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  Erin and Eddie exchanged glances. When Eddie didn’t move, Erin went first.

  Holding her small can of pepper spray ahead of her, she crept down the stairs, keeping to the side where the treads met the risers in order to make as little sound as possible. Even so, each step made a soft creak as she put her weight on it.

  The pleading and voices continued. She could hear them more clearly now and could tell they spoke in Spanish. She thought she recognized Carlotta’s rough voice and Isabel’s clear tones.

  The cellar was vast, larger than the house and with walls hewn of rough stone. Erin guessed that it had been the cellar of an older, much larger building, perhaps some sort of nineteenth-century factory, and that the modern house had been built on top of it. It seemed that Carlotta had spent years planning this out.

  The cellar was dimly lit, with the central portion where they stood having no direct illumination at all. At one end stood an upright cage surrounded by flickering television sets. The cage was empty. Erin peered around the staircase and saw beyond an unlit portion of the cellar stood a partition and an open door. Beyond it was a lit room. Through the doorway she could see a rack of knives, hammers, saws, and other tools. The voices came from there.

  Eddie followed her down, creaking as he went. Still the voices continued, one mocking, one pleading. Those voices were making too much noise to hear their approach.

  Erin and Eddie walked quickly across the cellar, the concrete floor soundless under their footsteps.

  As they peered through the open doorway their breath caught. Inside, beyond the rack of tools, was an operating table. Isabel Morales was strapped to it, naked. Standing above her, with her back to the doorway, they saw the squat form of Carlotta. She had a hypodermic needle in her hand and was just beginning to move it down to Isabel’s arm as the singer begged and pleaded for mercy.

  Erin and Eddie moved up behind Carlotta, Erin with her pepper spray and Eddie with his tire iron raised above his head.

  Suddenly Carlotta turned around. Her face twisted with shock and rage. Erin sprayed her full in the face.

  With shocking quickness, Carlotta dodged to the side. Erin hadn’t gotten close enough to hit her properly, but even so Carlotta coughed and wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve as she rushed over to a side table covered with knives, saws, and other tools.

  Eddie was right behind her. He swung the tire iron down, but once again Carlotta dodged and instead of taking the metal rod on the top of her head like Eddie had planned, she got a glancing blow to the shoulder. The hypodermic clattered to the floor.

  Carlotta reached the table and picked up a huge carving knife. Eddie swung at her again but she managed to back away in time, grabbing a gas mask off the table as she did.

  Eddie and Erin hesitated, seeing that knife wave in front of them. It was as long as Erin’s forearm. Their fear allowed Carlotta time to slip on her gas mask.

  Erin realized her mistake seconds too late. Just as the maid put on her gas mask, Erin leapt forward and sprayed her again. There came a muffled cry from behind the mask as the pepper spray burned Carlotta’s upraised hand and the exposed flesh of her neck.

  Her sight, however, was unaffected, and her rage only increased. She lunged for Erin, who leapt back, only to bang against the table. Carlotta loomed over her… then grunted as Eddie swung the tire iron into her stomach.

  Carlotta gave a weak swing with her knife that made Eddie back off. She flourished the knife at him to keep him from daring another swing.

  Erin righted herself and sprayed Carlotta again, this time right in the ear. The maid howled in pain and gave her a vicious backhand. The butt of the knife handle hit Erin right in the temple. With a flaring pain that made her feel like her head was breaking open, Erin dropped to the ground, the can of pepper spray rolling away.

  “Erin!” Eddie shouted, rushing to her side.

  That was a mistake. Carlotta slashed at him, cutting a bloody streak across his shoulder. Eddie hissed in pain and brought up the tire iron just in time to deflect a blow that would have cut his face to ribbons. He swung at her, connecting with her hip, but the blow was weak and only elicited a grunt from the killer.

  She slashed again, cutting under Eddie’s guard and opening up a gaping wound across his chest. Eddie groaned and fell, knocking the back of his head against the table.

