At the same moment Kai dropped the lighter and swept them both to the ground, rolling on top of Evariste. Dragons were less vulnerable than humans. He could only hope it was enough.
He had a moment to tense in anticipation of incoming bullets. Then the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows shattered, with so huge a noise of fracturing panes and crashing shards that it drowned out all attempts at conscious thought. Kai flung his arms over his head, trying to block out the sound. Fragments of glass fell around him or ricocheted off the floor, bouncing like lethal raindrops. A few pieces sliced across his clothing and skin, drawing blood from his hands and neck. He felt Evariste shuddering underneath him, trapped and helpless – and, a few seconds later, he heard the screaming of the gangsters who had survived.
When Kai raised his head, he saw that a number of them hadn’t.
But if human thieves were stupid enough to endanger his life, then a clean straightforward death was a moderate, reasonable response. Every dragon he knew would agree. Even Irene would be practical about it. Probably.
Though he had to admit, looking around, that the sheer scale of this was somewhat . . . excessive.
‘Up, now,’ he said, pulling Evariste to his feet and scooping up a volume that had gone astray. ‘Come on!’
Evariste pressed his knuckles to his mouth hard as he looked around the room – the broken glass everywhere, the fallen bodies, the blood, the men struggling to stand and failing – and the colour drained from his face. ‘I didn’t . . .’ he began, and then stopped, as if uncertain what he wanted to deny.
There wasn’t time for this. But Kai couldn’t bring himself to ignore the pain that was so evident in the other man’s face. ‘You didn’t cause this,’ he said. ‘You didn’t escalate this. Our job is to stop it, here and now, and to save your daughter. You want me to blame the other dragons? Fine. Qing Song has touched things off that he can’t control. Help me stop them from getting worse. Help me to keep your Library safe.’ He met Evariste’s eyes. ‘Please.’
Evariste took a deep breath and nodded.
The two of them stumbled out through the empty lattice of windowframes, into the evening shadows of Central Park beyond. ‘We need a cab,’ Kai said. ‘Then we need to contact Irene . . .’
‘If we can.’ Evariste had pulled himself together. ‘What if George has got her, too?’
Kai showed his teeth. ‘Then that is going to be very unfortunate for George.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The balcony was solid stone, faced with the same marble as the rest of the hotel. And it had heavy wrought-iron interlaced railings, to stop any theoretical suicides from stepping over the edge.
On the whole, Irene felt that climbing down the exterior of the hotel was slightly preferable to staying inside. Exactly how much so was arguable.
When she peered over the edge, she could see there was another balcony directly beneath this one. It was just a question of getting from here to there. No worse, on a theoretical level, than the sort of maths problems one did at school, involving vectors, angles and distances. On a practical level, there was the issue of slipping and falling to one’s death.
She’d always known that a strong capacity for self-deception and ignoring unpleasant realities had to be useful somewhere.
Irene kicked off her shoes and leaned over the edge to toss them onto the balcony below. Then she clambered over the iron railing.
The sound of Fifth Avenue below her came throbbing upwards, threatening to break her concentration. The honking of car horns and the screeching of tyres, the buzz of voices, even distant threads of music from clubs or radios, as far away as birdsong . . .
Inside the suite, a wolf’s howl was cut short by two quick gunshots.
Irene swallowed, her throat very dry. First floor. Visualize this as the first floor. She lowered herself to a crouch against the outside of the railings, working her hands down as close as possible to the edge of the balcony. Then she took a deep breath and slid her feet loose, letting her body drop free, to dangle by her hands above Fifth Avenue.
The floor of the next balcony down was about three yards away, at a rough terrified guess. And of course she was hanging outside its scope, rather than it being a straight drop down. This was the sort of thing Kai was so much better at than she was.
A yell came from the balcony she’d just vacated. ‘She’s not here! She must have jumped!’
‘No, wait,’ came another voice, unhelpfully observant. ‘I see her hands, she’s hanging on—’
No time left. Irene swung her body forward, fear massing in her stomach, then back again as if she were exercising on the apparatus in a gym – she never could remember all the gadgets, was it ropes or rings or parallel bars? – then forward again. And before anyone above her could grab her hands, she let go and dropped.
It was one of those falls that lasted long enough for Irene to envisage everything going wrong, and at the same time had her hitting the balcony before she could think twice. She hit the floor with a jolt and let herself roll forward, bringing her arms up to cover her head. Then she smashed through the apartment’s full-length windows with a crash of breaking glass, loud enough to have been heard on the balcony above.
The room she’d just invaded had the lights on and blazing, but there was nobody actually in it. A shriek came from the bathroom. ‘Help! Help, thieves!’
Irene would have shouted back something reassuring, but she couldn’t speak. And in any case, she had trouble thinking of anything that would be reassuring under these circumstances. She staggered to her feet, shook broken glass off her dress and coat and retrieved her shoes. Time to run and keep on running.
There was nobody in the corridor outside, and for a moment Irene thought that she’d made it free and clear. Then she heard the howling of wolves.
Elevator or stairs? It was a gamble. The sight of the elevator door opening ahead of her made her decision clear. She ran for it, pushing past the hotel guests emerging from it, and shouldered her way in. There was nobody in there except a thin young hotel page, barely out of his teens, all cap and buttons and Adam’s apple, who gave her a hopeful smile. ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’
Down, Irene gestured. In case it wasn’t quite clear enough, she pointed urgently at the big lever next to where the page was standing.
‘No need to worry, ma’am,’ the young man said helpfully as he reached for one of the two levers next to him. Irene dredged her memory for the current state of elevator technology – one lever for the doors, the other for up or down. ‘We have some of the best elevators in all New York here—’ He broke off at the sound of screams and howls. ‘Holy Mother of God, the wolves are loose!’