He knew now, finally and terribly, that he didn’t want to surrender to evil, didn’t want to be a slave.

But he had surrendered, hadn’t he?

He’d said it out loud. He’d said the unthinkable and he wouldn’t be allowed to take it back. Would he?

But always each moment was fresh, and though he’d given himself utterly to evil an unnamed time ago, he took it back, he did take it back, he wanted to live. So desperately he wanted to live!

Teeth clenched, he kept his eyes on the trail ahead.

He saw the shining boots first. They couldn’t be anything else. The last breath whistled out of him.

No way out. No escape. All his life, there’d always been some option. Even when his one girlfriend had dumped him, he’d rented a room and found comfort in books and gone on. There’d always been some way. But the iron bar in his belly and the trees closing in on every side whispered that this time there was nothing.

He couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe. But he also couldn’t faint dead away, no matter how he tried. He tried to make himself look up but the best he could do was to confirm that those things that looked like shoes seemed to be fringed by robes. He couldn’t look up further and see again that hungry, evil face.

But again, oh God, again nothing happened. Why didn’t it just take him and make an end of him? Please, God, please? And again he clung to the thread of hope.

He even started to say I know what a heartless bastard you are but please, just this once, be kind? But through the white, threading terror, he couldn’t even be sarcastic anymore. God might really be watching this, ready to punish him worse than he could even imagine. Please, God? I’m sorry for…everything. Aware that promises given under duress meant little and that if God really existed, He would probably ignore them, he just begged, Please? Let me get past this?

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It might still be an illusion of the dark. Clinging to that last hope, he managed to get his feet moving, looking only at the trail, edging as far away as he possibly could from whatever was on the left. The trees on the right side of the trail opened and he slipped into that opening, even further away from…whatever it was. He backed still further away. The thing was in shadow now, unless he moved his flashlight, but his own feet were in light.

He had taken the side track, and was backing toward that clearing in the moonlight, where waited the low stone wall and the black rectangle in the ground with the stairs down to that marble coffin.

But he couldn’t help it. He took another step back, and another, aware only that anything at all was better than walking toward that shadow in the woods which had hadn’t been able to look at.

Another step back. The ground was more uneven than it had been. One more step back, his foot grating on something sharp…

Almost lazily, the vampire emerged from the trees, gliding through the moonlight with arms outstretched, reaching for him with calm certainty. Slender and graceful, it grew in his sight.

With the same sense of inevitability, Rick took that final step backward, tripped over something that had not been there earlier in the day and fell in dragging slow motion into the black rectangle and down into darkness, filled with sorrow and hatred. In a moment he would crack his skull on the edge of a step and break his neck and he could only rage helplessly in that last second of life.

If only he could reach up into heaven and drag God, sanctimonious and reeking of blessedness, off of his throne and crush Him with his bare hands!

If only God was the sort who ever really forgave.

***

Gasping, Sally Yan was finally released. But when she struggled to move, she was still as paralyzed as a vampire in daytime…