Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [130]
She crawled for the light, the exit, and then the light was gone, blotted out—she didn’t understand how, and there was no time to think about it, because she heard Cray snarl, a low indrawn sound packed full of menace, the sound a dog would make in the instant before it leaped, and she knew he was tensing for the kill.
Directly ahead, something dropped into the shaft.
A human figure.
Twisting toward her—a man—and in his hand, a gun which rose for a shot he could not try, because Kaylie blocked the target.
“Take it!” he shouted, and he pitched the gun at her, a handgun, sliding along the shaft.
A gun that was just an illusion, like the man himself, a mirage out of nowhere.
Cray sprang.
The pistol completed its slide, spinning into Kaylie’s grasp, and remarkably it was real—as tangible and solid as the gun that had killed Justin many years ago—and with the gun in both hands she twisted onto her back, face to face with Cray as he fell on her, and she fired one shot directly into his heart.
Cray shuddered all over. Kaylie looked up into his eyes in the dim ambient light, eyes that widened with sudden intelligence, the shocked awareness that somehow, impossibly, she had beaten him.
Then she saw darkness filling those eyes, a flood of darkness, extinguishing the light, and Cray saw it too, she knew he did. He saw the dark tide that was fast flowing in to wash him away, and for the first time he was frightened by the dark, afraid like a child, afraid and alone.
She saw all this, in the moment when their gazes locked for the last time, and then the last living part of him was devoured by the dark, and everything was gone from his eyes, forever.
Cray sagged, a limp, dead thing, the knife in his hand as harmless as a toy.
Kaylie let go of the gun. It clattered in the vent with a hollow sound.
She made no further movement. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think.
“Kaylie?”
A familiar voice. She’d heard it before, but when? Oh, yes. On the night of her arrest.
It was Detective Shepherd’s voice. He was the man who’d materialized out of nothingness and saved her life.
She had no idea how he’d gotten here, no strength to ask. Later she would make him tell.
Later.
“Kaylie? You all right?”
He had crawled to her. Blinking, she looked at him.
“I’m fine,” she said, as if it were a summer day and she had merely responded to a casual pleasantry. “Just fine.”
He released a long-held breath. “Thank God.”
“Cray’s dead.”
“I know. Let’s get out of here.”
“Cray’s dead,” she repeated for no reason.
“There’s an exit to the roof.” Shepherd took her hand, gently coaxing her forward, away from the dead sprawl of John Cray. “Come on.”
She eased free of Cray’s loose, boneless limbs. “I know about the exit,” she whispered. “I used it to escape from this place once before. But ... not really.”
Abruptly she lifted her head, searching for Shepherd’s gaze in the faint light, wishing to make eye contact, feeling suddenly that it was very important for him to understand about the years of running, the scared-rabbit hiding, the night dreams and daytime fears.
“I never really escaped,” Kaylie said quietly.
Shepherd tightened his grip on her hand. “This time you did.”
Epilogue
“How did you find me?” Kaylie asked.
It was ten days after the events at Hawk Ridge, and she was sitting in an armchair by the window of her hospital room, a book in her hands.
Shepherd stopped just inside the doorway. “No hello? That’s the first thing you say to me?”
“Hello comes later. I have to know.”
“Well, at the sign-in desk the nurse told me you were in room three-twenty-two.”
“I meant that night, when I was in the air duct with Cray. You showed up and saved me. How?”
He smiled, circling the bed to approach her. The day was clear, the view through the window green and bright. He had not expected the grounds of Graham County’s medical center to be so nicely landscaped.