Bone Orchard (13 page)

“Hurry up,” she whispered.

“Shh.”

He opened the doors just enough for them to slip through. Lazarus brought the chain in with him and set it down on the interior floor to muffle the sound. Kitty slipped in behind him, and once they were both inside Lazarus pulled the cover off the carriage house’s sole occupant, a silver-blue 1963 Aston Martin roadster.

“Nice,” Kitty admired.

“Being rich has its perks.” The door hinges squeaked in protest as Lazarus climbed behind the wheel and Kitty slid into the passenger seat.

He produced the second key on the ring and turned the ignition. The tired battery labored to crank the engine.

“Come on, come on.” The twin-carb straight-six roared to life. “Yes!”

The carriage house doors exploded open and the Aston Martin tore away, rounding the corner of the house and spraying gravel in its wake. The headlights flipped on as it careened around the circular drive, nearly sideswiping Dylan’s Fiat. Kitty craned her neck searching for Dylan and Sian, but there was no sign of either of them.

The car fishtailed as Lazarus cut the wheel and left the roundabout. He punched the accelerator up the main drive and gunned it, racing along a stretch of straightaway flanked by open fields. A long drainage ditch paralleled the road on the right-hand side.

The thought of leaving the invaders alone in his home made his skin crawl and his fingers draw into hooks around the Aston’s wood-rimmed steering wheel, but Lazarus needed time to think. He needed to regain control. If he wanted to preserve the world he’d built (and he most certainly, desperately did), he needed a plan. That world was hanging by the thinnest of threads. It was the light bulb lost at sea. More than anything, he wanted to turn around, abandon the car and walk to his garden where he could sit beneath the weeping branches of the Worcester Pearmain. The garden would speak to him. It always did.

He cut the wheel and rounded a tight bend. The Aston’s bubbly headlights were fairly weak by modern standards, and Lazarus had to squint to make out what he saw ahead. It was Sian.

She stood in the middle of the road holding something in her hand. Reflex prompted Lazarus to hit the brakes.

“Why are you stopping?” Kitty asked. “Run her down!”

The car skidded to a halt eighty feet in front of Sian. The straight-six idled with a throaty growl. Sian stared daggers at them through the windscreen. Lazarus sneered back. Kitty grinned.

Lazarus slammed into first gear, popped the clutch and floored it. The back tires chirped, spinning for purchase and the car shot forward. Sian stood defiant.

The distance between them closed rapidly and Lazarus felt his smile begin to falter. “Move, you stupid cow!”

Sian raised her arm and the Aston’s headlights revealed a brick in her hand. Kitty’s brick. She reared back and launched it at them. Lazarus cut the wheel but the brick slammed into the windscreen. A cracked spiderweb erupted over the laminated glass. Lazarus couldn’t see a damned thing.

The car fishtailed and Sian sidestepped to the left as it sped past and veered off the road to the right, bucking its unbelted passengers and nose-diving into the muddy trench with a blunted crash. The impact drove them both forward in their seats. Kitty’s head slapped the shattered windscreen and Lazarus was slammed chest-first into the steering wheel. It pushed a hoarse groan from his lungs and filled them instead with the shooting pain of a drink gone down the wrong pipe. 

It took him a good thirty seconds to cough away the impact and catch his breath, but once he did, Lazarus reached for the door. He had to rock it a few times, but it finally creaked open and he tumbled out into the wet grass on the embankment. He dragged himself to his feet and Kitty crawled out the open door too, dazed and bleeding from the head.

Lazarus stumbled into the adjacent field and started across. There was simply no other choice. They’d get nowhere without a car. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Kitty limping along behind him. Beyond her, Sian had begun to follow them. She hopped across the ditch and up the other side. Lazarus turned his sights ahead and kept moving in the direction of the house.

“Dylan will catch you,” she called out. “You might as well give up.”

“You don’t sound so sure,” Dylan answered.

Kitty tried her hand at negotiation. “We can all just pretend this never happened, Sian.”

There was a pause. “Dylan knows best,” Sian said.

