by Baird Wells
Steps and a thump reached his ears, then more steps, more bumping. The pattern repeated a few times in a circle overhead.
Boots stomped back down the stairs, passing their landing, a reassuringly continuous sound until it reached the entry hall. There followed another brief pause, and finally the front door slammed shut.
Ty exhaled, temples pounding. “Hold a moment,” he whispered when Olivia grew restless. “Let's be certain he doesn't intend to come back.”
She relaxed beside him, no stranger to the waiting which comprised so much of their work.
After a moment, more creaking sounded overhead. Not the long groan of a footstep but short, quick cracks like a board being twisted. Then a whoosh, another sound he could almost place, similar to opening a furnace door on its roaring flames.
Flames.
As if reading his mind, a tendril of smoke curled in beneath the door, hooking into a finger and beckoning them out.
“Ty!” Olivia darted to her feet, grabbing for his sleeve.
“I see it.” The question was, up or down? Did they go in search of Elena and risk the fire or run hell-bent for the door? He groaned, already knowing the answer. “Upstairs, double quick.”
Jerking open the door was a mistake. What had he been thinking? Fire eating its way up from the hall bit greedily at old wood, and searing heat tingled against his face. He turned into his sleeve, coughing.
To her credit, Olivia didn't make the mistake of pausing and waiting. She clambered ahead, gaining the third floor in a heartbeat. He followed, eyes watering, throat raw as he searched his pockets for a handkerchief.
Olivia stopped at a door directly across the landing, leaned in and pressed her palm to the wood. She jerked it back just as quickly. “It's hot.”
“Stand back.” The kick jarred his teeth, splintering the door. He stood away, pressing Olivia behind him. The inferno devoured fresh air, roaring its satisfaction, then tempered. There would be no going into the room. Flames had climbed the plaster to the roof's pitch and glowing ash floated from above like burning snowflakes. Smoke danced in wide swirls, obscuring half the room.
Above a raging line of flame that nearly cut the room in two loomed a figure. Unmistakably female in shape, her limp arms dangled, chin pressed to her chest. She swung left and right in an unhurried motion, frustrating opposition to the chaos all around. A stool, its legs charred black, lay against the floor nearby. Tongues of fire licked at the rope, ready to drop Elena's body any moment. A shoulder pushed beside him, and he pushed back. “Olivia, don't!”
He turned and threw out his hands too late. Olivia pressed to his side, eyes darting above the sleeve covering her mouth and nose. “Don't what? What did you –” She stiffened against him. “Oh my God.”
“Just … turn around. Leave it. We have to get out.” He grabbed a fistful of her coat, propelling her back out onto the landing.
He was following suit when something caught his eye, a glint against the floorboards just inches from the smoldering stool. Bracing one hand on the door frame, he arched a leg out, extending every inch of muscle. Heat seeped through his trousers, stinging his calf like a sunburn. He got a toe over the object and raked backward. It clattered, metal and glass over wood, stopping when it struck the threshold. He would have guessed a watch by the sound. Bending for a closer look, he found spectacles instead. Darting forward he grabbed them, unthinking. The metal frames were searing; dropping them with one hand, he caught them in his sleeve. One lens was shattered, and glass triangles pinged off of the floor as he transferred them to his pocket.
“Tyler!” Olivia's cry was muffled by her coat. “Tyler, we can't go down anymore!”
Pressing the handkerchief back to his face, he turned to her. Smoke belched up the stairway. Flames already wreathed a doorway below, where they'd hidden minutes earlier. The fire spread quickly, jumping floors.
“This way!” Olivia's fingers bit into his arm, pulling him toward the last door at the end of the hall.
Her hand came up, he had no idea if to test it or just to push it open. At this point they didn't have much choice but to go in.
Fire had eaten a wagon-wheel sized hole through one wall, but otherwise the room had been spared, save for the smoke billowing in. Flames from next door offered illumination, enough to warn of missing floor planks. They toed their way along different paths, picking towards a narrow window set below the eave.
