While streams of blood gushed from her pierced stomach, Eva started hoping with all her heart that she really had been right.
She raised her blood-stained hands toward the stormy skies and felt that the red eyes of all the wolves were now on her. They held the still and attentive silence of divinities. And she knew that, yes, she had been right. Streaks of lightning crossed the clouds.
“You heard her, gods of death or whoever you are!” Eva screamed. “Dark sons of Zalmoxis, you saw her! Answer this crazy bitch’s prayer! Grant her the eternal death that she is asking for!”
“No!” Saint-Clair cried. “No!”
Her voice changed abruptly, becoming high-pitched.
The reason was simple. Her throat was now compressed, suddenly pushed back into her own flesh. And her body was changing yet again. The skin on her neck and arms was becoming flaccid. Wrinkles were deepening and expanding on her face. Her hands were veined and bony. Saint-Clair shuddered from head to toe.
She lifted her hands in front of her face and studied them as they aged with incredible speed. Black liver spots spread across the translucent skin. Her brand new hair turned gray, from its roots to its whirling ends, before falling out in huge chunks.
“No!”
She tried to scream but couldn’t. A trickle of ink-black blood oozed between her lips as she backed away, hands pressed against her temples, where the last strands of hair were stuck to her blotchy skull.
“Eva!” a voice called out above her.
The inspector raised her eyes and saw Vauvert on the adjacent roof. He slid down to her and landed in the chaos. He staggered but steadied himself. His sluggish movements, his mouth twisted in exertion-everything about him made it clear that he was struggling with the abnormal pressure too, and he was not doing any better than Eva. That didn’t prevent him from raising his gun.
Saint-Clair’s decaying figure turned toward him. Where she once had a mouth, the jaws of an animal taking shape.
Vauvert fired.
The bullets hit her in the chest, and the woman stumbled backward, her gnarled hands raised in front of her.
“The head!” Eva screamed. “It’s her weak point! Aim for the head!”
Vauvert was happy to oblige.
A bullet pierced Saint-Clair’s right eye. The back of her head spattered into the rain in black swirls.
Several more bullets followed the same path, blasting the bones of her nose and her eye sockets. The bubbling skull was wiped out, drowned in a mess of bloody, bony splinters.
The monster took one last step and collapsed against a chimney.
Bolts of lightning uncoiled in the sky with increased fury.
“Eva!” Vauvert shouted as he ran to her.
He took her in his arms as the thing that had been Judith Saint-Clair, which now looked like nothing more than a misshapen and liquid creature, let out a piercing scream.
Eva took the mask from her face, and the world swayed.
The pain in her belly came back right away.
She looked at the porcelain, still black between her fingers, and flung it away. The mask shattered on the concrete.
“You’re bleeding,” Vauvert cried, pressing both his hands against her gaping wound.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Eva told him. “The mask. It’s as if it were filled with her energy. It saved my life. Well, I hope it did.”
“I’m going to carry you. We have to get out of here right away.”
He took the deepest breath he could in the scarce air, wincing from the pain it caused his lungs, and wrapped his arms around Eva to lift her up.
On the rooftops all around, the beastly figures were approaching in a proliferation of red circles. The pack was tightening around them.
“They’re going to attack,” Eva gagged.
Her colleague, grimacing with the effort, carried her to the broken skylight.
“They’re the souls of her victims,” she said.
The wolves leaped in unison with a single roar.
102
The creatures streamed onto the roof in a huge wave of mangy bodies.
Vauvert let Eva slide down through the skylight first. Then he pivoted and put his legs inside too.
The wolves leaped over him.
Saint-Clair was the target of their rage.
It was toward the witch that they swooped en masse.
Vauvert saw her one last time, contorted at the far end of the rooftop, her flesh in throes, as the first animal reached her and bit into her hand, taking away several of her fingers.
Saint-Clair’s screams were harrowing. She did not have time to raise her arms to protect herself as the black beasts charged her. One of them seized a leg and took away a foot and part of her calf. The other creatures followed, claiming their body parts in turn. Between their ferocious jaws, the woman’s bones cracked and splintered.
Eva had been right, as always. Those things really were the souls that Saint-Clair had torn out of her victims. Seventy souls in all-seventy beasts mad with rage to whom the powers above had finally given permission to exact revenge. Or maybe to take back what was theirs? Yes, that’s exactly what those monstrous things were doing. They were tearing through Saint-Clair’s flesh, looking for the part of themselves that had wound up in the fibers of this woman.
Vauvert did not want to see any more of this. He let himself drop down the skylight. He landed on a rain- soaked bed, next to Eva.
Still, Saint-Clair’s screams of agony rang out on the roof, louder than the roar of the pack.
103
When Vauvert emerged into the entry of the building, Eva’s inanimate body in his arms, a police cruiser had just arrived. Leroy was on the sidewalk across the street, engaged in a heated conversation with Jean-Luc Deveraux. He stopped talking abruptly when he saw the giant come down the steps, and he ran toward him.
“I couldn’t find you! Oh God, Eva!”
“She’s alive,” Vauvert yelled. “We have to lay her down, quick!”
Deveraux and another officer rushed over too, and the four men joined forces to carry Eva to the car. With extreme caution, they lay her in the back seat, out of the rain.
She gagged in pain. Vauvert, crouching next to her, caressed her hair.
“Hang in there. We made it. Everything’s fine now.”
“The ambulance is going to be here in no time,” Deveraux assured her, his face waxy. “It should have been here already.”
He looked at Vauvert and Leroy in turn before telling them, “I swear I called it in immediately. I did it as quickly as I could, okay? I had to go through the proper channels first. I couldn’t have known.”
A deafening crash interrupted him. Curious onlookers cast their eyes skyward.
Wild arcs of lightning seemed to be raining down on the roofs.
Deveraux whistled between his teeth.
