Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [110]
With their hands and feet tied, it was a difficult maneuver requiring a crablike effort, but Summer had given up dignity long ago, along with trust, love and the remote possibility of a happy ending. She’d put her faith in a murderer.
They moved back, a good five feet out of the circle, and the brethren took their places, kneeling in a semicircle around the Shirosama. He’d set the urn on the antique kimono, and at another time Summer would have cried out at the sacrilege.
They must have taken it when they’d kidnapped her. If Reno had only left the urn behind this would all be over, for her at least. They would have had everything they wanted and she would probably be dead. If Taka didn’t get his shit together she wasn’t going to be alive to care about antique kimono or ancient ceramics or anything at all.
For that matter, even if he did, there was no guarantee that he was going to bother to save her.
The Shirosama arranged himself in a meditative position, and then nothing happened. The chanting stopped, and they all just waited, in silence.
A moment later Brother Heinrich reappeared in the firelight. “They’re here, your holiness. Brother Neville and his wife have seen to the loading of the plane, and the advance force is already aboard. They wish your blessing before they depart on their holy mission.”
“Of course,” he said graciously. “Bring them to me, that I may touch them and send them on their way.” He turned his face toward Summer and Taka. “Brother Neville is one of England’s top scientists, an expert in biochemical weapons, and he allows his wife to assist him. Devoted followers like them assure the success of my vision. Death is nothing more than the gateway to paradise, and my followers embrace that truth. My people are everywhere—there is no way to stop what must happen.”
Taka still wasn’t saying anything, but he was very still. Either he’d given up on trying to cut his bonds or he’d already managed it and was just choosing his moment to jump up.
Either way, he’d done nothing to release Summer, and clearly he wasn’t going to. If Taka was somehow able to stop them before they released the gas, then she might survive. Otherwise she could take small comfort in the fact that at least Jilly was safe. Small comfort that if she was going to die, so would Taka. Slowly and painfully.
The Shirosama’s British followers approached silently. One was a tall, bespectacled man, the colorless kind of person who’d disappear in a crowd. The woman with him was similarly nondescript—dull clothes, glasses, dishwater hair, frumpy. Older than her partner. And then Summer realized with horror that they weren’t alone—two of the brethren were dragging someone else behind them. Someone with flame-red hair, dressed in black leather. Taka must have brought his cousin up the mountain, for all the good it was doing him.
The British scientist approached the Shirosama first, sinking gingerly to his knees in front of him and bending his tall body in half, so that his forehead almost touched the ground. Beside her, Taka had grown very tense. He must have seen Reno being dragged along behind them.
“Greetings and blessings, holy father,” the man said in a perfect upper-class British accent.
“Greetings and blessings, Brother Neville. Greetings to Sister Agnes, too. You have served me well.”
“And will continue to do so, your holiness. The world will be cleansed by blood and fire, and a new order will arise in your image.”
Summer couldn’t keep her mouth shut a moment longer, always her abiding failure. Brother Neville was like some unctuous Dickens character—rail-thin and dependent on a cane, as if he’d recently been sick. His plain older wife would have looked at home as a prison warden, and Summer was damn if she was going to sit silently by while they congratulated themselves on their upcoming Armageddon.
“I thought it was going to be plague and poison, not blood and fire,” she called out from her place outside the sacred circle.
Brother Neville lifted his head to look at her,