She subsided into raspy gasps. Her hatred beat at him. He angled for Maple Street. Whoever had gone to Duncan’s aid would initially concentrate activity at the north end of the block near Oak. If he forced Lane past the south end, then stuck to alleys and back yards, they should reach his place without being seen.
And then what?
He saw only one answer. But the deaths had to look like an accident, and it had to destroy their bodies. A fiery crash of the ZX should do. It would solve everything. Lane would be punished and he pay for her blood with his. He could stop fighting blood hunger; Grandma Doyle would be relieved; Brian could be adopted in clear conscience.
They crossed the tracks. Lane reached for his hands, but each time her nails touched his skin, Garreth jerked the rosary and she subsided with a gasp of anguish. He gritted his teeth, fighting dizziness and weakness…fighting to keep his hold on her and his balance on the slick paving.
Up Kansas, motors roared. Garreth looked around to see Scott’s Trans Am gunning out of the mist, just in front of a pickup jacked high on its axles. He sucked in a breath of relief. He did not have to take her all the way home.
Before he could debate the rightness of the action, or change his mind, he caught Lane’s chin with his good hand. A quick jerk snapped her head around backward on her neck with a crack like a gunshot. Too fast for her to know what happened, he hoped. Then he shoved his hands under her arms and leaped directly in the path of the Trans Am.
It had no chance to stop. Scott tried. Brakes screamed…but his tires found no traction on the paving and the Trans Am spun end for end. Garreth kept moving, pushing himself and the slack Lane between vehicle and a solid old light pole in front of the theater…until hurtling metal wrapped itself sideways around the pole, Lane, and Garreth. The pickup piled into the Trans Am, further crushing them and the car against the pole.
Wrench.
Garreth found himself rolling on the sidewalk, shoulder and side burning with pain, arrow now driven out through the front of his jacket.
“No!” he howled. He was not supposed to pass through the pole! He was supposed to die in the crash and burn with Lane.
Then he realized there was no fire, only the smell of spilling gas.
Lurching to his feet, Garreth scrambled for the driver’s door. The crash had jammed it. He smashed the window with his radio and pulled out the dazed boy. “Run!” he yelled at the pickup’s driver. “It’s going to blow!”
Dropping the radio, he searched Scott’s pockets. Good. There were the cigarettes and lighter Garreth expected to find. Flicking the lighter, he tossed it under the Trans Am and hauled Scott backward.
Flame engulfed the car and quickly spread to the pickup and the light pole.
Violet ran out of the hotel with a fire extinguisher.
Garreth reached for it. “I’ll do this. You take the boys in the hotel and call the fire department.”
He contrived to fall, with the extinguisher “coming apart” in his hands, spewing foam on the sidewalk instead of the flames. After that, he and the people who materialized out of the hotel could only stand and watch the car, and Lane’s body, burn.
An unexpected sense of desolation swept him. In spite of his outrage at her crimes, in spite of burning hatred for what she had done to Harry and him, her death hurt. Pain closed his throat…grief for the child whose torment had driven her to seek the power of the vampire life and use it to vent her hatred on humanity, for the waste of an intellect curious and clever enough to theorize what made vampires, for the voice that would never sing enchantment again.
The fire department arrived in time to save the light pole and keep Lane from burning to the bone, but what Garreth saw amid the metal wrapped around her, told him her hands had charred beyond recovery of fingerprints and the hockey mask looked melted onto her face. An autopsy, if they bothered with one, could establish her as female but forty-eight years too young to be Mada Bieber.
Reassured Lane could not be identified, Garreth felt as if his bones melted. He faded back against the theater ticket booth and slid down to sit on the sidewalk.
In moments feet gathered around him. Voices began exclaiming about his bloody jacket and the arrow protruding from it, began asking questions.
He ignored them. God he was tired…too tired to answer, too tired to feel suicidal any longer, too tired even to feel pain. He closed his eyes and shut out the world.
2
To Garreth, it indicated his state of debilitation that he never resisted being admitted to the hospital, refused to think about daylight turning the bed into misery, could not bother to worry about the results of his bloodwork, and did not even mind that they put him in a room with Duncan. Once Dr. Staab in the ER mentioned giving him blood, nothing else mattered. For all her deception, he knew Lane had not lied about recuperation and human blood. Blood revived him in San Francisco; he wanted it now, whatever it took to get it. He lay watching the blood bag slowly empty, feeling pain and weakness ease a little more with every drop, and fought an urge to just unplug the tube from the catheter in his arm and suck the bag dry. Fighting less because Duncan might see than the fear drinking human blood would give him a hunger impossible to satisfy with cattle blood and turn him into Lane, preying on people.
Duncan, of course, wanted all the details about what happened after Garreth left him in the alley.
Garreth sighed and said, “It’s a blur. I think I was running on pure reflex and adrenaline.”
He had a more complete story for Danzig in the ER, of course…that in pursuit of the assailant, whom he spotted smashing Castle’s front door — probably planning to steal drugs — he entered the drug store, where the assailant managed to get behind him and take another shot. But instead of going down, Garreth turned and grabbed the bow. At which point the assailant fled. Garreth again pursued him…caught up as they crossed the tracks and entered the southbound lanes of Kansas…and managed to grab the back of the assailant’s jacket. He did not see or hear the Trans Am until it was on top of them. He had not drawn his gun after firing once at the sale barn because pursuing his assailant took all his strength.
Danzig listened in silence to the end, then said, “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t call for backup after you were attacked at the sale barn, or respond to Doris and Duncan when they called you.”
Garreth shook his head in pretended frustration. “I kept trying. I heard them but they obviously didn’t hear me. I fell on the radio when the arrow hit me. Maybe that damaged the mike.”
Fortunately the radio was also a casualty of the fire.
Danzig appeared to accept that. The worst moment had come next, when Danzig said, “Tell me what you know about Mada Bieber.”
Garreth froze. “What does she have to do with this?”
“Nothing as far as I know, but Anna Bieber has been calling the station. She hasn’t seen her daughter since the wedding reception but said Mada took a ride with you earlier and wondered if she said anything to you that might explain her disappearance.”
A loose end that needed tying up…in a way that never connected it to their John Doe assailant. He frowned as though thinking back. “Maybe, though I didn’t understand that at the time. She came out of the gym and asked to ride along with me, saying she needed to talk to me. What she wanted to was to tell me she’s my grandmother, that she lied to her mother about not being pregnant. She clearly felt extreme guilt about the lie, and about abandoning the baby. She said, ‘But I didn’t want him to suffer the stigma of being a bastard that I did.’”
Danzig said, “I guess there’s a part of your grandmother search I haven’t heard.”
“A part I didn’t know myself until a few weeks ago. Anyway, Mada said she knew Colleen Mikaelian would be a wonderful mother, much better than she could be. ‘For years I thought about telling Mama,’ she said, ‘but I kept thinking how disappointed she’d be with me, and how people would whisper behind her, like mother like daughter and the daughter didn’t even have the decency to get married and give the bastard a name. I didn’t want to shame her that way.’”