Dracula's Ghost - Chapter 18 (Part III)
A Ruined Tomb in an Unknown Land
XXI.
The black-clad figure was tall and strongly built, with dark hair that contrasted sharply with the pallor of the face. When he spoke, his English was the uncouth drawl of an American, and Heydrich’s eyes widened in recognition. Quincy Morris. The vampire smiled, a pleasant, welcoming grin, but the glimmering pupils hinted at darker passions beneath the friendly demeanor, and Heydrich dragged his own stare away with difficulty.
“Mister Morris.” The timorous edge in his voice surprised him. “I was not expecting you.”
“Really?” The smile widened. “Did you hope to trap someone else in that box?”
“Please excuse me.” The dead thing was trying to force an expression of guilt or fear, and Heydrich refused to take the bait. “It is wise to take precautions when dealing with dangerous men.”
“Or to stack the odds in your own favor. You went through a lot of trouble to find me…” he glanced at Jonathan Harker, “To reunite me with my friends. What do you want?”
A hundred images raced through his imagination, but their significance was too great to pass through the human mouth. Now, at the threshold of victory, his answer, the answer with which he had consoled himself for a lifetime of defeat and grievance, rang hollow in his own ears.
“I want to take back the honor that rightfully belongs to my Fatherland. I want –”
“Empires rise and fall, and only the dead remain.” Quincy dismissed him with a wave, and the smile disappeared. “Look at me.”
The eyes probed his own, and Heydrich’s stomach turned with the sick feeling of one standing naked before the physician. A hot flush crept up his cheeks as his mind and body were examined with careful scrutiny, he heard a low hiss deep within the recesses of his thought. The monsters lurk in the cellar of a man’s soul and wait for a chance to escape. Then the pale man turned away, and the spell was broken.
“Now,” Quincy said, “Let’s start again – what do you want?”
“A trifle.” The flush dissipated from his cheeks, and Heydrich steadied his nerves with a deep intake of breath. “A sample of your blood for scientific study. To unlock the secret of your long life and vitality.”
“I am flattered. And what do you offer in return?”
“The men by the river –“
“All dead by now.” The vampire spoke with bored finality. “What else?”
All dead by now. Reinhard Heydrich’s eyes widened in shock. He had known their fate all along, and yet… And yet you expected some grand ceremony, a trade between equals, only to find your offer dismissed out of hand, and your men wiped out in a matter of minutes. He was floundering, and Heydrich sensed that if he failed to provide a satisfactory answer, his own death would quickly follow.
“There is Harker and his daughter, of course.”
“Tempting.” Quincy’s eyes lingered on the woman as Jonathan Harker stared in shock, his own complexion deathly pale. “But since you have delivered them already, they are hardly yours to offer at this point. I want something else.”
“Anything you ask – name your price.”
Heydrich saw, or perceived, the torchlight dimming as the room darkened. Quincy Morris watched him, still smiling, as shadows twisted and danced about them like hungry ghosts waiting to be fed.
XXII.
If you don’t help them, they’re all going to die. Holmes watched as the old cemetery disgorged the dead. Their flesh had a desiccated, mummified appearance, but their eyes were positively radiant in the darkness. Perfect night vision, Holmes thought, as if the ambient light of the moon and stars was collected and amplified in those luminescent irises. The Germans that survived the initial onslaught would see little more than shadows. The vampires pursued fleeing mob, and he watched as another one passed, his own vision near-perfect in the darkness. Its dress was out of place among the soldiers’ uniforms and peasant outfits, and the significance of that shambling ghoul hit him with the force of a hammer-blow. Edward Harding, the Scotland Yard inspector who vanished in 1908. The thing that had been Harding drifted ghostlike into the trees and vanished from sight. In the distance, a voice called out in German, and he heard the first gunshots.
The blood of a strigoi can heal the sick, Gabriela had told him. Perhaps even raise the dead. At the thought of his dark-haired savior, a wave of desire washed over him, and Holmes turned his back on the village. He could do nothing for the others, and Holmes longed to see Gabriela again, to stroke her hair and run his fingers over her lilac-scented skin. To kiss her. Leave the Germans to their fate. They would spend the night together, and when the morning came and she was drained and bloodless, he would hide from the daylight until she returned at sunset and they were reunited in death.
