So Trey moved in and fired another bullet through the center of her face.

She fell back against the wall.

Trey fired again.

And again.

Until the gun was again empty and the blonde woman’s head was a pulped ruin.

Somehow, her body was still upright, but it jerked like a malfunctioning mechanical doll. Then, all at once, the life went out of her, and she dropped like a lead weight to the floor.

Trey’s heart was hammering.

Someone said, “Fucking finally.”

Trey derived little real satisfaction from stilling this agent of Myra’s wrath. He knew all too well she could make him turn the gun on himself if she wanted. But he didn’t feel her presence in his head now. She’d retreated, at least for the time being.

He felt sick.

This was all a game to her.

All these dead cops.

A grand distraction.

He flinched when his brother laid a hand on his shoulder. “She’s going to kill us.” He turned to look into Jake’s shocked face. “She’s going to kill us all.”

Jake’s expression was strained. “It’s gonna be okay.”

He didn’t sound like he meant it. Not one little bit.

Shuddery laughter trickled out of Trey’s mouth. “No. No, Jake, it’s not.”

Another suit-and-tie-clad detective escorted them out of the room. Trey kept his eyes closed until he was in the hallway.

He didn’t want to see any more blood.

Not now.

Not ever.

Jordan awoke with a start when she felt something cold graze the back of her hand. She jerked the hand away from the side of the bed, over which it’d been dangling while she slept. Her heart thudding, she sat and searched frantically about the room for the intruder.

But she was alone.

She sighed. “Shit.”

The obvious occurred to her-she’d been dreaming again. An unwelcome touch in her dream had seemed real. It was a sensible explanation, and just thinking it had the immediate effect of calming her.

Until she heard the sound of something skittering across the floor behind her. She gasped and spun about on the bed, again scanning the other side of the room. She saw nothing. There was a temptation to chalk up the sound to a mind befuddled by too many tranquilizers, but a strong voice rose within her.

That was NOT your imagination!

Jordan trembled as she remained rooted to the center of the bed. There was something in the room with her. Some animal. Maybe a snake. Her trembling became more pronounced as images of venom-spitting snakes entered her head. She had long feared snakes.

How would a snake have gotten into her room?

She didn’t know. Nor did she care. All she knew was that it was here, probably coiled up beneath her bed right now. She visualized moving off the bed-and in her mind saw the snake dart out from under the bed to sink its dripping fangs into her bare ankle.

Jordan whimpered.

She remembered the cold sensation of something grazing the back of her hand. Now she was almost certain she hadn’t dreamed it, that the snake had been inspecting her, looking for a suitably juicy morsel of flesh to clamp its jaw around. On some level, Jordan realized what she imagined wasn’t typical snake behavior, but, as was so often the case, fear overwhelmed logic.

The snake was here.

She believed it wholeheartedly.

And she was trapped on this bed, as helpless as an abandoned baby in a stroller. She sensed movement to her left. A rustling. With as much caution as she could muster, she inched closer to the edge of the mattress and looked at the floor at the side of the bed. Something pushed against a dangling bedsheet, stretching the fabric and pulling the sheet away from the bed.

This did not look like the head of a snake distending the fabric. Whatever it was, it was too large, too lumpish. An idea came to her, something that made her feel foolish. This was no snake. But maybe it was a cat. How a cat would have gotten into her apartment she had no clue, but she found herself eager to embrace the idea. It was possible that a cat had slipped through the front door when she’d ejected Bridget from her apartment. She’d been so upset she might not have noticed. The cat could have been hiding under her bed all day, frightened out of its wits by its new surroundings. The cold sensation she’d experienced a few moments ago had probably been the cat’s nose sniffing at her hand, trying to determine whether she was a trustworthy biped.

Jordan smiled, feeling a sudden warmth toward the cat. “Here, kitty, kitty…”

The thing from underneath the bed slipped free of the sheet, revealing itself to Jordan for the first time. It was not a cat. Jordan didn’t know what it was. It looked reptilian, with scaly green skin, a gargoylelike head, and a wide, froggy mouth brimming with rows of sharp, glistening teeth. A forked tongue emerged between two of the teeth and slithered toward her face. She felt it on her chin and knew then what she’d really felt moments before.

She screamed.

Instinct propelled her backward off the bed. Her ass struck the floor hard and a bolt of pain arced up her spine and jabbed into her head. The creature’s head popped into view a moment later. Its mouth widened and the rows of teeth seemed to lengthen. A steady hiss emerged from the mouth, and the forked tongue flicked in and out. A pair of three-fingered hands appeared, gripping the edge of the bed as the thing began to stand. The sight of its body, with its long, multijointed limbs and elastic, segmented torso, sent a ripple of repulsion through Jordan.

It was hideous.

And it was coming for her, an awful hunger evident in its dark, pulsing eyes. Jordan screamed and lurched to her feet, galvanized by adrenaline. She felt fully alive for the first time all day, all five senses engaged as the sluggishness she had felt since that morning gave way to a single, clear purpose-escape. Through the bedroom doorway and down the hallway she dashed, her mind intent only on getting to her front door. She had a good head start on the creature, but she heard its pursuit with a heart-jolting clarity, the razor-sharp nails of its three-fingered hands scraping along the corridor walls behind her.

She sprinted through the living room and reached the front door. Her hand closed around the knob. Alarming thoughts flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second. She didn’t have her keys, therefore she couldn’t use her car. Her feet were bare. She didn’t have a clue what she would do once she was on the other side of this door. But she had no time to contemplate the implications of any of that, so she yanked the door open, stepped outside and pulled it shut behind her. Would a thing like that know how to work a doorknob? She didn’t know. Jesus Christ, she didn’t even know what in the goddamn hell that fucking abomination was. It had managed to get into her apartment somehow, so she had to believe it could work its way out. And that meant she had to keep moving.

Get down those stairs.

Maybe run down the street to the QuikMart, get one of those stoner clerks to call 911.

And she would have done just that had the staircase been unobstructed. She got to the first step, glanced down, and loosed a shrill cry. There were more things there. Awful, grotesque creatures that looked like mutations, like things that couldn’t exist outside of nightmares. Long, slithering snakelike things and smaller variations of the lizard-monster she’d locked in her apartment. Some of them looked malformed, like genetics experiments gone horribly awry, with misshapen heads and eyes protruding from stalks, elongated, twisted jaws with long teeth that curled over bloated lips. When they saw her, they became agitated, bouncing and chittering, some of them communicating excitedly in a language she didn’t recognize.