  Momentarily stunned, he couldn’t resist as Carlotta kicked the tire iron away. The sound of it clanging across the concrete floor galvanized the stunned Erin into action. She grabbed Carlotta’s leg and yanked on it, taking her off balance.

  Carlotta grabbed onto the table with one hand and jabbed with her knife, pricking Erin in the arm and forcing her to let go.

  Erin tried to scramble away, still half stunned by the blow to her head. Carlotta took a couple of steps after her, raised a booted foot, and smashed it down on her forehead. Erin’s head jerked back and hit hard on the concrete floor.

  Carlotta staggered, unsteady on her feet as she cradled her damaged ear. The pepper spray made her head flare with pain and her breathing came in squishy bursts as her nose flowed with mucus.

  Recovering, Carlotta turned back to Eddie, who was just trying to rise. With a calm, deliberate movement, she grabbed him by the hair, straightened him up, and plunged the knife into his chest right up to the handle.

  As Eddie sank back onto the floor, gasping and struggling to extract the knife with fumbling fingers slick with his own blood, Carlotta gazed for a moment at the semiconscious Erin and then strolled over to where Isabel still lay strapped to the table.

  With a few deft movements she untied Isabel, slapped her hard across the face when the singer tried to leap off the table, and then grabbed the skinning knife. This she held to Isabel’s throat while gripping her hair with her other hand.

  Carlotta looked around for the hypodermic needle and saw it lying a few paces away on the floor, cracked and leaking fluid.

  “A pity,” she said, “that’s going to mean a messy job. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not about killing you, it’s about defeating Erin. Come, I’ll finish with you out in the woods next to your sisters.”

  Isabel screamed, but did not dare to struggle as Carlotta dragged her across the cellar by the hair with the knife pressed against her throat.

  Chapter 20

  Erin’s head pounded and her vision struggled to focus as she tried to rise from the cold concrete floor. Vaguely she heard screams and the sound of heavy steps on wooden stairs, growing fainter.

  Then she saw Eddie.

  He lay in a widening pool of blood, the knife still stuck in him. Erin rushed over.

  “Carlotta said something about going into the woods. Hurry after them!” he gasped.

  “Lie still. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “No time, go after them,” he moaned, still trying to pluck at the knife.

  “Don’t move it or you’ll bleed more,” Erin said, pulling out her phone.

  “Go!” Eddie shouted, knocking the phone out of her hand. “Fulfill your destiny, and prove to Father that good wins over evil.”

  A distant scream spurred her into action. With one final, anguished look at Eddie, she hurried to the door before hesitating, grabbing a large claw hammer off the rack, and bolting out.

  She was up the stairs like a shot. A cool evening breeze led her to an open back door, and Isabel’s scream led her into the darkened woods beyond.

  The moon was a crescent and only gave a soft light that didn’t penetrate the deeper shadows beneath the trees. As Erin entered the woods she slowed, peering around her, suspecting a trap. She held the claw hammer at the ready, heart pounding. She had never killed anyone before and didn’t know if she could now, but she sure wasn’t going to let Carlotta kill Isabel, or drive one of those knives into her own chest like Carlotta had with Eddie.

  A scream up ahead and off to her left spurred her into action and she hurried deeper into the woods. Once she stumbled over a root, but she righted
herself and kept on going. She caught a glimpse of movement through the branches ahead and followed it.

  Again the woods fell into silence. She slowed, then stopped, perking her ears and listening for the slightest sound.

  “Erin!” a voice called out far ahead of her.

  Erin chilled. That hadn’t been Isabel’s voice. That had been Carlotta’s.

  “Erin, over here! Catch up. We’ve been waiting all our lives for this. Don’t lag behind now.”

  You might have been waiting for this all your life, but I haven’t, Erin thought.

  She walked cautiously toward the sound of Carlotta’s voice, peering into the shadows to the right and left, wary of an ambush. Carlotta wanted to kill her, had been programmed to kill her. So why hadn’t she finished the job when Erin lay half-conscious on the floor of the torture room?

