I gained the tower room. I saw books all around me, and another silver hoop in the middle of the room. This one was bent and twisted into a variety of strange sigils.
On the other side of that hoop stood Charles Hammer. He looked like a sick man. His skin was sallow, his hair was greasy, and he had bags under his eyes. The room smelled like old socks and gunpowder.
Annalise stood. I slipped my ghost knife between my teeth and lifted the Uzi. No sense in being fancy about it.
Hammer’s eyes rolled back into his head. His mouth dropped open and he took a deep breath. My iron gate twinged painfully. It felt as though someone had reached under my skin and made a fist.
I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It felt stuck. I squeezed it as hard as I could, but the weapon still wouldn’t fire. I realized that the safety had to be on, but I had no idea where the safety was.
Charles blasted a column of fire from his mouth. Annalise threw herself at me, knocking me back through the trapdoor. I fell off the ladder just as the flames engulfed Annalise from head to toe.
I heard her scream. I was screaming, too. I tumbled down the stairs, wrenching my arm against the railing as I yanked myself to a stop. My legs dangled over the edge, with the long, long drop through the tower below them.
I pulled myself onto the steps, untangling the gun as I did. The fire still blasted over the top of the stairs. There was no way to enter the room above without charging straight through the flames. I held up the gun, found what looked like the safety, and flipped it. My iron gate throbbed.
Then the jet of flames stopped. I heard a sick, choking noise. What the hell, I thought. I charged up the stairs, screaming.
Everything in the room was charred and blackened. The acrid stink of smoke burned my nose and eyes. I couldn’t see Annalise anywhere. Hammer stumbled back against the tower window, clutching at his throat.
The inside of his mouth was as black as the room around me. The fire had cooked him as it came out. But as I watched, his lips turned pink, and his mouth and throat healed as quickly as Arlene’s ravaged throat had.
I shot him.
I tried to fire a short burst up the center of his body, from crotch to forehead, but the Uzi kicked like crazy, and the trail of bullets tore through his shoulder instead. Charles Hammer the Third stumbled back and fell out the tower window.
I ran across the room, feeling the burned wood wobble dangerously under my feet. I reached the window before he struck the rocks below. I saw him hit. Hard. He was still.
I noticed a piece of silver wire set into the windowsill. It ran from the hoop on the floor out the window and then down the side of the tower. I wondered what was at the other end. I also wondered when my iron gate was going to stop throbbing.
Then I saw Hammer lift his arm. Damn. The gun and the rocks hadn’t finished him. He wasn’t dead.
I turned back to the trapdoor, wondering if Annalise had managed to leap out a window, too, when I saw her. I had run right past her without recognizing her.
She was burned. Her skin and clothes were blackened and shriveled. She was not burned down to her bones, she was too tough for that, but her mouth gaped wide and her little hands were curled into fists. She held them as though she was about to knock my head off. She was absolutely still. She was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I knelt beside her and touched her face. Her skin crumpled like burned paper, and hot grease scorched my fingertips.
Damn damn damn. I wanted her back.
I ran down the tower stairs. I didn’t know how much time I had before he healed himself, but I knew it wasn’t much. My mind was racing, wondering why Annalise had deliberately sacrificed her life for mine, wondering whether the ghost knife or the silver blade I’d taken from behind the door would do the job the Uzi couldn’t, whether my iron gate would ever stop hurting, and whether the pain from my iron gate meant that more kids were burning to death even as I ran after their killer.
I reached the bottom of the stairs.
Through the thick Plexi enclosure around the causeway, I saw Charles Hammer struggling across the huge black rocks. Then I noticed the tumble of broken gray stones among the volcanic black. That was where the rest of the castle had collapsed.
There was a twenty-foot drop below the causeway, and I knew I couldn’t jump down onto the jagged black rocks. I slid the ghost knife through the Plexi, cutting out a section that was eight feet by five feet. It fell across the rocks.
I lowered myself out the hole and dropped onto the plastic. It bowed under my weight but didn’t snap. I scrambled across it and out onto the rocks.
Hammer was a good thirty yards ahead of me. He seemed to be heading southeast, although I couldn’t imagine where he was running. The town was to the northeast; if he wanted help or protection from the people of Hammer Bay, he was headed the wrong way. As far as I could tell, the only thing to the southeast was forest and mountain.
I kept after him, my ghost knife between my teeth, silver knife in my pocket, and the Uzi banging against my knee as I leaped from rock to rock. I considered dumping the gun. It had already proven less than useful, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I needed all the weapons I could get.
Annalise had told me not to go after Hammer by myself. She had said he was too much for me. She was probably right. But I had just touched her burned face. I couldn’t let that go. I couldn’t run away.
I focused on the rocks, trying to increase my speed to shut off my thoughts. Now wasn’t the time to think about my boss. Now was the time to figure out what Charles Hammer had become, where his silver wire led, and how hard I was going to kill him.