In God’s name what am I thinking? Holmes snatched up the lamp oil and he tore a thin strip from his shirt. Soaked in the pungent liquid, the cloth became a makeshift fuse, and Holmes stuffed the saturated rag into the neck of the jug. He would give them a chance to escape, and perhaps a good deed would squelch the desire that burned within him. Finished, he snatched up the rifle and began running.
The vampires gathered at the stone steps like mourners around an open bier. Two men backed away from the advancing mob, and a third lay screaming as the monsters devoured him. Holmes tried to judge the distance as he struck a match to the wick, then pitched the jug into the center of the horde. It exploded, a twenty-foot mushroom of light and heat, and the vampires not consumed by the flames fell back as Holmes fired two shots in quick succession. One creature, a mangy gray thing of indeterminate sex, went down as a living man raced through the opening toward his companions on the stairs.
The wind shifted and carried the scent of lilac, hints of freshly cut hay, and evergreen to his nostrils. And fresh blood. Gabriela. Holmes gave a final glance toward the surviving Germans. They climbed steadily upward as the vampires, disoriented by the flames, wandered aimlessly about the base of the stairs. He held no illusions about their likely fate, but if Quincy Morris had business elsewhere, perhaps the stragglers would make good their escape. Best of luck, Holmes thought. Save one bullet for yourselves. His bloodlust was gone, replaced by a sickening fear, as he turned toward the river. Behind, the vampires regrouped as the flames died and followed the survivors upward.
XXIII.
The air felt cold against her skin, and the pain in her leg made it difficult to think. Quincy Morris was not going to help them, Sarah realized - perhaps he had lured them here with the connivance of the German. Papa and Quincy were friends once, and now we’ll be friends forever, moldering away in an empty castle and preying upon unwary travelers when the sun sets. Jonathan’s hand clasped her own, but his touch brought no comfort.
“I will consider your request,” Quincy said, “but I want two things in return.”
“Anything.” Heydrich began to sweat, and Sarah wrinkled her nose at the sour odor.
“First, who else knows about this place?”
“The existence of the castle is a closely guarded secret, restricted to the highest echelons of –“
“Who else knows?” The voice grated across Sarah’s bones, and Heydrich visibly flinched at the sound. Slowly, the German’s posture stiffened, and his gaze no longer shrank from the dead eyes. It was, Sarah thought, as if the crossing of some unseen psychic threshold had buttressed his courage and restored his audacity.
“Three others know the truth – Strassor, Diels, and Skorzeny. What is the second thing?”
“A predecessor of yours came in 1929.” Sarah’s flesh crawled as the vampire placed a hand on her shoulder. “Before his most unpleasant death, he told me about a journal that documented certain activities in detail. Sadly, this document was not in his possession, and we can’t have others following in your footsteps, can we? I want the journal.”
“The blood first.” Heydrich pitched a flask to Quincy with a gentle underhand throw.
“I suppose you can have it.” Quincy’s eyes bubbled with mirth as he unscrewed the lid. “After all, most of it came from your own men.”
Quincy reached for his throat with a pointed fingernail, and the room filled with a peculiar aroma, not unlike the smell of her mother’s sickroom, as blood trickled into the canteen. When the hand was withdrawn, and she watched, fascinated, as the wound closed of its own accord.
“Now then – the journal.” Quincy’s voice was tinged with menace. “A simple trade, made in good faith, that will allow me to rest in peace. Now, please.”
Heydrich’s eyes fixated on the flask, and his left hand moved absently through a coat pocket. When he dropped the leather journal, it skidded across the stone as if drawn by some invisible thread. Quincy nudged it with a booted foot, and Sarah lifted the journal, a remnant of her dead brother returned to life.
“Go on. Open it.”
“The blood, Herr Morris.” A twinge of impatience crept into Heydrich’s voice.
“This isn’t my father’s handwriting.” Sarah flipped through the pages, perplexed, then returned to the first page. “Arthur Holmwood, April to December 1893.”
“Herr Morris, we had a deal!”
“I never realized that he was keeping his own record - did you, John?” Jonathan’s face contorted in anguish as Quincy spoke. “It killed him in the end, but Poor mad Arthur figured it all out, and I needed you here so that -”
She caught the movement from the corner of her eye and shouted a warning as the room erupted in a blinding flash. Sarah was thrown to one side, like a ship buffeted in a gale, as Quincy Morris cried out in pain and surprise. That unearthly wail rang in her ears, a noise so intense that Sarah barely perceived the sound of the gunshots. The sound faded, and she heard only the distant echo of footsteps and the rasp of labored breathing.
