Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [65]
She heard a sound, and she managed to surface from her fog for a moment, to look out the window. The doors of the seaplane were still open, which seemed impractical to her, and she opened her mouth to say something. When she looked down below.
The island was on fire, the inky smoke shooting toward the sky. Harry’s yacht was moving slowly away from the conflagration, heading out into the clear greeny blue of the Caribbean, when something dark came hurtling out of the sky as they passed directly overhead. A moment later the boat disintegrated, as if it had never existed. There was nothing left but a shower of smoke and dust.
She must have made some sound. A cry, torn from her smoke-damaged throat, as Peter Jensen was wiped from existence as if he’d never been there at all.
Her cry was enough to catch the attention of the man who’d been hovering over Harry’s limp body. A doctor, she thought, wishing she could feel relief, glad that she could feel nothing at all.
“You’re a mess, aren’t you?” the old man said in a heavy German accent. “Looks like you might have a concussion. We should’ve left you behind with a bullet between the eyes like that scumbag, but Mr. Van Dorn said bring you along.”
What scumbag? Renaud? They’d killed him? She tried to say something, anything, when she felt the pinprick in her arm.
“This will either kill you or cure you,” he said. And they were the last words she heard.
13
The dreams were horrible, never ending. Genevieve felt as if she was being smothered, trapped in a nightmare world of blood, fire and pain. She drank the smoke and it silenced her. She bled and she couldn’t move. The flames licked around her, the pain so sharp it blinded her, and death had moved under her skin and settled there.
She could see Hans, revolving slowly in front of her like a carousel horse, the hole in his forehead a silent scream. She could see Peter, but each time she reached out to touch him he disintegrated into dust that sparkled in the sun.
The carousel kept spinning, and she would see Harry, sprawled on one of the benches that moved sedately around, his huge smile unshadowed by all around him. Renaud would come into view every now and then, and the black hole in his face was lower than Hans’s—directly between his dark, staring eyes. And the merry-go-round would turn once more. the calliope loud and macabre, and Peter would be there again for a brief moment before dissolving once more into nothingness.
She clung to the darkness and pain, stubborn, even as it began to recede. The light was taking her to a place she didn’t want to be, and she fought hard to stay in the hopeless night. But in the end her will wasn’t strong enough, and she opened her eyes to a strange room.
She had no idea where she was. Presumably it was late afternoon or evening—the room was deep in shadows. She wasn’t alone—someone was moving quietly at the far end, and for a moment she wondered if she was in Harry Van Dorn’s villa.
But no, that was gone as well, and she closed her eyes again, seeking the black emptiness that had become her life.
“Awake, miss?” The voice by her side was soft, hesitant, and she wanted desperately to ignore it, but her eyes betrayed her, opening to stare into the plain, reserved face of a middle-aged Asian woman, dressed in some sort of dark traditional clothing.
“I’m awake,” she said, but her normally strong voice was little more than a husky whisper. “Where am I?”
The response wasn’t encouraging—a rapid-fire explanation in a language Genevieve couldn’t identify much less speak.
“Where am I?” she asked again, slower.
The woman shook her head. “You wait,” she said.
At that point Genevieve doubted she could have gone anywhere at all on her own strength. “I wait,” she said, leaning back against the pillows, exhausted.
She was coming back to life when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The first thing she noticed was the bedding. The sheets were like silk—soft and smooth and of the highest-quality cotton. The same sheets had been on the island. She