Up From the Grave: A Night Huntress Novel by Jeaniene Frost Page A

sooner rather than later.”
    “Come on over, then. You know where I am,” was his reply.
    “So I can stand in the cross fire of dozens of machine guns concealed in your walls?” My scoff was soft. “Thanks, but no.”
    This time, his silence stretched longer than a couple heartbeats. Probably trying to figure out how I knew about the guns.
    “What did you have in mind?” he asked at last.
    “Midnight tonight at the Rat Branch Pier off Watauga Lake. It’s just east of Hampton, Tennessee. Come alone, and I’ll do the same.”
    Laughter floated across the line, harsh as glass being ground by rocks. “You’ll do the same? We both know Bones is glaring over your shoulder right now, silently vowing to accompany you.”
    “If he were here, he would be,” I said, and that was the unvarnished truth. “But we already had this fight, and he got pissed and left. That’s why our meeting has to be tonight. He won’t be gone long, and once he’s back, he’ll insist on coming.”
    Another extended silence. Either Madigan was mulling this over or trying to trace the call, but he’d get nowhere with that. Finally, after long enough for me to wonder if he’d hung up, he spoke again.
    “This intrigues me, Crawfield, but I don’t think I’ll give you an opportunity to kill me. You want to talk? Come to me here.”
    “It’s Russell,” I said at once, “and see if this intrigues you: Don made arrangements for a letter to be mailed to me in the event of his death. I’ve moved around a lot the past several months, so I only just got it. In it, he apologized for the horrible things he allowed to go on while the two of you worked together—”
    “What things?” Madigan interrupted.
    I smiled. Have your interest now, don’t I?
    “That’s what I want to find out, but not enough to give you home-field advantage. The pier on Watauga Lake tonight or forget it. Hell, maybe forget it anyway. Another letter’s probably on its way with more information.”
    Frustration practically seethed through the silence on the other end. Not only did Madigan really want to capture me; like all bureaucrats, he was nothing if not paranoid about keeping his secrets. The last thing he’d want was a group of vampires poking around his illicit experiments, and the idea that his former nemesis might spill the beans posthumously must be giving him an ulcer.
    “If I thought you had a shred of honesty in you,” he finally gritted out, “I’d make you swear on Bones’s life that you’ll come without him. Or anyone else.”
    “I swear it,” I said evenly. “And out of the two of us, I’m not the biggest liar.”
    The noise he made was too low for me to determine if it was a scoff or a laugh.
    “I guess at midnight, we’ll find out.”
    “See you then,” I said crisply, and hung up.
    Denise stared at me, her hazel eyes wide with alarm. “You’re not really intending to go alone, are you?”
    “Of course.” My lips stretched into a cold, predatory smile. “As I said, between Madigan and me, I’m not the biggest liar.”
    T he Rat Branch Pier at Watauga Lake was a public place, yet even if I’d chosen high noon instead of midnight for our meeting, it was still very isolated. More than half of the lake’s sixteen-mile shoreline was bordered by the Cherokee National Forest, while a snaking road overshadowed by steep, wooded terrain bordered the other side. Only the moon provided illumination since the single light post next to the pier was broken.
    The steady rain plus countless rustling trees and the nearby dam muffled the natural sounds from the forest’s inhabitants. Still, here and there I caught the glow of eyes as nocturnal creatures foraged for food, mates, or both.
    I waited at the very end of the pier, my clothes already soaked from the summer rain. Clouds concealed most of the light the moon cast, but with my enhanced vision, I had no difficultly seeing Madigan pull up in a sleek black Cadillac before parking next to the