“What?” Ellie said. “No.”
“Up high,” I said. “Get the knives out of the bag.”
Kathryn and Roxanne fled upstairs.
Callan and Christoff would have to stay here.
“Ellie,” I said.
“Peter’s pep talk didn’t convince me,” she said. “What makes you think I’m listening?”
“Because I’m telling you go to go up to the third floor. Shutters are closed, all you have to do is holler or scream if someone gets the bright idea to come in through the window.”
“You can’t possibly believe someone’s going to-”
“Ellie,” I cut in. “It’s probably the safest places in the house for you.”
She considered that for a second, “Where were those other three hiding?”
“Hidden room on the second floor,” I said. “You can’t get in there, you’d attract attention by trying, and you’d probably get hurt one way or another, nosing around there. Third floor, bedroom, safe place. Stay put, don’t move around.”
“I like being able to move around,” she said.
Midge made more noise in the backyard. I was pretty sure something very solid had broken.
“Then, fuck it, just stay on the third floor,” I said, exasperated. I wasn’t terribly in tune with my emotions and she was still pissing me off.
“What about the tower room? That one room that sticks up?”
What did one say to a woman who’d always gone against the grain, always rebelled, and fought every damn step of the way, even when not fighting probably would have been easier and more beneficial for her?
How was I supposed to convey to her that it would be the worst idea in the world to break into that room, when telling her would only make it more enticing to her warped brain?
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m kind of interested too,” Peter said.
“Why do you think my brother and I showed up?” Eva asked, turning her head away from the people outside.
“Hm?” Peter asked.
No, I thought, but I didn’t have anything to interject with. This was entirely the wrong thing to be saying to Ellie and Peter Thorburn.
“We brought bombs, we brought guns and tasers and grenades. Those assholes out there, I know some of them. Little lady out there wants to stitch your mouth and eyes shut, stitch your hands to your sides and your legs together, and leave you like that. I’m not even joking. All the sick freaks and monsters are coming this way, and they’re coming because of what’s all the way upstairs.”
“Oh god,” Callan said. “Stitch-”
“What’s upstairs?” Peter interrupted.
“Come on, Pete,” I said, miming his tone from earlier. “What do you think? What’s the worst possible thing it could be?”
“Worst possible-” he started.
“I’ll give you a damn hint,” I said, before he spoke thoughtlessly aloud. “When Rose and I talked about it, we talked about it in terms of contamination.”
“Enough said,” he said. “Upstairs, Ellie.”
“What are you- no,” she said. “That isn’t enough said. That-”
“Bioweapons or radiation or some shit that has all the other organized crime psychos scared shitless,” he said. “I don’t want to know, neither do you. Go. Those guys outside look restless.”
I heard Ellie’s retreating footsteps splashing on the wet floor, even though I couldn’t see her.
There was a sound of breaking windows. The only windows I could think of that weren’t broken already would be the ones in the basement.
“Basement,” I said.
“Right.” Peter rose to his feet, heading back to the hallway. He shut the door and I heard him dragging something.
Blocking the door. It probably wouldn’t help much.
A second and a half later, there was a banging, a rattle of the door repeatedly being slammed against the blockade. Peter began to move other things in the hallway, supporting the position of the table more than he was trying to block the door.
I could remember when I’d assumed the outside walls would hold off the Others for hours. It hadn’t been twenty minutes.
The absence of one person in the living room apparently gave the Others outside a bit more courage.
They advanced a little.
“Hey,” Eva called out. “I recognize you, that means you should damn well recognize me.”
“Yeah,” was the response from outside. A male voice.
“You know you don’t want to get on my bad side.”
“We’re not here for you, Eva.”
“You damn well better not be. As I was saying, you don’t want to get on my bad side. How would you like to do me a favor?”
“No, Eva,” I intoned the words, like an adult might to a wayward child.
“You want in? Go right ahead,” she said.
“I will kill Andy if you fuck with us here!” I said.
She hesitated. But in the moment she turned to reply to me, she saw Peter coming out of the hallway, weapon in hand.
He could see right through her, just like I could. She was betraying us, right here. He’d acted on it.
Said a lot about him that he could be so damn clever, but when the situation called for it, he went straight to ‘blunt object to face’.
He swung the fireplace poker over his head and down. Eva didn’t have time to bring her whole arm up, so she only raised her elbow, moving towards the descending poker. Her elbow caught Peter’s wrist and deflected it. The poker came down a fair distance to the side of her.
Peter had an instant of eye contact with Eva, a deer in the headlights with his face a matter of a foot from hers, before she hit him. Two punches to the head, a kick that seemed primarily aimed at disarming him, stepping on the poker that still touched the ground, then wrapped her arms around his upper arms, pinning his arms to his side while she brought her knee into his side. Staying right up close, not giving him any room at all to act.
I saw a knife flash in her hand.
She hadn’t had a knife a second ago. Concealed?
Eva didn’t stab Peter. The Others were making a move, and she shifted her grip and flung Peter to the side.
“Alexis,” I said, as they approached the window, moving through snow with long, powerful strides.
No response.
She hadn’t responded in a while. Fuck. I’d been so focused on external events-
“Alexis!”
Callan reached over to Alexis, who was half-sitting on the arm of the sofa, and took her wrist. I didn’t get to hear his verdict any more than Eva got to finish dealing with Peter.
The Others were adroit, hopping up the two or three feet to the window itself.
The faceless woman was the first I noticed. She stayed on the bench beneath the window, the curtain blocking the full view of her face. Her cigarette glowed.
Did she have a supernaturally good sense of light and dark, like I had with reflections?
The other Other was a bald man in a suit, thin enough to be skeletal, with a pinched mouth and eyes too large for his head. He clasped a pocketwatch to his chest with one hand, the other straight down at his side.
Fuck me. If the Behaims had bogeymen on call, this would be the type, wouldn’t it?