Her knife flashed up, stabbing into his hamstring. Hobart screamed. His gun went off, the bullet thudding into the stairs. He fell backward—and Zoe was on top, slamming her fist into his face.
A rapid movement caught his eye. Lily jerked to the side, and the movement caught King off guard, pulled him off balance. The two of them hit the aged, cracked wooden banister, which had born Bruno’s weight when he fell against it but could not bear the combined mass of Lily and King together. It cracked, sagged. Gave way.
“No!” Bruno yelled as King and Lily toppled out into empty air.
They took flight. Part of her hoping maybe it was all over. She might break her neck, please God. But the fall wasn’t far enough. They toppled in a sickening three-sixty flop, everything spinning—
Thud. The sudden stop stunned her. King was beneath her, his face empurpled, gasping for air. Horribly close. He’d landed on his back. Her on top. She’d knocked out his wind. She scrambled away and crab-walked through a puddle of gasoline, groping for the duct-tape necklace with the cell phones. Jerked them off, threw. One ended up in a pool of gas. The other fetched up against a tasseled velvet curtain.
Zoe and Hobart had paused in their combat to watch their idol fall, horrified. Lily looked frantically around for a weapon. A banister slat lay on the floor, a chunk of the handrail still attached, jagged and sharp. She seized it, hauled it back, loading a vicious swing at King.
Zoe and Hobart forgot each other and lunged to stop her.
Bruno jerked the pistol up. Bam. Bam. Hobart’s head disintegrated. Julian exploded into action, flipping him onto his back, slamming his gun hand to the ground.
The gun flew from Bruno’s fingers, spinning across the floor. A pinkish arc of Hobart’s blood and brain tissue had spattered across the room. Boom. One of the cell phones exploded. The sound hit him, like a blow to the center of the chest. The puddle of gas burst into dancing flames with a whump. Flames licked, leaped, spread. Fast.
Bruno tried to regroup, but Julian drove him hard, and he could only catch what was happening in jagged flashes out of the corner of his eye, like stop-motion animation amid a desperate dance to avoid the blows crunching into his ribs, the boot heels flying toward his chin. Julian fought like a demon, but the stench of burning hair dragged a split second of attention Bruno could ill afford to see Zoe lurching to her feet—on fire. Hair, clothes, face. Her back was aflame, her hair a torch, her face blistering. She’d fallen in a puddle of gas.
She didn’t seem to feel it. She just shambled toward King, arms outstretched. Smiling, as her skin crackled, melted. Come to mamma. Lily backed away from the flaming apparition. King staggered back, screaming desperately. Words her ruptured eardrums could not hear.
She came on. King’s back hit the base of the curving wooden staircase. Thwack, Bruno’s distraction earned him an elbow to the jaw that sent him spinning way too close to a pool of dancing flame. He twisted and skittered to keep from falling into it, which opened him up to a devastating whap-bam double punch to his kidneys. Down he went, oof. Fuck. Julian came at him, boots flying. Bruno jerked an arm to block a kick and saw Lily, swinging her strange, jagged-edged club—
Whack, right between Julian’s shoulder blades. The kid stumbled forward with a startled grunt, turned—and witnessed King, clasped in Zoe’s fiery embrace. Clothes aflame, mouth wide, issuing a rasping, inhuman sound. King fell, Zoe on top of him. Flames roared around them, closing until only their legs emerged, jerking. Shiny, blistered hands poked out of the blaze, groping for the bottom of the tasseled velvet curtains, which were also on fire.
Julian bolted toward his master. Dove in, heedless of the flames, trying to pry King loose. The blazing curtain gave way and billowed down onto the struggling knot of people, thawhump . Crackling.
Bruno and Lily were alone in a roaring inferno. The heavy folds of burning cloth writhed, flopped. Bruno pushed himself up to a sitting position. Lily straightened and tossed the makeshift club to the ground.
Bruno got to his feet and gestured toward the door. “Let’s go!”
Amazingly, she shook her head and backed toward the staircase that was not yet in flames. “No! The kids are still in there!”
Her voice sounded like it was coming through thousands of miles of phone wire. He shook his head. The movement made everything hurt.
