Last Safe Place, The (38 page)

At the sound of her voice, the dog lifts his head, turns and bolts out of the room and out the door into the rain.

Yesheb remains rigid, fears the dog is waiting there, out of sight, ready to pounce at the first sign of life. And Yesheb knows he will not survive another attack. He has lost too much strength, too much blood.

He forces himself to count to three hundred slowly. Then he inches his eyes open, looks around without moving his head. He can see out the open back door into the gloom below the gray overcast. It is raining again now, but not as hard as before. Through the film of rain, he sees two figures in the distance. He lifts his head to get a better look. Yes. It’s the dog running out ahead and the woman behind it.

Yesheb uncoils, moans and tries to assess his injuries. He pulls himself to his feet, looks around the kitchen, finds a towel and shoves it over the gaping wound in his forearm. He must bind up his wounds as quickly as possible. And he must find something, a mop or broom handle, to knock his gun out from under the loveseat.

CHAPTER
18

A
PAIN IN
G
ABRIELLA
’
S TEMPLES FIRED AGONY IN HEARTBEAT
bursts into her head. Her neck hurt with every movement.

Ty! Where’s Ty?

She understood on some level that she was staggering around in the rain too disoriented to form an intent and then act on it. But another part of her had gone on autopilot. Like the “danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson” robot, it kept repeating, find Ty, find Ty.

“Ty!” The cry savaged her from her collarbone to her sinuses. But she shouted out anyway, ignored the pain. “Ty. Where are you? Answer me. Ty!”

Wherever he was, she knew he must be terrified. Obviously, he’d seen Yesheb and run from him. If he’d been there, Yesheb would have hurt him, too, like he did—

Theo!

Gabriella began to cry. Each sob dragged steel wool across the inside of her throat. How could she tell Ty about his grandfather. And Pedro! What had happened to—?

She heard something approaching behind her, turned in terror to see … P.D.! He must have heard her calling Ty. The dog raced up to her, tail wagging. His wet coat was splotched with blood that his run through the rain hadn’t washed away. His muzzle was bright red, as were his teeth. Yesheb’s blood.
Good!

She wanted to bellow some yell of triumph, wanted to stand over the homicidal lunatic’s dead body and … Instead, she collapsed to one knee and hugged the dog that had saved her life and killed the madman who had terrorized the whole family.

“Good dog, good dog, P.D. Good boy!” The dog licked her face, smeared some of Yesheb’s blood on it, but she didn’t care. “Oh, Puppy Dog, I can’t find Ty.”

The dog barked and wagged his tail furiously.

Duh! Of course. P.D.! She got painfully to her feet.

“Find Ty!” she commanded and the dog instantly took off at a run toward the back right corner of the valley. That was crazy. Why would Ty …? She started after the dog, then realized she was dragging her nylon jacket on the ground behind her. She picked it up and shoved her arms into the sleeves as she followed along behind P.D..

T
HEO SWAM BACK
up to the surface of the water from some deep, dark, cold place. He had dangled beneath the bridge, fallen into the depths and now he was struggling to—

His eyes opened and he saw an expanse of bloody kitchen floor. And brand new black hiking boots. Yesheb stood a few feet away with his back to Theo.

Somehow the madman had survived P.D.’s attack!

Always said that mutt was useless as a rubber beak on a woodpecker.

As the black boots turned and started out of the kitchen, Theo realized Yesheb thought he was dead. All he had to do was lie still and ...

Instead, he reached out and grabbed Yesheb’s ankle. The slick blood did the rest and Yesheb fell forward, slammed hard into the oak floor, groaned in pain. P.D. must have messed him up pretty bad; Theo forgave him.

Yesheb managed to roll as he hit so the fall didn’t cause any real damage, but when he lifted his head and looked at Theo, the old man wanted to cheer. Yep, P.D. messed him up real bad!
Good dog.

“Here’s one more nut for your trail mix,” Theo said, his words garbled by blood and broken teeth. “A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

The bloodied figure got to his feet and wordlessly placed the barrel of his pistol to Theo’s forehead—he could feel it; the metal seemed particularly cold.

Cornelius, you about to get evicted!

