AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Howard did not bother to reply.
“She’s about five-foot-eight, or a bit less. Light brown hair, blue eyes. At first glance, I suppose she’s not beautiful, but after you’ve looked at her for a while, you realize that she is.”
Howard stared at him, a sudden, intense gentleness in his eyes. “We’ll get her back. Now I’ll take you and show you where to go. I’d better, or Pamela will think I’ve lied to her.”
Lucas nodded and turned to go down the path to the gate, Toby on his heels.
CHAPTER
19
Elena woke up in the night, her heart pounding. Then she heard the noise again. It was someone moving quickly and trying to be silent. The soft sound of footsteps hurrying, then a gasp of breath.
She slid out of bed, put on the wrap that Zillah had lent her, and went to the door. She opened it quietly and looked out. The hall light was on and Zillah was standing at the top of the stairs, her hair loose around her shoulders. She was staring downward. She had not heard Elena’s door open. She was holding something, an armful of towels.
Eli’s voice came from below her. “Hurry. Maybe sheets would be better. We can replace them.”
“I’ve got sheets, too,” Zillah replied. “We’ll burn them if need be. It hardly matters now.” She started down the stairs awkwardly.
Without thinking, Elena went to her and took some of the towels.
Zillah swung around, startled. She was ashen pale. “Go back to bed!”
“I can help,” Elena replied. “Whatever it is, I can help. You don’t need to slip and fall down the stairs with that lot.”
Before Zillah could argue, Eli’s voice came from below. “Let her! We need her. What will she do? She’s a fugitive anyway. This can’t make it worse.”
Zillah let go of half the pile of sheets and towels, and Elena followed her down, carrying her share. They went after Eli into the kitchen. On the floor Jacob was kneeling with his arms around a young man covered with blood. The man’s upper body was naked and all the flesh raw. Elena had never seen anything so shocking. She stumbled as if her heart had stopped.
Zillah was looking at her. “That’s what we all look like when our skin has been taken off,” she said quietly. “If we help him, keep it all clean, he’ll be all right.”
Elena swallowed hard, trying to keep her stomach in place. The young man was conscious. The last thing he needed was hysteria. Or someone else’s horror. “What do you want me to do?”
“Antiseptic. It’ll hurt like hell, but if it gets infected, it’ll kill him,” Eli told her. “Unfold the sheets and pass whatever you’re told to. We’ve no time to waste.”
Elena obeyed. It was a nightmare of pain and blood, but the four of them worked on the young man with no words except instructions. Pass me this, take that. Fetch more water. Use the brandy. The pain cannot be helped. Now wash the floor. We can have no trace left.
The young man, whose name she never learned, slipped out of consciousness, for a merciful time unaware of the pain. Zillah checked every few minutes, but he was breathing regularly, although his pulse was erratic.
Elena met Jacob’s eyes once. He seemed to know what he was doing, as if he had seen it before. He worked silently, except for the requests for assistance.
Gradually, Elena realized what had happened. It was not an accident, as she had first supposed, perhaps a bad burn. The outer layers of the man’s skin had been deliberately removed, flayed. Such a thing had been outside her imagination.
She lost all sense of time. She was taken by surprise, and then fear, when there was a quiet, triple knock on the kitchen door, and Jacob went to let in two men. He greeted one of them by name.
“Is he ready?” the first man asked.
“Almost,” Zillah replied. “Five minutes.”
The other man glanced apprehensively at Elena.
“Wanted for shooting Scharnhorst,” Eli said simply.
One of them nodded with a bleak smile. The other stared at her for a long moment, then turned away, not unkindly, simply more concerned for the young man. He spoke gently to him, not in German. Elena took it to be Yiddish.
Ten minutes later they were gone, carrying the young man with them, and Elena was helping Zillah clean up the kitchen and remove all signs of blood. They washed the sheets that could be saved and burned the others. The first light of dawn was breaking when Elena went back to bed, exhausted.
Before she could fall asleep, there was a light tapping on her door. “Come in,” she said.