  Erin got the feeling that she’d soon find out, and that the answer wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Come on, Erin! See what I’ve been doing all these years.”

  Erin felt tempted to call out to see if Isabel would respond but didn’t want to betray her location. Was the star even alive? Probably. She was the bait to get Erin to fall into Carlotta’s trap, and Erin had no choice but to walk into it.

  Damn, where the hell were the police? Shouldn’t they be here by now? She heard no sirens, saw no lights. The further she, Carlotta, and Isabel got into the woods, the harder it would be for the police to find them.

  Erin felt very much alone.

  A scream led her on. After a moment there was another scream, and a maniacal laugh.

  Erin saw vague shapes up ahead through the trees. They looked white in the moonlight.

  As she drew closer she blinked and stopped in surprise. They looked like people, the moonlight shining on their flesh. None of them moved.

  With a growing sense of dread, Erin crept closer, keeping a firm grip on the claw hammer.

  Then she entered the grove of the stuffed women.

  Fear passed through her body like a cold wind, replaced with a benumbed calm. She saw naked women wrapped around the trunks of trees. Dozens of them.

  As she passed further into the grove, looking about her, she saw them spread all around. All were nude, with leaves for hair, stuffed with something to flesh them out and give them a sick imitation of life. They gazed at her with acorn eyes, their full breasts a lurid expression of sexuality. A breeze rustled their hair of leaves.

  Erin turned slowly, staring at those blank, lifeless faces, seeing the white forms wrapped around the trees stretching out as far as she could see.

  Her stunned mind finally came up with a coherent thought.

  This could have been you.

  She didn’t mean the victims, although there was certainly the chance of that happening—she meant the perpetrator.

  If the man with the old hands had decided to turn you into this, it could be you lying in ambush and Carlotta chasing you.

  Erin felt the acid rise to her throat. She tamped it down.

  No. I could have never been twisted into this. He saw some flaw in Carlotta and exploited it. He saw I was made of stronger stuff, and so he picked me to be on the side of good. I could have never been made to do this.

  The roles could have never been reversed. Erin could not believe it. Erin would not believe it.

  How many? How many women had Carlotta murdered, flayed, and preserved?

  This had to stop now, and Erin was the one to stop it. The man with the old hands would get exactly what he wanted. She’d play her role to the end, and she would win.

  “Welcome to your fate,” a voice said behind her.

  Erin whirled around.

  Carlotta stood a little way off, keeping a hand tightly over Isabel’s mouth and holding a knife to her throat. The killer had taken her gas mask off. The ear Erin had pepper sprayed had swollen to twice its size and even in the dim light Erin could see Carlotta’s eyes and nose ran with mucous. She and her captive stood next to a young, well-formed oak behind which they must have been hiding. There was no body wrapped around this tree, but Erin could faintly discern an X painted on the trunk.

  “Is that tree for me?” Erin asked, hearing her voice come out faint and shaken. She was surprised she could form words at all in this place.

  “For her,” Carlotta answered. “You don’t belong in this grove. I’ll kill you and bury you in the woods. This place is only for the sexy girls, the ones who degrade women. I’ve followed your career, Erin. You never married. The British tabloids couldn’t even find any evidence of a boyfriend. I suspect you’re still a virgin. Why?”

  “I thought he molested me,” Erin found herself saying. “It turned me off from physical relationships. Only when Eddie told me more details about that time did I realize I was wrong.”

  For a moment Erin was amazed that she spoke so candidly to this madwoman before realizing that she had no reason not to. Carlotta was a sister of a sort.

  “I don’t think he ever molested any of us,” Carlotta replied. “That wasn’t his nature. He wanted to turn us to his will, create a story that would outlast his death.”

  Erin nodded. “Eddie told me.”

  Carlotta gave a grim smile. “Strange to see good old Eddie after so many years. I only recognized him when you called out his name. Is he dead?”

  “Not yet. Let’s end this. The police are coming. You can’t get away. Give yourself up now.”

