If you're not planning on coming back, another part of her mind answered.
A kilometer farther and the rail line diverged west through tunnels into the Fagaras Mountains. Kate went out on foot until she found two overgrown ruts in the darkness and they bounced east down the old access road until they reached a twoplank bridge over the river and Highway 7C that ran past the citadel.
Lucian got out of the car and Kate joined him. The highway was quiet here but they had seen traffic earlier. To the east and west, foothills rose to mountains lost in the night and clouds. To the north, the valley visibly narrowed until it made Kate think of a narrowly opened door. Into darkness.
Lucian pointed toward an orange glow against the clouds low above the peaks ahead. “They have the ceremony site lit up already.” He glanced at his watch. “It's tenfifteen. Time sure flies when you're having fun.”
Kate felt like pounding her fists on the car roof. Instead she touched Lucian's arm. “We can't keep creeping along like this. How do we get there quickly?”
He grinned at her. “What do you say we just drive? Maybe they don't have any roadblocks this close. “
“How close are we?”
He looked toward the black doorway in the mountains. “Three miles. Four.”
Kate stepped out onto the highway. “I don't see any spotlights like at the other roadblocks.”
Lucian nodded. “Maybe we're past them all. Maybe there's nothing between us and the citadel but valet parking for the strigoi.”
Kate tried to smile but found that she was on the verge of crying instead. She walked over to Lucian and put her arms around him.
“What, babe?” he whispered.
She shook her head, feeling how soft his cheek was. “Thank you, Lucian. Thank you for . . . stopping him . . . today.” Her throat was too tight for her to say more.
Lucian patted her awkwardly on the back. Kate smiled through incipient tears at the thought of how young he was, how filled with energy. She kissed him on the cheek and stepped back. “OK, let's go find that valet parking.”
There was a roadblock less than two miles ahead. No searchlights or military trucks here, two black strigoi vans pulled out from the woods behind them while a black Mercedes and some sort of armored vehicle became visible around a bend in the road ahead.
Lucian hit the breaks and the Dacia wallowed to a stop between the two barriers. “Damn,” he whispered.
There were no back lanes here, no friendly railroad grades, no obvious ways out. The strigoi had set this trap welclass="underline" the sides of the road dropped steeply six or eight feet on each side, the river ran by beyond the ditch to their left, and the canyon wall was to their right.
Searchlights snapped on from the armored car and the grimy windshield of the Dacia became opaque with white light. Kate blinked and shielded her eyes, but the intensity of the glare was like a physical assault.
Someone hailed them with the bullhorn.
“They want us to drive slowly to them,” whispered Lucian. He was grinning broadly and waving at the unseen figures behind the spotlight. “They want us to keep our hands in sight.”
Kate lifted her hands to the dash. Lucian kept both of his on top of the steering wheel. He put the car in gear and began edging slowly toward the Mercedes and armored car a hundred feet ahead.
The bullhorn barked in Romanian again.
“They want us to stop and get out of the car,” said Lucian. He stopped. “I don't really want to stop and talk to these guys, do you?”
“No,” said Kate.
“Shall we go for it?” Lucian was grinning in all sincerity now.
“Go for it,” said Kate. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that her chest ached. The white light filled the world.
“Okay, babe.” He shifted his right hand, touched her hand, and then slammed the car into gear while flooring the accelerator.
The Dacia lurched, almost stalled, and then whined into motion. The bullhorn barked again. Lucian smiled and waved. Maybe they recognize him, was Kate's thought. Then the shooting began.
Lucian jerked the car to the right as if they were going to try to get behind the armored car, the searchlight lost them for a second, Kate saw the slightest gap between Mercedes and armored vehicle the same instant Lucian shifted to third gear and aimed for it, and then the windshield disappeared in a thousand flakes, Kate covered her eyes, bullets pounded across the hood, roof, and fenders, there. was a terrific impact that slammed her against the door, and then Lucian was steering hard to keep them on the road. He turned the headlights on to show empty highway ahead and then the blazing white light was back in their rearview mirror and rear window. That window exploded inward, Kate felt something tug at her left heel and something else pass between her upraised arm and her ribs, and then they were around the bend in the road and accelerating again, weaving wildly as they did so.
“We made it!” screamed Kate, not believing it even as she shouted. She knew that most of the exhilaration she felt was a pure adrenaline high but she did not care. Lucian grunted something and fought the wheel.
The spare on the right front wheel gave way then with a pop louder than the gunfire had been, the Dacia slewed right, Lucian fought it left, and then they were sideways and flipping down the road. Kate threw her arms over her head, felt her knees bang the underside of the dash, and then she was watching through the broken windshield as the road, sky, road, and sky alternated past.
The Dacia rolled a final time, came to a stop on its wheels, and then slid sideways down a thirty-foot bank into the river.
The old car did not go fully into the water but stopped upside down and wedged between a boulder and a tree with the hood underwater and the left wheel spinning. The right wheel was only tattered rubber on a twisted rim. Kate realized that she was seeing all this from outside the car and she sat up, braced herself on a rock the size of her head, and looked at the Dacia upside down, its headlights under the water.
“Lucian!” She ran to the other side of the vehicle, found him half pinned under the driver's seat that had come out of its brackets and fallen on him, andignoring every rule she had learned as an emergency room internpulled him from the wreckage. There was no sound of pursuit yet from the highway above them.
“Lucian,” she whispered, dragging him to the shelter of trees downstream. “We made it. We got past them.”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
She laid him against the roots of the largest tree and scrambled back to the wreckage, feeling around for the pistol. She could not find it, but she came up with the binoculars that had been in the backseat. She put the leather strap around her neck and waded back to Lucian, listening hard. Still no sound of the vehicles.
Lucian was sitting up and was inhaling deeply as if to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him. She knelt next to him. “I think I'm all right. My God, what a mess. Are you all right, Lucian?” His face was very white in the dim light.
He steadied himself with one hand against the tree. “Not really,” he said. “I think I'm going to lie down a minute.”
She heard the armored car shifting gears and moving down the road toward them. A spotlight stabbed into the water two hundred yards away. “No, come on, we have to get across the river and into the woods there,” she hissed in his ear. “Come on, Lucian.” She lifted him to a sitting position and pulled her hands away thick with something.
“Just . . . rest a minute,” he muttered. “Am o durere aici, Kate. Uh . . . I mean, I have a pain right here. Ma doare pieptul.” He touched his chest.
Kate pulled him forward and ripped away the tatters of his shirt. As far as she could tell in the darkness, there were four large entry wounds high on his back, two near or above the spine, and another entry wound low and to the right. She felt his chest and stomach but found only one exit wound. It was very large and hemorrhaging badly.