“What?” Val couldn’t believe her ears. “Oh, for the love of—You sanctimonious, self-aggrandizing bitch! You killed those women because they were adopted? Because Frank O’Toole liked them? You’re out of your mind!”

“Oh, but they were happy,” Devota argued. “You should have seen them smile blissfully as they put on their ridiculous gowns.”

“Because they were drugged!”

“High on love.”

“Bull!” Val knew that they’d been drugged. Devota might have been able to get what she needed through the clinic where she worked or from some of the people she was supposed to be helping, some of them drug addicts. Val felt sick when she thought of Cammie and how she’d been duped, used by this twisted, vengeful woman.

In the flashlight’s beam, she caught sight of a glint, a bit of metal. The gun! Fifteen feet away.

“Nuh-uh-uh!” Devota warned, as if reading her mind. She raised her brutal knife high overhead, its dripping blade ready to strike again.

“Go to hell!”

Val rolled toward the weapon.

“Val!” Slade yelled, his deep voice reverberating through the halls.

Surprised, Devota glanced toward the sound.

Val touched the barrel of the gun with the tip of her fingers, but it spun away again, skittering over the stones.

Devota turned back and saw Val’s mistake. “Stupid Jezebel!” With surprising agility, Devota leaped forward, her fingers curled like talons over the knife, her shadow a hideous wraith. “Die!” She thrust her arm out. The wicked blade gleamed steely blue, slashing downward, bits of blood flying.

Val flung herself to one side.

Too late.

Hot pain seared down her shoulder.

“Die! Damned your heathen soul to Satan!” Devota hissed, and jerked her knife upward, determined to plunge it into Valerie’s heart.

“Stop, you goddamned bitch!” Slade yelled from somewhere in the shadows, somewhere behind the killer’s back. “Drop the knife!”

From the corner of her eye, Val saw him step into the light, his face drawn, his eyes blazing, ten feet from Devota’s back. Fury twisted his features, but he didn’t give Devota a second to think.

Throwing himself across the tomb as if to tackle her, he shot forward, airborne.

Devota spun, twisting the knife.

Oh, God!

With insidious delight in her eyes, the she-devil intended to rip Slade from his neck to his crotch, spilling his guts.

“No! No! No!” Val cried, and threw herself toward the gun just as a horrible, wet, rasping scream issued from the bloody lips of Sister Charity.

In one last, desperate act, as if propelled by God, the dying nun flung her body upward, knocking Devota down onto the bed of the tattered wedding dress, Charity’s half-dressed body pinning Devota to the floor as she gasped for breath.

Swearing, Slade skidded across the floor on his shoulder.

Devota reacted. “Why can’t you just die?” she screamed at Charity, then plunged the knife deep, burying the blade between the older woman’s breasts.