Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror by Charlaine Harris, Tim Lebbon, David Wellington, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dan Chaon, Brian Keene, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kelley Armstrong, Michael Koryta, Scott Smith, Joe McKinney, Laird Barron, Rio Youers, Dana Cameron, Leigh Perry, Gary A. Braunbeck, Lynda Barry, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, Robert Shearman, Lucy A. Snyder Page B

from the viewfinder. There was fresh blood, still damp, in the dust all around them, but he’d watched her shake her hand and send fat, wet drops of it flying inside the adit. He’d seen it happen. How had it dried so fast?
    He walked closer to the gate, knelt, and stared.
    The rocks just inside were dry and unstained.
    “Losing my damned mind,” he muttered, and then he turned and saw that the sun was descending. That meant going back down the slope in darkness. Kristen was nearing the base and approaching camp, surely leaving a trail of blood the whole way, and he cursed himself for not thinking to bring the first-aid kit up here with them.
    You want to pay attention out here , the stranger had said, and still Jim had made a fundamental mistake. First with the gas, and now with the first-aid kit.
    He hoped they were allowed a third strike.
    Behind him, something rustled, and when he turned back, he lifted the camera as if it were a club, as if he’d have to defend himself. But there was nothing there except for silent rocks and wind-whipped dust, and he laughed uneasily at himself. Kristen had made one too many jokes about bad luck back at Dead Indian Pass, that was all. The bars of the adit were spaced far enough apart to allow adetermined and thin man to slip through, maybe, but no bears were coming out of there.
    Jim knelt beside a bloodstained rock and lifted the camera again. The last of the light bridges between worlds was fading fast, and he didn’t want to miss it.
    H er hand was throbbing by the time she reached the base of the slope, and Kristen had tears in her eyes and was glad that Jim wasn’t there. The truth of the matter was that she was scared of the mountains, and she didn’t want him to know that. In the six months they’d been dating, he’d made so many references to appreciating her willingness to join him in his outings that it had become a part of her identity, and she’d gone too far along with the ruse. Initially, she’d wanted to impress him; it was that simple. Spending time with Jim in bizarre locations sounded intriguing, and once she was out with him she didn’t want to be a complainer, so she’d done her best to put up a brave front. Then they’d returned from a trip through the backwoods of Maine that had been absolutely terrible—she’d counted fifty-seven mosquito bites—and he’d spent an entire dinner party with friends bragging about how tough she was. Why she couldn’t tell him the truth, she didn’t know. It was childish, but there was something about spoiling the illusion he had that seemed like failure. She was a librarian, and while Kristen loved her job, she had to admit she grew tired of the jokes that came with the territory. Traveling with Jim had added something to her identity that she thought she enjoyed. Discovering the truth that it was merely a mask, a falsehood, had probably disappointed her more than it would him.
    Then he’d proposed the Montana and Wyoming trip, showing her photographs of the old town and collapsed storefronts, and that had sounded okay, certainly no worse than Maine.
    Until they arrived. The mountains unsettled her instantly. Kristen thought she had an understanding of them, but you couldn’ttruly appreciate the vastness and the isolation until you were out there in it. She’d turned unease into teasing, giving him a hard time and labeling the trip as jinxed, but she really had been scared by the idea of running out of gas on that lonely road, and she really had been scared of the strange man who’d accepted a fifty-dollar bill and promised to return with gasoline. All of her jokes about the horror-movie motel were actually born from a desperate desire to convince Jim that a hotel was the better option, at least tonight. The base camp that he found so beautiful, she found terrifying. There wasn’t another soul in sight, and down there in the basin by the stream, the mountains quite literally surrounded them, looking imposing