Qunicy Morris and Reinhard Heydrich were gone, leaving her alone as life ebbed from her father’s body.
XXIV.
Amy could see the plane, sitting idle in the field below. When her grip failed, she had done a gangly swan dive from the wall, and she had a bare instant to observe the ground racing upward with terrifying speed - and then I was floating. The only plausible explanation was that she was dead, but Amy touched her cheek with a greasy finger, and she certainly didn’t feel like a ghost – and there was the odd discomfort in her foot. She glanced at her boot. Oh, no.
The man that held her ankle displayed extraordinary strength, for he leaned over the wall at an impossible angle. He was quite handsome, but his smile was unnerving, as if the face was a mask, imperfectly fitted, that concealed his true self from the wider world. A black coat flapped about him like wings as he hauled her to the roof.
“It was a clever trick, wasn’t it?” Her rescuer spoke with the uncouth accent of an American. “I thought nothing could startle me, but my guest proved more resourceful than expected. It was a fortunate turn of events, in a way, since it led me to you.”
“Thank you for saving my life,” Amy said. She took another sickening glance over the wall. “I need to find Jonathan Harker. Is he all right?”
“I’m afraid not -” black anger flashed over the face - “but Sarah is alive. At the far end of the wall, you will find a stairway that leads down. Find Sarah and get away from this place. Do not leave without her. Do you understand?”
He stared at her, and a peculiar thought seemed to emanate from those unblinking eyes. I will pass through the land of Egypt this night and will smite the firstborn. Amy nodded, grateful as those eyes turned away from her.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have unfinished business below.”
He looked back a final time and disappeared over the wall.
XXV.
Jonathan’s eyes were wide open, and he tried to speak through the foam that bubbled from his lips. Sarah whispered to her father between sobs as the light from the flare began to fade. Heydrich brought the flare gun to trap Quincy in his coffin, she thought. When his gambit had failed, he had improvised, a trap of light and heat that allowed him to escape with his prize. And, in the process, he murdered papa for no reason at all. Her own eyes darted about the room, desperate for a final miracle to stave off the approaching darkness, until fear yielded at last to hopelessness. Sarah embraced him, her face against his own, as his labored breathing finally ceased. I love you, papa. I’ll be back for you at sunrise.
She picked up Heydrich’s rifle and her father’s knife and made her way toward the great hall. Amy is waiting at the plane. The mechanical whine had been the unmistakable noise of an engine, but Sarah turned from the gatehouse and made her way toward the stone steps. If she moved quickly enough, perhaps she would catch Heydrich before he made it to the river. There would be time enough for escape, but first, she would avenge her father.
Behind, in the darkness of the abandoned room, only the rats remained to bear witness as the body on the floor began to move.
XXVI.
Adrenaline surged through his body, and his boots slapped against the stones as he ran. When he reached the great hall, Heydrich slowed his pace and pocketed the flare gun. A simple solution to a difficult problem. The vampire was a creature of darkness, and he had reasonably assumed that it would flee from the light. He opened the leather satchel and struck a railroad flare - he had abandoned the rifle, but the light would protect him from the gravest danger, and if Frau Spencer decided to follow him, he still had the pistol in his waistband. A man of honor, he took no pleasure in harming women, but he would defend his own life without hesitation. Killing the old man had been just such an act, a decision guided by pure instinct. After all, Jonathan Harker had proven himself a dangerous adversary.
You lie.
The flask, dropped by Quincy Morris in his haste to escape, felt warm and comforting in his pocket. Otto would be outside with the plane, and once they were safely in Berlin with his prize, he would let the scientists distill its essence and separate its life-giving power from the portion that corrupted the body. He pushed at the gatehouse door.
Harker was unarmed and no danger to you.
The heavy door refused to budge, and the first hint of panic, distant but undeniable, caressed his spine. The remaining flares would be gone long before sunrise, and Heydrich doubted that the vampire would be so easily defeated again. The plane, freedom, lay on the far side of the gatehouse door. And on this side? He closed his eyes and saw Peter, smiling at him with blood-flecked lips. He drew his pistol and placed the muzzle against the lock.
You killed him because you wanted to, didn’t you?
