Still, what choice did she have? She picked the knife up in her left hand anyway, and using the numbed wrist of her right, guided it to the hole she’d dug around the central icon. Perhaps if she just wriggled the point of the blade around for long enough, she’d locate a weak spot. She leaned forward, to put the weight of her body into the calculation.
“Come on,” she murmured to it, “you sonofabitch … move for Momma.”
There was a sound behind her. A soft sound. A groan.
She looked back, fearing the worst, and the worst it was.
Todd had swung around the doorjamb coming from the kitchen, his hand clutching his lower belly. There was blood running between his fingers; and blood on his trousers, a lot of it.
“She stabbed me,” he said, his tone one of near disbelief. He kept his eyes fixed on Tammy, as though he couldn’t bear to inspect the damage. “Oh Jesus, she stabbed me.”
He leaned forward, and for a moment Tammy thought he was simply going to fall over. But he reached out and caught hold of the lips of one of the four alcoves carved into the walls of the passageway.
“You have to get out of here,” he said to Tammy.
She got to her feet, ready to help him, but he waved her away.
“Just go! Before she — ”
Comes, he would have said. But it was academic. Katya was there already, coming round the corner, the knife in her hand, his blood on it. Todd turned back to look at her.
She was moving at her old, leisurely pace, as though they had all the time in the world to play out the last reel of this tragedy.
Todd reached into the alcove and found an antique pitcher there. His body blocked what he was doing from Katya’s view, but even if she’d seen what he was up to, Tammy thought, she would have still kept coming. She had the knife, after all. And more than that, she had the certainty that Todd had nowhere else to go; nowhere to fall, finally, except into her arms; into her knife. That was what the pace of her approach announced: that she expected him to die in her embrace.
Todd grasped the pitcher and swung it round. It caught Katya’s shoulder, and shattered, shards of ceramic flying up into her face.
The impact was sufficient to throw her back against the wall, and the knife dropped from her hand, but the effort had used up a significant part of what was left of Todd’s energies. He stumbled across the passageway, his arms outstretched, and fell against the opposite wall.
His face was ashen, his teeth clenched — his eyelids lazy with pain.
“Let them in,” he murmured to Tammy. “What are you waiting for? Let. Them. In!”
At the other end of the passageway, Tammy felt Katya’s gaze fix on her. A ceramic chip had nicked the skin beneath her eye; a single drop of blood ran down over her flawless cheek. She didn’t trouble herself to wipe it away. She simply dropped to her haunches and casually picked up the knife.
Even in the chaos of her thoughts, the symmetry of all this was not lost on Tammy. Two women, each with a knife. And dying between them, the man they’d both loved; or imagined they had.
As Tammy’s mother had been fond of saying, when the subject of love had come up in conversation, as it would from time to time: it’ll all end in tears.
Well, so it had. And more to come, no doubt. Plenty more to come.
She tore her gaze from Katya, picked up the knife with her left hand and guided it with her right back to the assaulted wood around the middle icon.
Again, she leaned into the task, put every pound to work. She twisted the knife to the left. A few small sprinters came away. She twisted again, this time to the right, wanting nothing in the world as much as she wanted that sickening jolt through her bones. She could see more of the icon’s depth now, embedded in the wood. It went far deeper than the others, she saw. That was why it refused to budge. It wasn’t just wider, it was longer.