Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [112]
Either way, there was nothing she could do about it, particularly since Taka seemed to have no interest in cutting through her bonds. She sat back on her heels, figuring she could always close her eyes at the gross part, just like she did with CSI.
Other brethren were appearing out of the darkness, forming an outer circle around the kneeling monks, with the Englishman and his mousy wife to one side. As the chanting grew louder the Shirosama began opening his robe, and Summer decided gazing at his soft, pasty body might be even more horrifying than watching him butcher himself. She looked away, meeting Taka’s dark, pitiless gaze. Silently, he mouthed something unbelievable. She was sure it was, “I love you.”
She was going to die, after all, and he’d taken pity on the love-sick gaijin. She would die with his lie in her heart, and even a lie would bring her some comfort.
She closed her eyes. Then opened them again at the rush of wind as Taka surged to his feet, leaping across the kneeling monks to tackle the Shirosama before he could sink the blade into his belly. Suddenly all was chaos, noise, shouting. Taka was leaner and stronger than the Shirosama, but he wasn’t batshit insane, and they rolled on the ground, over the gorgeous kimono, knocking the priceless urn to one side.
Brother Heinrich stood up, but before he could come to the aid of his master, Reno rose from the dead, launching himself at the German. Summer yanked at her bonds furiously, but they wouldn’t budge, and she could do nothing but try to scuttle out of the way of what was rapidly becoming a pitched battle. Almost all the combatants were dressed in the white robes of the True Realization Fellowship, though they seemed to be fighting each other and she had no idea who was winning, until Reno fell to one side, his red hair flying out behind him, and lay still.
Taka had managed to straddle the Shirosama, but the cult leader was still struggling, screaming out a mixture of words that Summer couldn’t understand; any connection with sanity seemed to have vanished. Brother Heinrich rose again, and in his hand he held the long, ceremonial katana with the wicked steel blade. For a moment she thought he was going to go for Reno’s still body, but then he turned to Taka.
Summer’s scream of warning was swallowed up in the noise of the battle, and Taka was too focused on trying to restrain the Shirosama to realize death was coming up behind him.
She screamed again as Heinrich raised the katana, and then he froze. The sword dropped uselessly from his hand while he sank to his knees, then pitched over onto the ground, onto the outstretched kimono, the blood from the hole between his eyes spilling out onto the ancient silk.
The mousy British woman was heading toward her, and Summer tried to scramble farther out of the way until she realized it was her husband, Brother Neville, who’d shot Heinrich. The tall man was now leaning over Reno’s fallen body, and he no longer looked like a gray ghost at all.
“Stop squirming, Summer,” the woman said in a clipped British accent. “I can’t untie you when you fight me.”
Summer stopped moving, her gaze focused on Taka, his hands around the Shirosama’s neck, squeezing, as the man’s pale eyes began to bug out of his bleached face. “He’s going to kill him,” she said in a hoarse voice.
The woman glanced toward them. “No, he won’t. There’s nothing Hayashi would like more than to be a martyr. Taka knows what he’s doing.”
Summer’s hands were free, and even as her shoulders screamed in pain she started for the bonds around her ankles herself. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
The battle was already over. She could no longer see Taka and the Shirosama—the silent, defeated brethren were blocking her view. Brother Neville seemed to be directing things, and Summer had the sudden fear that this was simply a religious coup, one crazed guru overthrowing another. Until he headed toward them and she looked up into