animal blood affects your recuperative powers.”
He needed to get close to her…behind her.
Lane’s head turned, hunting the source of the sound. “Come out, come…out.”
He yelled at himself in his head to drown her voice.
Lane moved forward, almost soundlessly now…past the checkout counter…past the photo counter. “Stop… hiding.”
He groaned.
She passed the batteries to the rosary display case.
Breathing as little as possible, ears straining for sounds of Lane’s approach, he waited. Steps whispered closer.
Garreth grabbed a dental floss package and tossed it over the shelves into the next aisle. It clattered on the floor.
He heard her spin…step into the aisle.
Gathering all his will, Garreth made himself move…leaping around the end of the shelves. With his arm and ribs screaming with agony at lifting his arm, he tossed the loop of beads over her head and mask and jerked it snug.
Lane reached for her neck, snarling, dropping the bow and arrow she had ready for him. Then her hand touched the crucifix in the middle of the rosary. She shrieked…the high, tearing sound of someone in mortal agony. Garreth needed all his will to keep the rosary tight.
“Garreth, let loose!” Lane cried. “I can’t stand the pain!” She clawed at his hands. “I’ll do whatever you want…anything…just take this thing off me. Please. Please!” She began sobbing.
Dizziness swept through him. His knees trembled, making him fight to stay on his feet. Was this capture too late? Had he become too weakened to hold on to her?
He thought of Duncan shot down, of Mossman and Adair’s drained bodies…of Harry bleeding almost to death on Wink O’Hare’s floor. Of his own shattered life.
“We’re going to walk out of here and back to my place.” He hoped.
“Yes. Yes! Whatever you want, if you’ll just take this thing off! Inspector, it’s burning me! It’s a thousand times worse than the barrier around dwellings. Help me. Take it off! Garreth, please!” Lane screamed.
Only his grip on the rosary kept him on his feet…and kept him standing while he kicked in the drug store’s door to fake a break-in and explain the presence of a bow and arrow on the floor. The street spun around him. He shivered with cold, a sensation he noted in dismay. Could he hang on long enough to reach his place?
Lane started screaming. “Help! Someone help me!”
Garreth jerked the rosary. “Shut up!”
She subsided into raspy gasps. Her hatred beat at him. He angled for Maple Street. Whoever had gone to Duncan’s aid would initially concentrate activity at the north end of the block near Oak. If he forced Lane past the south end, then stuck to alleys and back yards, they should reach his place without being seen.
And then what?
He saw only one answer. But the deaths had to look like an accident, and it had to destroy their bodies. A fiery crash of the ZX should do. It would solve everything. Lane would be punished and he pay for her blood with his. He could stop fighting blood hunger; Grandma Doyle would be relieved; Brian could be adopted in clear conscience.
They crossed the tracks. Lane reached for his hands, but each time her nails touched his skin, Garreth jerked the rosary and she subsided with a gasp of anguish. He gritted his teeth, fighting dizziness and weakness…fighting to keep his hold on her and his balance on the slick paving.
Up Kansas, motors roared. Garreth looked around to see Scott’s Trans Am gunning out of the mist, just in front of a pickup jacked high on its axles. He sucked in a breath of relief. He did not have to take her all the way home.
Before he could debate the rightness of the action, or change his mind, he caught Lane’s chin with his good hand. A quick jerk snapped her head around backward on her neck with a crack like a gunshot. Too fast for her to know what happened, he hoped. Then he shoved his hands under her arms and leaped directly in the path of the Trans Am.
It had no chance to stop. Scott tried. Brakes screamed…but his tires found no traction on the paving and the Trans Am spun end for end. Garreth kept moving, pushing himself and the slack Lane between vehicle and a solid old light pole in front of the theater…until hurtling metal wrapped itself sideways around the pole, Lane, and Garreth. The pickup piled into the Trans Am, further crushing them and the car against the pole.
Garreth found himself rolling on the sidewalk, shoulder and side burning with pain, arrow now driven out through the front of his jacket.
“No!” he howled. He was not supposed to pass through the pole! He was supposed to die in the crash and burn with Lane.
Then he realized there was no fire, only the smell of spilling gas.
Lurching to his feet, Garreth scrambled for the driver’s door. The crash had jammed it. He smashed the window with his radio and pulled out the dazed boy. “Run!” he yelled at the pickup’s driver. “It’s going to blow!”
Dropping the radio, he searched Scott’s pockets. Good. There were the cigarettes and lighter Garreth expected to find. Flicking the lighter, he tossed it under the Trans Am and hauled Scott backward.
Flame engulfed the car and quickly spread to the pickup and the light pole.
Violet ran out of the hotel with a fire extinguisher.
Garreth reached for it. “I’ll do this. You take the boys in the hotel and call the fire department.”
He contrived to fall, with the extinguisher “coming apart” in his hands, spewing foam on the sidewalk instead of the flames. After that, he and the people who materialized out of the hotel could only stand and watch the car, and Lane’s body, burn.
An unexpected sense of desolation swept him. In spite of his outrage at her crimes, in spite of burning hatred for what she had done to Harry and him, her death hurt. Pain closed his throat…grief for the child whose torment had driven her to seek the power of the vampire life and use it to vent her hatred on humanity, for the waste of an intellect curious and clever enough to theorize what made vampires, for the voice that would never sing enchantment again.
The fire department arrived in time to save the light pole and keep Lane from burning to the bone, but what Garreth saw amid the metal wrapped around her, told him her hands had charred beyond recovery of fingerprints and the hockey mask looked melted onto her face. An autopsy, if they bothered with one, could establish her as female but forty-eight years too young to be Mada Bieber.
Reassured Lane could not be identified, Garreth felt as if his bones melted. He faded back against the theater ticket booth and slid down to sit on the sidewalk.
In moments feet gathered around him. Voices began exclaiming about his bloody jacket and the arrow protruding from it, began asking questions.
He ignored them. God he was tired…too tired to answer, too tired to feel suicidal any longer, too tired even to feel pain. He closed his eyes and shut out the world.
2
To Garreth, it indicated his state of debilitation that he never resisted being admitted to the hospital, refused to think about daylight turning the bed into misery, could not bother to worry about the results of his bloodwork, and did not even mind that they put him in a room with Duncan. Once Dr. Staab in the ER mentioned giving him