“They got out!” he yelled. “Julian chased them onto the grounds!”
“Not them! The babies!” She headed back up the stairs.
Babies? What in the flying fuck . . . ?
Boom, the other cell phone exploded. Bruno barely heard it, he was so deafened by gunshots. A new pool of flames whooshed into existence, threatening to engulf the second staircase, where Lily had gone. The other was already a solid wall of flames.
The air was hot, the smoke thick and greasy. He heard himself, from faraway, screaming obscenities as he leaped the flames to the foot of the stairs, practically barbecuing his testicles in the process.
By the time he got to the top, the base of the stairs was engulfed. No going back down that way. It was brutally hot. He peered down the corridor after Lily. Flames crawled along the sprinkle of gasoline that Zoe must have laid down,icking hungrily at one side of the corridor wall. Fiery light lit the clouds of smoke into an eerie orange haze.
He spotted her at the end, a tiny figure, doubled over, hand to her mouth. She rounded the L-turn without looking back, and disappeared.
Not waiting for him. Not expecting help from anyone.
Aw, fuck. What else did he have to do? He bent down, pulled in all the oxygen he could without choking, and charged after her.
Lily crawled with her face to the ground. Stopped at the room she devoutly hoped was the one where she’d found those babies. She couldn’t leave those little kids in those cribs while the house burned around them. Not if it killed her. Probably it would. She couldn’t carry both babies or go back the way she came. The flames were rising. She had no air to breathe. She wasn’t Tinker Bell. No wings. No fairy dust.
She leaned against the door, eyes tearing in the smoky air, fumbling with the bunch of keys. Zoe hadn’t splashed her gasoline this far down, but the flames were advancing fast, even without accelerant.
Key after key. A figure burst through the haze. After one heart-stopping moment, she recognized Bruno. The graceful lines of his body, stretched out in a run, straight toward her.
Good. Another pair of arms. She’d squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of them. So, then. He was still a righteous, heroic dude, even if he had mistaken her for a rotten-hearted, backstabbing whore.
He sagged against the wall, sliding down and coughing. “What the fuck are you doing, Lily?” he demanded.
“I didn’t invite you, so I don’t owe you a goddamn explanation.” She shoved another key into the lock.
He watched, glancing toward the leaping flame. “How’d you get your hands on those keys?” he asked.
“How about you shut up and let me concentrate?”
He watched three more failed attempts before opening his trap again. “Um. Lily. Want me to do that for you?”
“One more word, and I’ll rip out your throat and leave you to die.”
“Ah.” Bruno flopped onto the ground. “Yeah,” he croaked. “Right.”
She continued grimly plugging in keys in, with the sinking sensation that she’d missed the right one, when click—it gave, turned.
They practically fell inside. Bruno slammed the door behind them. They lay there, gasping the relatively untainted air. The room was dim, only a long slit of cobalt blue dusk sky showing between the drapes.
Bruno cleared his throat with a rasping gurgle. “So? What the hell?” he demanded, irrepressible. “What is this place?”
She ran through the bathroom. Bruno hurried after her. She threw open the drapes so that he could see the cribs in the dim light.
He stopped short. “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Oh, no.”
Lily struggled with the w
indow latch while Bruno leaned over one crib, prodding under a plump chin. “Are they even alive?” he asked.
“They were breathing when I came through before, and it’s not too smoky in here yet. But they’ve been drugged. I don’t know with what.”
“Son of a bitch.” Bruno sounded as scared as she felt.
Now what? He didn’t say the words, but they were loud in the air as th smoke crept in under the door, fogging up the room.
Lily redoubled her efforts with the ancient brass window latch. Then Bruno was behind her, his big arms circling her, his warm hands closing around hers. She couldn’t let herself like this feeling, not one bit. For a thousand reasons, imminent death by fire being on the top of the list. The latch creaked and opened. She elbowed him away, hard, and shoved the window open. She hung out of it, gulping cold, sweet air into her lungs. They stared out, assessing prospects for survival.