  Erin made eye contact with Isabel, trying to give her a look of reassurance that she wished she felt. Isabel gazed back at her curiously, and Erin realized how bizarre this conversation must sound to her.

  “I suspect he’ll be dead soon enough,” Carlotta said, ignoring Erin’s demands. “It feels good to gut him after all this time. Prince Eddie. Remember we used to call him that? What a little tyrant he was.”

  “He was a victim too,” Erin said, realizing she meant it.

  “Oh, come on!” Carlotta scoffed. “Don’t you feel just a little jealous that you didn’t stick the knife in yourself?”

  “No.”

  “An evil person like you taking the moral high ground? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Evil?” Erin stared at the dead bodies on display all around her.

  “You oppress women, just like this piece of trash,” Carlotta growled, shaking Isabel, who squealed from behind the hand clamped over her mouth. “You defend those who make women out to be sex objects. In fact, you’re even more evil than they are because you defend them blindly, not even realizing that you betray your gender with your allegiance. Our maker set us up for this moment. He opened my eyes to how the world works, set me on a great mission. Oh, he didn’t realize what form it would take, he only made me a great force for good, and let me decide how I would fight for what’s right. I resisted at first, tried to have a normal life like you. I tried to be an entertainer, but they laughed at me.”

  Here her voice broke. She glared at Isabel and then at Erin before going on. “That woke me up. I realized that I had been fooling myself, thinking that I could be a force for good while still somehow being part of an evil system. So I used the inheritance our maker gave me to come here and buy this land. It cost a fortune, so many acres of woodland right in the middle of such an expensive area. I bet I’m the only person in this entire zip code who’s ever done an honest day’s work in their life. All these snobby rich people with their pretty hair and perfect plastic-surgery noses and their happy childhoods. When I go to the supermarket they think I’m a maid instead of the biggest landowner in town. I don’t care, it makes me invisible. I don’t want the neighbors to talk to me. None of them have any idea what’s in these woods.”

  “They will,” Erin interrupted. “The police are coming any minute. You’ll get caught and killed.”

  “I want them to come!” Carlotta screeched. “I want them to see what I created here. Then the world will know what I know, that the beautiful people are our true oppressors. But first I have to deal with you.”

>   Carlotta hurled Isabel against the oak, smacking her head against the hard trunk. The singer fell to the ground like an empty sack as her maid charged at Erin, knife upraised.

  Erin’s self-defense training kicked in. She had expected a sudden attack. She leapt to her left, swinging out her hammer as she did so.

  Carlotta didn’t react in time and took a glancing blow to the side. The pain forced out a whoosh of air from her lungs and yet she still managed to swing around too fast for Erin to make a follow-up attack. Instead Erin backed off a bit, unsure of herself.

  “Maybe I should skin you after all,” Carlotta growled. “Maybe I should hang you on the same tree. Maybe I should sew your two hides together while you’re still alive!”

  Carlotta readied her knife for another attack but Erin struck first. She swung her hammer down, aiming for Carlotta’s hand, but the maid was too quick for her and moved her arm away so that the hammer swished harmlessly through the air. Carlotta slashed with her knife, missing Erin by an inch, and Erin responded with a backhand, the claw part of the hammer catching on Carlotta’s sleeve and tugging her off balance for a moment.

  Erin used her free hand to punch Carlotta square in the jaw. The maid’s head jerked back and she stumbled. Erin raised the hammer again and brought it down at her opponent’s head with all the force she could muster.

  Only to miss again.

  Carlotta had sprung aside at the last instant. A moment later Erin felt a hot streak of pain in her side as the murderer’s knife slashed across her ribcage. She hissed in pain and doubled over, only to fly back as Carlotta drove a fist into her face. The hammer fell out of her grasp as she stumbled backwards and landed on her back on the damp ground.

  Dimly she saw Carlotta looming over her, knife upraised.

  “Evil is vanquished, good is triumphant!” Carlotta screamed. “I will—”

  A sick, wet crunch cut her off. Carlotta fell to her knees, straddling Erin. Her eyes looked down at Erin, unfocused.