The smile was gone. Mad hatred was no longer behind eyes and voice: it was in them, and in the set of her features, the pose of her body. This mad hatred–and she as part of it–seemed the only live thing in the room. The eight of us who looked at and listened to her didn’t, for the moment, count: we were alive to her, but not to each other, nor to anything but her.
She turned from me to fling an arm out at the girl on the other side of the room; and now her voice was throaty, vibrant, with savage triumph in it; and her words were separated into groups by brief pauses, so that she seemed to be chanting them.
“You’re her daughter,” she cried; “and you’re cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that she and I and all the Dains have had; and you’re cursed with your mother’s blood on your hands in babyhood; and with the twisted mind and the need for drugs that are my gifts to you; and your life will be black as your mother’s and mine were black; and the lives of those you touch will be black as Maurice’s was black; and your–”
“Stop!” Eric Collinson gasped. “Make her stop.”
Gabrielle Leggett, both hands to her ears, her face twisted with terror, screamed once–horribly–and fell forward out of her chair.
Pat Reddy was young at manhunting, but O’Gar and I should have known better than to stop watching Mrs. Leggett even for a half-second, no matter how urgently the girl’s scream and fall pulled at our attention. But we did look at the girl–if for less than half a second–and that was long enough. When we looked at Mrs. Leggett again, she had a gun in her hand, and she had taken her first step towards the door.
Nobody was between her and the door: the uniformed copper had gone to help Collinson with Gabrielle Leggett. Nobody was behind her: her back was to the door and by turning she had brought Fitzstephan into her field of vision. She glared over the black gun, burning eyes darting from one to another of us, taking another step backward, snarling: “Don’t you move.”
Pat Reddy shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. I frowned at him, shaking my head. The hall and stairs were better places in which to catch her: in here somebody would die.
She backed over the sill, blew breath between her teeth with a hissing, spitting sound, and was gone down the hall.
Owen Fitzstephan was first through the door after her. The policeman got in my way, but I was second out. The woman had reached the head of the stairs, at the other end of the dim hall, with Fitzstephan, not far behind, rapidly overtaking her.
He caught her on the between-floors landing, just as I reached the top of the stairs. He pinned one of her arms to her body, but the other, with the gun, was free. He grabbed at it and missed. She twisted the muzzle in to his body as I–with my head bent to miss the edge of the floor–leaped down at them.
I landed on them just in time, crashing into them, smashing them into the corner of the wall, sending her bullet, meant for the sorrel-haired man, into a step.
We weren’t standing up. I caught with both hands at the flash of her gun, missed, and had her by the waist. Close to my chin Fitzstephan’s lean fingers closed on her gun-hand wrist.
She twisted her body against my right arm. My right arm was still lame from our spill out of the Chrysler. It wouldn’t hold. Her thick body went up, turning over on me.
Gunfire roared in my ear, burnt my cheek.
The woman’s body went limp.
When O’Gar and Reddy pulled us apart she lay still. The second bullet had gone through her throat.
I went up to the laboratory. Gabrielle Leggett, with the doctor and Collinson kneeling beside her, was lying on the floor.
I told the doctor: “Better take a look at Mrs. Leggett. She’s on the stairs. Dead, I think, but you’d better take a look.”