PROLOGUE
Capitol Hill neighborhood, Seattle...
The two-block walk from the bus stop on Broadway to her apartment was a terrifying ordeal late at night. Reluctantly she left the small island of light cast by the streetlamp and started the treacherous journey into the darkness. At least it had stopped raining. She clamped her purse tightly to her side and clutched her keys the way she had been taught in the two-hour self-defense class the hospital had offered to its staff. The small jagged bits of metal protruded between her fingers like claws.
Should never have agreed to take the night shift, she thought. But the extra pay had been too tantalizing to resist. Six months from now she would have enough saved up to buy a used car. No more lonely late-night rides on the bus.
She was a block and a half from her apartment house when she heard the footsteps behind her. She thought her heart would stop. She fought her instincts and forced herself to turn around and look. A man emerged from a nearly empty parking lot. For a few seconds the streetlight gleamed on his shaved head. He had the bulky frame of a bodybuilder on steroids. She relaxed a little. She did not know him, but she knew where he was going.
The big man disappeared through the glass doors of the gym. The small neon sign in the window announced that it was open twenty-four hours a day. It was the only establishment on the street that was still illuminated. The bookstore, with its window full of occult books and Goth jewelry, the pawnshop, the tiny hair salon and the payday loan operation had been closed for hours.
The gym was not one of those upscale fitness clubs that catered to the spandex-and-yoga crowd; it was the kind of facility frequented by dedicated bodybuilders. The beefy men who came and went from the premises did not know it, but she sometimes thought of them as her guardian angels. If anything ever happened to her on the long walk home, her only hope was that someone inside the gym would hear her scream and come to help.
She was almost at the intersection when she caught the shift of shadows in a doorway across the street. A man waited there. Was he watching her? Something about the way he moved told her that he was not one of the men from the gym. He wasn’t pumped up on steroids and weights. There was, instead, a lean, sleek, almost predatory air about him.
Her pulse, already beating much too quickly, started to pound as the fight-or-flight response kicked in. There was a terrible prickling on the nape of her neck. The urge to run was almost overwhelming, but she could hardly breathe now. In any event, she had no hope of outrunning a man. The only refuge was the gym, but the dark silhouette on the other side of the street stood between her and the entrance. Maybe she should scream. But what if her imagination had gotten the better of her? The man across the street did not seem to be paying any attention to her. He was intent on the entrance of the gym.
She froze, unable to make a decision. She watched the figure on the other side of the street the way a baby rabbit watches a snake.
She never heard the killer come out of the shadows behind her. A sweaty, masculine hand clamped across her mouth. A sharp blade pricked her throat. She heard a clatter of metal on the sidewalk and realized that she had just dropped her only weapon, the keys.
“Quiet or you die now,” a hoarse voice muttered in her ear. “Be a shame if we didn’t have time to play.”
She was going to die, anyway, she thought. She had nothing to lose. She dropped her purse and tried to struggle but it was useless. The man had an arm around her throat. He dragged her into the alley, choking her. She reached up and managed to rake her fingernails across the back of his hand. She would not survive the night but she could damn well collect some of the bastard’s DNA for the cops.
“I warned you, bitch. I’m really going to take my time with you. I want to hear you beg.”
She could not breathe, and the hand across her mouth made it impossible to scream. To think that her fallback plan had always been to yell for help from the gym.
The alley was drenched in night, but there was another kind of darkness enveloping her. With luck she would suffocate from the pressure of his arm on her throat before he could use the knife, she thought. She’d worked in the trauma center at Harborview. She knew what knives could do.
A figure loomed at the entrance of the alley, silhouetted by the weak streetlight behind him. She knew it was the man she had seen in the doorway across the street. Two killers working as a team? She was so sunk into panic and despair that she wondered if she was hallucinating.
“Let her go,” the newcomer said, coming down the alley. His voice promised death as clearly as the knife at her throat.
Her captor stopped. “Get out of here or I’ll slit her throat. I swear I will.”
“Too late.” The stranger walked forward. He was not rushing in, but there was something lethal and relentless about his approach, a predator who knows the prey is trapped. “You’re already dead.”
She felt something then, something she could not explain. It was as if she was caught in the center of an electrical storm. Currents of energy flooded her senses.
“No,” her captor shouted. “She’s mine.”
And then he was screaming, horror and shock mingling in a nerve-shattering shriek.
“Get away from me,” he shouted.
Suddenly she was free-falling. She landed with a jolt on the damp pavement. The man with the knife reeled back and fetched up against the alley wall.
The unnerving energy evaporated as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared.
The killer came away from the wall as though he had been released from a cage.
“No,” he hissed, madness and rage vibrating in the single word.
He lurched toward the other man. Light glinted on the knife he still clutched.
More energy shivered in a heavy wave through the alley.
The killer screamed again, a shrill, sharp screech that ended with stunning abruptness. He dropped the knife, clutched at his chest and dropped to the pavement.
The dark figure loomed over the killer for a moment. She saw him lean down and realized that he was checking for a pulse. She knew that he would not find one. She recognized death when she saw it.
The man straightened and turned toward her. Fear held her immobile. There was something wrong with his face. It was too dark to make out his features, but she thought she could see a smoldering energy in the dark spheres where his eyes should have been.
Another wave of panic slammed through her, bringing with it a fresh dose of adrenaline. She scrambled to her feet and fled toward the street, knowing, even as she ran, that it was hopeless. The creature with the burning eyes would cut her down as easily as he had the killer with the knife.