Altar of Bones (45 page)

The dim light glinted off steel as the knife touched her eyelid. She grabbed his wrist with both hands and twisted her head aside, felt a sting on her forehead, a splash of blood. He’d cut her, but not her eye yet. Not her eye.

The knife was coming back at her face again, and he was so strong. She pushed against his wrist with all her might, and still the knife tip came closer, closer.

She tried to ram her knee into his balls, but she couldn’t get any leverage. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and she could feel the strength melting out her, all her muscles turning to mush, and the knife was so close now.

She squeezed her eyes shut, felt the tip prick her lid.

Something wet and hot splashed her face. He let go of her mouth, and she screamed and screamed.

S
HE COULDN’T SEE
. Oh, God, what had he done? Was she completely blinded? Why couldn’t she see?

Suddenly the weight lifted and she stopped screaming to gasp and suck in air. She felt something soft wipe at her eyes, and then she was looking up into Ry’s face. She was
seeing
his face.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” he said. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“He was going to …” She shuddered, closing her eyes, then she opened them again right away. She didn’t like the world being dark.

Her forehead burned. She touched it, looked at her fingers, and saw blood.

“It’s not yours,” Ry said. “Mostly not yours. I guess we did kind of let things get a little too close for comfort there.”

His voice sounded tough, matter-of-fact, but as he leaned closer to her, she thought his eyes were dark with violence and something else she couldn’t read. His mouth was white.

She was afraid that if she blurted out all the things she wanted to say to him, she’d sound all emotional and embarrassing, so she said, “Hey, O’Malley, don’t get too full of yourself. I had things perfectly under control in here. Couldn’t you tell?”

He laughed. “Yeah? What I heard, Dmitroff, was you screaming like a girl.”

“Well, if the shoe fits …” She was laughing herself as she sat up on the chaise. She felt weak and dizzy, but at the same time she had so much adrenaline shooting through her veins she felt as if she’d burst into a million pieces.

She tried to stand up and her foot knocked against something thick and heavy. She looked down and saw the ponytailed man sprawled on his back on the floor, half his head blown away.

She stared at the body, at the big, ugly-looking knife in his hand. It looked just like the knife he’d left in her grandmother’s chest. A Siberian knife. This was her grandmother’s killer and he was dead.
Good
, she thought.
Good
. She was glad he was dead, he deserved to be dead.

She picked up the knife. It was heavy, wickedly sharp, and she was going to keep it. She would use it, too, on the next asshole who came at her from out of the dark.

She looked from the knife in her hand back up to Ry. He still knelt in front of her, a blood-soaked pillow in one hand, his Walther in the other, but she noticed now that it had a silencer attached, which explained how the ponytailed man had suddenly keeled over dead on top of her and she hadn’t heard the shot.

The weird thing, though, was that Ry had been right—she’d screamed her head off. So where was everybody?

“I thought you’d left me,” she said to Ry. “When I came out of the bathroom and saw that my stuff was gone and you were gone. But then I found the note you scribbled on that napkin, so you’re forgiven. Sort of. I mean, ‘Gone to see a guy about a thing’? Way to overwhelm me with the details, O’Malley.”

“I had to call a couple of guys, see if they could give me a lead on a Russian-icon expert. Then I arranged to meet another guy who can make us some fake passports, since we can’t go on hiding in here forever. It ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I took your stuff because it didn’t seem smart to leave it unguarded while you were in the bathroom.”

“No, it wasn’t very smart.” She dropped the knife in her lap and lowered her head in her hands, feeling suddenly exhausted, and way, way, way out of her depth. Ambitious DAs, prickly judges, deadbeat dads, abusive husbands, stalkers—all those she could handle. But not this.

She pushed her hands through her hair and felt something sticky. What the …? She thought she’d washed out all the wedding-cake frosting, and then she realized it was the ponytailed man’s blood, and maybe some of his brains, too, and she shuddered.

“He wanted me to give him the altar of bones, but he was going to torture me first just for the hell of it.” She looked back up at Ry’s face, into his eyes. He looked serious and tough, but a tenderness was there, too, and she wasn’t sure what she ought to be making of it. “You had my back, Ry. I should’ve thanked you sooner.”

He brushed back the hair that was stuck to her forehead with the ponytailed man’s blood. “Most people who went through what you have would be curled up in the corner in a fetal position by now, so cut yourself some slack. And in the world where I come from, when a guy tells you he’s got your back, he’s also saying he knows you’ve got his.”

Zoe felt tears well in her eyes and she looked away, embarrassed. But she also felt full up to bursting inside with a mess of feelings she couldn’t name. Pride, she supposed, but also something strangely like
faith, a deep, lasting faith in the man kneeling in front of her, and also faith in herself.

“Really?” she asked. “You really trust me to have your back?”

“All the way.”

