Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [114]
She released the trigger, letting the gun drop in her lap. There was blood on her hands, blood on her jeans, draining out of Peter’s body by the second.
“You see, you can’t do it,” Harry said smugly, standing up on the seat, preparing to get down off the railing.
She picked up the gun and threw it at him, and it smacked him in the face, full force. A second later he was gone, tumbling over the side of the railing into the darkness below, and his scream echoed eerily in the fog, accompanied by the sound of crashing trees and then a merciful silence.
She couldn’t move—she just knelt in the blood at Peter’s side, disbelieving. He couldn’t have just disappeared like that—it was too easy.
And then Peter’s friend was pushing her out of the way, hovering over Peter’s body. “Hang in there, old friend. Ambulance on the way…just hang in there.” He looked up at Genevieve, who had risen to her feet, standing in shock.
“Remind me not to tangle with you again,” he said. “You’re as bad as Peter said you were,” he muttered.
“Harry…” Her voice barely made a sound, but he could hear her a moment before the sound of an ambulance cut through the night.
“Over the side. If he survived we’ll catch him. At least you did that right,” he said uncharitably.
She moved to the railing. With infuriating timing the fog was just beginning to lift, and she could see partway down the steep hillside the black skeletons of burned trees spiking into the sky.
And then she saw Harry, lying against a stand of crushed tree trunks. But he hadn’t crushed them all— one thick pine tree had gone straight through the center of his chest, and it was poking up into the sky, black and red with blood.
She took a step back. She could see the flashing lights of the ambulance, and she wondered if she should go and lead the way, but she didn’t know where she was going, so she simply sat down on the deck and stared at Peter’s unmoving body and the blood that soaked into her jeans.
She heard one word…“dead” in the man’s voice, and she let out a sob. “He can’t be,” she said.
“Peter’s hanging in there. I’m talking about Harry. Is he dead?”
She thought back to the body impaled on the burned tree. “Oh, yes,” she whispered in her ruined voice. “Most definitely.”
“Well, that’s something,” the man said. “Your first kill.”
He looked calm, controlled, and not the slightest bit concerned that his friend lay dying at his side. Genevieve didn’t know whether to scream, to laugh or to cry.
She settled for drawing her knees up, putting her head down on her bloody knees and praying.
24
Genevieve couldn’t quite decide whether she liked Bastien Toussaint or not. He reminded her of Peter in all the worst ways, combined with a certain French “fuck you” attitude that was particularly annoying. But he’d saved Peter’s life, so she could forgive just about anything, do just about anything she had to.
If she hadn’t gone charging out onto the deck, desperate to save Peter, she wouldn’t have distracted him long enough to get shot. She knew it, Bastien knew it, and she’d have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life. At least Peter would, too.
The last time she’d seen him he’d been on a gurney, unconscious, taken out of her life. She only had Bastien’s word for it that he survived, that he was recovering, slowly, but recovering. Madame Lambert was gone as well, a good thing, Genevieve thought. She didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone from the goddamn “Committee,” if she could help it. At least Bastien had walked away from it.
She did like Bastien’s hugely pregnant wife, Chloe. She was never quite sure how she ended up in North Carolina, staying with them—probably some highhanded decision by Madame Lambert, but at that time she was too rattled to argue. And it was very peaceful up there in the woods in the house that Bastien was in the midst of building for his wife, far enough away from his in-laws to keep his sanity, Chloe