“What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back to you?”

“A
STICK
,” Y
ESHEB
replies, and pulls the trigger.

He pauses for a moment above the old man’s lifeless body, sorry he’d administered such a painless death. He would have liked … but there is no time.

He turns and staggers out of the kitchen through the mudroom and pauses at the back door of the cabin before stepping out into what is now a light drizzle. He has a decision to make. He can activate the signal from the paging device in his pocket and summon the helicopter to come for him. The brunt of the storm has passed over the peak and is now assaulting the other side of the mountain. The chopper can land, rescue him and get him medical attention before he bleeds to death. But he hardly even toys with the idea. His own survival matters nothing to him. What is of paramount importance is that they die tonight! All of them. At his hand. He will not suffer them to see another sunrise.

He struggles out into the meadow, trying to keep the woman and dog in sight ahead of him. They are not moving fast, don’t appear to realize they are being pursued. Soon he will have her in his sights. He will merely wound her, bring her down. Gabriella.
Not
Zara. She isn’t his beloved bride, just an imposter, a fake. He will make her pay for deluding him, tricking him. He will make them all pay for what they have done to Yesheb Al Tobbanoft.

He is profoundly grateful that he did not choke her to death. Now he can kill her slowly, make her suffer delicious torment. He will inflict on her an agony like no other human being has ever felt. He knows how. He has studied the art of torture, practiced it, honed and refined it the way other men fine-tune their golf swing. Many from the worthless dregs of humanity have died agonizing deaths as he perfected his skill. The torture and death of Gabriella Carmichael will be a work of art, his virtuoso performance.

First, he will dispatch the dog with a bullet in the skull. Then in a magnificent two-act play, he will ravage her mind, force her to watch the long, agonizing torture of her son. By the time the child gasps out his final breath, she’ll be begging for her own death. And he will have only just begun!

His rage is the white hot fuel that propels him forward. It is wrath alone that keeps him going. He no longer notices pain. The bandages he crafted from hand towels won’t hold long. Soon, he will begin to pour out his life blood again and he has none to spare. His recently healed foot had been reinjured in his fight with the dog—perhaps even re-broken. The best pace he can set is a shambling limp. And then there is the air. He gasps and has to stop often to catch his breath. The others are accustomed to the altitude. He is not.

But none of that matters. Pain and injury are totally irrelevant. He will do what he has to do no matter how much it hurts, no matter what the cost. Nothing, absolutely nothing short of death can stop him now.

W
HEN
P.D.
BEGAN
to scramble up the slope on the barely visible trail leading to the chalet, Gabriella finally had to admit to herself that’s where he was going. How could Ty possibly have known about the place?

How often had he gone there? Did he sneak away every day to play in the bristlecone pine forest like she and Garrett did that summer thirty years ago? The flood of memories, happy and painful, temporarily blinded her as she climbed and she lost her footing, went down on one knee.

Something whizzed past her arm and slapped into the dirt beside her.

What in the worl—?”

She turned and saw death itself on the slope behind them.

Like a black, hairy-legged spider, Yesheb was crawling up the trail below, lurching forward, limping and holding his left arm against his body with his right.

But he was alive!

She’d have screamed if she’d had the voice and the air. Instead she stood stunned, stupefied, rooted to the ground in terror. He lifted his hand and pointed at her and she realized what he was doing just in time to dive aside as a bullet went pinging off a rock at her feet. She heard no gunshot; the wind carried the sound away back down the mountain.

P.D. emitted a vicious growl and with hackles raised, started toward Yesheb.

“No,” she said and P.D. stopped in his tracks. Yesheb would shoot the dog if it got anywhere near him. “Find Ty.”

P.D. turned and continued up the rock trail toward the forest of bristlecone pine trees. Jesus trees. She followed close behind, zigzagged and hopped abruptly from rock to rock to present a moving target. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she cringed away from the agony she would feel any second from a bullet ripping into her back. He fired twice more; the bullets dug up dirt beside and behind her. At first, she thought he was a lousy shot. Then she realized he wasn’t aiming at her back at all but at her legs. He wanted to wound her, not kill her outright. She knew why, knew what he would do to her if he caught her.