Lazarus took another glance back. Sian was closing the gap. “You said it yourself, Dylan’s not following his plan. You’ll get caught.”

“You’re the one who’s caught! We know who you are and what you’ve done!”

Lazarus spotted the lights of the manor house ahead. “You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of,” he said with such low and detached flatness that it made Kitty shiver. For a moment, she considered turning around and joining Sian, but with a sickening epiphany, she realized something…

She didn’t
want
to.

Lazarus grabbed her hand and broke into a run.

“Dylan!” Sian shouted ahead. “They’re coming your way!”

Lazarus and Kitty sprinted across the field and emerged from a screen of trees behind the carriage house. Kitty was bruised and dizzy. She tripped and stumbled to her knees, but Lazarus grabbed her arm and pulled her back up to her feet. They jogged to the driveway roundabout and saw the front door standing open. Dylan was nowhere in sight.

“Come on,” Lazarus urged her. They ran for it with every ounce of endurance they had left. Their feet pounded the gravel and they raced up the brick path toward the door. Luck was not on their side, however. Timing was everything.

Dylan emerged from the shadows holding a trenching spade. With its long handle and pointed blade, it resembled some sort of medieval polearm weapon. Dylan certainly saw it as such. He swung at Lazarus and the pole swished through the air. Lazarus threw up his arm in defense and the flat of the blade smashed against his arm.

It was well-oiled and freshly sharpened. Lazarus had done it himself only days ago and he knew he didn’t want to be on the business end of it. Had Kitty remembered the stun gun tucked into her belt, she could have easily dispatched Dylan and sent him shrinking to the ground like a watered witch, but she’d suffered a mild concussion in the crash. Her thoughts were thick and imprecise. Her head throbbed and there was an ache behind her eyes that made it difficult to focus. She forgot all about the stun gun and found another weapon.

Dylan swung again and Lazarus managed to grab the spade handle just above the blade socket. A rock flew threw the air and smashed Dylan’s knuckles. He cried out in agony and spun his head toward Kitty just as she had released a second rock. He ducked instinctively and Lazarus yanked the spade from his hands.

A primal screech shot out from the darkness and Sian attacked Lazarus. She leaped onto his back, cuffing a forearm around his neck to choke him. Kitty grabbed her around the waist and tried to pull her off.

Dylan grabbed Kitty and flung her away like doll. “Enough!” he shouted.

For some reason, the call to end the farce registered. Sian slipped off Lazarus and Dylan ripped the spade from his hands. He tossed it away into the shadows and pulled a handful of zip ties from his pocket.

“Put your hands behind your back,” he said to Lazarus.

Lazarus looked at him as if he’d just told him to kiss his own ass. “Fuck you.” He bolted straight into the house and Dylan went after him.

CHAPTER 15

Lazarus ran for the main staircase. He took the first three steps in one athletic leap then stopped short like a dog that’s reached the end of its chain. Dylan had him by the waistband of his jeans. He snatched him backward off the staircase and slammed him to the limestone floor as if he were no more than a dry scarecrow. Lazarus just lay there groaning in stunned defeat. He felt like he’d run into a flagpole.

Kitty lay on her stomach outside the front door in a similar state of just-got-my-ass-handed-to-me. Sian poked her with her toe.

“Oi… get up.”

Kitty didn’t move. Sian nudged harder.

“I said move!”

Kitty stared straight ahead. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, and as she did so, her fist closed around a rock the size and weight of a billiard ball. Sian grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her feet.

“Light a fire under that skinny arse.”

Dylan shoved Lazarus into the parlor and led him to the sofa.

“Have a seat.”

Lazarus sat down and leaned back, reluctantly grateful for a moment of physical comfort and rest.

“Sian! Get a move on! We haven’t got all night.”

“So you’ve been watching me.”

“Aye,” Dylan nodded gravely. “You sick fuck.”

“Made you curious, did it? Made you wonder what it was like?” Lazarus leaned forward. “How the knife feels when it slides through the flesh. How the blood flows—”

“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”

Dylan walked to the parlor door, but didn’t take his eyes off Lazarus. “Dammit, woman! What’s taking you so long?”

