crypt opening. There was no sign of Walter. Jesse lay still. The voice, which had to come from Lavinia, kept saying: stop that asshole thinking, shut him the fuck up.

“Rich, Rich,” she hissed. “Wake up. Hear me.” She nearly touched his face again but, imitating Lavinia if she had only known it, stopped her hand a millimeter from his skin, a twilight zone where she could pick up his thoughts but stay herself.

But the only flicker she caught was: another super sexy woman who’ll never be interested in me in a thousand years.

Sally sighed and sat back on her haunches. Should she kiss him and shock him out of that train of thought? Other than picking up that charred hunk of marble again, she was out of ideas.

Charred?

Did it mean something that the marble was blackened?

She played back the hiker’s memories. When he first walked up to the low marble building there had been no rubble. Everything had been bone-white and whole.

But when he backed into the clearing late at night, he tripped over something which hadn’t been there before.

She now remembered all the jagged lumps of rubble she’d stepped around earlier in the day. She had assumed they were from the crumbling wall but they hadn’t been there when young Rich first walked into the clearing.

He had heard a low hollow boom and thought it was the marble lid dropped heavily on the sarcophagus.

But what if it had been an explosion instead?

What if something had been sealed inside that marble container and had burst its way free? Something that sensed the frightened thoughts of the young man earlier in the day as he knelt with damp trembling hands beside what he was sure was a vampire’s coffin?

Something that read his fear and manufactured the vision of the vampire which would terrify him most?

For a moment, she nearly held the whole woven picture of what had happened to her Earth, her home. But Lavinia’s thoughts hammered, the never-ending scream shredded, and the slender form of Jesse scrambled to his feet at that moment.

She had to drop everything and whip a stake from her belt as he stumbled over to her, reassuringly unvampire-like. Keeping his hands raised, he crouched beside her. “Sorry, sorry,” he choked in a horrid gurgle.

Blood from his throat sprayed Sally’s face and she started back, but kept the stake pointed at him.