Olivia reached it first. She grabbed the sash and heaved.
Nothing. Not so much as a creak.
“Dammit all,” he croaked through a round of coughing. Leaning over her shoulder, he examined the frame. It had been painted, nailed, and painted again, then neglected for decades. He jammed a boot against the pane. It wasn't a conscious decision; more like a reflex borne of self-preservation. It took more kicks than he cared to count before a line ran up the glass and it finally splintered. The pane shattering nearly ate up a ripping sound behind him. Blinking against watering eyes, he glanced back to find Olivia tearing her gown from bodice to hem. “What in the hell are you about?”
Still trying to cover her face, Olivia jammed a finger at the window, kicking away a heap of silk and velvet. “I'll never fit!”
Of course. There was certainly no time to unbutton or unlace. He stuck his head out through the opening, sucking in mouthfuls of fresh air that burned nearly as much as the smoke. There was a ledge below but he couldn't see where it ran. Wherever it went, it would put them outside, and for now that was preferable to being inside.
He turned back to Olivia and held out a hand. “We're three floors up. Prepare to do some climbing.”
Grabbing her discarded dress, he wadded it, folding it over jagged shards clawing out from the frame. Olivia hung one leg out, ducking, flinching with every movement. She fit through the window without her clothes, but had no protection from the glass. He winced, watching her wriggle through.
A crash thundered from the room next door. Flames roared louder, and wind sucked faster through their new-made opening. The floor was falling in.
Ty wedged himself into the frame. Cold night air stung the lines it sliced along his neck and scalp and a hot rivulet trickled into his collar. Flesh throbbed along his left thigh, swelling around each puncture.
Panting, he joined Olivia on the ledge. His temples pounded from smoke as much as primal fear. He laid palms against the cold stone, anchoring against a wave of dizziness. When it passed, he looked to Olivia, assuming almost the same posture. Her head was back, her eyes pressed closed, and he wondered if she knew how much blood saturated her shift. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, still not opening her eyes. “I'll be better, once our feet touch ground.”
Glancing both directions along the ledge, he took stock of the geography. “Let's see what we can do about that. And let's hope that no one stayed to admire their handiwork.”
A cloudy sky winked with red and orange stars, embers blowing overhead from a roof nearing collapse.
Olivia had observed him weighing their choices. “The balcony,” she offered. “Front side of the house. It should be stable. We can sort it out from there.”
Her confidence bolstered him, even if it was an act. Nodding, he worked his boots to get better purchase on the ledge. “Off we go.”
The house groaned and snapped, protesting their escape. A flaming maw at the roof's peak insisted that one life was not enough to satisfy.
Bits of limestone sloughed off beneath their feet, weakened by rain and winter freezes. As they fell, he registered a chillingly long space before an impact echoed back from the yard below. Three floors might not kill them, but they'd wish it had.
Reaching a corner, they paused their shuffling. It was going to take some doing, negotiating from one face of the house to another. Quoins jutting out at the corner offered hand-holds, but the towers of stacked bricks also ate up their footing.
A wall shuddered at their backs; something had given way deep inside the house. Ov
er the roar, he caught the first shouts of alarm from the far side of the square. When the fire brigade arrived to find one dead woman inside and two people hunkering on a ledge, there would be questions. Questions were what got spies like him and Olivia executed.
She was holding still beside him, not showing the slightest awareness that they were about to have company.
“Olivia?”
“I hear them. Just...” She sighed, frowning over her shoulder at the corner. “Here, I have an idea.” Bracing her outside arm perpendicular with the quoin, Olivia flipped her body back to front. He swore that for a moment she hung in midair. Then she swung around, smacking into the corner face first and grabbing its opposite side with her other hand. Grit scraped beneath her feet; she balanced, then was still. With two side steps, she disappeared from sight around the front of the house. He would applaud under different circumstances.
He doubted his ability to follow suit, body dense where Olivia's was graceful. Above, the roof heaved its final sigh, crashing into the belly of the mansion. Tongues of flame and molten ash belched out through shattering windows below.
