By then, the others had come running.
Ted with his speargun, Liam with his police revolver. But Zoe was calm and resolved. “Put the weapons down. I cannot tell you what it will look like if I fire into Vanessa’s flesh and blood and bone!” She said the last with relish.
Liam held on to his gun for a moment.
Suddenly, he stiffened.
“Down, my friendly neighborhood cop,” Bill Hinton said. “Set it down, come on now, good cop! Zoe, go on, take her. I’ve got the situation here.”
“Hell, no!” Liam said. He spun quickly, but not quickly enough. Bill Hinton brought the butt of his gun down on Liam’s head with a savage vengeance and turned to shoot at Marty’s foot. Marty, stunned, let out a roar of pain and fell to the sand.
“I said to drop all the weapons!” Bill thundered. He turned his gun on Jaden. “She’ll look great with a shattered kneecap!”
The entire group was still. “Take her, and I’ll be right behind,” Bill said, his voice bizarrely gentle as he spoke to Zoe.
“Hey, I’ll be all right,” Vanessa said. “We’re just going for a little walk in the woods.”
Her heart was racing. She saw the trapped fury in Sean’s eyes, and she was afraid that he’d wind up dead in the sand himself if she didn’t defuse the immediate situation. “Please, stand back,” she begged Sean. “I’ll be all right.”
She wasn’t going to be all right. She couldn’t believe that Zoe—who had cried in fear of what she had done to Barry that day—could be this person. But she had been fooled—Zoe was petite, delicate. Zoe was a murderess, apparently. And she had probably managed to spring the door on purpose, knowing it would bring a weakening of the ranks.
Zoe dragged her into the trail where she had first traveled to find Carlos.
Zoe meant to kill her, just as she had killed Georgia Dare. It wasn’t for money. It was because she had become strangely…possessed.
Sean made a dive into the sand, rolling to retrieve his weapon.
In all honesty, he wasn’t sure if he would make it or not.
But it didn’t matter.
Just as Bill started to rage at him, his attention distracted as he tried to take aim at Sean, something came leaping from the tent behind Liam’s prone body—something! A whir of motion and of fury.
Sean got his hands on his gun just as Carlos Roca brought Bill down to the ground. Bill twisted, trying to aim his gun at Carlos Roca’s face.
Sean fired, as carefully as he could, praying that his aim would be true.
It was. Bill Hinton screamed in agony as his hand exploded and his gun went flying. Carlos Roca did not find mercy at that cry of pain. He slammed a bone-crunching fist into Hinton’s face, and the cry was cut off cleanly. Hinton was out.
“Jesus!” Jaden cried, almost sinking to her knees, then rising, going one way, and then the other, not certain whether to see to Liam or Marty first.
“Liam!” Ted suggested, and they crossed one another as Ted raced to Marty and Jaden hurried on to Liam.
Jake Magnoli stood in the middle of the group, his jaw wide with astonishment and horror.
“Zoe? Bill?” he breathed.
Jay had been frozen in place. He moved, pacing, looking at Sean. “She’s crazy. She’s got to be crazy. She’s got Vanessa. Why Vanessa?”
“We’ve got to hurry, track them, run…!” Lew Sanderson cried.
“No! No, we have to track them, but she can’t see us,” Sean said. “She’ll kill. I know she’ll kill. We have to take her by surprise.” He looked up. Bartholomew was at the start of the trail. He looked at Sean, and he began to run into the darkness of the pines.
“She can’t hear us, she can’t see us!” Sean said. “Carlos…come. Lew and the rest of you, stay here. Help Liam and Marty. Call for the authorities!”
He ran toward the trail, his heart thundering.
Zoe? Zoe Cally? The little bitty blonde…
The little bitty bloodthirsty blonde.
“All right, I admit to being incredibly confused,” Vanessa said, trying to keep her voice calm and her words conversational. “I did figure out the truth behind Dona Isabella, right? What I’m trying to understand is how on earth you came to be so…”
“Crazy?” Zoe asked. “I’m not crazy. She’s here. She is the power of the sea. Eventually, she’ll reward us, and we’ll live like royalty within her realm!”
“What are you talking about? She made you kill people. You ruined your own work with the movie—”
“Oh, right! The only people who would have made money on that movie were you and Jay,” Zoe said. “While Dona Isabella…you must understand. She thrives on blood, she needs so much blood in the sea. Souls are good, too, but she really likes a good machete massacre.”