Die J?gerin’s pistol came up. “No closer.”
Jordan clicked off another shot. Ian saw their target wince. “You really don’t like having your picture taken, do you?” he observed. “I wouldn’t like looking at myself either, if I’d done what you’ve done.” Click.
Another flinch. “Jordan, stop.”
“No.” Jordan adjusted something on her Leica. “You and I have said everything that we needed to say to each other, Anna. I’m just doing my job, now. Recording the moment.” Click. “The moment a murderess realizes she’s going to pay for what she’s done.”
The woman’s voice was calm. “You cannot arrest me.”
“Yes, we can,” Ian said. “For murdering Daniel McBride. You admitted as much to Jordan in the darkroom a few hours ago. We can perform a citizen’s arrest and bring you to the authorities. Murder is punishable by the electric chair in Massachusetts.” Ian waited for the flicker of her eyes. “There’s another option, of course.”
“Murder me here, sink me in the lake?” The pistol lifted again.
“Don’t tar me with your brush, you Nazi bitch. I have no intention of harming you.” Ian felt no fear at all, only a humming tension running through him like wire. Was this how Nina felt on her bombing runs, when she cut the engine? He was gliding down now, falling very fast but very sure toward his target. “Put that pistol down, Lorelei Vogt. I know you can shoot either me or your stepdaughter between the eyes at this range, but be aware of this: the moment you do, my partner in the car back there will shoot you. And even if you get the drop on him”—Ian could see her eyes measuring it—“your time running is done. My article exposing you runs in the Boston Globe tomorrow. Page one above the fold, with photographs.” Ian hadn’t written a word in years, but he flung the lie at her with complete assurance. “There won’t be a reader on the East Coast who doesn’t know your face by the end of the week, and after that, the nationals will pick it up. There’s nowhere you will be able to hide, not one corner of this huge country that will not know your face and recoil. That is a promise.”
Click. Jordan snapped the shot right as the look of horror rolled across her stepmother’s face. The pistol jerked in answer, not at Ian this time but at her. “Stop.”
Jordan took a step forward, blond hair blowing. “No.” Click.
The shot deafened, echoing across the water. Ian lunged in front of Jordan, heart hammering, but the shot went wide into the water, a warning. Jordan never flinched, merely reached into her pocket and began calmly loading a new roll of film. Ian had seen photographers moving under shellfire on D-day in the same intense haze, the world narrowed to a lens that felt like a shield before them.
“You have Ruth.” Lorelei Vogt’s voice rose. “You have everything. Take it all and let me go—”
“No. That is not the choice in front of you.” Ian’s voice rose to a whiplash cut. “The choice in front of you is to be charged in Massachusetts for murdering Jordan’s father, or be charged in Austria for war crimes. That is your choice, Lorelei Vogt. That is the only choice you have left in this life.”
Click. Click. Click.
There was a moment he thought she was going to crack—a quiver across that smooth face, the even smoother gaze. Then resolve seemed to sheathe her in ice, chin lifting, pistol rising toward her own head, and Ian saw she was going to escape. She would escape justice and courtrooms and the world’s hatred with a bullet, and he shouted without words because her death wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, but even though he was running to close the distance between them, the barrel was already reaching the underside of her chin.
Then a rising shriek ripped the air, and they all saw what had just crawled out of the lake onto the end of the dock.
She crouched there for a moment like some giant spider, lake water sluicing off her skin. Ian knew perfectly well who she was—Nina Markova, his lover, his comrade in arms, his wife of five years—but as she uncoiled, she made even Ian’s heart clutch in fear. She stood relaxed and reptilian, streaked with blood from the corners of her mouth down the sides of her throat, red lines curling down her soaked slip, down her arms, off the edge of the unfolded razor in her hand. She smiled, eyes glinting like winter ice, and her teeth were scarlet as though she’d been tearing at human flesh.
