Damned if I didn’t, at least a little bit, feel sorry for him. “Just one more issue,” I said, “regarding something you said before, something you never finished explaining to my satisfaction. Why would you believe terrorist action against your family ‘impossible’?”
With that, Vernon Wethers stepped away from the wall and, demonstrating an economy of movement that suggested many, many previous opportunities to stand between his employer and an unwanted question, helped Philip Bettelhine to his feet. The wormy little bastard didn’t even say anything about the matter being classified, or the questioning being over. He just hustled Philip out of there with about as much personal acknowledgment as he would have afforded any other misplaced obstacle.
Once Philip was safely on the other side of the door, Wethers whirled at me and pointed a long, narrow finger in my face. “Be careful, Counselor. I know you have Jason and Jason and the old man protecting you, but this is still Xana. We know how to deal with visitors who offend us.”
I’ve never enjoyed being pointed at. In an instant I had closed one fist around that finger and another around his wrist behind it. It would have been the work of another instant to leave him screaming with broken bones, and I inflicted just enough pain to make sure he knew it. “What did your people do to Bard Daiken?”
The ghost of a smile, superior and infuriating and pregnant with knowledge, tugged at the corners of his lips. “Something you don’t want done to you. Something Philip can do by whispering the order in the right ear. Something I’d find funny as hell and revisit in my old age whenever I needed reminder of the moments that gave my life meaning. Let me go.”
I maintained the painful grip and penetrating eye contact for another ten seconds, but this was his place of power, not mine.
I released him.
He massaged his wrist with his spare hand, gave me a further dismissive look, and turned toward the door.
It would have been a fine exit for any villain.
But just as he entered the narrow hall between the suite’s main room and the door to the main parlor, something went for his throat…
13
STRANGLEHOLD
The attack was so smooth, so graceful, so organic in its terrible precision, that for its first precious seconds my eyes and my mind lagged behind the moment, refusing to recognize his collapse against the wall as anything but a moment of pathetic clumsiness, brought on by exhaustion and the trauma we’d all been through in the last few hours.
Even when he grabbed for his throat for both hands, his blind fingers clutching at the black line that now banded his neck, I mistook his difficulty breathing for a heart attack, or a careless swallow that had sent saliva down the wrong pipe. His protruding eyes, his gaping mouth, the sudden terrible knowledge written on his face, my own dulled realization that something awful was happening to him—they were all inhabitants of that first second, so complete even in this the moment of their birth that there was no time to apply logic and consider where they might have come from.
I thought Claw of God and reached for him.
A burst of pain and I found myself propelled backward, aware only that I’d been struck in the jaw. By the time I tripped over the leg of the chair Philip Bettelhine had vacated only a couple of minutes before I’d figured out that the fist had belonged to Wethers, and by the time I realized to my intense dismay that I was going to fall I’d decided that the bastard must have faked whatever the hell he wanted me to believe was wrong with him, so he could catch me with a sucker punch.
By the time I smashed into the floor with a force that summoned fresh pain to the same hip I’d bruised during the emergency stop, I was past wanting to kill him for getting past my defenses and well into the realm of that’s not what this is.
With the breath knocked out of me, my body wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and wait for air and order to return to the universe.
I rolled anyway, getting to my hands and knees in time to see Wethers slide down the wall and drop to a crouch. The pale skin of his face had darkened to a shade of purple that would need only a little additional intensity before it went black. His eyes protruded so far from their sockets that they seemed about to pop out, like marbles. He tried to stand again, but his convulsions denied him even that; his legs kicked outward and his ass hit floor, making him look oddly comfortable even as he still scrabbled at his neck.
At the black line that had appeared around his throat.
His fingers sliding across that line without gaining any purchase.
I speed-crawled toward him, the distance feeling infinite, each step feeling like minutes in a race where life and death could be measured in heartbeats. It may have taken me all of three seconds to get to him, lifetimes, more as I pulled myself over his thrashing legs and he fought in his panic to throw me off. A knee in my belly robbed me of what little breath I had left; and when I grabbed him by the wrists and tried to pull his hands from his throat he fought me, his already bulging eyes overflowing with panic.
Had I enough air for speech I would have shouted Let go you asshole, I’m trying to save your life!
It was only because he was already weakening that I was able to wrestle his hands away from his throat and get a close look at what had constricted him. It was a black, shiny ribbon of some kind, looped around his neck, its endpoints a pair of silver toruses intent on pulling the material between them tight.
The donut holes at the center of each torus roiled with black spots, a lot like the receding patterns that afflict human vision after too much time spent staring at bright lights. I didn’t know whether they were gas exhaust or some manifestation of the energy source that powered them, but they hurt my eyes to look at.
There was no time to worry about whether the endpoints were too dangerous to touch. The danger was already here. The toruses were too narrow to admit my fingers, so I grabbed them with my fists and fought to loosen the stranglecord between them. They bucked violently, like little missiles intent on resuming their previous trajectories. The first jolts almost tore them free of my grip, and I had to struggle so hard that for one terrible instant I realized that I’d become so intent on winning the wrestling match that I’d overcompensated and was now fighting to tighten their grip on their victim’s neck.
If Wethers died, the evidence would show that I’d murdered him.
I heard voices from my own immediate future.
I’m not surprised. I always expected this.
She’s Andrea Cort. Do you know what she did when she was just a little girl?
Once a monster, always a monster.
It’s time to put her down like the mad dog she is.
“God DAMN it!”
Maybe it was a burst of strength born of adrenaline and maybe the toruses decided to change targets and maybe they bucked in the wrong direction just in time to match my own effort, but the loop came loose all at once, releasing Wethers and sending me falling backward, against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway. I landed ass-first, just as he had, with my legs straddling his. Able to breathe now, he gasped a deep grateful inhalation that did little to help me as the black material between those two toruses thrashed with the fury of a deadly thing denied blood.