He would have to learn to be deft, and learn quickly. Shoulder to the corner, he tensed, pivoted on the ball of his right foot and lashed out for a second handhold. Where Olivia had struck the wall and seemed to stick, his chest resisted the impact. For a moment he was certain of falling. Her palm slamming his shoulder kept things from going horribly wrong. Resting a cheek against the rough stone, he panted. “Thank you.”
“Thank me when we're down.” Olivia took up a position above the balcony, scooting, glancing over her shoulder, judging distances through deep shadows cast by the fire. She crouched, grabbed the ledge and without warning dropped in a single fluid movement.
He startled, grabbing for her before it registered that the move was purposeful.
“Oof!”
“You all right?”
“Mostly,” she groaned. “Tuck your legs in.”
Understanding dawned when he landed, nearly catching the balustrade on his descent. The balcony was not much deeper than it was wide, a small half-circle of marble. If he'd appreciated the size of their target while still above it, Ty wasn't so certain he could have stomached the jump. It was a credit to Olivia's bravery as much as to her quick thinking.
She was already outside the balcony's iron railing. Palming its supports, her hands slid until she hung from the lip. “Wish me luck.”
He wished she would stop doing things without warning and held a breath.
Her thud was soft. “I'm all right. Not as far as I expected.”
She was right. The impact hardly winded him, landing him in the one part of the door yard not entirely heaped with old stone or downed trees.
Shouts rippled out beyond the gate, growing exponentially and carried by hammering footsteps. He grabbed Olivia's arm. “Back. Run for the back.”
“I don't think we can scale it,” she huffed, loping breathless beside him and pointing toward the wall.
He scowled at the jagged spine of blocks. “Then we had damned well better be able to burrow under it.”
As it turned out, neither path was necessary. There was a u-shaped hole from the top of the wall to its base, the last act of a dying oak whose roots still reached skyward, skeletal in the moonlight. They jumped the low threshold with ease.
Beyond the wall, a sandy bank fell away, barely covering its foundation stones. It heaped into dunes at the bank of a canal nearly twenty feet below. Normally a muddy trench, it was filled with days of rainwater and whatever awful things flowed through the Paris gutters. Ty braced; none of what they were about to do would be pleasant.
Beside him, Olivia nodded, more for her own reassurance than his, it seemed. “We can slide down. I think we can slide down.”
“We'll make it. And if we do not...” He glanced between his clothes and hers, “We'll leave some poor soul very confused.”
Something occurred to him, watching the water drift past far below. He unholstered his pistol, tightened the flint, and tossed it by the butt in a wide arc. It landed on the canal's far side, gripped by mud. He committed its location to memory and met Olivia's wide eyes. “We may need that later. I'm trying to remain optimistic, but I have the sinking feeling we are about to get wet.”
“Well,” Olivia offered, “no sense dallying.” She stepped over the lip, crouched and began to pick her way down the slope. It only took four or five steps and a growing avalanche of dirt and stones before the inevitable happened, and she was swept along toward the bottom. He caught momentum in her wake, ground giving faster. He ignored grit filling the spaces beneath his fingernails, tearing his palms.
The landslide worked to their advantage until they were perhaps eight or ten feet from the bottom. Heavy rocks and packed detritus formed a sound base there, refusing to shift. Dragged to a halt, they tangled in it. It gripped his legs, tumbling him first sideways, then arse over crown. Olivia's splash spattered his face and then he plunged into the water behind, filling his mouth and nose before he found his feet. Its pungent, coppery stench choked him. His stomach turned and he would have wretched then, if it weren't too bound by knots.
Steadying Olivia by a fistful of her shift, Ty waited until her feet planted on the slippery bottom. “Still doing all right?”
“Progressively worse each time,” she gasped between coughs, spitting water from her mouth. “Perhaps you should stop asking.”
Her hand in his, Ty dug boots into a sticky clay embankment, towing her behind until they were atop a narrow dirt road that wound along the stream's path.