There was a rapid burst of snapping static and a blue halo flickered behind him. His muscles locked up and convulsed as the voltage rippled through his body, a hoarse groan pulsing out of him like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. Seconds passed. His teeth began grinding together with a sickening squeak. Lazarus could hardly watch.
Jesus, it’s worse than I thought.

Finally, Dylan went down and he lay in a spasmodic, liquid heap on the parquet floor. Kitty stood in the doorway.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. Where’s Sian?”

“In the hallway. It was a lot messier than I expected.”

Lazarus nodded as he stood up. “It’s not a pretty thing.”

Kitty stepped over Dylan’s twitching body. “No… it
was
pretty… Beautiful, actually.”

Lazarus knelt beside Dylan and pulled the zip ties from his pocket. He looked up at Kitty, but his mind was blank. Quite honestly, he was at a complete loss as to how to respond to the highly disturbing words he just heard come out of her mouth. He turned back to Dylan and crossed his arms behind his back.

Kitty held the stun gun at her side. She raised it up silently behind him. She pressed the trigger… but nothing happened. She looked down and saw the maddening flash of a “low battery” indicator light on the side of the black case.

Lazarus bound Dylan’s wrists and pulled the tie tight with a quick zip. Kitty dropped the stun gun back to her thigh. She hadn’t been nervous when she was about to zap him, but for some reason was absolutely terrified now.

Lazarus stood up and walked over to the scrap pile that used to be the grandfather clock. He reached down and retrieved the double-hooked fireplace poker from the debris and walked back to Dylan. He racked the poker back over his head like a saber.

“You might not want to watch this part,” he said gravely.

There was a baseball cap shoved under the driver’s seat in the Fiat along with wads of greasy chip wrappers and empty Mayfair packs. Lazarus slapped the cap on top of his head.

“What are you doing?” Kitty asked from behind him.

“We’ve got to get rid of the car. Come on, let’s see if the Aston still runs.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was driving the Fiat down the road toward town and Kitty shadowed behind in the Aston Martin, one headlight, chugging roughly and beat to hell, but at least it was moving. The headlights of a truck shot over the crest of a short rise and Lazarus pulled the baseball cap down a little further.

Clive Collins steered the truck with his knees so he wouldn’t have to set his beer down while he was handed a joint. He saw the headlights of two cars approaching and squinted to try and make who it might be. On this road at this time of night, this was about the closest thing to gridlock one might ever expect to see.

Lazarus ducked down in the Fiat as the truck barreled past in the other direction. He watched it in the rearview mirror, and caught sight of the absolute last thing on earth he wanted to see right now.

Brake lights.

“What fresh hell?” He kept his eyes on the rearview, pulse rising in his chest. The truck was now making a sloppy u-turn in the road. Lazarus squelched the impulse to floor it. He stayed cool. The rattling truck caught up and overtook them. It sped past and Lazarus slowed a bit as it did. He took a quick glance in the rearview. The Aston was still behind him. Kitty was holding it together.

The truck screeched to a skidding halt ahead of them, blocking the road diagonally. Lazarus tugged the baseball cap down as far as he could while maintaining the ability to see.

“Shit.”

Clive rolled his window down and hung his head out. Lazarus recognized this one as a piss-artist of the highest order.

“Oi! Dylan Daly!” Clive called back. “What gives? You don’t say ‘ello to your mates?”

A second piss-artist hung out the passenger side. “Getting too good for us, eh?”

Back in the Aston Martin, Kitty gripped the wooden steering wheel until it squeaked in her burning hands. Her eyes drifted down to the socket of a tire iron poking out from under the passenger seat.

Lazarus did the only thing he could think of. He rolled his window down.

Kitty reached down and wrapped her fingers around the tire iron.

Lazarus thrust his arm out the window and pumped his fist into the air.

“Rock on, mates!”

There was silence.

Lazarus held his arm in the air. He felt the jetstream surge around him. Bad timing.

Then the cab of the truck erupted with cheers. Smoke billowed from the windows as the truck lurched forward and rounded a second u-turn. Lazarus wasted no time in getting moving himself.