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to blame but herself, for Bryan had always been as thoughtful as Attila the Hun. Only this time she knew something was terribly wrong; it had been in his voiceeven on a telephone all the way from London. He'd been excited and he'd been too smooth. He'd said "honest" twice, and called her "love" three timesa sure sign he was lying through his teeth. |
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It was probably just another woman, Kyna mused. She wasn't crazy enough to think a man with Bryan's looks and money was always going to be faithful, but still . . . where the devil was he? And why all the rush about this trip? She hadn't been scheduled to make any more deliveries until after the first of the year and yet he'd practically made her swear in blood that she'd go and be done by the thirty-first. What was so special about Halloween? |
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The Dark Man stood comfortably in the eye of the storm. As the rainwater ran down over the scabrous tattoos on his face, his eyesbleak and unseeingwere fixed on a renovated art deco house in the middle of a palm tree clearing. Neither the rain nor the wind that buffeted his face, nor the lightning that ripped the night like the claws of a beast could intrude upon the memories that flashed like grade-school slides across the screen of his mind. |
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It was inconceivable, of course, that anyone would be insane enough to steal anything from himmuch less the talisman. It was the most sacred thing he possessed. |
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In and of itself, the talisman was just a rather odd-looking strand of stones and shells, scarabs and fossils, all topped off with a two-thousand-year-old death's head bead from Tanzania. But Macumba, the Butcher of West Africa and a genius of evil, through years of torture and bloody sacrifice had instilled the necklace with the ability to magnify the essence of the wearer. To paraphrase the pasty-faced devils in the white collars: dark from darkness, true evil from the essence of evil. As long as the Dark Man had the Butcher's Broom in his possession, he was invulnerable. But even he had to sleep. |
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