She rises out of the lake, streaked with blood, and drifts across the surface of the water toward me. Jordan had described her stepmother’s nightmare in the huntress’s own words. And that’s when I wake up. Before the night witch cuts my throat.
There was no dream to wake from now, as Nina stalked down the dock.
Die J?gerin did not move. She stood wax white, quivering, a rabbit paralyzed by a snake’s gaze, a Soviet biplane pinned to the sky by a German searchlight. Nina came remorselessly forward, razor outstretched. “Mine,” she was crooning, “mine—” And the woman who had murdered Ian’s brother, and who knew how many others, backed up before her, twisting away in frantic horror. Ian saw none of her ferocious control this time as she brought the pistol back to her own head. Just fear—but he was still too far away to stop her from taking the bullet’s escape.
Nina wasn’t.
She flashed down on the huntress like a falling star, the razor coming around in a whistling arc. Lorelei Vogt screamed, staggering back with blood spilling from her arm this time rather than her neck. Red drops pattered on the dock, and Nina reached out contemptuously and pushed her down. Crouching slow and unhurried over the cringing woman, leaning so close they could have kissed, Nina plucked the Walther PPK from the nerveless fingers. “You don’t get to die,” she whispered to the woman who had shot at her across a lake half a world away, and dropped the pistol into the water.
Die J?gerin’s face shattered. She crawled away, clutching her bleeding arm, scrabbling past Ian to Jordan, and she just stopped. Huddled against her stepdaughter, cringing from Nina, keening.
Slowly, Jordan bent down to embrace her.
Silence fell again over the frozen tableau. Nina came to Ian’s side, never shifting her eyes from die J?gerin. Tony came out of the car on shore, shotgun cradled in one elbow, the other arm around Ruth, who clung white faced to his side. The only noise was the muffled sounds coming from the woman in Jordan’s arms. Ian wondered if the children she shot had whimpered that way, as if snapped in half by terror. His heart resounded in his chest.
Nina had told him once, on the Prater Ferris wheel in Vienna, that one could kill a fear. She’d thrown herself into a lake today, to become a huntress’s nightmare and protect her team. Ian had thrown himself into a plane. Lorelei Vogt, it seemed, could not kill her one fear when it crawled from her nightmares to look her in the eye.
Not yet, anyway, Ian thought. So hit her hard before she recovers herself.
Jordan said it before he could. “Anna,” she said, her voice gentle, even though her face hadn’t lost that distant look, the one that told Ian the world was still coming to her through a lens. Her hand rubbed her stepmother’s shaking back in a soothing circle, even as her body remained stiff with revulsion. “You are going to make a choice now.”
Chapter 58
Jordan
September 1950
Selkie Lake
She’ll go?”
“She’ll go.” Jordan sat down next to Tony on the dock steps, where he sat with his sleeves pushed up and the shotgun still propped beside him. Anneliese was sitting just inside the cabin door some distance away, her arm bandaged, hands and ankles bound together, unmoving. Jordan looked away from her. “Where’s Ruth?”
“In shock. I put her in the backseat of the car, covered her with blankets, let her cry herself to sleep.”
She’s going to have questions, Jordan thought. What am I going to tell her?
Maybe for now, I’m here, and I’m never leaving was enough. “Where are Ian and Nina?”
“Walking down the shore where Nina left her clothes. Our little Soviet popsy did a fine impersonation of a nightmare.” Tony looked at Anneliese’s huddled shape in the cabin doorway. Her shoulders were shaking. “Does she really fear Nina that much?”
“Nina is the one who got away. It haunted her.” Jordan was maybe the only one who realized how much it haunted her. She hadn’t hesitated to use it, telling her stepmother quietly that she could go to Austria and face trial for war crimes, or stay here and face trial for murdering her husband—but if she refused to go willingly down either path, Jordan would let Nina do the asking. “She chose Austria.”
“Why?”
“Because I said Nina would never stay in Europe, that she hates it. Anneliese chose whatever continent would put an ocean between her and Nina.” That was how terrified the huntress was of the rusalka.