her, bullets pumping out, screaming something unintelligible, his hand to his distorted, bleeding face.
Val opened fire with the Walther. Bam, bam, bam. Head, throat, chest.
András toppled across the threshhold, a look of stupid surprise on his face. There was a hole in the center of his forehead.
The sudden silence was disorienting. Val’s cool detachment evaporated the instant there was no desperate use for it. He began shaking convulsively. He almost fell. Caught himself.
He lurched to his feet, limped over to András. Kneeled by him to make sure he was dead. He prodded the man with his gun. The condition of András’s skull convinced him. There was very little left inside it. Good.
He blundered into the room, bumping painfully into various obstacles and trying to intuit where a light source might be. The darkness was so dense. The room appeared to be crowded with bulky furniture covered with canvas dropcloths.
There might be no light source at all. Back in his time, entire wings of the old palace had been left to fall into decay just as they had been in the eighteenth century. No wiring, no modern plumbing.
“Rachel?” He got down to his knees with a grunt of pain, putting himself in the glow of twilight from the door so that she could see him, wherever she was. If she was alive. If András had not shot her.
“Rachel?” He tried to pitch his voice normally, but it rasped and quavered, barely recognizable. “It’s Val, remember? Your Mamma’s friend? It’s all right now. Come out to me.”
She did, to his astonishment. He heard a rustle, a squeak, and a tiny body scrabbled across the floor toward him. Rachel ran into him full on, knocking him onto his ass, and wound her arms around his neck. He grabbed her, held her, chest shaking uncontrollably. She was alive.
Ah, no. Not yet. Please. He could not fall apart. Not yet.
He picked her up, swaying dangerously. He didn’t have much time left. He had to find someone to care for her, to make the phone calls, the arrangements. He could not slide down into oblivion and leave Rachel alone in this slaughterhouse just because all his blood had drained out of his body.
That was no fucking excuse. He had promised Tamar.
He lurched out into the corridor, gasping for air.
“Mamma?” Rachel asked, her voice breathless.
His chest tightened around his heart like a fist. “I’m sorry. I don’t know about Mamma, baby,” he whispered. “We’ll see about Mamma.”
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, digging her fingers into the blood-soaked fabric of his coat. “Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mamma,” she repeated. Like a mantra. Blocking out the world with the magic word.
He envied her the trick.
He scooped up the guns and staggered back toward the Saints Salon, following his own trail of blood. He was not sure what the fuck to do now. He couldn’t show Rachel her mamma naked and covered in blood, not if the unspeakable had happened. Yet Tamar’s vibe dragged at him like a steel cable attached to his insides. Someone was reeling it mercilessly in.
He had a bad moment when he turned the corner outside the Saints Salon and saw the two men, but as soon as he focused his eyes, the shock of blond hair struck an instant chord of recognition.
Connor McCloud, Seth Mackey. Val was so relieved, he might even have wept. He didn’t care.
Connor hurried toward them, his face gray with strain. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” he muttered. “Rachel? Honey? You OK? Holy Jesus, Janos, what’s all this blood? Is she—”
“Not hers,” he said, exhausted. “She’s all right.”
Connor reached out. The little girl relinquished her grip on Val and transferred it willingly enough to the other man. “Mamma?” she asked.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Connor said helplessly.
Rachel began to sob. Val turned away from the sound, and shuffled like one of the living dead into the blood-drenched Saints Salon.
The place was cold and dark. Wind whispered through it. Davy and Sean were bent over Tamar’s still form, muttering to each other. A thermal blanket was thrown over her. Davy was pumping on her chest.
Val fell to his knees next to them, only dimly aware of the glass shards digging into his flesh. “How is she?”
“Alive,” Sean said. “I don’t know how, or for how long, considering the condition he’s in.” He indicated Georg’s gruesome corpse, bent backward in a contorted arc. The man’s mouth, nose and bulging eyes all streamed blood. “She must have taken the same poison he did.”
“She kissed him, and he died,” Val said.
“That’s what I figured.” Sean’s voice was grim. “She has a tongue stud in. Some kind of poison capsule. The chick is a fucking head case. She makes me tired.”
Val cupped her jaw, tried to open her mouth. Sean batted his hand away. “Don’t touch her, for Christ’s sake! Some of the stuff she uses goes right through the skin. We can’t even do mouth to mouth.”
“I don’t care about the poison,” Val said. “I will give her mouth to mouth.”
Davy gave him a steely glance. “Like hell you will. Things suck enough without you croaking on us, too. Try it and I’ll knock you out.”
It would hardly be necessary, Val thought, swaying. He caught himself against the floor as he stared down at Tamar’s still form.
Her face looked like a pale, delicate wax effigy.
“I must call someone,” he said, shaking himself. “Medics, doctors. For Rachel, too. Someone give me a cell phone. An ambulance—”
“Connor’s already on it,” Davy interrupted him. “The FBI liaison’s taking care of it. Everybody’s on their way. So, these bodies…uh, what the hell happened here? Did you waste them all?”
“No. Just a few of them,” he said vaguely. “Seven or eight, maybe. They mostly killed each other. What are you doing to her arm?”
“It’s broken,” Sean said roughly. “Those filthy pigfuckers had her hanging from a goddamn rope with a broken arm. I can’t do shit about her crazy poisons, but at least I can splint her arm.”
Glass crunched as Val thudded down onto his ass. He caught himself with a bloody hand. The dim room was fading away.
He struggled to stay awake, alert. He didn’t want to leave Tamar while she still breathed. What a waste of precious moments with her.
But he could not support the weight of consciousness any longer. He was collapsing under it. On his way down the long slippery slide.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, he’s shot, he heard one of them say in an exasperated tone, before he pitched face first into nothing.
Chapter
30
