J.B. glanced back over his shoulder. “Thought just occurred to me that we might do better getting ourselves back into the house, friends. The samurai could easily have gotten himself around behind us.”
It was an uncomfortable suggestion and a more uncomfortable thought.
Keeping low, they all crawled back inside, taking up defensive watching positions on every floor and on every side of the old building.
“Don’t open fire if you see him,” Ryan ordered. “Be good to take him alive and ask him some questions. Like if he and his friend used the gateway. Following from that, do they actually know how the system works? They could hold keys to unlock doors that could transform our lives.”
“He’s still around,” Krysty said from the back bedroom. “I can feel him.”
“What’s his game?” Mildred asked. “Just going to try and keep us holed up in here?”
“Revenge would be guess.” Jak was on the attic level of the house, his hair like a beacon in the gloom as he peered over the banisters.
Ryan walked slow up the stairs, SIG-Sauer in hand, into the room where Krysty was flattened against the wall, her own blaster drawn.
“Nothing,” she said, squinting cautiously around the edge of the empty window frame. “Just a lot of green.”
“Never got trapped by one man with a bow.” Ryan moved fast across to the opposite side of the window, keeping flat against the wooden wall.
The second arrow came without any warning. Its splintering arrival, missing Krysty by less than a foot, followed a second later by the deep song of the bow, somewhere out among the overgrown garden. It pierced the outer and inner walls of the house, exploding in a burst of white plaster, burying itself at an angle in the far wall of the room, up close to the ceiling.
“Gaia!” Krysty gasped, belatedly dropping to the floor, brushing powder from her face.
“Son of a bitch!” Ryan stood for a moment in the window, daring the archer, his automatic searching the greenery for any sign of then: enemy.
His eye caught a flicker of movement, deep in the shadows of a feathery palm tree, just in time to pull back into the corner as a third long shaft hissed into the bedroom, clear through the broken window, burying itself within a couple of feet of the other arrow.
There was the boom of Dean’s Browning far below them, and Ryan was back at the window in time to see the leaves shaking as someone moved quickly away.
“Missed him, Dad.”
“Nice try, Dean. Bastard came close to hitting us up here. Saw me speak to Krysty and worked out where she might be. Put an arrow clean through the wall.”
“Think gone.” The teenager was directly above them in one of the attics.
“Spot him, Jak?”
“No, Ryan. Just movement going away after Dean’s shot. Good try, kid.”
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’ Jak.”
The albino laughed softly.
J.B. WAS INTRIGUED by the quality of workmanship shown in the arrows. “Don’t know what kind of wood they’re made from,” he said, handling it like a religious icon.
“Goose feathers, for the flights, I thought,” Ryan offered. “Steel tip. Beautiful thing.”
“Certainly not Native American. No tribe would use something of this length. Damned nearly as tall as me.” He held it against his five feet eight inches. “To get this kind of power and velocity, the bow has to be.” He shook his head. “Wish we could capture this son of a bitch, Ryan. Surely wish we could.”
AFTER TWO HOURS of waiting, Ryan had begun to think that the samurai warrior had departed, possibly going back to the redoubt to jump away to where he’d come from.
Doc stood at the bottom of the stairs. “I think that I can wait no longer, friend Cawdor.”
“What for, Doc?”
“A personal matter.” His voice tight with tension. “But one that can wait no longer. I beg you to trust me implicitly in this matter.”
Krysty leaned toward Ryan, her face so close that her bright red hair brushed his cheek. “Doc means that he’s bursting to take a crap,” she whispered.
“Oh, yeah.” Ryan raised his voice. “You want to go out into the garden, Doc?”