“Ruth,” they heard Anneliese call, closing the Ford’s trunk on the cases and tossing the keys into the front seat. “We’re leaving.”
So close, Jordan thought. Even flying, they had barely got here in time. By car they would never have made it. A few fast-murmured plans flew, the first part of which was Get Ruth. Until Ruth was removed they could do nothing or Anneliese might kill her.
Nina slanted off toward the east, away from the cabin and the dock. Tony peeled left toward the cabin’s far side where Jordan had told him about the back window. Ian and Jordan continued on straight, stopping well inside the tree line, where Ian cupped his hands around his mouth and gave a whistle: the haunting four-note opening of the simple Siberian lullaby he had learned from Nina and taught Ruth to play on her violin.
Anneliese, slamming the car door, didn’t hear. At the end of the dock, Ruth looked up.
Ian whistled the opening bar again, low and calling. Jordan bit her lip, watching Ruth’s eyes hunting for the music. Anneliese paused, clearly puzzled, but she didn’t play the violin, she didn’t know the ancient cradle song Ruth played so beautifully. Anneliese stepped onto the dock, her back to the cabin as she walked out over the lake. “Ruth, into the car. Stop sulking.”
At the end of the dock, Ruth stood up. Jordan thought she could see the stubborn set of that fragile jaw all the way from here. Anneliese held out a hand, but Ruth brushed straight past her, breaking into a run. That’s it, cricket, Jordan wanted to cheer as Ian whistled one more time and her sister pelted off the dock.
At that moment, Tony broke out of the cabin at a flat sprint, door banging open, something long in one hand. He scooped up Ruth like a football, tossing her over one shoulder and running for the car. Anneliese scrabbled in her coat pocket, but her pistol snagged for a split second and Tony was moving too fast. He yanked the car door and dove inside, pulling Ruth with him out of sight. Jordan could hear him urging Ruth down flat on the floor of the car, even as he slapped a long glinting shape down across the open driver’s-side window: Dan McBride’s spare shotgun, taken from the cabin and now leveled at Anneliese.
Jordan quivered inside like a plucked violin string, seeing Ruth disappear inside the car. Tony had sworn that if all went wrong he would drive away with Ruth, that he would make her safe first. The most precious pawn was off the board.
Now, staring across the chessboard, they faced only the queen.
Anneliese had frozen midway down the dock, pistol finally in hand, caught between lunging toward shore and firing from where she stood. Her back was to the trees as she stared at the car, and Jordan stepped out of cover onto the shore.
Ian strode arrow straight at her side. “Stay back,” he said very low voiced. “This time she may shoot you.”
“I know how to throw her off guard,” Jordan murmured back, feeling the Leica about her neck on its strap. She’d snatched it on pure instinct when they left the house—perhaps the same instinct that made Ian stretch for his typewriter, Nina for a plane, Tony for his own nimble tongue. When preparing to level with an enemy, you readied your best weapon. “Anneliese doesn’t really want to kill me, and after years of hiding, she’s scared of the camera. I can use both against her. If I don’t, she’ll shoot you—you’re the stranger; she’ll aim right for your head.”
Ian’s stride didn’t slow, sun glinting off his hair as he aimed for the dock. Jordan didn’t stop either.
From inside the car, Tony was shouting at Anneliese in German and English, telling her to remain still or he’d shoot, keeping her gaze aimed at him. Jordan could see him from the corner of her eye. She didn’t turn to look directly; neither did Ian. The world had narrowed to the two of them, and Anneliese. It has to be us, Jordan thought. The ones who have already gone against her and lost something—me, my father; Ian, his brother. Us. The ones who refused to lose Ruth too.
Anneliese saw them as they stepped onto the dock, stiffening in a freeze of pure shock. She seemed to turn very slowly, or maybe it just seemed slow to Jordan through the Leica’s lens as she lifted the camera—the flying strands of her hair, the blue of her eyes as they rounded, the knuckles whitening around her pistol. Watching it, something in Jordan telescoped, compressed, divided: there was the side of her that flinched in fear; the human side—and there was the lens that narrowed with perfect focus, the ruthless eye that put a lid on the chaos of emotions and simply watched Anneliese scrabble like a cowering animal chased out from under a bush. The cold inner lens that wanted nothing but to record what happened here and show it to the world.
