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Then my eyes flicker to a spot of deeper darkness in the corner.
I scream.
Then the darkness lunges for me.
78
MISHA
The sound of her scream slices straight to my core. Like my whole world tearing itself apart at the seams. Death is here—but it isn’t coming for me after all.
It’s coming for my wife.
“Drive!” I yell at Konstantin. “Now!”
He careens into the courtyard of the mansion, which is littered with the burning bodies of a dozen of my security patrolmen, each of them weeping blood from jagged wounds in their throats.
But I know without even having to look that it’s too late.
Death is already here.
79
PAIGE
I stumble backwards and trip over Augustin’s body. I hit the ground hard. Pain blooms in my hip and my head thwacks against the floor.
When I blink back to reality, I see that I’m staring right at Augustin’s corpse. His brown eyes, glassy and disinterested, gaze at nothing and everything at the same time.
A sob wrestles free of my throat, but before it can even finish, I’m being yanked onto my feet like a ragdoll.
I smell the man first. He smells like kerosene and gunpowder. I’ve spent enough hours in the warehouse with Misha, shooting at lifeless targets, to know that smell—and strangely enough, it’s comforting. It reminds me of how it feels to be held close in Misha’s arms, to be taught by him, guarded by him, loved by him.
Then I look into the man’s eyes, and I understand that that sense of safety is exactly what he’s come here to destroy.
I’ve seen him once before, though it was a dark night and he was just one of three of the phantoms lurking there in my home where they didn’t belong.
The Babai.
This one, one-third of that repulsive trio, has blue eyes. An unearthly blue, uncanny and unsettling. His face is mottled with a thousand tiny little scars like paper cuts.
My instinct is to cringe away, but he holds me close with an iron grip. “P-please,” I manage to stammer out. “I’m pregnant.”
“There’s no point begging,” another voice interrupts just as its owner appears from around the corner. “He’s not the kind of man who can be moved by tits or tears.”
This man, I’m a little more familiar with. Petyr Ivanov leans against the wall and smirks at me. “Come, Tiger,” he says to the man holding me. “We’ve overstayed our welcome here.”
The Tiger, who still hasn’t spoken, nods mutely and starts carrying me down the hall. It’s like being swept away by an avalanche. There’s no chance of fighting back.
We move through the house and out into the backyard. The path we’re walking is lined with bodies. At the sight of them, another sob tears out of me.
Mario and Danica are lying side by side. Their eyes are milky, their clothes clotted with blood. I want to stop and scream and cry next to them, but we just keep moving inexorably away from everyone.
I see Jace. I see Noel. I see more of the people who’ve loved and cared for me since I came to this house.
All of them are dead.
There’s a car sitting just beyond the fence with its engine running. The Tiger grunts as he opens the back door and hurls me in. He follows, and, as I open my mouth to scream, slaps a thick piece of duct tape over my mouth. He binds my hands together with zip ties, too, then pushes me low into the gap between seats.
