28. All that was left of them
All that was left of them
She heard it before she saw it. The crash and tumble over the comms, the grunts of pain, the snapping branches.
Then nothing. She was crouched by Lindsey’s side, supporting him as he sat up, and her body went rigid.
The last flash of lightning had showed Tennyson and Hartmann on the ground.
She waited for the next. She knew what she would see.
“Tenny?” Lindsey said. His hot blood ran over her frozen fingers, burning them. He twisted toward the fight—toward the cliff.
Lightning tore through the darkness.
They were gone.
Lindsey lunged to his feet, and Louna went with to keep him there. He staggered forward, his breath fast and shallow. “Tennyson!” he yelled. Nothing. He broke for the cliff, but Louna held him back.
“Let go,” he snarled.
“You can’t climb down,” Louna said, her voice even. It didn’t sound like her. It didn’t feel like her. It was someone calm and logical, someone who didn’t already know what a cliff that steep would do to a falling body.
“Let go,” Lindsey growled again, yanking his injured arm out of her grasp. He reached the edge of the drop-off and crouched, searching the darkness. “Tennyson!”
“You can’t climb,” Louna repeated. “You’re shot.”
“I have another arm.” Another blink of lightning lit the empty cliff side, and Lindsey turned to lower himself to the rocks.
“Lindsey,” Louna said. He ignored her, so she kneeled to grab his uninjured arm. A faint wail rose over the shriek of the wind—sirens. “We have to go. If we don’t leave now—”
“I’m not leaving him,” Lindsey said. His foot slipped, but he caught himself and readjusted his grip with a gasp of pain.
Louna inhaled. “All right. Then I’ll go with you.”
He froze. “You can’t. Not dressed like that.”
“Two arms are better than trousers,” she said.
She turned to join him, but he shoved her back with his injured arm. “I know what you’re doing, and you’re wasting time. I’ll be down and up in—”
“You’ll fall,” Louna said, the first hint of emotion bleeding into her voice. “And everything that Tennyson is relying on you to do will go undone.”
“I won’t—” Lindsey started, but she spoke over him.
“Hartmann knows about Blake. He told Harlow about her.”
He didn’t answer. A deep, wrenching groan of thunder lamented overhead, followed by a half-hearted flicker through the clouds.
And Louna saw it. The anguish, unmaskable, laid bare on Lindsey’s face in the rain and the cold and the blood.
The fear. The regret. It was that expression that shook loose her own emotions, and her eyes blurred until the image of Lindsey was lost.
He pulled himself up beside her, his breathing harsh. “Find the gun.”
Louna ran her hands blindly along the ground, her numb fingers stumbling over the broken ice and crusted snow.
She went on her hands a knees, feeling the gouges where Tennyson’s and Hartmann’s feet had torn up the unmarked snow, mapping their fight.
Lindsey made a noise, and she turned to him. “Did you find it?”
“No,” he said, strained. “Not the gun. Keep looking.”
She moved again, and when her fingertips bumped into the icy barrel, it took several seconds before she recognized what she was touching.
She picked it up and crawled for the sounds of Lindsey’s ragged breathing, and pushed the gun into his hand.
He reached down with his good hand to pull her up, and they stumbled together along the uneven ground, not speaking, not looking back.
The sirens were clear now, and a spray of red and blue light blinked and glittered against the castle’s walls as they fled into the trees.
Lindsey was leaning heavily on her, shielding half of her body from the rain.
It didn’t help. She was soaked, frozen, numb.
His body gave off no warmth, and hers accepted none.
She didn’t remember most of the walk. One moment she was fumbling to pull her skirt free of a skeletal shrub, ripping the fabric she’d sewn so carefully the day before, and the next she was falling into Philippe’s arms as he ran to meet them from the van.
Jean-Claude was there to carry Lindsey, and then they were in the refrigerated compartment in the back of the van, the heat blasting through the open window dividing the cab from the delivery space.
Jean-Claude cut through Lindsey’s ruined shirt and began cleaning the wound, working by the light of his phone to keep from alerting anyone in the castle to their location.
The coin glinted on Lindsey’s bare chest with his ID tag, and he wrapped his hand around them and squeezed while Jean-Claude worked.
Philippe helped Louna sit and draped his coat over her shoulders.
