“You all right, Ryan? You look sleepy.” Straub’s voice sounded solicitous but oddly muffled, as if he were speaking from a far-off room.
“Fine. Fireblast! But my head is”
“Open your eye, Ryan.” There was a sharper note in the man’s voice, snapping out the order.
Ryan swallowed hard, feeling the short hairs at his nape beginning to prickle with unease. His brain was puddled, like at the beginning of a jump, and his hearing was becoming more and more muffled. Unconsciously his hand began to teach for the butt of the SIG-Sauer, but it was missing, the holster empty.
“Open your eye, you fucking shit!”
Startled, Ryan did as Straub commanded, finding himself staring directly into the spinning silver disk that the bald man held in his right hand. It gripped his attention, though he made an effort to look away. It felt as if his brain were gripped in a vise, sucking him under.
Straub laughed, the voice echoing and echoing, filling the scented room. “So fucking easy, you triple-stupe arrogant bastard! It’s cost you everything. Your friends are all prisoner now or already dead. After you’ve obliged the countess, then you will join them. It’s over, Ryan. Over.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
All that Ryan knew was the reality that Straub had showed him. His mind was bound in limitless shrouds of sweltering midnight linen, closing off all his perceptions.
Straub whispered in his ear as he sat there, motionless, paralyzed, explaining how he and the countess had worked out the only way to secure what she most wanted.
“Stiff-backed pride, Cawdor. Your downfall. As it was with that withered old fool called the Trader. He thought he was immortal until he faced death on that beach.”
“Dead?” Ryan barely forced out the single word through gritted teeth.
Straub’s face was close to his, so that he could taste the rotten odor of his breath, foul on his cheek. “You can go to your grave without ever being sure of that, you one-eyed, scum-sucking imbecile! But it might be you’ll be meeting him again very soon. After you’ve performed your duty for my lady. But I only say mebbe. Why give you an inch of knowledge when you can more easily die ignorant?”
THE BALD MAN TOOK Ryan by the wrist, leading him unprotestingly through the shadowy passages of the huge, rambling mansion. It was oddly deserted, with no sec men at doors and cross corridors. There was no sign of any servants, nor of his friends. Ryan’s feet seemed to float over the thick carpets, and his eye gazed incuriously around him.
“It was so easy. They chose to separate and go to different places. There was no need to be cunning. Simply to find them and slay them. Let me show you all your friends, outlander. All of your dead friends.”
The combination of the powerful drug in the drink and the vicious skill of the bald man’s mesmerism had robbed Ryan of all sense and reduced him to a feeble puppet in the hands of the sniggering Straub.
“First let us see your redheaded slut, Ryan. In the library, I think she said.”
The door swung open silently, and Ryan and his captor drifted through into the dusty stillness.
“Smell the death, Ryan. Smell the spilled blood of your lover. See the way her hair melts into the flow of crimson from the slit throat, lying there, on the floor, with old books scattered around her corpse. See it.”
Ryan saw it, exactly as Straub described it. Krysty was on her back, hands spread, fingers clenched, her fiery hair floating out around her shoulders, free and loose, the ends sodden in the lake of dull blood that still trickled from a deep gash that opened up the whiteness of bone in her throat.
Ryan blinked, stricken, feeling a vague surprise that her sentient hair hadn’t coiled up defensively at the last. That was odd. But it was such a tiny, foolish detail.
“If you want to weep, then do it,” Straub said, still grinning widely.
“No,” Ryan said slowly. “After I’ve chilled you and the bitch then then”
JAK HAD BEEN MURDERED in the armory As they moved through the dark stillness, Straub had described what Ryan would see behind the hair-open door. And it was true.