FORTY-ONE

The helicopter was already sliding back toward the castle and Kate hit the right skid hard, her arms going over it, her chin snapping down, her breasts feeling as if she had been slammed by a baseball bat, and the wind going out of her in a rush. She hung on.

The door on the right side was still swinging open and shut, and O’Rourke was working the controls, trying to hover without allowing Joshua to tumble out. The helicopter wheeled right. Kate glanced over her shoulder and saw strigoi guards raise their machine guns in the hailstorm of grit and dust.

“Nu!” screamed Radu Fortuna. He stepped up onto the wall.

Kate tried to scream at O’Rourke to move left, but the ex-priest was obviously too busy trying to control the machine and keep the rotor from slamming into the tower or battlements. The helicopter slid another eight feet to the right as if on invisible rails, Radu Fortuna reached up, grabbed the open door, and stepped easily onto the skid.

O’Rourke glanced left, saw the shadow of the man leaning in, and banked the helicopter steeply to the left. Kate’s fingers slid off the fuselage but she clung to the skid and the metal strut holding the skid in place. Under her shoes, the vertical face of the castle wall suddenly upended and seemed to swing sideways as the chopper first dove, then rose again, always tilting a bit to the left so that Joshua would not tumble out.

Kate swung her leg up onto the strut and kicked Radu Fortuna’s ankles out from under him before he could step into the cabin.

Fortuna fell forward and swung out on the door, his legs hanging free. Kate released her secure handhold, balanced forward on the skid as if doing a forward roll on a tubular balance beam, and got her left hand in the open cabin doorway. There was a ridge there and she locked her fingers around it and pulled herself to one knee on the slippery skid.

O’Rourke leveled the helicopter sixty or seventy feet above the castle terrace. A score of muzzles were lifted toward them, but no one fired because of the baby and Radu Fortuna.

With the helicopter level, the door swung inward and Fortuna’s stocky body slammed into Kate, squeezing her against the doorframe but not giving her enough room to pull herself into the cabin. His strong left hand seized her by the throat and began squeezing.

They were both standing on the bobbing skid now. Their weight tipped the machine sickeningly to the right, and Kate felt Joshua’s small form strike her back. If she and Fortuna went off now, the baby would come with them. She tried to twist out of the strigoi’s grasp but the chopper tilted left, his weight fell against her, and he freed his right hand to complete his choking. His thumbs closed over her windpipe and Kate knew that he could break her neck in a second.

The helicopter bobbed slightly, a space opened between their bodies, and Kate pulled the Gypsy’s dagger from her belt and plunged it through Fortuna’s flapping vestments into his stomach.

The blade did not go deep. Kate’s leverage was too restricted and Fortuna’s robes too thick. But the pain and shock stopped Radu Fortuna’s thumbs from closing on her neck. Kate released her grip on the inside of the door and pushed the knife farther in, knowing precisely where the largest bundle of nerve fibers was.

Radu Fortuna roared, pulled his hands from her throat, and wrestled the knife away from her, pulling it from its shallow cut. O’Rourke banked the hovering machine to the left at precisely the right instant, Kate leaned far back onto the seat over Joshua’s wailing form, lifted her legs, and kicked Fortuna off the skid.

She swung her legs in, held the baby tight against the back of the seat, and leaned out the flapping door to watch Fortuna fall. Several hundred white faces stared up from red and black cowls, all of them watching while the short man, arms swinging and legs extended as gracefully as a sky diver’s, did two complete somersaults in the air and then fell, faceup, with all limbs extended for the final sixty feet. Directly onto the metal stake that had been reserved for Kate.

The crowd of strigoi raised their hands as blood spattered their robes and faces. Two of the guards began to fire short bursts.

“Go!” screamed Kate, slamming the banging door shut. “Higher!” Her watch said 12:26 and thirty seconds.

Something banged against the fuselage behind them, but O’Rourke ignored it, twisted something on the stick in his right hand, lifted a lever in his left hand, kicked at rudder pedals, and the Jet Ranger’s engine whined higher. They banked to the left and started climbing away from the citadel and the muzzle flashes.

Kate looked down, realized that the castle was now on the other side, saw something dark far below—like a giant bat—its shadow rippling across the river for the briefest second, and then she raised her wrist again, looked at her watch, and shouted above the engine roar to O’Rourke. “What time is it?”

He glanced toward her incredulously. “You expect me to take my hand off the collective to tell you—”

“What is the fucking time?” she screamed, realizing that she sounded a little hysterical even to herself.

O’Rourke blinked, freed his left hand for a second, and said, “My watch says twelve twenty-fi—”

The world exploded beneath them and around them.