Nobody spoke. Jean-Claude and Philippe had heard enough over the comms to guess what had happened, and they didn’t ask for details.
When Lindsey’s shoulder was cleaned and packed with gauze, Jean-Claude fashioned a sling with a roll of bandage and swathed Lindsey’s arm against his body.
He didn’t suggest Lindsey go to a hospital.
He didn’t mention the headlights winking through the rain toward them.
“I’ll stay,” Philippe offered, breaking the silence. “It doesn’t look like the rain is letting up. I’ll stay until morning, and I’ll look for him then.”
“When the guards realize that Lindsey is gone, they’ll search the grounds,” Louna said. Her voice was calm again, though her body was shaking. She made an effort to control the shudders. “We have to be gone before then.”
“Somebody should—” Philippe started, but Lindsey spoke over him.
“He’ll find us.” He looked at each of them, daring anyone to argue. His right hand, the one not bound against his chest, was clenched in a fist at his side. “Where’s home base?”
“In Bucharest,” Jean-Claude answered.
“Then go there,” Lindsey said. “That’s where he’ll meet us.”
Jean-Claude glanced at Philippe, then at Louna. She nodded. Without a word, he opened the back of the van and hurried around to the driver’s seat, and Philippe went to settle beside him. Louna stayed where she was, pain throbbing through her head, her chest aching.
Jean-Claude pulled forward and inched along the utility trail without headlights. The van swayed over the uneven ground, the sounds of its engine lost in the thunder at the sirens.
“He’ll come,” Lindsey said again, and Louna looked at him. He dropped his gaze to his hand and began to speak firmly.
“Cannon to right of them,Cannon to left of them,Cannon behind themVolleyed and thundered;Stormed at with shot and shell,While horse and hero fell.They that had fought so wellCame through the jaws of Death,Back from the mouth of hell,All that was left of them,Left of six hundred.”
He opened his hand, revealing the 10 franc coin from Tennyson’s necklace. “He’ll find us,” he said, turning again to look out through the window.
Painfully, Louna shuffled across the van and put her hand in his, pressing the coin between their palms and trying not to think about those of the six hundred who didn’t make it home.
The road was narrow, and they had to pull over several times to let other cars pass.
It was still raining, and between that and the darkness, they traveled slowly.
After an hour they had barely gone thirty kilometers, and the constant starting and stopping over the rough road was wearing on them all.
Lindsey was pale and shivering in spite of the heat still gusting through the vents, but he refused Jean-Claude’s coat and wouldn’t even let Louna finish speaking when she tried to offer the one around her shoulders.
Finally, she gave up arguing and simply leaned against him.
She was on his left, her head on his injured shoulder, but he relaxed against her and seemed to breathe a little easier.
After the fourth time they had to abandon the road to let a vehicle with lights and sirens pass, Jean-Claude caught Louna’s eye in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “The rain’s turning to sleet. I don’t think we can make it back to the city in this.”
“We can’t stay here,” Louna said. “It’s too visible.”
“I was looking through a map of the area back at the Nest,” Philippe said hesitantly. “I can’t be sure of where we are, but I think we may be near a hiking hut.”
Louna picked up her head to frown at him, waiting for an explanation, but it was Lindsey who spoke.
“Hikers travel hut-to-hut in the mountains,” he said. “They walk the trails during the day and stay in the huts at night. Some of them are like hotels, but some are just meant as emergency shelter. Which one is this?”
“I don’t know,” Philippe admitted. “It didn’t say. But if this isn’t an emergency, I’m not sure what is.”
“There should be signs along the road,” Lindsey said.
Jean-Claude pulled forward again, and Louna moved to the back of the van to squint through the windows in the doors.
It was Philippe who found the sign, tilted away from the trees and barely legible through the snow crusted across its face, but there.
Jean-Claude turned up the service road it led to, and they chanced their lights as the terrain steepened along the mountainside.
Before long the road evened out, and a two-story wooden hut rose up out of the darkness.
The road was lost under the snow now, so Jean-Claude pulled around the house and parked near the back door.
“I’ll check it out,” Philippe said, and because Louna’s limbs felt like they had been replaced with bags of wet sand, she didn’t argue.
She didn’t want to get out of the van. She didn’t want to think.
But the boys kept looking at her like they expected her to do something, so when Philippe came back and said that the back door was unlocked and the house was empty, she forced herself out into the rain and went inside.
