Something moved in the fog, and his gaze immediately riveted there. The fog swirled, seemed to come alive. He saw a woman’s face pressing toward him through the gray vapor. No, the mist actually formed the face. He recognized his first kill. She swayed and moaned, staring at him with accusing eyes.
He gasped and stumbled back, nearly falling into the fire. All around him, in the tight ring of fog, faces began to appear. Women. Moaning. Calling to him softly, arms outstretched first in pleading and then to take him into the bank of fog with them.
Everywhere Armend looked, the women were there, surrounding him. Eyes on him. Arms out. Faces accusing. The sound of their moans continued to rise until he couldn’t hear anything else. Until the sound penetrated his bones, pierced his organs and frayed every nerve he had. He’d forgotten a couple of them, but each had been his victim over the years, his and his friends’.
“You’re not real,” he muttered. Then he raised his voice and shouted at them. “You’re not real.” He found his rock beside the fire and sat down because his legs trembled so much he couldn’t stand any longer. It wasn’t real. His mind was playing tricks on him.
Jerking the radio from his belt, he pressed one hand to his ears in an effort to drown out the terrible moan. He would never be able to hear that particular note again as long as he lived. “Giles, come in, over.”
Static answered him, and then faintly, very faintly, he heard a woman’s voice calling to him—over the radio.
Join us, Armend. Come to us. Forever is a such a short time to spend with us.
He dropped the radio into the dirt and kicked it away from him. “Shut up!” he yelled. “All of you, shut up! You’re dead.”
The moment he uttered the words you’re dead, those faces in the fog turned to skeletons, horrible bones with teeth and sunken holes for eyes. All of them. Surrounding him, bony fingers reaching for him.
The wind picked up and the women moaned louder, the sound making him feel sick. He couldn’t escape the terrible penetrating moaning note of pain, and now it was consuming his body, bit by bit, as if it were eating him alive. He could feel the reverberation biting into his flesh, taking him, wanting him to join the women in the fog.
He pressed both hands to his ears, trying to drown out the sound. The moan was physical, ripping and tearing at his body like teeth. The sound of their bones only added to his mounting terror. He circled the fire, trying to find a way to escape, but the ghosts had him completely surrounded.
Ghosts. He took a deep breath. The women were dead. He was alive. They weren’t real. They couldn’t come out of the fog and drag him into it. Very carefully he backed away from the few wisps that strayed from the main wall of dense gray matter. He found his rock again and slowly sank back down. He didn’t take his eyes from the thick fog bank as his hand reached toward the ground to feel along it for his radio.
The ground felt damp. Wet even. He dared to take his gaze from the macabre sight of the skulls with their empty eye sockets, opening their empty mouths and calling to him. He glanced down and froze. There on the ground, he could see tendrils of fog, much like the root system of trees, creeping along the dirt. Alive. Searching. He had a terrible feeling the creepers were searching for him.
What did roots do? They fed the tree. They were searching for him. For his body. His blood. He was nearly hysterical, and he tried to force himself to think beyond the fear. This couldn’t really be happening, no matter how real it seemed.
The moans continued, but one woman—his first kill—changed her note, her voice rising on the wind to a howl. A call to the hunt. He knew that sound. He’d heard it earlier. An alpha calling his pack to the hunt. Another chill went down his spine and his heart thundered.
He fed the fire quickly, building it up. All around him, along the ground, the veins of fog, tubes of gray stretched like the bony arms of the women in the fog bank. His body stilled. He felt them. The wolves. When he dared to peer into the dense wall of mist, he saw the red eyes staring back at him.
There was nothing worse in his imagination than to be killed and eaten by wolves. He counted at least seven in the pack. They surrounded him just as the women in the fog did. Strangely, the bony hands looked as if they were petting the wolves, although he couldn’t see the creatures through the dense fog.
He heard them. The growls and snarls. He felt them. The hair on his body stood up. His heart pounded so hard he feared he would have a heart attack. Occasionally he glimpsed a large beast pacing back and forth, waiting for some kind of signal.
The fog swirled, forming another shape. At first it looked like a wolf. A huge wolf. The animal turned its glowing eyes on him and then, to Armend’s horror, stepped right out of the fog as if it was really alive and not a part of the mass of dead creatures. The wolf took several steps toward him, and then he wasn’t a wolf, but a man.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered, solid. Real. He wore a long, hooded cape that fell to his ankles. It was difficult to see his face as it was in the shadow of the hood. There was no denying he was real. Not a wolf. A man. The sight of him had Armend’s shoulders sagging. He nearly sobbed with relief. His imagination had gone wild. He’d been experiencing a hallucination, but now, with this man, things could get back to normal. He forced a smile.
The man didn’t smile back. He looked at Armend with ice-blue eyes that seemed to look straight through to his soul. Eyes that could see his dark perversions and his need to see women in pain. Women suffering for his amusement. Suffering because he enjoyed the pain of others—particularly women. This man knew he had killed and that he craved killing and would continue to kill because he needed it just as much as he needed air to breathe.