“Of course I wanted to!” A shrill giggle escaped his lips, and for a mad instant, he contemplated turning the pistol on himself. “Harker made me a fucking clown at every single turn, and I did what anyone would have done!”
There was a click as the lock turned, and the door opened slowly outward. Heydrich stepped through the gatehouse and made his way into the tall grass. The plane was there, a dark silhouette outlined against the horizon, but no one came forward to meet him. Otto, where in hell are you? Heydrich struck another flare and peered inside. The plane was empty.
“I’ve never seen a flying machine before.”
Quincy Morris stood mere feet away, watching him. The vampire did not move, but his form shifted in the sputtering light of the flare, producing a strange optical effect - a man one instant, a translucent ghost, then a monster, a thing of such bloodcurdling appearance that Heydrich’s knees almost buckled. His hand crept to the chain about his neck as the surrounding grass began to rustle.
“A funny thing about the dead Reinhard.” The light flickered in Quincy’s eyes as a half-dozen wolves emerged from the darkness. “They are sentimental for those that they loved in life, and when the sun sets, they visit spouses, parents, friends – there is an attachment that even death can’t break. Jonathan was my friend - the last living tie to what I was before.”
A wolf growled, and the others joined in, a chorus of yellow eyes and bared fangs. What now? He still had the pistol, and perhaps the shot would frighten them. Or perhaps they’ll tear you to pieces.
“You should get inside.” Quincy Morris studied a fingernail with an air of ennui. “It’ll take you about thirty seconds to reach the gatehouse, and I’ll hold the wolves for… let’s say twenty seconds. They’re faster than any human, but I think you can make it. Better start running.”
Heydrich sprinted for the gatehouse. He was twenty meters from the door when the wolves began howling, and he redoubled his effort, legs and arms pumping furiously as his lungs struggled to deliver oxygen to his muscles. An image his death, of the wolves pulling him down at the threshold, flashed through his mind, but the heavy door closed behind him as he passed through the gatehouse. One by one, the torches on the wall blazed to life. He’s toying with me - he could overwhelm me in the dark, yet he lights the room. So be it.
Heydrich made his way toward the courtyard. He would fall back to the stone steps, and if any of his men remained, they would fight their way back to the camp. And if the worst came to pass and his only option was to fight a last battle with the dead, he would be ready with one final surprise.
XXVII.
When he was eight, Klaus’s father accepted a low-level position in the bureaucracy of German East Africa, and the entire family moved from Wiesbaden to a small outpost on the Serengeti Plateau. They eked out a miserable existence over the next four years - Klaus lost a brother to smallpox and a sister to cholera - but the wildlife fascinated him, and he looked upon the Hadza, the nomadic foragers of the plains, with childlike awe - a mortal beholding a tribe of demigods. They hunted with bows and arrows and followed their quarry for hours, sometimes days, at a leisurely pace. They cut a single antelope from the herd, his father explained. The antelope would gallop away as the men approached, but pursued by the hunters, the animal’s breathing would become labored, and its pace would slacken. When the end comes, they don’t even lift their heads as the hunter approaches for the killing shot. These things flashed through his mind as he staggered through the woods. Low-hanging branches grasped at his arms like tentacles, and unseen roots caught at his feet and ankles. His thirst returned, an unquenchable dryness in the back of his throat.
“Klaus? Klaus, are you there?”
Peter was hunting him in the dark. The insistent whisper filled his head, like the sound of his own ragged breathing, and Klaus wondered if he would have the strength to lift his head when the end came. Another sound, soft and enticing, reached his ears, and he changed course toward the distant noise.
The stream cascaded from in a series of rapids and steep waterfalls, collecting rainfall and snowmelt from the highest peaks and carrying it downward on its long journey to the ocean. Follow it to the river, Klaus thought. If he could make it to the river, he could find the others, and everything would be all right. First, however, he needed to slake the awful thirst that assailed his body, and the water was cold and fresh - almost sweet. In 1912, his father set out for a distant village, some three days walk from the outpost, and vanished into the brush. Klaus dreamed of him often, sunburned and delirious as he wandered the savanna, praying in vain for a muddy rivulet. Water, even the tepid puddles of the Serengeti, was essential for life, and his father had surely known as much as his body turned to leather. Klaus hoped that his father died quickly, or even that he survived and lived out his days in some distant forest, but his ultimate fate was a mystery.
