99
When Eva saw the black beasts running through the storm in her direction, she fired, praying that it would have some effect on them.
It did. Her bullets struck them in midair, and the creatures dissolved in the rain, dispersed like mirages.
But she did not kill them, assuming such things could be killed. They reappeared, silhouetted on the rooftops, their red eyes fiery in the rain.
Eva raised her weapon and fired at them again. The beasts vanished and then reappeared just a bit farther away.
A gust of wind threw her off-balance. The inspector grabbed a cable to steady herself.
She was perched in the middle of the scaffolding, high above the street. After her colleagues had climbed the ladder and gone off to find Eloise, she had decided to go up the ladder herself and head the other way. Her progress had been slow, and she had almost fallen off more than one rooftop. In fact, she thought she might not make it to the other side in time to save the girl.
But there she was, finally.
Clutching the cable, she turned toward Saint-Clair.
The woman was grinning at her with the twisted look of someone who’s demented or visionary, as though she had been waiting for this moment and knew it would exceed her every expectation. Eva realized how much she had changed. She was not an old woman anymore. She had grown younger. Her body had straightened. Her hair was real now, not a wig. All this was impossible, unthinkable, and yet it was true in an awful way.
As she held her victim’s body against her like a shield, the woman was swaying, as though her bones weren’t exactly in the right places.
“Saint-Clair! Back off!” Eva shouted, struggling to steady her footing on the tarpaulin.
The woman tilted her head to the side and pressed the blade against the girl’s throat.
“The gods are here!” she exulted. “The gods are waiting!”
“Let the girl go! Or I shoot you!”
One step at a time along the scaffolding, Eva drew nearer.
She knew that if she slipped now or if a sudden blast of wind hit her, she would be hurled to the ground.
She put it out of her mind.
Judith Saint-Clair tightened the grip on her hostage. The blade of the scalpel drew a trickle of blood under her throat. Eloise Lombard’s eyes bulged with terror.
“I’m serious!” Eva screamed. “Let her go right now!”
She finally reached the ledge and jumped off the scaffolding, landing in a puddle on the roof. She raised her gun and took aim.
Saint-Clair, protected by her victim’s body, threw her head back and broke into hysterical laughter. It merged with the rumbling in the sky.
“Talk about deja vu. Don’t you think?”
Indeed, this had happened before and even more times than this crazy bitch could ever know. The girl in her clutches was Justyna. She was every innocent victim terribly mistreated in the arms of a monster. It was the same story always, and it was happening again before her eyes. Eva’s entire life seemed to come down to this one scene, and the panic increased tenfold. Yet she refused to show any of it.
She took another step on the roof.
She was close. With her Beretta steadied at arm’s length, there was no way she could miss her target now.
“I’m going to shoot!”
“You’ve come too late, little tiger. You always come too late.”
Judith Saint-Clair was still laughing.
As she aimed, Eva made out her face behind the porcelain mask, and she realized that, like the rest of her body, Saint-Clair’s features were changing by the second. Wasn’t it obvious? She was not a woman anymore, but a multitude of people. She was composed of the lives she had stolen, the lives she used to extend her own time in this world. Eva understood deep in the recesses of her being, in the same way she could read people’s minds around her. And now an infinite terror rose inside her, as no human being is made to witness such things without losing her sanity.
She still did not dare fire her weapon.
The body of the Lombard girl was still exposed in front of her tormentor. Between her ribs, where the blade had gone in, blood continued to gush in spurts, streaming down her legs in the swirling black rain. If Eva fired, she might miss her target and hit the girl.
“The will of the gods shall be granted!” Saint-Clair exulted. “No matter what you do, they’ll give me my reward!”
“This is your last chance! Let go of the girl!”
“Or else what? What do you think you can do?”
“I’m going to kill you,” Eva insisted. “You bitch from hell, I swear I’m going to blow your fucking head off!”
“Go ahead, then,” Saint-Clair said, grinning at her.
And with her eyes still on Eva, she slit the girl’s throat with one single, swift move of the scalpel.
Her blood, propelled by arterial pressure, shot into the rain in a great steaming spurt.
Eva screamed at the top of her lungs.
100
The past always repeated itself.
Eva stopped having any coherent thoughts.
Screaming with anger and helplessness, she began to fire, not caring anymore about the consequences. She just squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, firing bullet after bullet, submerged in a frozen and relentless wave, a mix of despair and absolute fury. Nothing else existed, save the familiar recoil of each detonation, which sent shock waves along her arms all the way to her shoulders.
And with each shot, she could see Judith Saint-Clair’s body jolting. The masked woman had let her victim’s body fall, and she moved backward, one step after the other, struggling to remain on her feet. The bullets were going right through her, opening red holes in her chest and stomach.
When Eva ran out of ammo, she continued to pull the trigger reflexively, not understanding why the monster had not collapsed, why she was not dead.
Saint-Clair came to a stop at the edge of the roof.
She stood perfectly straight, arms outstretched, palms turned skyward.
She roared with laugher.
Her hair had grown even longer. It was now long and thick, coiling around her like snakes.
The woman’s entire body was rippling wildly.
With absolute horror, Eva saw her wounds closing. Each wound boiled, as the churning substance of the woman reconstructed itself and filled each gaping hole in her body.
“Zalmoxis!” Saint-Clair howled. “You who rule over the empire of death! Quench your thirst with this blood, and let me drink from the black spring of eternity!”
Eva ran through her pockets, looking for another clip, though she knew that her gun would be no help. Something terrifying was happening, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nobody could do anything