“Smile for the camera, Lorelei.” It was Jordan who smiled as she took the picture.
Then the shot rang out.
Chapter 56
Nina
September 1950
Selkie Lake
Nina crouched on the shore of Selkie Lake not eight hundred meters down from the cabin, yanking off her boots. She watched Tony snatch the child, saw Jordan and Ian come from the trees, saw the slim figure of the woman now frozen on the dock. There you are, Nina thought, yanking her summer dress over her head. The blue-eyed huntress with her Walther PPK and her scar. Half a decade and half a globe had had to be traveled, but the hunt went on. Only now, who was the huntress and who was the prey?
Ian was advancing down the dock now, implacable as granite, the American girl at his side just as steady. Tony worked the bolt action on the shotgun, the threat of it echoing across the lake, telling Lorelei Vogt not to run. Your days of running are done.
Nina straightened, naked except for her slip, the waters of Selkie Lake lapping at her toes, and unfolded her razor. Reaching carefully inside her mouth, she nicked the inside of her cheek. Spat blood.
Voices from the dock, more camera flashes. The huntress half frozen, half poised to pounce. Don’t kill anyone yet, Nina thought to her enemy and her team both. Wait for me. She waded into the water, warmer by far than Lake Rusalka or the Old Man. The huntress’s scar was calling her, the rusalka’s kiss. You’re still mine.
A shot echoed into the perfect summer sky, and Nina was pierced by a bolt of pure, clawing, protective rage. Oh, you blue-eyed bitch, if you killed my husband—
And she dived into the arms of the lake.
Chapter 57
Ian
September 1950
Selkie Lake
The shot came from Tony. At the corner of Ian’s eye he saw his partner had aimed into the sky, a flat report making the blue-eyed woman flinch and whirl even as she was still flinching from the flash of Jordan’s camera. “Smile, Anna,” Jordan called out again. Click click click. She’d said there was nothing her stepmother disliked more than having her picture taken, and she was right—Ian could see the woman flinch with every flash.
He took a deep breath, speaking up in his deepest, crispest tones of authority. “Lorelei Vogt, stay where you are.”
She straightened at the sound of her name. He hoped she would lunge forward in a panic, let him get within arm’s length and wrench the pistol away. But she stepped back instead, to the very end of the dock, face emptying of shock with frightening speed. Ian had never seen anyone knocked so off-balance recover their poise so fast. The pistol hung loose at her side, but he and Jordan still froze halfway down the dock before she could raise it. There was an odd moment of stillness where the sound of the shot faded and they regarded each other. Ian met the eyes of his brother’s murderess for the first time, and every sound in the world—Ruth’s muffled sobbing from the car, Tony’s voice soothing her, the monotonous slap of the lake against the pilings—faded to nothing.
Here you are, Ian thought, staring into those blue eyes in wonder. Here you are. For more than half a decade he’d thought of her every day, and here she was. Ian drank her in. He found her lovely. He found her obscene. He found her. “Here you are,” he said aloud, and smiled.
“Who are you?” she asked, sounding genuinely puzzled, and it made Ian smile again. This woman had loomed over his life like a boulder, blotting out the sun, yet, of course, she had no idea who he was.
Ian didn’t answer. Instead, he spoke words he’d dreamed of speaking for years. “Lorelei Vogt, you are charged with war crimes.”
He expected excuses, the defensive shuffle, the whine that always seemed to begin It was so long ago or I was just following orders . . . Lorelei Vogt did none of those things. She merely shifted her gaze to Jordan at his side, steadily gazing through her camera lens. “How did you get here?” Genuinely curious. “Even if you got out of the darkroom at once, you couldn’t—”
“Magic,” Ian said. That was as good an explanation for Nina as any. Nina, where are you? Ian took a step closer, Jordan at his side.