Because we never found his body.
Klaus was pulled off balance as a hand seized his arm. At sunrise, he had cradled a frightened boy in his final moments, but the thing that confronted him now was a travesty, an awful simulacrum of the boy that died with the first rays of dawn. Peter laughed with the gibbering cackle of the damned as he pulled Klaus’s head aside, and his lips curled back from the long fangs as the head plunged toward his throat.
Klaus took a single step backward, and his foot met nothing but empty air.
The laugh became a full-throated cry of agony as they plunged into the freezing torrent. Cold water poured into his mouth and nose, and Klaus gasped as his throat contracted in a painful spasm. He clawed at the awful construction and realized with horror that no hand squeezed at his airway - his own muscles and tendons were betraying him. I’m going to drown, he thought wildly, drown with no water in my lungs. Still the dead hand fell away from his arm, and as the bodies were carried downstream, Klaus had a final thought as his consciousness faded. If I die, at least I die clean.
Sometime later – whether minutes or hours, Klaus could not recall – he found himself in a shallow pool. The stream was wider, its flow languid, as it exited the mountains onto the narrow flood plain. His entire body throbbed as he forced himself upright, but Klaus flexed each joint carefully and found no sign of a broken bone or ruptured tendon. Lucky. He was cold, and death was still tangibly close, but the whispering voice was gone, and the sensation of impending doom no longer held him in its grasp. Overhead, the moon approached its zenith in the night sky.
A pallid hand touched his arm, and Klaus pushed it away with a cry. Peter bobbed in the water, then floated onto his back. The face was swollen, and the flesh had taken on a waxy appearance, as if Peter had floated in the stream for weeks, but Klaus noted with wonder that the long teeth, if they had been there at all, were gone, and all traces of malice had vanished from the face. Washed away in the flowing water.
His knees were weak as he pushed himself erect, and his chill worsened as Klaus sloshed toward dry ground. In the distance, Klaus heard gunshots, and the sound gave him a little hope. He would freeze before morning, but if he could reach his friends, perhaps he still had a chance at survival. Shivering in the night air, Klaus set off to find the others.
XXVIII.
Otto Skorzeny broke several ribs as he hit the water, and the force of the blow drove the air from his lungs as he was carried downward by the momentum of his fall. Through sheer willpower, he struggled to the surface, gasping a desperate lungful of air as the rapids loomed. Then the water took him, and Skorzeny was tossed end over end as the water cascaded through the rocks. Finally, the turbulence pinned him at the base of a large boulder, and as the pressure in his lungs built to agonizing levels, Skorzeny repeated a single thought like a mantra. This is my punishment for murder.
The rock, an egg-shaped stone the size of a fist, hits him in the chest as Skorzeny charges, arms swinging loosely at his sides. Some deep recess of his mind screams at the woman to get in the water and escape, but his rage - over the debacle in Vienna, the loss of Richard and Sulzbach and Peter, the sense of dread that grips him with each passing sunset - carries him forward. The woman makes a graceless, flopping dive for the current, but he is already on top of her, and the knife sweeps downward - two, three, four overhand strokes - before he forces her head into the water. When her struggles cease, Skorzeny grasps the body beneath the arms. The woman’s eyes stare vacantly at the sky, and the dark hair trails behind her as he walks crablike into deeper water and flips the body into the current. She lies suspended for a moment before drifting downriver.
And then he was free, through his own struggles or the caprice of the shifting torrent, and Skorzeny popped to the surface below the rapids. The current slackened, and he let himself float until his feet touched the streambed. Cold water lapped about his knees and hips as he staggered toward the far shore. The village was a mile or more downstream, but Skorzeny dismissed the thought of braving the current again - he could barely stand upright. If he lived through the night, he could worry tomorrow about finding the others.
He was almost to the water’s edge when he saw the body. Gabriela de Cel lay tangled in a pile of flood debris, hair entangled in the branches and one arm protruding at an odd angle. Skorzeny gazed at the ashen face and found himself unable to connect her death to his own actions. His memory was clear enough, but on some deeper emotional level, his mind refused to acknowledge the act - a long-ago murder by a stranger who had worn his face. The water had carried away most of the blood.
A beautiful woman, even in death. Otto Skorzeny gave the corpse a shove with his boot, and it floated downstream as he staggered to shore.
