Ryan burped, wincing at the bitterness that came flooding into his mouth, reminding him of the flavor of the thick soup. The odd flavor of the soup.
A loose shingle was rattling on the roof, distracting him from what he felt had been an important chain of thought. He’d remembered something that really mattered, but he couldn’t now recall what it had been.
“What was it?” he muttered.
“What? Didn’t hear you, lover.”
Her voice was indistinct, like it came from inside a suitcase. Ryan steadied himself on the frame of the door, feeling the roughness of the hewed wood.
“Didn’t hear you, lover.”
“Said that before.”
“Did I?”
“We going for that walk?”
A flurry of rain dashed into his face, making him blink. For a moment he was worried. Something was definitely wrong. He shouldn’t be feeling this tired.
Krysty hadn’t answered him, leaning more heavily on his arm, making him reach around to support her slumped dead weight. The odd, cold realization that she had fallen asleep, standing up, registered. That wasn’t right, either.
“Krysty?”
The piano had fallen silent, and Ryan had the strange, familiar hunter’s suspicion that someone was watching him from the pools of the dark shadow around the ville.
It had gone very still.
HE WAS LYING on the bed, one arm jammed underneath him. Ryan squinted from his good eye, seeing that Krysty lay on the bed at his side, her bright hair illuminated by the flickering flames of the fire.
A pulse pounded in his temple, like a deadening hammer blow. With an enormous effort he turned his head, seeing that the door of the hut stood wide open, a few drops of rain falling, tinted red by the fire. The door shouldn’t be open at night; it should be locked and barred.
“Bolted,” he said, his tongue feeling swollen, filling his mouth.
He should swing his legs over the side of the bed and walk the few paces across the floor, push the door closed and slide the heavy bolt. But the idea of so much effort was cataclysmically impossible, so far beyond the realm of possibility that Ryan laughed at the thought.
There wasn’t a bolt on the door. Funny. He never noticed that before. Anyone could walk in out of the night.
Ryan burped again, the taste of bitterness seeming stronger, almost making him gag.
The odd flavor of the soup.
Odd flavor.
“Odd,” he said.
Ryan closed his eye.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ryan dreamed, a clogged, dark dream, one that carried him into deep waters and vaulted caverns.
He was the chaser, pursuing a nameless, faceless creature along the slippery corridors. Damp streamed down the rough-hewed walls of what seemed like an ancient mine. His own steps echoed all around him, distorted, making it sound like he was surrounded, behind and before.
He was wounded.
In the biting chill of the caves, Ryan could feel an ominous warmth clotted around his groin and lower stomach. He touched himself, reaching inside the coat. His fingertips, numb with cold, touched hot stickiness.
There wasn’t much pain.
A throbbing, pounding feeling lanced across his temples, and a sick dizziness. Two or three times Ryan felt that he was going to lose his balance and fall in the slimy passages. But if he fell, then his prey would escape him.
Or he would find that he had suddenly, inexplicably, become the prey himself.
The shafts kept forking and dividing, yet he somehow always knew which trail to follow. Onward and downward, once having to use the rotting length of braided rope that clung to the one wall like a handrail.
His hand gripped what he had thought was his big SIG-Sauer pistol, but a feeble, guttering lamp had revealed that the blaster in his right fist was really only a single-shot, bolt-action .22. It was a Chipmunk Silhouette, a heavy, long-barreled pistol, almost unique in the bolt action, for a handblaster. It wasn’t the kind of weapon that Ryan had ever carried before, hardly the sort of man-stopper that he needed for this subterranean chase.
A black plastic box was hooked to the wall just ahead of him. It made a sinister crackling sound, and then a calm voice came from it, a voice that sounded like the man who ran the legendary Children of the Rock.