“Here,” he peeled his coat off, wringing water from the leaden wool. “Take it.”
Olivia's laugh was coarse with irony. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”
It wasn't the time or place. They had witnessed a murder and nearly been burned alive, escaping death a statistically improbable number of times in the past quarter of an hour. He should have been focused on nothing but gratitude at being alive and mostly intact. Instead, he noticed only Olivia's wet chemise plastered to every curve of her body. He was staring, and he didn't give a damn. He drank in every inch of a shape created to tempt a man's eye, draw his fingers, giving thanks that he was alive to do it. The image would be burned into his mind for a long time to come. He went on staring until she wrapped his coat around her shoulders.
In the silence stretching between them, he realized she had stopped, coat halfway on and was watching him. At first he thought she was waiting for something, or that she would chastise his frankness. Her chin raised a fraction, coat forgotten, and Ty swore she was letting him look.
Then she shivered, flicking droplets from her hem, and slipped into the sleeves. “We can't hire a cab,” she glanced down, “And I've lost both shoes, so walking back to Philipe's is out of the question.”
“We have this.” He reached out and tugged his pistol from the dirt, seating it into his holster. “It will get us as far as the safe house, should we run into trouble.” They very well might, depending on the proximity and thoroughness of Elena Breunig's killer, not to mention an array of cutpurses frequenting dark streets.
Rubbing water and leaves from her face, Olivia groaned. “Nights like this make me question why I don't just pack my trunk and sail back to England.”
Draping an arm around her shoulders, Ty guided them haltingly along the pitted roadway. “You don't have the heart to leave me here all alone.” Underneath the jest, he hoped his words held at least a grain of truth.
“No,” she sighed, wrapping a warm arm across his back, “I don't suppose I do.”
* * *
“Ow! Dammit.”
“Wait until it cools off!” He could see a wisp of steam from Olivia's kettle trailing up above the screen shielding her from view. He could see it all the way from the bed. “Cauterization is a method of last resort, medically speaking.”
Ty was certain he'd been as eager as Olivia to get clean. He'd also been more patient
about it.
The screen jarred, rocking on a bamboo frame. It nearly tipped, and there was a clatter. Something metal, maybe a bowl. “I'm trying to wash the silt and ash and... whatever this is off of my body. I'd prefer not to do it with lukewarm water.”
Leaving her be, he scooted farther up the headrest, rotating the broken spectacles between his palms while doing his damnedest to ignore everything that was happening behind the screen. Splashing, scrubbing. After their exchange along the canal, he would quickly lose his wits without a distraction.
He certainly had one. Facing the frames toward him, he pinched each bent earpiece tightly. The glasses held an answer, a clue; they practically hummed with it. Ty felt certain that he could perceive what it might be, with enough concentration.
Olivia stepped out at last, clad in a disappointingly shapeless white dressing gown. Toweling damp curls with a bath sheet, she raised her chin at the spectacles. “Any ideas?”
He exhaled his frustration. “No, not yet. But I feel as though I've seen them before.” He turned them over one last time before stowing them in the bedside table drawer. “I have no idea where.”
Tucking up on the bed, her back half facing him, Olivia sat quiet a moment. “I've been mulling something over, something that's bothered me all night.”
“What's that?”
Slender fingers went to her throat. “She was hung. Hung.”
Gruesome, but Ty wasn't certain he grasped her point.
Olivia glanced at him over her shoulder. “Who gets hung?” She waved a finger between them.
“Spies?”
“Traitors,” she corrected.
It hadn't occurred to him. That Elena Breunig died as a result of her profession was never in question. He'd been too focused on the spectacles to consider any deeper meaning, but Olivia's suspicion made sense. Whoever had come in behind her, he hadn't simply stabbed or strangled her. Hanging Elena was an act that would likely never be discovered owing to the blaze, and that seemed symbolic. Not ordinarily a man for coincidences, Ty considered the spectacles again and was silent.