But she wasn’t helpless anymore. She had the advantage this time. Once she made it to the trees, she could lose him. She knew this forest; he didn’t. It’d been here 4,000 years so it hadn’t likely changed a whole lot in the past 30. And though she stood up taller now than the trees, the labyrinth of passageways between them would provide excellent cover. She’d go to the chalet for Ty and then the two of them and P.D. would vanish into the trees. She could find her way through the forest by moonlight. Yesheb would quickly become hopelessly lost. She doubted he’d thought to bring a flashlight.

She stumbled in the gravel and slid backward a few steps, then staggered forward the final few feet up the trail to the crest. The slope had shielded her from the worst of the whistling wind, but it hit her full force now, a cold, wet fist that almost knocked her off balance. It pummeled and battered her, whipped her jacket around her, lashed her face with her hair and took her breath away.

P.D. had already disappeared into the trees and she had to hurry. Once Yesheb made the crest, he could follow along behind her down the trail. It was indistinct from lack of use, but if you looked closely, you could see it. She had to get to Ty and get him out of the chalet and into the forest where there was no trail to lead Yesheb to them.

As she plunged into the trees, she looked back over her shoulder. The black spider was still there—his shadow actually looked like a spider, humped over, using his hands as well as his feet to climb. He was farther back; they’d gained on him. And now that she could run standing up, she’d put even more distance between them. She knew where they were going and he didn’t. That was another edge.

She’d outwit him. Outlast him.

Lightning flashed. Though the storm was on the other side of the mountain, the lightning near the crest lit the mountainside like a neon sign. She didn’t have time to be frightened of it, though. She had only so much currency in her terror account and right now she was spending every dime of it on Yesheb.

Once she was among the trees, they protected her from the brunt of the wind. But she found it more difficult to follow the trail than she’d thought. It was hard to see in the odd half-light. P.D. was in front of her, waiting patiently at the first bend in the trail. Then he turned and headed deeper into the woods, but this time he stayed close, only a few feet ahead. As
they wound deeper into the forest, she heard a sound she hadn’t heard in decades, the mournful wailing of the wind around the crags of the peak two thousand feet above their heads. For the first time, Gabriella realized how cold she was, chilled to the bone, she had her jaws clamped together to keep her teeth from chattering and could not feel her fingers at all.

Did Ty bring a coat?

The absurdity of that thought forced a semi-hysterical giggle from her raw throat. The boy was on a mountainside in an electrical storm running for his life from a madman who wanted to cut out his heart and she was worried that he’d catch a cold!

She noticed that her breath frosted, made little white puffs in the air in front of her as she ran. Then they rounded a corner past a rock outcrop and there it was—the chalet. It was much more like she remembered it than the cabin had been. The chalet’s changes had come from disuse, not renovation. As she drew closer, she saw the hole in the roof, the missing porch pillar and the crooked front door. The sight made her unexpectedly sad.

P.D. raced up to the spot where the trail connected with the rock porch of the chalet—and kept on running! What was that dog doing? She stopped in front of the chalet, gasping and called out, “P.D., come.” Softly—she knew the wind would bear the sound instantly away down the mountain toward Yesheb. For a moment, she feared P.D. didn’t even hear. But then he appeared from behind a Jesus tree. He stopped, looked at her, then turned and ran back the way he’d come.

Gabriella yanked open the chalet door and called out, “Ty!” though it was clear he wasn’t there. The single room with no furniture offered no place to hide. But if he wasn’t in the chalet, then where …?

Gabriella’s heart took up a staccato rhythm and she couldn’t seem to draw a breath, like the wind had been knocked out of her. Neither had anything to do with exertion or thin air.

She turned from the door and raced after P.D., but she no longer needed him to lead her. She knew where they were going.

R
ATHER THAN FOLLOWING
the winding trail through the aspen grove, Pedro cut through the trees in a straight line toward the cabin. He had done the same thing coming up the trail. Wherever he could, he climbed
the space between the lower and upper trails, rather than going all the way down and back the long traverses. He’d fallen twice scrambling up the wet rocks. Lost his rifle the last time and had to climb back down to retrieve it.