Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [99]
Alli knew what she had to do; she and Thatë had gone over it during a short break in the trek while his men had surveilled the area just ahead. She now had to do it. She recalled with perfect clarity the Ukranian mistress Milla Tamirova and her dungeon with its restraint chair that had brought back with a sickening rush her week at the mercy of Morgan Herr. Something inside her quailed and tried to shrivel up. But she wouldn’t let it; she was stronger than that now. The guerillas’ eyes burned into her pale flesh. The inner halves of her breasts were exposed, moving as she approached them. She walked as Milla Tamirova walked, putting one boot directly in front of the other so that her hips and buttocks swayed gently back and forth.
She was close enough to them now to smile, her white, even teeth shining in the light of the bare bulb above the door. She kept her lips slightly open. She had moistened them just before she had stepped into the light.
And then something odd—and thrilling—happened. Their very stares, which had terrified her a moment before, buoyed her. Their eyes caressed her, moving over one body part after another. They weren’t repulsed; on the contrary, naked lust suffused their faces, warming her, fueling her. Emma had made her feel beautiful. But now, for the first time, she realized that her childlike body was not connected to the womanly power inside her. This was the moment of her final flowering into womanhood, the moment when all childhood things were left behind, when she saw who and what she could become.
Finding her voice, she began to sing again. The guerillas licked their lips seconds before they died. She watched them with a curious dispassion as the light went out of their eyes, and she shivered, suddenly cold.
“Fucking beautiful,” Thatë said. He called Paull and gave him the all clear.
As soon as the chatter of machine-gun fire bit into the night, he led his men into the school.
Alli followed him, feeling like a shell sucked up in a powerful undertow.
* * *
THREE OF Thatë’s men had been killed by the time the kid brought her face-to-face with the orphans. Until that moment, he had kept her safe in the rear guard, guarded by two of his grupperovka foot soldiers. But she had heard the sounds of fierce fighting, cries, and grunts as the forces met head on. She recognized all three of the dead men as she was led past them, and felt a slight tugging at her heart, shocked by how young they were.
The orphans were huddled in one darkened classroom. Before she stepped into the doorway, she handed Thatë her assault rifle.
He offered a handgun. “Don’t go in there unarmed.”
She looked at him and shook her head. “They need to trust me.”
As she stepped into the room, she sensed the orphans shrinking back, and knew she had been right to come in without a weapon. Then, as they saw her, expressions of surprise and perhaps curiosity bloomed on their faces.
“I don’t speak Macedonian,” she said. “Which of you speak English?”
There was a rustling of bodies. Then a voice from the rear said, “English?”
A young girl pushed her way to the front of the group. She was delicate, her porcelain beauty all the more potent for it. But there was a tigerish look to her eyes and this made Alli wary.
“You are English?”
“American,” Alli said. And then, because there was no time and, really, no other way to state it: “There is danger here. These people are bad.”
“I know,” the porcelain girl said.
One of the other girls behind her said, “They are our teachers.”
Alli, hearing the fear in the girl’s voice, thought about Morgan Herr, who had claimed to be her teacher. “Yes, but they’re teaching you only what they want you to know. They’re making sure that when you grow up you’ll be just like