It didn’t look good. No terraces, no balconies, no low-lying roofs or awnings from the first floor. Not even a ledge to creep along. Not a tree or a bush to break their fall. Just a sheer, thirty-foot drop, down to the rose garden. Hard mosaic tile and spiky pruned thornbushes.
Bruno cursed and yanked his head in. Lily turned to find him looking around the room. More smoke crept under the door. A hazy cloud drifted in through the communicating door, too. She went to the door to the corridor, laid her hand against it. “It’s hot,” she said.
“No shit,” Bruno said. “So’s the floor.” He leaped up, grabbed two handfuls of the curtains, hung on them . . .
Rrrrrip, the fabric gave under his weight, ripping into tatters.
Undaunted, he groped around for the curtain cord. “The velvet’s rotten,” he said. “But I think this cord is silk. It still feels strong. There might be six yards of it or more.” He gathered armfuls of the tattered fabric into his arms, rolling them around his forearms, and leaped.
This time, the arms that held the curtain rod snapped under his weight, and the rod, rings, and curtains tumbled down onto their heads, along with a choking cloud of dust.
They fought their way out from under it. “Drag one of those cribs over to the window,” Bruno said. “They need air.”
That sounded smart. Lily got to it. The little girl was so floppy when she lifted her. Bruno measured out the length of an alarmingly thin cord. She could barely see it, pale in the dimness.
“Will that hold a person?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But it would hold one of them, if I could rig a way to lower them down. The curtains? Help me think of something.”
“They have those baby seats over there for a car, with webbing restraints.” Lily grabbed one out of the inky, foggy shadows.
Bruno glanced at it as he yanked out armfuls of cord. “Might work.” He hung out the window, dangling the cord as far as it would go. “Shit. It’s short. Over three meters short. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Lily peered at the shortfall. “And if you went down first?” she said. “And I lowered them to you? You could catch them.”
He let out a coughing bark of laughter. “And leave you up here?”
“I’d come down after them,” she argued.
“Yeah? Really? Hand over hand, on a curtain cord? You’d have to drop it anyway, to let the kids fall! I wouldn’t be able to reach it to untie it. Unless I find something five feet tall to stand on. You go down first!”
“Bullshit,” she snapped. “You’re the only one with a hope in hell of catching one of those things if it fell on you from above your head!”
“I couldn’t catch two at a time,” he pointed out.
“Oh! Well, fine, then! News flash! Neither could I!” she yelled.
He shrugged. “I doubt the cord would bear my weight anyway.”
“Then why are we fucking with it in the first place?” She was screaming now.
“Because there’s nothing else to fuck with!” he yelled back. “There’s not even a bed in here with a goddamn sheet! Nothing!”
She pressed her eyes until red dots swirled and danced. “The top hem of the curtains?” she offered. “The reinforced part, with the rings, the pleats? That might give us a little more length.”
He pawed through armfuls of the dusty fabric until he found the top hem, jerking it to test its strength. “I need a knife.”
“I have one,” she told him. “A little one on the key chain I lifted off Melanie. I cut your cuffs with it.”
She immediately wished she hadn’t mentioned that. Bad associations. He took it from her and started hacking off the top strip.
“How’d you manage that?” he said. “Taking her keys, I mean.”
“I had to kill her first,” she said.
Bruno stopped for a second. “You did what?”
“Focus, Bruno!” she snarled.
“I am focusing! I’m multitasking!” He jerked at the curtain to test its resistance. “Seems like there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”
“So I should think!” She couldn’t hold back. “Since you thought I was that psycho’s robot chippie! That’s flattering, Bruno. That just does wonders for my self-esteem.”
He hacked the curtain with renewed savagery. “Now you’re the one who should focus.”
“You can’t blame me for taking offense,” she said.
“Save the blame for when the kids are safe.”
She blew out a furious, huffing breath. “Fair enough.”
Bruno knotted cord around some of the rings sewn into the curtain hem and tossed the whole thing out the window to measure the shortfall. They gazed down, dismayed. Still over two yards short.
A vehicle rounded the corner of the house, bouncing and thudding. A white Volkswagen panel van.
Bruno grabbed the curtain and flung it out the window, flapping.