The cabin was dark, and though there was a light switch beside the door, nothing happened when she flicked it on.
She felt along the wall until she came to a fireplace, already set with tinder and wood.
She found a matchbox on the mantel and struck one, crouching to light the little pile of wood shavings and paper, breathing her thanks to whoever had left it prepared.
The boys had followed her in, and Jean-Claude came over with a lantern and took another match from the box to light it.
In the tentative light, the room came into soft focus.
The cabin was broken into a living space consisting of a couch, two chairs, and the fireplace; a small, simple kitchen; and a dining area set with a long table.
A hallway extended from the living area, presumably to bed- and bathrooms, and the front door stood in the junction between the living and dining areas.
Philippe helped Lindsey to the couch and strode across the room to lock it, while Jean-Claude searched for more lanterns.
Louna drifted into the kitchen, but the cupboards were empty of food and there was no refrigerator.
After a few minutes of searching, Jean-Claude produced another lantern and a flashlight, and Philippe returned from a brief exploration of the back of the cabin to report two bedrooms and two bathrooms with plenty of towels.
“No running water though,” he said, setting an armful of towels on a chair as he returned to the living room. “I suppose they turn it off in winter so the pipes don’t freeze.”
“There are pots in the kitchen,” Louna said.
Philippe waved her toward the couch. “I’ll get it. Go dry off.”
Dry. Yes, that was something she needed to do—her hair had tumbled loose without the hairpin and was sticking to her face and neck, and her skirts dripped on the floor.
She didn’t want to move, but the boys expected her to, so she walked toward the chair and tossed the top towel to Lindsey, then took one for herself.
Philippe found a pot and went out the back door to gather snow, and Louna began rubbing half-heartedly at her arms. She needed to get out of her clothes—they all did—but there was nothing to change into.
“Louna?” Lindsey asked gently.
She looked at him, unaware that her hands had stilled, or that her gaze had drifted toward the door. “What?”
He’d forced himself back to his feet, and was trying to dry his trousers before sitting back on the couch. He opened his mouth, then shook his head a little and said, “Come stand by the fire.”
She went, mostly because she didn’t want him to try to come to her.
He had put Tennyson’s necklace on over his, and the two coins caught the golden light from the fire and glowed like stars.
After a moment, Lindsey reached down and took her hand, and they stared into the fire the way they’d stared out the window, seeing nothing.
“Problem,” Philippe said in French, pushing through the back door with the full pot in his hands. “There are headlights coming toward the cabin.”
Lindsey dropped Louna’s hand and spun toward the door. “How far?”
“They’re almost here,” Philippe said, setting the pot on the counter. Jean-Claude moved to a window beside the front door and nudged aside the curtain, peering through at an angle so he wasn’t silhouetted in the frame.
“I see them,” he said. “Looks like just one car. I can’t tell what kind it is.”
Louna took a slow breath and forced it through her algid lungs.
They needed a plan. Besides Hartmann’s gun shoved through the back of Lindsey’s waistband, they had no weapons.
There was a chance they could outnumber the men in the car, and might surprise them long enough to increase their advantage, but they would have to get into position before the men arrived.
As if reading her mind, Lindsey drew the gun and waved for Philippe to stand on the other side of the door. “You should hide,” he told her. “They may see us and not search the rest of the house.”
Louna didn’t argue. Hiding was the smartest plan—if the men recaptured Lindsey and the Verdiers, their best chance of escape would be Louna. She stepped into the hallway, angling herself so she could watch both doors and still slip into the back rooms if necessary.
“They’re stopping,” Jean-Claude said.
There was a tense moment of silence, and then a car door opened and shut, and a fist pounded on the door.
“Ot gusya k lebedyu,” called a voice.
Louna exhaled. “Open it,” she said, stepping back into the room and motioning for Lindsey to lower his weapon.
Jean-Claude shot her a wary glance, but unlocked the door and pulled it open to admit a very wet, very agitated Ilya.
“Swan to goose,” Louna said in French.
Ilya barked a relieved laugh and entered the room, shaking his head like a dog and splattering water across Jean-Claude and Philippe. “That was a fine chase,” he said in French, nodding to each of the men. “I almost...” He broke off, looking at the others again before turning back to Louna.
“Hang on,” he said, frowning. “Where’s Stone?”