Jeffrey Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

And then the cabin door opened again, and Alana Acosta slithered out on deck.

She was followed by the ponytailed bouncer from Fang, and three nasty-looking men carrying shotguns, and the world turned dim and dangerous once more.

I had known Alana was a predator from what the Dark Passenger had whispered as we stood beside her Ferrari. And now, seeing her here so clearly in command, I knew that my brother, Brian, had been right: The head of the coven was a woman, and it was Alana Acosta. And this was not merely her trap; it was also her invitation to dinner. And if I could not come up with something really clever, I was going to be on the menu.

Alana strode right to the rail, looked out into the park more or less between me and where I thought Deborah should be, and she called out, "Olly olly oxen free!" She turned and nodded at her posse, and they obligingly put the shotguns to Samantha's head. "Or else!" Alana yelled happily.

Clearly her bizarre yodel about oxen was some sort of British children's ritual, meant to summon everyone to come in: Game over, come to home base. But she must have thought we actually were children, and very dull children at that, if she supposed we would come obediently out of our hard-earned cover and trudge into her clutches. Only the rankest ninny would fall into that kind of stupidity.

And as I hunkered down for what I assumed would be a long game of cat and mouse, I heard a shout to my right, and a moment later, to my very great horror, Deborah came into view. She was apparently so obsessed with saving Samantha — again! — that she had not even spent two seconds thinking about the consequences of what she was doing. She simply sprang out of hiding, ran over to the ship, and raced up beside the pier to surrender. She stood there below me looking defiant, and then very deliberately she drew her pistol and dropped it to the ground.

Alana clearly enjoyed the performance. She went to stand closer, where she could gloat at Debs properly, and then turned and said something to the bouncer. A moment later he wrestled the decrepit boarding ramp over the side and thumped it down onto the dock.

"Come on up, dearie," Alana said to Deborah. "Use the ramp."

Deborah stood still and looked up at Alana. "Don't hurt that girl," she said.

Alana's smile grew huge. "But she wants us to hurt her; don't you see?" she said.

Deborah shook her head. "Don't hurt her," she repeated.

"Let's talk about that, shall we?" Alana said. "Come on aboard."

Deborah looked up at her and saw nothing but happy reptile. She dropped her head and trudged up the ramp, and a moment later two of the shotgun-toting lackeys grabbed her, jerked her arms behind her, and duct-taped them in place. A mean little voice in the back of my head suggested that this was only fair, since very recently she'd merely watched them as they did the same thing to me. But kinder thoughts emerged and shouted that one down, and I began to fret and scheme on how to get my sister loose.

Alana, of course, had no intention of allowing any such thing. She waited for a moment, looking out across the park, and then cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, "I'm quite sure your charming companion is out there somewhere!" She looked at Deborah, who stood with her head down, saying nothing. "We saw him at the carousel, dearie. Where is the bugger?" she said. Deborah didn't move. Alana waited for a moment with a smile of pleasant anticipation on her face, and then called out loudly, "Don't be bashful! We can't start without you!" I stayed where I was, frozen motionless among the thorns.

"Well, then," she called out cheerily. She turned and held out a hand, and one of the lackeys put a shotgun into it. For a moment I was torn by anxiety, and it was worse than the thorns. If she threatened to shoot Debs… But she was going to kill her anyway… and why should I let her kill me, too? But I couldn't let her hurt Debs —

Unconsciously I raised up my pistol. It was a very good pistol, extremely accurate, and from this distance I had about a twenty percent chance of hitting Alana. The odds of hitting Debs were just as good — or hitting Samantha, and as I thought that the pistol rose higher, all by itself.

Of course, such things would never happen in a just world, but we don't live in one, and this small movement must have caught a glimmer from one of the few battered lights still working in the park, and it gleamed just enough to attract Alana's eye. She pumped the shotgun, briskly enough to leave no doubt about whether she knew how to use it, and she raised it to her shoulder, pointed it almost directly at me, and fired.

I had only a second to react, and I just barely managed to dive down behind the nearest palm tree. Even so, I felt the wind from the pellets as they slashed into the foliage where I had so recently been hiding.

"That's better!" Alana said, and there was another blast from the shotgun. A chunk of my protective tree trunk vanished. "Peekaboo!"

A moment ago I had been unable to choose between leaving my sister in danger and placing my own head into the noose. Suddenly my decision was a whole lot easier. If Alana was going to stand there and remove the trees one shot at a time, my future was bleak either way, and since the more immediate danger was from buckshot, it seemed like a much better idea to give myself up and count on my superior intellect to find a way out of captivity again. Besides, Chutsky was still out there with his assault rifle, more than a match for a couple of amateurs with shotguns.

All things considered, it was not much of a choice, but it was all I had. So I stood up, staying behind the tree, and called out, "Don't shoot!"

"And spoil the meat?" Alana called. "Of course not. But let's see your smiling face, with hands in the air." And she waved her shotgun, just in case I was a little slow in getting her point.

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

I put down my pistol, raised my hands as high as dignity would permit, and stepped out from behind the tree.

"Lovely!" Alana called. "Now over the river and through the woods, little piglet."

It stung a little more than it should have; I mean, on top of everything else, being called «piglet» was not much. It was just a minor indignity tossed lightly on top of some rather major calamities, and it may be that my new-grown semihuman sensibilities encouraged me to take it harder than necessary, but really: piglet? I, Dexter? Clean-limbed, physically fit, and tempered to a fine edge in the furnace of life's many fires? I resented it, and I beamed a mental message to Chutsky to shoot Alana carefully, so she would linger and suffer a little.

But of course, I also moved slowly down to the bank of the river with my hands in the air.

On the bank, I stood for a moment, looking up at Alana and her shotgun. She waved it encouragingly. "Come along, then," she said. "Walk the plank, old sod."

There was no arguing with the weapon, not at this range. I stepped onto the ramp. My brain whirled with impossible ideas: Dive under the boat, away from the aim of Alana's weapon, and then — what? Hold my breath for a few hours? Swim downstream and get help? Send more mental messages and hope for rescue by a gang of paramilitary telepaths? There was really nothing else to do except climb up the ramp to the deck of the Vengeance. And so I did. It was old and wobbly aluminum, and I had to hold on to the frayed guide rope that ran up the left side. I slipped once, and held tightly to the rope as the whole rickety thing pitched and yawed. But in far too short a time I was on the deck, looking at three shotguns pointed my way — and even darker and deader than the weapons' barrels, Alana Acosta's blue and empty eyes. She stood much too close, as the others duct-taped my hands behind me, looking at me with an affection I found very unsettling.