Staring up at the shadowed ceiling, Nina smiled. Maybe she could invite Lyons into her room and engage him in conversation. Maybe-
A slight sound close by, from a direction she couldn’t determine, made her heart leap. This wasn’t like the car horn, obviously far away.
At first she lay breathless, unmoving. Then she snaked out a long pale arm, opened the nightstand drawer, and withdrew the small, nickel-plated handgun Newsy had given her. It was surprisingly cool and heavy in her hand. Horn hadn’t wanted her to have a gun. He was afraid the wrong party might accidentally be shot.
Then her addled mind regained some function:
She tried to call out to him but made no sound. Terror was a steel claw at her throat. She could barely move. Nina never dreamed it would be this bad, that she’d be paralyzed like this.
Her hand trembling, she held the gun beneath the white top sheet, her finger curled around the trigger.
Her eyes strained to peer through the dimness at the rectangle of paler night that was her bedroom window.
She heard the soft rush of the bedroom door scraping on the carpet, opening behind her.
Nina tried to tell him she’d heard a sound, but she could only emit a strangled squeak. She chanced turning her head a fraction, looking away from the window.
A dark figure as tall as Lyons but thinner and more angular.
More nimble.
Quicker.
Before she could move an inch, before she could inhale to scream, it had crossed the room and was on her.
On the living room floor, Lyons felt warmth and wetness beneath him and knew this was serious, he was bleeding badly. He was on his back, his hands at his sides.
If he could only reach the gun in his shoulder holster. . fire a shot. . let them know. .
Slowly and laboriously, with all the effort he could muster, he raised his lower arm, then his elbow, and felt for the gun in its leather holster.
His fingertips moved exploringly on the coarse nap of the carpet and he knew his arm hadn’t risen at all.
A burning sensation at his throat, and he was having difficulty breathing.
He was inhaling but he wasn’t breathing.
The knowledge struck him with cold, numbing immensity. The recollection of his surprise, his throat being slit.
He wasn’t breathing!
The dimness grew darker until it became blackness and silence.
He died gazing at Nina Count’s open bedroom door.
34
Nina writhed and bucked beneath the taut sheet but could barely move. The Night Spider was straddling her, his knee on one side of her, his foot on the other. One of his hands was at her throat, cutting off breath and sound. She tried to adjust her right hand, with the gun in it, so the barrel was aimed at her attacker. She was sure he wasn’t aware that she had the gun. At the cold core of her panic, she knew the gun was her one slim chance for life.
Quickly, roughly, a broad rectangle of duct tape was slapped over her mouth, then made tighter so her front teeth bit painfully into her lips. The powerful hand came away from her throat. Salt taste. Blood in her mouth. She managed to swallow it.
She could breathe now. Instinctively she tried to scream. The muffled moan she emitted devasted her. It was as if the silence of death already had her. Soon would come the agony.
Her assailant’s eyes were dark and wide, and fixed on hers. Something about them. They seemed to draw from her, to drain all her energy and will to resist. Their whites gleamed in the dimness of her bedroom, making the irises seem all the blacker. She could make out nothing of his features other than his eyes, and she couldn’t look away from the eternity of darkness behind them.
Inside the tight sheet that he was now tucking beneath her left side, preparing to begin the winding, her right forefinger was still curled around the gun’s trigger. She straightened the rest of her fingers so her hand was cupped over the small pistol, smoothing its contours so it might not be noticeable.
But she knew the barrel was pointing straight down along her right leg. If she squeezed the trigger, the bullet would probably carve a furrow in her thigh and strike nothing else. She desperately needed to shift the weight that bore down on her, pinning her to the mattress. Her legs were encased in material he was skillfully drawing tighter.
She
Nina gathered all that was left of her stubborn desire to survive, all her physical strength, and dug her heels into the mattress. She strained to raise her hips so she could drop them suddenly and draw up her legs, which were bound together so firmly.
She moaned with effort and the thing that had come for her life stopped his tucking and winding and looked down at her, cocking its head to one side. She was up to something and he was curious.
Nina moaned again, almost getting her buttocks off the bed. And suddenly it struck her:
She caught the gleam of white teeth in the darkness.
His weight shifted and he rose a few inches. He leaned his strong, spindly body back so she could do whatever she was attempting in her desperate, futile struggle.
Nina managed to bend her legs at the knees the thirty degrees or so she thought she needed, then lowered them abruptly and created slack in the sheet.
Enough to adjust her hand and elevate the gun barrel half an inch.
She squeezed the trigger.
The gun roared, and she felt a burning sensation along her right thigh.
He was off her and poised by the bed even before the sound of the shot stopped reverberating. She could hear his breathing, rapid, ragged, oddly inhuman. He was hissing in the silence left by the gunshot. There was more rage and malevolence in that hissing than she had ever heard.
He tensed his body to spring at her.
The Night Spider leaped not toward Nina but toward the window. He unlocked and raised it in one smooth, unbelievably quick motion. It was as if time sped up and swept him along. Quick as a thought, he was through the