She cleared her throat. “Okay, then. Good.” She poked at the body again with her toe. “I guess we won’t find out now if was working for Popov’s son or not.”

Ry got to his feet. “What I’m wondering is how, out of all the gin joints in all the world, this guy knew he’d find us here.”

“How do you think he knew, Ry
lushka
?”

Madame Blotski stood in the open doorway. She had a gun in her hand.

Y
OU ARE
to bend over slowly and set your gun onto the floor, please,” Anya Blotski said. “With the barrel pointing towards yourself…. Yes, yes. Very good. Now you will push it over to me.”

Ry did as she asked. The Walther didn’t slide well on the thick Turkey carpet, but it went far enough that it was now out of his reach.

He straightened, his hands hanging empty now at his sides. “Since when are you working for the bad guys, Anya?”

“There are no good and bad guys, only the living and the dead. Was it not you who once told me that,
lapushka
?” She pointed with her gun toward the table with the samovar. “Now, you will be so kind as to move over there…. No, that is far enough. I want you separate from your little friend, yes? Yet not so separate that I cannot watch the both of you at once.”

But the Russian woman’s eyes, her whole being, Zoe saw, were really focused all on Ry. So she stole the chance to pull one of the pillows from the chaise up onto her lap to hide the ponytailed man’s knife.

She looked from the barrel of the woman’s little Ruger back to Ry’s face. He didn’t seem surprised, rather disappointed, and Zoe realized he had figured right off that the only way for the ponytailed man to have found them here at the Casbah was through Madame Blotski.

“So who did you sell us out to?” Ry asked, and Zoe wondered if he was as relaxed as he sounded. Because with his gun now halfway across the room, she couldn’t see where he had a plan to get them out of this mess once he got what information he could out of the woman.

“I only ask,” he went on, “because maybe I can top their offer.”

Madame Blotski shook her head, and Zoe was surprised to see the
gleam of tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. The gun in her hand trembled a little. “There is no amount of money to buy what he can give me.”

“He?”

“This afternoon a telephone call comes to me from a man, a stranger to me. He says only one thing at first—a name. Oksana.”

She shook her head again, crying more openly now and not caring if they saw it. “Oksana. It is the name of my niece, Ry, and she is only five. She lives in St. Petersburg, and she loves dinosaurs and your silly SpongeBob SquarePants, and she wants to be an Olympic ice-skater when she grows up. This man, he gives me a cell phone number and he tells me I must call it if you come here, and I knew even as he was telling me this, even as he was telling me how I must betray you, I knew I would do it, because of the way he said her name.”

She choked on a sob, squeezed her eyes shut. “Then he says to me, ‘Life can be cruel, madame. Little girls, especially the lovely ones like your Oksana, are disappearing from the streets of St. Petersburg every day. Where do they go? Who knows? But I have heard that in Bangkok there are brothels where one can buy, for a price, a child of either sex and any age.’ “

Ry drew in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Anya.”

She gave him a wry, sad smile. “This man—he must know a lot about you, if he knows who are the few in this world you would trust with your life. Is he
mafiya
?”

“We think so.”

She nodded slowly. “They are like vampires, these
mafiya
. They live in the dark, they suck your blood dry, and they cannot die.”

The word
die
echoed in the empty nightclub. Zoe slid her hand under the pillow, wrapping it around the hilt of the knife.

Madame Blotski’s gaze flickered over to Zoe, then back to Ry. “I am so sorry,
lapushka
, but it is the girl he wants. Not you. If I thought you would give her up without a fight … but, no. I know you too well.”

She raised the gun higher, pointing the barrel at the middle of Ry’s chest.

And Zoe threw the knife at her head.

M
ADAME
B
LOTSKI DROPPED
the gun and threw her hands up in front of her face as she tried to duck the flying knife. Zoe dove for Ry’s Walther at the same time that he did. They bumped heads so hard she was knocked back onto her butt, nearly senseless.

By the time the world stopped spinning, and she’d blinked the tears from her eyes, Zoe saw that Ry’s gun was trained on the Russian woman and he was picking up her little Ruger.

“Zoe?” he said. “Are you all right?”

Her ears were ringing and she thought she might be sick. “Your head’s as hard as concrete, O’Malley. I feel like I’ve just been kicked by a—”

“I know, I know. Get your stuff now, okay? Fast. We need to get out of here.”

She looked wildly around the room for her satchel, which only made the world spin again. Then she spotted it, leaning up against one end of the chaise. She tried to stand up, but that wasn’t working so well quite yet, so she ended up crawling to it on her hands and knees.

“Okay. Got it,” she said. Only now her words were coming out all woozy, too.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“In a minute. I just …” She drew in a deep breath and that seemed to settle her stomach down, although it did nothing for the ringing in her ears.

She took another breath and stood up slowly, slowly. The world spun, settled, spun again, then settled again and stayed settled. She took a careful step, then another, and when the world stayed put, she decided she was going to live after all.