“That might be more of King’s goons,” she warned.
“So? So they shoot us,” he said. “They’re welcome to. Have at it. At this point, they’d be doing us a goddamn favor.”
Ouch. Not what she wanted to hear. But he had a point.
The van jerked to a stop. Two people jumped out, waving. Lily squinted through the gloom. Not possible. She must be hallucinating.
“Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s Kev and Sean! Kev!” he bellowed. “Kev!”
Kev waved his arms, yelled back.
“You got some rope?” Bruno yelled. “The floor’s going to fall in!”
The two men leaped back into the van, accelerated over walkways and rosebushes until they were directly below the window. Kev got out, a coil of rope in his arms, stepped onto his brother’s linked hands, and leaped up on top of the van. Tears streamed down Lily’s face.
Kev grabbed the end of the curtain cord, gave it a reassuring tug, and threaded his coil of rope through it. He knotted it, tugged again.
“You go first,” Bruno said, as he hauled up the rope.
“The babies first,” Lily said.
“No. I’ll work faster and better if I know that you’re—”
“The babies first!”
He crouched, fixing the rope to the steam radiator. “Then get one of the kids strapped into the goddamn seat, quick!”
Their furious activity was punctuated by grunts of effort, coughing, the odd Calabrese obscenity. Soon, the unconscious little girl toddler was strapped into her seat, secured with the five-point harness and the webbed restraints. Lily got the boy strapped in to his seat while Bruno snapped the carrier’s handle into place and looped the rope around, jerking, knotting. The knots looked secure, but still they stared at each other, pale and sick when he poised the thing on the windowsill.
“This is so fucking terrifying,” he said.
Lily coughed and gritted her teeth. “Go for it.”
They watched the child’s pale sleeping face slowly twist and twirl beneath them, getting smaller in the reddish glare as Bruno fed the rope out. Thank God the kid was still unconscious. The rope was more than long enough. Kev received the bucket seat, untied it. Bruno yanked the
rope back up as Kev passed the baby to Sean.
The next one went faster. When the boy was safely down, Lily was able to breathe again, more or less. “You go next,” she urged him. “Let me go last. Since this whole thing was my idea.”
“Shut up,” Bruno snarled. He jerked her arms up. Knotted a loop of the rope beneath her armpits.
She stepped off into empty air, elbows tight to her ribs, clutching the rope. Staring up at Bruno’s anxious, soot-streaked face as he steadily lowered her down. She twisted and swayed, buffeted by blasts of heat coming out of the windows. The first floor looked like the pits of hell. Hands grabbed her from below. Yelling male voices. The world lurched, slid, twisted. Gravity sucked at her, buffeted her.
Then she was lying flat on her back on the hard stony tiles, ignored while Kev and Sean loped away to concentrate on Bruno.
She tried to get up, but her legs gave out, wobbling. She just propped herself up. The baby seats were near to her, the kids still asleep.
Crash, the second floor gave way. Heat and sparks blasted out, blowing her hair back. She screamed, stuffing her sooty fist into her mouth. Her heart stuttered. Her eyes watered so badly, she couldn’t tell if Bruno was still . . . how could he be? There was no floor beneath him.
Then she saw his silhouette, backlit by red-tinged billows of smoke, dangling on the rope. He climbed swiftly down, hand over hand, and landed lightly on top of the van. He leaped off it to the ground.
She must have fainted for a while. Or just shut down. She remembered being carried. Blazing, flashing lights, voices. A blanket was tucked around her. People discussing her, prodding at her. She clawed her way back to wakefulness by brute effort. She couldn’t afford to let herself go, like a fainting Victorian miss. She was alone. She had to keep it together, look out for herself. Nobody else would do it for her.
At some point, a hot paper cup of coffee was pushed into her hands. Someone wrapped her cold fingers around it.
She pulled her gaze into focus. She was sitting on a marble bench on the grounds somewhere in the midst of various emergency vehicles. Bruno crouched in front of her, hands around hers. She looked away from him. The babies were gone. Whisked off to a hospital. The house was burning, great arcs of water from fire hoses pumping into it.
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