XXIX.
His limbs were filled with the vitality of youth, and the darkness was no impediment as Rupert Holmes followed the scent of blood. Perhaps the scarred German way lying in wait, but bullets held no more terror - after all, he had passed from death to life. Let him draw his pistol when I meet him now. If Gabriela lived, he would open a vein in his own wrist to restore her life, just as she had saved him. He vectored toward the river, and the stench became overpowering. There was blood, nearly fluorescent in his night vision, on the exposed rock. Where is the body? He knelt at the water’s edge, not quite daring to touch the surface, and a distorted image of his own reflection gazed back at him. The eyes appeared shrunken in their sockets, and the cheekbones were unnaturally prominent, as if the mirrored surface prefigured his destiny, and he shrank back, dismayed.
Let her go, Rupert. The voice lacked the diabolical timbre of his childhood nightmares, and as he turned, Holmes half-expected to find Lucy Westenra, the pallor gone from her cheeks and the red eyes restored to a vibrant blue. The forest behind him was empty. If it was her, perhaps Lucy knew better than most about the boundary between life and death, and the consequences of blurring that line. Yes, he thought. Let her go and let the dead rest in peace. When the sun rose, he would find her body and give her a decent burial, but tonight, there was nothing more to be done. Rupert Holmes settled on a nearby rock, and the scent of blood gradually faded as he watched the river and waited for daylight.
XXX.
The clouds dissipated, and a sliver of moonlight illuminated the plateau as Sarah passed through gatehouse. Her night vision was surprisingly good, a consequence of weeks without electric bulbs or gas lamps, and the wolves eyed her without interest as she waded through the grass. The plane gleamed in in the moonlight, and Sarah peered inside, half-expecting to find Quincy Morris feeding on the unfortunate pilot, but the plane was empty.
Sarah chewed at a ragged thumbnail and tried to think. Papa and Amy flew here, but we were heading to the river when we were captured. Perhaps it’s a German plane. The possibility of Reinhard Heydrich’s escape by plane had guided her movements, yet no sentry had challenged her approach. Moreover, the plane didn’t seem German. No gunmetal gray camouflaged the wings, and no swastika adorned the fuselage. The aircraft was a pleasant blue with bright yellow numbering on the tail. Then where is Amy?
She returned to the great hall, and the torches bathed the room in a ghostly light as the gatehouse door closed behind her. High in the castle wall, a breeze wafted through the gaps in the stones, a smooth harmony of whistles and sighs not unlike the murmur of a human voice. For a grief-filled instant, Sarah imagined that she recognized the speaker, and she pushed the thought firmly from her mind.
She passed through the portico to the courtyard. Somewhere below, shouted voices and gunshots echoed through the forest, and she took a tentative step forward. Two or three men, speaking in German, and they sound afraid. Perhaps Heydrich was with them, and if Quincy Morris had unleashed some horror upon the trespassers, it would be simple enough to extract payment for her father’s murder. Slip up behind him and shoot him in the head. Better yet, she would shoot him in the spine and leave him to die slowly.
Amy is here somewhere. Do you leave her to die as well? She hesitated as mercy and vengeance warred for mastery.
“Sarah.”
At the sound of her name - not the wind, but a clear, audible voice - Sarah’s eyes darted about the empty courtyard. Her heart raced, and she felt a spasm of joy that, incongruously, mingled with a cold finger of dread at the base of her spine.
“Sigmund?” Her voice quavered, like a child wakened from a nightmare.
“I lost you in Vienna and it took so long to find you.”
That’s not possible, she thought. I cradled him in my arms as he died. Still, her feet carried her of their own volition, as if the protests of conscious thought were drowned out by the simple imperative to go. In the recesses of her mind, Sarah heard her mother, the words drowned out by the mixture of deepest longing and mortal dread that urged her forward.
“Sarah, I love you.”
NO! Mina Harker’s voice was so strong that she recoiled as if slapped. She stood frozen at the entrance to the portico and gaped at the manlike umbra on the far end.
“All who danced were thought mad by those who could not hear the music.” Richard stared at her with lifeless eyes. “I have waited so long to see you again.”
Sarah fired a single shot from the rifle before losing her nerve. She fled toward the courtyard, and Richard followed.
This is a long chapter, so I have to separate the parts to keep it manageable. The conclusion of Chapter 18 will be published this afternoon.